Abstract
Unlimited economic growth is not sustainable in a finite physical world. Assuming that population will simply increase along fixed forecasts is wrong. Technology notwithstanding, urban Australians have encountered physical limits in the form of vulnerabilities to water supply, heat stress, congestion, pollution, waste disposal, biodiversity and extinction rates, fresh food supply, and bushfires. Our ancient landscape is not Europe or North America: it is different—dry, climatically variable, poor soils!
A pandemic like COVID-19 has demonstrated the severe limitations of neoliberal market ideology to prepare for, as well as solve, a biological problem. Only government can govern a community. To govern is to look ahead, monitor trends and engage honestly with the community. One expects the Commonwealth Government to reduce immigration rates, as population growth and consumption are the twin causes of our physical vulnerabilities. COVID-19 has accomplished this—what will our Governments do with this opportunity?
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Notes
- 1.
Governments will attempt to reduce debt, both public and private. But recent European evidence post the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) suggests that austerity won’t work, and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) suggests it is not needed. Simplistically, the Commonwealth Government as a currency-issuing state can issue bonds that are purchased by the Reserve Bank and at maturity, ‘paid out’ by Government to itself in order to finance extraordinary circumstances.
- 2.
Unlimited economic growth in a closed system—our Biosphere—reaches a ‘singularity’, a point at which, systems of energy transfer, for example, food, water, clean air, collapse. No amount of ‘innovation’ or substitution at this point can rescue the civilisation from the catastrophic failure of economic ‘externalities’; that is, entropy overwhelms the systems.
- 3.
MYEFO 2019–20 Budget Papers, Part 2, p. 11: Real GDP growth is forecast to be 2¼ per cent in 2019–20, a downgrade of ½ of a percentage point since PEFO. Growth is then expected to strengthen to 2¾ per cent in 2020–21. Employment growth will be underpinned by a pick-up in economic activity, although leading employment indicators suggest that growth is likely to moderate, keeping the unemployment rate at 5¼ per cent (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020).
- 4.
Kuna and Sreedhar (2019): Various studies reported up to 600 particle microplastics per kilogram of salt, up to 660 microplastic fibres per kilogram of honey and up to about 109 microplastic fragments per litre of beer.
- 5.
“Embodied energy is essentially an indicator of energy consumption in the econometric system relative to direct energy or operation energy. …. It enables us to analyze energy-related issues from the perspective of the whole supply chain and the whole energy flow network. … Moreover, due to the scalability of the concept of embodied energy and the application of more analytical methods like SDA and complex network analysis, embodied energy can be used in more fields and help us understand energy issues better” (Chen et al., 2019, p. 17).
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Sobels, J., Turner, G. (2022). There Are No Sustainable Cities in Australia. In: Levin, I., Nygaard, C.A., Newton, P.W., Gifford, S.M. (eds) Migration and Urban Transitions in Australia. Global Diversities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91331-1_4
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