Community

One word you hear a lot from politicians mouths is 'community'. When you think of what politicians of all kinds have done over the years, it makes you want to rush to the dictionary, to check out if the meaning has changed. John Howard often talks about the community as if he is the voice of the average person. The truth is that Howard, like so many others in business, government and the media, is ultimately only interested in a community that follows the orders of various elites.

Howard's vision of community seems to be limited to a mythical beast called 'Middle Australia', which seems to include those agree with John Howard and exclude anyone who doesn't. Anyone who disagrees with John Howard is not a real Australian. This would mean that the majority of Australians are not part of the Australian community, as even Liberal voters disagree with Howard about many things. If you're not part of the Australian community, you can be safely ignored and all your interests are irrelevant.

The most obvious example of the way in which talk about community is mostly all hot air, is the way in which economic matters have been decided to override other interests. Local community interests are continually sacrificed for vague concepts such as "National Interest", the "Free Market", "Growth" and "Progress". Most people in most communities don't seem to matter much in the face of such powerful concepts.

In South Australia, there have been various examples of the struggles of local communities against government, bureaucracies and business during Howard's term of office. One area is the closing of schools. In keeping with the patttern set by the Labor Party, the state Liberal government continued to close large numbers of schools around South Australia. Such school closures brought immediate disadvantages to local communities who had sent their children to schools that had been closed. In many instances, the closure of schools meant children had to travel increased distances to school, start at a new school and parents often had to spend more time getting their children to school.

But the disadvantages do not end here. In many cases, the local school is one of the few green areas in the community where children can play. When many schools were sold, they were sold to developers who promptly went about building housing estates on them. The money from the school did not go towards improving facilities in the community surrounding the school. Instead, money went to the government who decided how it would spend it. The government effectively penalised local areas because schools were deemed to small to operate along bureaucratic lines.

This example shows that who controls resources within a community is a very important matter. Without control of resources in your community, you really struggle to control your own life. Talk of government ownership means nothing if that government (as they frequently do) ignores the people most affected by a decision regarding a particular resource. If you think just for five minutes, I'm sure you can recall at least a couple of instances where residents have struggled to stop or modify building projects, close polluting industries or stop health service or school closures. In every instance, it is clear that those who actually live in the areas affected by closures or new industries have very little control over the areas they live in. Instead of communities controlling the resources that are used by that community, the government or business has much greater control over what happens.

Government ownership is not equivalent to 'ownership by the people' or 'socialism'. The anarchist vision of socialism holds that ordinary people must have control over their own lives and the resources that are needed to keep their community going. A 'socialist' state which regularly uses force against communities to get its way, is no greater friend of ordinary people than any other state.

In the case of school closures the government is often supporting private enterprise, ie. the state acts in the interests of individual capitalists. A huge resource is taken from the local community and often given to a wealthy land developer. A large profit is thus given to a single individual, thanks to the generosity of taxpayers and the local community through the power of the government.

While various communities did protest the closure of their schools, the closure of the Croydon Park Primary School brought a number of issues surrounding the closure of schools into the light. Another aspect of the closure of the Croydon Park Primary School, was the campaign carried out by some of the parents of children who attended the school and the reaction of the various elites to this campaign. Both the campaign and the responses to the campaign bring up several important issues that hold extreme importance for all communities.

In the case of Croydon Park Primary School, concerned parents chose to undertake a different model of media campaign to highlight the insensitivity of the government. The parents chose to constantly harass the Minister for Education Rob Lucas at press conferences, questioning him over the school closure. Instead of addressing the concerns of these people, the politicians chose to be arrogant and condescending. Rather than taking these concerned people seriously, the politicians and the media, generally abused these people for daring to question the bureaucratic process and the government. There were very few media outlets that dealt with the issue of school closure on a sustained and serious basis. Clearly those who did not accept the current orthodoxy of government for private gain are to be dismissed as stupid, mad or naive individuals who should step out of the way and leave politics to the experts - the politicians, media and a few chosen academics.

The truth is that while politicians and business groups like us to think that 'we're all South Australians', ordinary people who refuse to accept external control of local affairs are always attacked by those who assume they are superior, know better and deserve to operate the levers of power over others. Whether the government is Labour, Liberal or Democrat is irrelevant. Neither governments, nor business can allow ordinary people to challenge their authority to decide what is right and proper. If they did, people might decide that they could run their own lives quite well.

The issue of community strength is all about people having control over matters which directly affect them and control over the resources within that community. This notion extends to matters such as the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, the exploitation of resources and people in countries like Mexico and Viet Nam, as well as matters like the industrial development of Pelican Point. A while ago, Transport SA told local councils and residents that they would not listen to their demands for jet skis to be restricted at Adelaide beaches. Those who actually live in an area are not to dare to think that they should have some say (let alone control over) in the organisation of their own area.

While our current system remains intact, local control over local matters will remain a fiction. The only way to remedy this is to begin the change to a society or societies that interact on the basis of cooperation and respect, rather than the principles of rape and pillage. A system which sees governments control areas as large as South Australia and allows large corporations to do largely what they like cannot give people meaningful control over their local environments and their own lives.

While individual campaigns must be fought out by those most affected, for real change to happen, lasting links must be built between all such campaigns. The potential of these links was seen in the union-busting dispute on the Australian wharves. These links are already formed or forming, but the interaction needs to go further if existing power structures are to be changed or removed.

If we are serious about real change, a change to a society where we could spend a lot less time protesting and a lot more time enjoying ourselves, we must embrace a move for real change, not just tinkering at the edges of our bureaucratic capitalist society. Debate about the shape of our society and any future society must take place at the same time as efforts to revive and strengthen traditions of cooperation and mutual aid.

In the process of building such cooperative networks we will be laying the foundations for a new, inter-connected, ecologically-sustainable, truly democratic and enjoyable society.