Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Australians have gone gangbusters over rooftop solar. Their personal responsibility for it is the same as it is for most community-focused projects, world-leading. Governments got the ball rolling with generous rebates and tariffs, but this is where the story shifts. /2
Government incentives (feed-in tariffs in particular) have been gradually wound back over time, until sometimes people are now blocked from exporting any excess energy to the grid at all. This is largely because governments didn't do their personal responsibility bit.../3
...in building new transmission and storage for all of this home-grown energy. We've been led by governments focused on 'getting government out of peoples' lives' for decades, and it's now showing. And here's the critical bit. /4
The 'grid'. The grid makes a lie of all of the political bullshit about individual freedom versus government oppression. The grid is both individual, and collective, *at the same time*. Australians use the grid to help themselves personally, but also as a mechanism to.../5
...share that personal benefit with others. That's why humans invented government itself. All this tiring rubbish about individuals vs the State, imported from the UK and US with their libertarian hang-ups and fantasies, has no place in Australia. /6
Personal responsibility in Australia has ALWAYS been community-focused. We lead the world in collective mobilisation to face problems, because we don't have all the historical baggage of political systems developed in the territorial politics of Europe. /7
Right now with Covid, politicians indebted to that old European politics through inherited privilege here in Australia have taken away the 'grid'. The public health framework inside which any personal responsibility public health work we individually do works and makes sense. /8
They've been trying desperately for decades, with the assistance of Murdoch media and think tanks, to graft that neoliberal/libertarian framework onto Australian life. It's not really taking though, because Australia's entire existence as a society rejects every.../9
...premise of that framework. It's the framework of the people who sent us here as a penal colony, why would we want it back? Indigenous Australians also had a communal framework, before we arrived (and I'm sure we learned some of it from them, without even realising). /10
When Australians use personal responsibility, it doesn't mean they want to look after themselves, individually. Australian society and politics is communitarian - not socialist, capitalist, communist, or any of those European categories. The 'community' is individual AND.../11
...collective, at the same time. Until we get rid of politicians trying to transplant centuries of European failed territorial politics into barren Australian soil, what's unique about living here will be constantly under threat. /end

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More from @RageSheen

Jul 26
We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play in this pandemic. /1
The raw material of society is beliefs. Beliefs are the building blocks of all societies. Everything solid or ‘physical’ you see is constructed ultimately of beliefs too. Like our ‘hybrid’ junk NBN. Beliefs aren’t separate, they’re woven into the fabric of everything. /2
The Covid pandemic is the same. It doesn’t matter how many dire health and medical statistics you throw at it, the trajectory never shifts - more infections, more deaths. The most dangerous illusion is that facts have some sort of free-floating existence that compels action. /3
Read 22 tweets
Jul 22
The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll use SKY News Australia as an example. The channel nobody watches but which shapes Australia. /1 #auspol
The N=1 crowd understand something their opponents don’t, and it’s why they’ve been winning for so many decades. Including on Covid. They understand that there is no such thing as a group will, groups never, ever guide themselves in any direction. Attending any committee…/2
…meeting will tell you that. It’s always a tiny number within a group that provide the direction others follow. I say 5%, based on research showing that’s roughly how many ‘lead’ groups. The N=1 crowd themselves, the financial elite of society are themselves a tiny group. /3
Read 12 tweets
Jul 19
Public health paradoxes. Where we use ‘personal choice’ in banking, or supermarkets etc., despite the ideology of choice everything coagulates into a handful of monopolies. Give people ‘freedom’ and they *always* reinstate hierarchy. Why? /1 #covid19aus

choice.com.au/shopping/every…
Because the default state of society is social interaction. And social interaction is created by imitation, by status. We all look for leadership, for a hierarchy of value in which to assess the decisions confronting us. The idea of a free-floating individual making choices…/2
…is a fantasy. The only place it exists is that persecuted, bullied outsider on the fringe of groups. And even that person’s life is dominated by exclusion from that same social group. Public health has to be led, like anything we do in society. If it’s not led, people will…/3
Read 5 tweets
Jul 18
One of my projects is to unwrap neoliberal, libertarian framings of our collective lives. I don’t think it’s widely understood just how deep these are, how entrenched in how we see the world. One that I think may challenge many is secrecy and freedom of information. /1
I think most of us instinctively get warm feelings about freedom of information legislation. And about whistleblowing warriors who use it and even go well beyond, breaking the law to release restricted information. But do we stop to think about why we instinctively love this? /2
Here’s a first warning bell. It’s neoliberal, libertarian governments who are often the greatest champions of FOI, and who write the legislation for it. It’s not hard to figure out why, they despise government, and love nothing more than a narrative that suggests it’s corrupt. /3
Read 15 tweets
Jul 14
@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as Bill Mollison used to say. /1

#auspol #COVID19Aus
Australia (and the world) will never escape this pandemic until we abandon our root strategy, to 'minimise severe disease'. That's a hospital management strategy, or as I call it, a public disease (rather than public health) strategy. /2
It directly causes the infection of the entire population, over and over. It makes the public sick, potentially permanently. A total collapse and failure of public health responsibilities, we don't manage any other infectious disease in this way,.../3
Read 11 tweets
Jul 14
These protesters demand freedom from public health action, which they see as a type of tyranny. But humans are social animals, nobody really wants freedom. All humans form hierarchies, even scientists, shaped by what the group in question values. /1 Image
These protesters a clear case in point. They’re a coordinated group, with shared values and aims. Despite what they say and maybe even think, they’re not after freedom from being told what to do. They want to be told what to do by *somebody else*. /2
Like Trump’s freedom warriors. They’re not after freedom, they’re desperate to follow somebody. Trump. We have to replace the stupid libertarian idea that the default state of society is free individuals. The default state is social groups, who want to be led, guided. /3 Image
Read 6 tweets

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