In February this year, the University of Sydney appointed a new Chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson. This appointment opens the door to the mining industry on our campus and reflects the neoliberal orientation of our education system. Ms Hutchinson is currently a director of one of Australia’s largest companies. AGL makes its money through coal seam gas extraction, a technology that threatens Australia’s productive farmland, fractures our waterways and underground aquifers and pours climate-change-causing methane into the air in large quantities. It is a corruption of a public office for Ms Hutchinson to remain a director of AGL whilst also directing the interests of our supposedly independent University.
Ms Hutchinson is also a former director of the Centre for Independent Studies, a right wing think tank that churns out neoliberal ideas for business interests. With her at the helm we can be assured that our education will be geared to make profit. That means more deals to do research and courses for the...
CSG coming to a backyard near you!
We’re standing on the edge of a quarry. At the far wall my eyes travel up through a dissection of the earth’s first 50m, layers of shale, sandstone and earth in shades of grey, yellow and brown. Atop the hill, grey-green against the fields and the sky is a gas plant, the central point of a new generation of resource extraction South West of Sydney, sucking gas from drills up to 4km underground in a radius of 100km around the plant.
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The David and Goliath tale of Civil Society and Big Coal in the Land of Plutocratic Turbo-Capitalism
By Chris P.
If there was one take-home memo from #occupy it was that ‘representative democracy’ in the United States, indeed of much of the world, is no longer representative, nor democratic, if ever it was. The idea that “representative” democracyis capable of delivering an equal say to equal people has become a farce so blatant it’s a real surprise more aren’t calling the omnipresent political spade that which it actually is by definition: a representative Plutocracy.
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The David and Goliath tale of Civil Society and Big Coal in the Land of Plutocratic Turbo-Capitalism
By Chris P.
If there was one take-home memo from #occupy it was that ‘representative democracy’ in the United States, indeed of much of the world, is no longer representative, nor democratic, if ever it was. The idea that “representative” democracyis capable of delivering an equal say to equal people has become a farce so blatant it’s a real surprise more aren’t calling the omnipresent political spade that which it actually is by definition: a representative Plutocracy.
plutocracy |pluːˈtɒkrəsi|
noun ( pl. plutocracies ) [ mass noun ]
government by the wealthy.
• [ count noun ] a state or society governed by the wealthy.
• [ count noun ] an elite or ruling class whose power derives from their wealth.
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