I see a future healthy society as only possible under a planned and democratic system – ie socialism. I think there are systemic pressures to work longer, to have quick meals, quick relationships and quick solutions to any problem.

The common link to all is the insatiable drive for more and more profit.

Finally, I don’t support the Liberals in Higgins; but Higgins is one of the richest electorates in Australia. It is home to many of those who live off our labour.
If I lived there I’d vote for Clive and not the Liberals (and assuming there are no leftwing alternatives standing.). That doesn’t mean I can’t criticise the Greens and Clive for their essentially top down elitist approach to change.

And I agree about visionaries. There is much that the Left can learn from Clive about the problems humanity faces; but it is his view that ordinary workign people are the problem not the solution that means I fundamentally disagree with his solutions to the environmental and economic problems he has identified.
he sees the problems as stemming from over-consumption. I see them as stemming from the drive to make more and more profit. In the end this may put us on different sides.

Are we suggesting that the Higgins’ constituency should elect Kelly O’Dwyer who represents a party addicted to unsustainable growth?

Clive Hamilton makes perfect sense to me. I’m working class, having retired in 2001. Sure – so I now collect an aged pension – the first time I’ve been near Centrelink. The maximum wage I’ve ever earned is $29,000 p.a. and I raised two children on that wage, without any contribution from the “elitist” father.

Two years ago I purchased my third house to the value of $420,000 and despite the self-imposed economic restraints, I and my children have had a most fortunate life.

A couple of my former “top end of town” employers have gone broke – too greedy! A couple have dropped dead at an early age. Hmmm?

Now the working class have mortgaged themselves to the hilt. These days they want only to start at the top. Now many have become “middle” class because they live in obscene 4×2 mansions they can’t afford. They too have become greedy.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics advised in 1999, that over 63 percent of Australian men and 47 percent of Australian women were overweight or obese. One now reads that Australia has become the fattest nation on the planet.

Even the people living in government housing or humpies are eating themselves into oblivion with a voracious appetite for junk food.

Studies conducted among Australian children suggest that the obesity rate has doubled in recent years, reaching levels of between 12.5 percent and 30 percent. Yep – these are our predominantly “poor” working class people. Truth is I’ve never seen a fat marathon runner. And walking or running’s free but increasingly, cars, television, computers and junk food is reducing their mobility.

So when will you guys go after the multi-national junk food corporate fat cats who are killing off our working class – in all developed nations? The omnicide of the West by stealth. Is this what the politically au fait describe as the “free” market? So what about the cannon fodder? Or are jobs for the working class in the junk food industry more important than the health of a nation?

“The alternative is the long hard slog of building a mass movement of ordinary people to defend their interests – wages, jobs, a better environment and justice and equity.”

And why not give some credit to the visionary, Hamilton since the issue of least concern among the working class is “a better environment” or climate change as they continue to “spend themselves sick” and the average Joe Blow believes climate change is a hoax.

OK so I’m a political illiterate but you guys with all the ideas should get a grip on yourselves.

But far more important is challenging the idea that Hamilton’s politics are left-wing in any way. I started at comment 82, arguing that Hamilton’s contempt for consumption makes him *more* right-wing than people like Howard or Rudd – it makes him like romantic mediaevalist reactionaries like B.A. Santamaria.

Humphrey McQueen also wrote a critique of Hamilton (I think of Hamilton’s “Afluenza”), pointing out the truism that wage labour is the problem, not workers wanting to consume (shock horror!). I can’t find this online though.

I think one of the most important things leftists can do right now is to take this argument to broader social-democratic arenas. “Leftism” is seen by the vast majority of people as something that approves of the dull grey police states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and until leftists say, again and again, that we stand for the rights of workers to have a BETTER standard of living, not a worse one, we’re never even going to have a chance of cutting through. The article “What is the pseudo-left?” might be useful here.

http://www.overlandexpress.org/189%20o‘lincoln.htm