Author(s): Tony Kevin

Politics

As the world struggles with the twin crises of economic catastrophe and rapidly accelerating climate disruption, a new urgency has entered into discussions of what needs to be done. In America, President Obama has launched a massive series of government reforms and economic interventions, linking them with a serious environmental agenda. His inspired adoption of green Keynesianism stands in sharp contrast to Australia's pursuit of short-term economic fixes, and its continual downplaying of our environmental problems. Kevin Rudd has announced that 'we are all Keynesians now', but this adoption of Richard Nixon's famous line is only true on the surface. Apart from embracing deficit-funded spending in search of infrastructure 'multipliers', our political elites refuse to make rational policy connections between the economy and the natural environment, and to think about these things in an integrated way. Instead, disruptive global warming has now been rolled into a policy siding, as the national policy train roars on in desperate pursuit of revived economic prosperity. Tony Kevin argues that this approach is no longer defensible or practical. We have reached a crunch time, and we need to apply the genuine, profound insights of John Maynard Keynes to help feed and employ us while we reinvent Australia as a renewable energy-based economy that will sustain our children's and grandchildren's climate security.