Piping Mad

If you don't already think that the Victorian Government's pipeline from the Goulburn river to the Sugarloaf reservoir is a bad idea then the map on page 3 of today's Age newspaper should set you straight. While the media has highlighted that the route will follow the Melba Highway, I think the more interesting point is that most of the pipeline will loosely follow the course of the Yea River. The government is basically building a pipeline that will pump water back up the course of the Yea river.

It used to be that infrastructure planners came up with mad schemes to turn the rivers inland. Obviously they've changed their minds on that because now they are planning to use a river course that's flowing inland to pump water back to the coast. Even if one agreed in principle with these sort of mega-projects sure this should be opposed on practical grounds in favour of diverting water from higher in the Yea river and thus requiring a pipe a quarter the length of the current proposal. Admittedly the proposed pipeline will extract water from the Goulburn a few kilometers upstream from where the Yea river flows into it so the argument is probably that the Yea river is not big enough to provide the water on it's own. Yet the map just illustrates to me the flawed assumptions behind this project and others like it: the idea that we can just manipulate our environment on a large scale without worrying about the consequences.

When will we learn to simply live within our environmental means? We must come to fully value our interdependence with the environment, and work with it rather than to continually exert our power-over it. It is on this basis that I stand in principle against all these mega-projects that attempt to twist the environment to human purposes, pipelines and dredging included.

Collaborative Reconciliaton?

It's been a momentous day. An apology finally offered to Australia's Indigenous peoples and particularly the stolen generations. While there are many deep emotions running through the population at large I'm drawn to comment on one of the more unexpected parts of the day. That is, Kevin Rudd's offer (perhaps better described as a challenge) to the opposition to form a bipartisan working group to address the practical issues of aboriginal disadvantage.
From the perspective of the crowd gathered in Melbourne's Federation Square this morning it seems like such an obvious suggestion that it should hardly be note worthy. But as I return home to the perspective of a lounge room parliamentary watcher the proposal takes on a radical significance. Rudd is not far wrong in describing it in the style of a war cabinet, for that is the best comparison I'm aware of and this shows its historical significance. In a contemporary sense though, Rudd's offer is an act of the politics of collaboration.
As I explained in a previous post collaborative processes contrast with democratic ones much more than I had previously realised. Democracy involves two or more (but usually two) sets of competing or oppositional ideas, with the outcome settled by a simple majority. Consensus, or collaboration, is philosophically different in that it invites multiple sets of ideas to be presented in a way that values all ideas and perspectives. It then attempts to unify them into a commonly agreed way forward rather than the divisive democratic result of winners and losers.
In this light Rudd's proposal can be seen for the radical step it is. It is an admission that a democratic approach applied over several decades and governments has failed. It makes the case that a new collaborative bi-partisan approach is needed and proposes a method for adopting a collaborative process within a wider democratic system. If Rudd, Brendan Nelson and others can work together constructively on this issue, surely they cannot help but be affected by their own co-operation as they battle on everything else. Who knows how this could permeate through our parliamentary system?
Let's not get ahead of ourselves though. This is only the first step in a long process and it began shakily at that. There was an unmistakable element of wedge politics in the way Rudd presented the offer today. It came from nowhere, in the middle of one of the most significant speeches of 21st century Australia and at a time when Brendan Nelson had to give an immediate response. One only had to watch as Nelson squirmed in his seat as he worked out what was coming to realise how the proposal was initially received. Yet it was accepted and so the process begins, hopefully with enough genuine goodwill to carry it to its first successful outcome.
And so for a moment it seems like parliament is almost keeping up with popular culture. Politicians appear to be learning what was obvious to the crowd at Federation Square. The lessons learnt by black and white communities alike about the value of collaboration seem to be finally filtering up into federal politics. A cultural shift is underway and Kevin Rudd has tapped into the mood of the nation.