9 February

The great myth of ‘the community’, ‘the people’. Every elite aspirant to power evokes the community or the people. There is no such thing as a community or the people, just networks of groups following a tiny handful of leaders or influencers. A local government example. The ‘community objection’ to projects has is usually led by the same handful of people, across all projects. That objection obstructs hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in the community. This obstruction is portrayed as speaking for the community, but really it’s a platform for the elite aspirations of the objectors themselves, who want a more powerful and prominent role in the community. Go to a Council meeting, you wll see all the same faces objecting to all major proposals. Similarly for wind and solar farm obstruction, the same tiny handful of activists launch all of the obstructive action against them, and often live nowhere near the proposed projects or even in the same country. Again, that’s the supposed ‘community voice’.