Privatisation of the Public Estate, and Decimation of the Common Good have been part and parcel of neoliberalism’s metastasising cancer throughout our world for fifty years now. No one has been free from the tentacles of greed weaving their way through and around every aspect of our personal and communal lives.
All sealed up in long-binding contracts and Nondisclosure Agreements, signed and sealed behind closed doors by compromised Bureaucrats, bullying Banks, parasitic Hedge Fund Financialising “Investors”, Toll Road Infrastructure Builders, Rentier Capitalists and Uncle Tom politicians, all happy to segue into board directorships of these same businesses after leaving ‘public office.’
With social media’s successful individualisation of global human interactions, selling the deluded notion that we can each have life unfold exactly as we want it, the Attention Economy has perfectly distracted the vast majority of people, while their grandchildren’s inheritance has been quietly ripped out from under their feet and sold off.
So, like we say in the old TV journo’s mantra: What’s the Story? It’s a Worry! What are you going to do about it? How are we going to “SIS this one out?”
There’s only one answer, and it’s now started to burst out onto the streets everywhere – Public Action. Only this time we can determine that it’s not just another “Arab Spring”, soon to be repressed back into silent community compliance. This time it is gathering a different sort of momentum, expressed in his usual prescient style by DJ Eminem, Bansky’s blood brother, in a recent posting on TikTok:
“I am not a liberal snowflake. My feelings aren’t fragile, my heart isn’t bleeding. I am a badass believer in human rights. My toughness is tenderness. My strength is in the service of others. There is nothing more fierce than formidable, unconditional love. There is not a thing more courageous than compassion. But if my belief in equality, empathy, goodness and love indeed makes me or people like me snowflakes, then you should know WINTER IS COMING.” (Eminem on TikTok)
The arrival of Gangster Capitalism has just brought out into the light of the public square the parasitic White Collar Corruption that has been occurring behind the scenes at all three levels of government (local, state and federal) for decades. Hidden in public site beneath the acceptable face of “subcontracting and outsourcing” public services to private providers, through confidential tendering supposedly guaranteeing due process, under the false name of “efficiency and effectiveness”, in the marketisation of the public estate.
But we are now “in a moment of change” that can either mark a major turning point in local, city, regional, state, national and global affairs. Or it can ramp up the current oligarchical nightmare scenario of “the Captured State” that Trump, Putin, Musk and the TechnoFeudalists are thrusting into our faces, with a sense of complete entitlement to take over the world of Johnny Howard’s “relaxed and comfortable” nice people. Those of us (the vast majority) who have been asleep at the wheel for years, or should I say “texting while driving”.
Howard famously said, in an ABC TV Four Corners interview just before he began his 11-year reign in 1996: “I would like to see an Australian nation that feels comfortable and relaxed about three things: I would like to see them comfortable and relaxed about their history; I would like to see them comfortable and relaxed about the present and I’d also like to see them comfortable and relaxed about the future.” (ABC Four Corners,1996)
Luckily, history shows humans are capable of waking up and reclaiming the Public Estate and restoring the Common Good. But we need to do what most have forgotten to do, while distracted by today’s virtual bread and circuses – get involved in social democracy and intervene, to reverse out of this unaccountable transglobal marketised economic cul de sac.
Dr Seuss’ Lorax tried to tell the Once-ler 54 years ago (The Lorax, Random House, USA 1971) that he and his mob were wrecking the world by exercising their Paradigm of Endless Growth. We’re now in a life and death battle with that paradigm combining forces with the Oligarchical, TechnoFeudal Greed paradigm taking over the world, while Climate Change is literally about to push us all over the existential cliff.
It’s no time for “relaxed and comfortable liberal snowflakes”. We need to follow the advice of Thomas Kuhn (The structure of scientific revolutions, Uni. of Chicago Press, 1962), who said “You change paradigms by working with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open minded.”
How can that make a difference? By giving “those in power” the shock of their complacent, entitled lives (as should have happened to the banking and financialising rorters after the Global Financial Crisis, and Robodebt, and the COVID Job Keeper rip-offs, etc etc).
When I was growing up in the 1950s, my parents used to ship me and my two brothers off to National Fitness Camps for the long Christmas holidays, while they ran their shop during its busiest weeks of the year.
At the Broken Bay National Fitness Camp, a group of tired school teachers and youth workers were running second jobs to make ends meet. So they didn’t want any smart-arse trouble from the scraggly kids who were sent there from all over the state.
It became legendary that anyone found wrecking the environment, disturbing the peace of this bushland, would be fair game for two unstoppable mythical forces of Australian nature: the Drop Bears, who could suddenly fall from great heights onto your shoulders and “do for you”, if you were thinking of doing something dodgy. Or, if you went even further and succeeded in getting away with a major destructive rort, then heaven help you… because “the Pookacky Man” would be coming for you in the middle of the night, to wreak vengeance on behalf of Mother Earth and all her creatures.
Eminem wasn’t kidding, and there’s plenty of troops behind him when Winter Comes.
Dr Robbie Lloyd has been a national journalist, public affairs director, education and community health reformer for over 50 years. He works with First People and those with Lived Experience of mental health challenges, disability, alcohol and other drugs, DFV, ageing and trauma. Robbie now works in community wellbeing reform.