A Nation of Challenge

Australia is experiencing its usual run of disasters and tragedies this summer.  The ruinous flood in Townsville and the threat that Cyclone Katrina now poses to North Queensland, twenty-five people drowning at surf beaches across the country, the death of four NSW volunteer fire-fighters in bushfires;  all are a reminder that we live in a land with more than its share of natural hazards.

But despite the pain and hardship that follow from such calamities, they also draw attention to something fine about our nation.  The thriving voluntary associations that Australians have developed to deal with these threats are evidence that a basic decency still prevails.

And perhaps more unexpectedly, the way we have responded to these recurrent natural crises may also help to explain why, comparatively speaking, Australia is well governed, with deeply rooted democratic sentiments and institutions.

How are these two matters connected?  In Making Democracy Work, a book that quickly became a classic when it was published five years ago, Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor of politics, offered a straightforward answer.

The introduction of a new set of regional governments throughout Italy in 1970, all with the same formal structures and powers, had allowed Putnam and his colleagues to carry out a unique experiment.  They began a twenty year long study of these new governments, and found that some proved to be inefficient and corrupt failures, while others had turned out to be great successes.

Putnam considered a number of possible reasons for this difference -- wealth, education, party politics, and so on -- but none offered a satisfactory explanation.  Finally, he discovered that one characteristic provided a correlation that was "virtually perfect".  Regions with the most effective and well-regarded governments were invariably those with the strongest networks of voluntary associations.

By belonging to such groups people learn the importance of civic obligations and accept a degree of personal responsibility for the welfare of their communities.  The groups also enhance their ability to co-operate with and trust fellow citizens, people who would otherwise be strangers with whom they had little in common.  This forms a "virtuous circle", creating a community whose values encourage individuals to join voluntary associations, which in turn reinforce the values and skills on which public-spiritedness depends.

Many kinds of organisations seem able to do this successfully, and Putnam stressed the contribution of mutual-aid co-operatives, sporting clubs, and cultural societies.  He did not specifically discuss voluntary groups set up on a permanent basis to provide various rescue and emergency services.  But these groups are probably more effective than any other kinds of associations at fostering the values and attitudes that lie at the heart of a good society.  I think there are two reasons for this.

Firstly, unlike organisations that are formed around particular philosophical or ideological views, such as political parties or lobby groups, members of service associations do not see themselves as promoting an interest or cause that might be opposed by others.  They genuinely work on behalf of everyone, not just those who are sympathetic to their views.  Of course, this applies to many kinds of charitable organisations as well.

But there is a further consideration that applies to associations such as volunteer fire brigades, emergency service units and surf life saving clubs.  The potential dangers that members of these groups may face makes it particularly important that they can trust each other.  So the skills which enhance their ability to co-operate effectively with the people of many different backgrounds from which membership is usually drawn form an important part of their training.

Australia is very well endowed with these kinds of voluntary groups, to the envy of many other countries.  About 50,000 men and women across the country are active members of State Emergency Service units, the voluntary organisation which has carried a major burden of helping people affected by this week's Townsville flood.

These highly-trained units, which work closely with local government structures, were established in different states at various times over the past forty years, and developed from post-war civil defence organisations.  SES members are on 24 hour call to respond to cyclones, floods, search and rescue emergencies and other crises.

Around 260,000 Australians -- and 52,000 Queenslanders -- are volunteer fire-fighters, belonging to local Rural Fire Brigades and similar organisations, which in some states go back to the middle of the last century.  As the tragic deaths in NSW remind us, these are the men and women who face possibly the greatest dangers of any volunteers, and like SES members, they are on 24 hour call.

80,000 Australian men and women belong to over 260 clubs affiliated with Surf Life Saving Australia.  The first of these clubs were formed in the early years of this century in NSW and Queensland, and the movement as a whole has a distinguished record with around 350,000 people saved from drowning.  In Queensland, no-one has ever drowned in an area patrolled by volunteer surf life savers.

But these membership figures understate the actual support such groups receive.  The intensive training requirements, and the demands that voluntary duties can make on time and personal safety means that it is not just their own commitment that is necessary -- active members must also have the backing of their families and employers.

Why do people join these kinds of associations?  There are a number of reasons, and not all of them are altruistic.  For many, a desire to meet a physical challenge, to prove one's courage in the face of nagging doubts, to enter into the camaraderie that these groups usually generate, or even to meet members of the opposite sex, may be just as important a motivation as the desire to perform a public service.

But in an important sense, the initial motivations don't matter much.  It is the social consequences that count.  For quite apart from the direct rescue and emergency services that these voluntary associations provide, they play a vital role in perpetuating the values of citizenship on which a free, democratic society depends.

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Doomsayers Scare Tactics

The usual burst of New Year's predictions is a reminder that when it comes to foretelling the future, there are two big differences between tribal cultures and ourselves.

Increasingly, we seem to expect dismal rather than optimistic predictions, especially in regards to the environment and public health.  And we have developed more elaborate reasons to explain why most of these predictions turn out to be wrong.

Or perhaps we are just better at forgetting the failures.  Hearing the predictions of a global warming catastrophe that accompanied last month's Kyoto conference on greenhouse gases, how many people remembered that less than twenty-five years ago, there was widespread panic about global cooling?

In the mid-1970s, scientific as well as popular magazines were warning about ominous signs of a world-wide decline in temperatures that would lead to devastating crop failures and political instability.  Some of the very scientists who have been most active in recent years in promoting global warming fears, such as the American climatologist Stephen Schneider, had previously hitched their fortunes to this coming ice-age.

At least Schneider has been frank enough to admit the tactical considerations that lie behind such pessimistic predictions.  In an interview with the anti-nuclear activist Jonathan Schell some years ago, Schneider said that to obtain broad public support for their causes, scientists "have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts that we might have ... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest".

Some gloomy predictions seem to fill such an important cultural and psychological need for our elites that even a long and illustrious record of failure does not dent the credibility of those who make them.  Since 1973, Lester Brown from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington D.C. has been warning that world population is about to outgrow food production.  In an article on environmental doomsday forecasts in its most recent issue, The Economist notes that in 1994, after 21 years of being wrong, Brown said "after 40 years of record food production gains, output per person has reversed with unanticipated consequences."

At least Brown has a consistent tally with his predictions.  His comments were followed by three years of big increases in world food output.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Index of per capita food production gained over 5 per cent from 1993 till 1996 (the most recent year for which full statistics are available).

Such figures only seem to challenge Brown to redouble his efforts.  Last August, he released another missive, called The Agricultural Link:  How Environmental Deterioration Could Disrupt Economic Progress.  The message:  it's crunch time for agriculture, and the world is about to experience the "politics of scarcity".

Nevertheless, every year, when the Worldwatch Institute updates its State of the World report, journalists around the world respectfully report its forecasts, and neglect to enquire about the fate of earlier prophecies.

The American environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook has formulated a law of doomsaying which holds that the greatest success goes to those who predict dreadful events which will occur between five and ten years in the future.  This time window is near enough to cause anxiety, far off enough for most people eventually to forget what was predicted, and long enough to allow for substantial book sales and paid lecture tours.

Easterbrook offers biologist Paul Ehrlich as a good example of a canny catastrophist.  In 1968 Ehrlich declared that "the battle to feed humanity is already lost, in the sense that we will not be able to prevent large-scale famines in the next decade".  A year later he predicted that by the mid-1970s, "smog disasters" would cause 200,000 Americans per year to drop dead.  He also warned that American life expectancy would decline to as low as 42 years.

Warming to his task, Ehrlich began to venture outside the Easterbrook window of opportunity, and make longer-range predictions.  In 1969 he told British biologists "if I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000".

Actually, he was a gambler, for in 1980 he accepted a wager offered by the economist Julian Simon, who had long ridiculed Ehrlich's predictions of devastating global shortages of crucial commodities.  Simon bet that the real price of any five natural resources of Ehrlich's own choosing would be lower in 1990 than in 1980, because recoverable reserves would continue to outstrip demand.

Ehrlich lost, and he would still have lost even if the prices had not been adjusted for inflation.  So what was the lesson he learnt?  Did he stop making his wild predictions and apologise for misleading millions with foolish predictions?  Of course not.  He increased his attacks on Simon's supposedly unrealistic and dangerous views.

In their famous study of a 1950s doomsday cult focused on aliens in flying saucers, When Prophecy Fails, the social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues discovered that the failure of the world to end on the day predicted did not weaken the faith of those who had been strongly committed to the group.

On the contrary, the intensity of their involvement and the mutual support they gave each other after the world continued to exist meant that many of the cult's followers emerged even more convinced than before, and more dedicated to promoting their message to a wider audience.  Festinger's findings are as valid for contemporary environmental doomsayers as they were for the eccentric cultists he wrote about forty years ago.

By now, my own forecast should be obvious.  It is based on the simple futurological technique of extrapolation from the present.  I can confidently predict that environmentalists will continue to warn that unless we follow their bidding, the world will go to hell in a handbasket.

It has been a winning formula for them to date, ensuring considerable public influence and financial rewards.  But they are wrong.  Don't allow their jeremiahs to distract you from having a happy New Year.

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Not a powerful argument

Former SECV Commissioner, David Scott, (29/12) responded to my article (22/12) which argued that greenhouse controls would be the death knell of our efficient brown coal electricity industry in the Latrobe Valley.  Mr Scott suggests I am unaware of, or wilfully ignored, the SECV's plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

On the contrary, I am only too well aware of those plans.  One of the proposals to cut carbon dioxide emissions under the Cain/ Kirner Government included reducing emissions by decreasing output.  Part of this entailed ceasing to export electricity to South Australia.

As South Australia buys one-third of its electricity from Victoria, such a proposal was as uncharitable as it was unbusinesslike.  The strategy entailed closing down the Hazelwood power station, which the present Government has sold for $2.3 billion.  Other plans involved installing wind generation with energy costs five times that of brown coal stations.

Mr Scott actually suggests it would be better for Victorian taxpayers not to have the revenues from the Hazelwood sale.  We could, of course, buy it back;  we could also commence the windfarm construction program that he favours.  I doubt that any responsible political party would subscribe to such notions today.

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