Category: Columns

Mullumbimby’s fiery protest on Saturday aiming to keep Woolworths out of that town possibly appears quaint to those readers who embrace development. Residents of Ballina, Alstonville and Wollongbar probably have more sympathy with the residents of Narabeen, in Sydney, who have posted signs in their main street, “Bring Back Woolies” and “No supermarket is killing this town”.

When Frank Sartor’s Far North Coast Regional Strategy was released in late 2006, real estate agents and business groups across the region welcomed the focus on developing regional areas, especially in the hinterland. The region-of-villages approach taken by the NSW government, promised to put money into Casino and Lismore, creating a diversity of housing and employment opportunities.

I interviewed Nationals Ballina MP, Don Page, at the time. He was concerned that Sartor’s estimate of 60,000 new residents by 2030 is well short of the actual figure. He expects there to be closer to 100,000 new residents and is concerned at the lack of infrastructure, especially for the aged.

It has always been the case that some people are enthusiastic about development and others about conserving the status quo, but petrol prices and climate change put this debate in a special context.

The Mullumbimby protest is not just about corporate domination of the food supply, or the takeover of planning laws by a decadent State government. It is about survival.

How will regional Australia survive when petrol prices are $10.00 a litre? We drive everywhere.

How will anyone who shops at a supermarket survive when industrially farmed, frozen chickens that have been fed on manufactured feed stocks cost $40?

The solution is small, densely populated communities that can feed themselves.

By all means lets have a regional strategy that promotes a region of villages. But let’s make sure those villages can feed themselves, provide their own energy and water and re-use their own waste.

The four key principles to a robust, viable future are:

1. Shop locally: Lower transport costs and keep the money in your community.

2. Bake it, don’t buy it: Control your ingredients, avoid preservatives, packaging and transport.

3. Grow your own: The home garden is a zero footprint food supply, that’s healthy to boot.

4. Share generously: Spread the word. Build your community. You’ll need it soon.

For your own sake, don’t buy into the suburban dream of cars, supermarkets and packaged food.

It’s about to become a nightmare.

Giovanni will be discussing this topic on Bay FM 99.9 FM on Friday morning at 9.

Saturday’s report on the housing crisis shows battlers joining the homeless, caravan park residents and welfare recipients in the struggle to find shelter. Speculation in real estate has pushed house prices beyond the reach of everyone except the permanently employed.

Two features in Saturday’s report deserve special mention.

People now commute further to work because houses in town are more expensive. As petrol prices continue to rise, these dormitory suburbs will become ghettos of unemployed.

The proposed subdivision in McClean’s Ridges highlights the problem. We carve up precious agricultural land and create dormitory suburbs that depend on cheap fuel to survive. Then we wonder why the nuclear families with two working parents struggle to maintain the mortgage, motor car and consumer lifestyle that goes with the territory.

Over ten millennium a sustainable form of settlement emerged independently on every continent, in every civilisation. The traditional village consists of ten to thirty families clustered together for protection, surrounded by the fields that feed them. These villages are within walking distance of each other, and a day’s ride of a market town that offers medical, educational and cultural services.

The industrial revolution began the destruction of these communities, clearing land for large scale agriculture and herding workers into dormitory suburbs. The motor car completed the process, allowing us to live like kings, burning oil to get around, to grow food and produce cheap goods.

Within five years, petrol prices will render the private motor car practically obsolete and we will be forced to tear down our fences and work together to grow food we can afford.

If we start building small houses, integrated into communities that share resources we can solve the immediate housing crisis and future proof ourselves against the end of cheap energy and the food crisis that will follow.

The absence of candidates from major parties in the forthcoming Tweed Council elections underlines the trouble with Australian politics.

It’s no surprise that Labor supporters will not fly the ALP banner.

The state government is hell-bent on destroying local councils; elected Labor representatives are prominent among the 320 councillors signed up for the Keep It Local campaign against Frank Sartor.

Local conservative politicians have problems closer to home. Being sacked for corruption is never a good look, but the scale of scullduggery on the Tweed beggars belief. Developers donated $340,00 in campaign funds during 2004, prompting a comparison with the total campaign budget of $63,000 for the Sydney Lord Mayor in the same election.

Half those funds were raised by Tweed Directions, run by prominent Liberals Jeff Egan and Bob Bordino. Political balance was assured by Labor apparatchik, Graham Staerk.

This disgusting history may explain the reluctance of this year’s candidates to don Labor, Liberal or National party t-shirts but is a symptom not the cause.

Our disgust with corruption reinforces the fear that politicians do not govern in our interests. They protect the commercial interests of the companies that fund their election campaigns, but they also have one eye on their own retirement packages and another on the larger interests of a globalised economy, our military allies and major trading partners.

This self interest is shocking but it is their weakness that marks our leaders as failures. Politicians naturally form alliances with the rich and powerful to get things done. Machievelli accurately defined self-interest as the one reliable motivator. It is weakness, though, that confuses alliance with obsequiousness.

Historically successful leaders have displayed the strength to balance the interests of the people, the nation (or empire) and the many and various interest groups demanding their attention.

The strength of the Labor Party last century was the connection with its rank and file. As a grass-roots party, beholden to its members, it was always guaranteed the support of almost half the population and almost half the time, the majority required to win government.

The membership of the three older parties has been declining for two decades. In that time, only the Greens membership has grown. The Greens’ consensus decision-making may be cumbersome and its insistence on refusing corporate donations might limit rapid growth, but it has paid off. It is now the only party fielding a ticket on many local councils.

The anecdotal evidence is sweet. Prominent political operators in the region are embarrassed by their families’ support of The Greens. The branch secretary of one major party complains that he has to remove Greens literature from his fridge every time he hosts a Party meeting. “Your policies are too damned attractive,” he said. The eldest offspring of one prominent Federal candidate is now a member of Australia’s only expanding political party.

As Julius Caesar once observed, “Lose control of your family, and you lose the nation.”

I take a more benign view. The young face an uncertain future and are leaving the dinosaurs of the twentieth century behind. They are naturally attracted to a party that has a sensible plan for the future that, after all, is theirs.

The incredible shrinking Dad observed through a teaspoon of shredded lettuce that it is impossible to get fat if you don’t stick it in your face. I forced away dreams of deep fried potatoes and reminisced about the surfing lessons I gave myself for my fortieth birthday. A dozen, slender, twenty-somethings and one fat old bastard lined up on Belongil Beach. Four hours later, they were complaining about sore calf muscles from balancing on the board. My calf muscles were as good as new. It was my upper arms that caned from trying to haul my fat carcass to the vertical.

It shocked me enough to stop drinking the left over gravy and start running. Exercise is more fun than starvation, in my book.

A dietician friend is hired by the mining companies to help keep their workforce healthy. The catering at the mine is four star and sometimes, the miners go a little silly. Interviewing one fair sized fella, she asked if he ate meat more than once a day. Detecting a certain shiftiness in his response, she probed. He had eaten four steaks for breakfast, every day for a week. We never got to talk about his dinner.

At the turn of last century over seventy five percent of the energy spent doing useful work in the United States was provided by animals or humans. Muscle power dug the ditches, ploughed the fields and pulled the carriages that drove civilisation.

Come the year 2000 and muscle power contributes a fraction of one percent. Machines clean our floors and dishes, knead our bread and carry us around the corner to pick up “stuff” we can’t be bothered making. Sixty percent of car trips in Australian cities are shorter than fifteen minutes. Elbow grease now comes out of a spray can.

The modern tractor, or excavator, is air-conditioned and laser-guided with a CD player on the dash. The notion of a working man, and his shape, is so far removed from that of a century ago as to be completely alien. Pop-Eye was once your average Joe.

I’m not suggesting that we turn off machines altogether, though oil prices may force us to, but it does seem odd to spend money on machines that save us making any effort and then spend more money in the gym on another machine to exercise our wasted muscles.

One story that did not make the papers is that Haitians are suffering kidney failure from the mud-cakes they eat to quell their hunger pangs.

They mix a special yellow clay with salt and fat – no worshipers of Pritikin, these folk – bake them in patty cake tins and take them to market. Traditionally the cakes delivered calcium to pregnant mums but have become a staple food since the grain ran out. Not all of the minerals in these mud cakes are good for you, thus the kidney failure.

If it wasn’t for the food miles involved we could trade hamburgers for mud-pies and solve two problems at the same time.

Giovanni Ebono is the founder and producer of The Generator on Bay FM.

99.9 FM on Mondays between 9 and 11.

Breakfast radio can be lonely. It’s dark when you unlock the studio, print out the weather and start talking to an audience, who is, mostly, still in bed.

No doubt many of you accidentally or deliberately celebrated the overthrow of British imperialism by a militia of American farmers 220 years ago. The gold-coast chapter of the Australian American Association hosted a barbecue on Friday: The Drink nightclub in Surfers went red white and blue on Friday night.

Reassured to know that someone’s listening, I was chastened to realise that I’d hurt someone’s feelings.

The first caller was American. “July the 4^th is our birthday,” he said. “How would you feel if someone started shouting insults at you on your birthday.”

“Fair point,” I said, “I’ll pass your comments along to other listeners.”

The impact of the American revolution, though, has not been all good.

Tossing heavily taxed British tea overboard in the Boston harbour, for example, has given the septic tanks an ongoing distaste for the humble cuppa. As a result it is impossible to get a decent brew anywhere north of Atlanta and south of Ontario.

Nevertheless, the principles of freedom and human rights enshrined by the founding fathers in the constitution of that fledgling republic still capture the imagination of freedom fighters everywhere. Ho Chi Minh, for one, used the declaration of Independence as the basis of his first speech to a newly independent Vietnam in September 1945.

Unfortunately, those principles and the republic itself have been deliberately undermined from within. The America First movement grew from the Spanish wars with Mexico and the annexation of the Philippines in 1899 until the second world war. They largely lost the argument under Harry Truman who tested the atom bomb on innocent civilians deliberately duped into the streets to collect data on the effects of nuclear weapons. The Bretton Woods conference, The Monroe Doctrine, Kennedy’s adventurism, the shame of Chile, el Salvador and Panama naturally followed.

Patriotic Americans, like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky, have written widely on the dangers of the security state that emerged to protect this imperial court. They also lament the security laws that protect the American people from the true nature of the American project.

It has taken a cynical war in Iraq to expose once and for all that, while spouting the rhetoric of democracy and freedom, the American imperial government will blithely spent three trillion dollars, kill hundreds of thousands of people and destroy their education, health services and government, just to get their hands on the world’s last untapped oil reserves.

As I said when I passed on my listener’s comments on Friday, “I do not want to offend those of you who celebrate the principles that founded the American republic 200 years ago, but those principles have been compromised and undermined by an empire that has thrown its shadow across the world for my entire lifetime.”

The point of Independence From America Day is to demand that our government leads an independent, non-aligned country, not the southern-most cornerstone of someone else’s empire.

My next caller was American, too. He moved here because his nation’s foreign policy makes him sick. Let’s hope that we become a nation that he is proud to call home.

Giovanni is on air on Bay FM 99.9 this morning from 9:00 until 11:00am.