Thursday, October 20, 2005
“THINGS CAN’T GO ON AS THEY ARE”
David Williamson answers criticism of his sneering attack on aspirational Australians:
I fully expected the kind of response I got to my ironic state-of-the nation piece Cruise Ship Australia in last week’s Bulletin. All the usual right-wing heavies were wheeled out to pour scorn. The one thing you can’t do to these gross national product worshippers is suggest that eternal economic growth and ever-increasing material acquisition are unsustainable in the long term, or they literally go bananas. Their ostrich-like behaviour is extraordinary in the face of the growing evidence that things can’t go on as they are.
Even the progressive oil companies are warning people that the age of oil is coming to an end. The resource is simply running out and there are no obvious replacements. Oil has fuelled our growth and supplied the great bulk of our energy. The price of oil is tipped by even conservative observers to be on a permanent rising curve, some predicting $US100 a barrel within a year. When these sorts of prices start to bite, the picnic is well and truly over on Cruise Ship Australia.
We have tripled our real income since 1950, but surveys show we are no happier with our lives. Some studies show we are actually unhappier. What’s the logic in eating up the earth’s resources and leaving our children and grandchildren a lot less well off than we are if the habit isn’t even making us happier? Is there no one of intelligence on the Right who is prepared to look at the the long-term consequences of the way we are behaving towards our fragile planet, and look beyond gross national product as the be all and end all of everything?
Let’s cut everyone’s wages by two-thirds, and see if happiness levels remain constant. In the same letters column, Lew Bretz (a reader of this site, by the way) has his say:
After reading your editorial on David Williamson’s cruise-ship trauma at the hands of the boorish Howard-voting aspirational classes, I read his article then referred to my copy of his 1990s play Dead White Males. As I feared, Williamson’s been taken over by one of his characters, the radical anarcho-feminist humanities lecturer and consummate opportunist Dr Grant Swain. Surely some of his Noosa neighbours, at least the other refugees from crass hotspots such as Melbourne and Sydney, can help David recover himself?
Alas, people rarely recover from Swain flu. Professor Bunyip checks the symptoms.