Just look at all the spruikers coming out of the woodwork to advise how there’s big money to be made out of all the Fed’s quantitative easing before the market tanks. Gee, thanks, guys! As the world disappears down the plug-hole, I find this very comforting, very helpful.
I caught Geraldine Doogue interviewing Steve Bibb and Ivan O’Mahoney about their book Great Southern Land this morning. “Do we really know our land?” she asked towards the end of the interview.
No, Geraldine, we don’t know our land. If we really knew it like the aboriginal people knew it we’d base our revenue system on it, because this would reconcile people with the land – the way the aborigine was spiritually reconciled with it.
We do not know our land because we’ve come to believe it’s a commodity to be bought and sold, not rented. All longstanding and successful civilisations knew land is common and cannot be ‘owned’, except in the Middle English sense of the word ‘ow(er)ner’: he who owes the rent.
Seizing, buying and selling land in perpetuity was the wrongful act undertaken by all colonial powers in dispossessing the original inhabitants from the lands they had long possessed, hunted and husbanded, turning their native lands into a commodity that could be bought and sold came at a damning cost to their long held rituals and beliefs. They became lost souls.
Who are the wise? Those who prop up an errant financial system and encourage share markets as our civilisation disappears down the gurgler, or those whom we have egregiously tried to separate from their great Truth?
It’s not drawing too long a bow to argue the rent of land to be paid into the public purse is the missing reconciliatory clause for the preamble to the Australian Constitution. (The Americans back-slid on the point; their founding fathers–being predominantly big land owners–replaced it with the near-meaningless clause, “the pursuit of happiness”.)
You say we need more funds to tackle poverty, homelessness, health, the environment, education and infrastructure? I say instituting the Henry Tax Review is a BIG step towards solving those problems.