Lower living standards and lack of education also exacerbate the world's population problems.Greed and lust for power are destroying what little democracy and freedoms left on this planet.We can save the planet and our people too.The two are not mutually exclusive.

The source of most of our problems is the debt money creation system of private central banks that owns our increases in productivity and creates it as debt which our Govts must tax us to service.L Frank Baum in 'The Wizard of Oz' had a real economic meaning for us in his book, which was lost in the production of the movie inWhich Judy Garland starred. http://www.youtube.com/?v=6cq9yEVcGIU

Oxley belongs to the dinosaur class of economist. Free trade is anything but, it allows the exploitation of the markets of weaker nations by the more powerful. He takes issue with the notion of environment preceding economics; just because other dinosaurs said they were equal at the Rio Summit does not make them so. If anything, the economy is but a subset of the environment. If we stuff the environment then the economy will totally collapse.

What is needed is a winding back of the "growth at any cost" economy to a steady-state economy (cf. Herman Daly) where development has multiple meanings, not just making more stuff. It may well mean a somewhat simpler life, but it would still be rich if we replaced overconsumption with more social activity.

The Greens may not have all the answers, but then neither does anyone else. At least they are asking many of the questions that need to be asked.

"Business as usual" is doing a damn fine job of screwing the whole planet. For our children and our children's children it may be time for some new thinking.

Most of the policies being mooted by the political parties bode misery and poverty for the wage earners in probably all the countries, It had been proved by success when Harold Holt was the Treasurer for Australia, but he is only remembered as the person who was washed out to sea and lost. Neither the gross resources exporting nor the immoral tax system has done anything towards driving Australia towards being a prosperous economy, the higher top tax of 66.6% was reducing the excessively high incomes we were getting then, and it would do the same now. The improvement would have to be an increase of the level of the zero tax earnings to about $30,000, to bring the tax intake to the 30% of GDP that has been the aim of the Treasurers since 1970, unfortunately their religion does not allow them to think about such a sacrilege as reducing costs for mere wage earners. The reciprocal imports of all the goods we were manufacturing here previously, have all but destroyed our own industries, the economy and employment opportunities of far too many of our people. The call for our people to leave their homes and opt for the mining employment away just does not wash. The Parties neither Labor nor Liberal have been able to recruit people with the required intelligence to manage these problems, they don’t even recognise that there is a problem, and I don’t see that they have enough intelligence or integrity even to handle the “Global Warming” problem. The religion of the members of political parties demands complete destruction of the countries and the conditions of their workers.

Do the sums Merv09.We have a $1.4 trillion economy.With inflation and increase in our productivity of 6% pa ,the money supply is inceased by $84 billion pa but not as a tax credit by our Govts.It is created by mostly private central OS banks as debt.So in going from a what should be a tax credit our productivity gets expressed as a negative thus our liablity doubles to $168 billion pa plus interest.The debt can never be repaid.

In the 1970's we had a national OS debt of $ 3 billion and now it is over $ 600 billion.The more productive we are,the more debt we incur.China has many Govt banks which produce 80% of its' new money either as debt free infrastructure or as a tax credit when the money is loaned to private individuals/companies.

Only sovereign Govts should have the power to create new money to equal our increases productivity.The US Consitution still states this but Pres Woodrow signed way this right in 1913 with the Instigation of the US Federal Reserve whom our banks borrow from.

Had our Govt the power to create new money debt free,every workers tax bill would be reduced by over $18,000.Do you now see how rotten to the core our system is?

jimoctec - "Free trade is anything but, it allows the exploitation of the markets of weaker nations by the more powerful."

Nope, precisely the opposite in recent decades, as even a glance at the region's economies show. As an example, free trade permits manufacturing work to go to the lowest wage country (mostly) where it generates jobs. Wages and our dollar are very high at the moment and that means its cheaper to make toasters and cars almost anywhere else.

In buying that stuff we are paying for jobs in other countries. They get the extra work, and we get goods cheaper. Both sides benefit.

But wages in the countries that get the income don't stay low. They start increasing - as happened in Japan and Korea and is happening (off a very low base) in China. The country stops being poverty stricken and manufacturing moves again. People stop being factory workers and start being tourists, design consultants and lawyers.

Although free trade has problems as well as benefits, it can do far more for any country than aid.

Critical self-reflection leads to the conclusion that our society fails on the criterion of ecologically sustainability. We are a profligate, consumption-mad society, in a world in which unsustainable living arrangements are the norm in the developed world and spreading quickly in the developing world. We can't predict the time frame for collapse if we continue on this trajectory, but we can be reasonably certain that without major changes in our relationship to the larger living world the ecosphere will at some point (likely within decades) be unable to support large-scale human life as we know it. These crises, if honestly acknowledged and squarely faced, would test our capacity to analyze and adapt, there's no guarantee that enough time remains to prevent catastrophe. Without such honesty, there is no hope of a decent future. So, the bad news is that we're in trouble. The worse news is that the mainstream political culture cannot face this reality.

As the world burns, as species die off, as mothers breastfeed their children with dioxin-tainted breast milk, as nuclear reactors melt down into the Pacific while the aerial deployment of depleted uranium damages innocent lives, it is perplexing that so few people fight back against a system that has horror as a reality for most living on the planet. And those who fight back, who stand in opposition to the culture behind such wholesale abuse and call it what it is – a genocidal mega-state (especially if you believe that the lives of nonhumans are as important to them as yours is to you and mine is to me) – are met with hostility and hatred, scoffed at, harassed, even tortured. With so much at stake, why aren’t more people deafening their ears to the nutcases who preach a future of infinite-growth economies? And why do so many people continue to put “the economy” first, to take industrial capitalism as we know it as a given and not fight back, defend what’s left of the natural world?