Wednesday, April 23, 2008
2020 X 2
The Great Australian Cringe is back, according to 2020 summiteer David Marr:
More troubling is the return of a cringing question that disappeared in the Howard years. “What does the world think of us?” was the theme of a one-hour Sky News broadcast for which the thousand delegates were co-opted …
The delegates were co-opted in more ways than one. Speaking of Howard, here’s the Age’s Catherine Deveny:
Man, we loved to hate Howard. Back in the good old days of 2007 it was wall-to-wall leftie love-ins of hatred. The hate brought us closer together. Now, who’ve we got? We can’t hate Brendan Nelson. That’d be like picking on the retarded kid.
Nice lady. We’ll pick on Peter Garrett instead, which isn’t like picking on the retarded kid. Hater Pete was a summit star last weekend, but he had an unfair advantage – in the mid-90s Garrett participated in a forum called 2020 Vision: Australia’s Future. A book on the event, by Craig Emerson and Fleur Kingham, summarised proceedings:
Garrett’s vision for 2020 is a nation in the process of transforming its economy into a steady state, where - apart from mining, which would still play a part - it did not use up the continent’s environmental capital. He envisions a nation that has cleaned up its rivers, reclaimed its soil and where solar and wind energy provided at least half its energy needs ...
For the coming 25 years, Garrett calls upon Australians to repair the damage already done to the environment and to move to an ecologically sustainable society where nonhuman communities act like natural communities and live within a natural ebb and flow of energy from the sun and plants.
Nonhuman communities acting like natural communities … looks like Pete got his wish.
(Via Miss S.)