The Forum > Article Comments > The problem with sustainability > Comments
The problem with sustainability : Comments
By Jim Gall, published 16/9/2011Sustainability is simply thinking about the future.
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I’m not blaming the corporate sector. I understand the motives for bigger markets, business growth and ever-bigger profits.
The problem lies fundamentally with government. It is afterall supposed to be one of the primary roles of government to protect our future wellbeing and to not allow our environment (humanised and natural) to become degraded and our resource base to become stressed and unable to reliably meet demand. In other words; to achieve a sustainable society.
But governments just fundamentally fail to do this.
You can’t say the quality of government is dependent on the will (or lack thereof) of the people. I think most people would like Australia to have a much lower immigration rate, for Sydney to stop packing in ever-more people, and likewise with southeast Queensland, Perth and so on. And yet our government just keeps right on doing it… and the opposition is aligned all the way.
Most people would like Australia to have a sustainable society, as opposed to an obviously unsustainable one, in which our quality of life remains high for a very long time into the distant future.
Those ‘paper entities’ of yours are very powerful indeed, and are NOT aligned with the wishes of the general community. Not by a long way. And the overall strong bias of government towards never-ending expansionism and hence antisustainability, is way out of whack with the majority view of the general populace.
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