The Archivist
25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC

Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A…

Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt
Post 2 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
Australians have gone gangbusters over rooftop solar. Their personal responsibility for it is the same as it is for most community-focused projects, world-leading. Governments got the ball rolling with generous rebates and tariffs, but this is where the story shifts. /2
Post 3 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
Government incentives (feed-in tariffs in particular) have been gradually wound back over time, until sometimes people are now blocked from exporting any excess energy to the grid at all. This is largely because governments didn't do their personal responsibility bit.../3
Post 4 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
...in building new transmission and storage for all of this home-grown energy. We've been led by governments focused on 'getting government out of peoples' lives' for decades, and it's now showing. And here's the critical bit. /4
Post 5 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
The 'grid'. The grid makes a lie of all of the political bullshit about individual freedom versus government oppression. The grid is both individual, and collective, *at the same time*. Australians use the grid to help themselves personally, but also as a mechanism to.../5
Post 6 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
...share that personal benefit with others. That's why humans invented government itself. All this tiring rubbish about individuals vs the State, imported from the UK and US with their libertarian hang-ups and fantasies, has no place in Australia. /6
Post 7 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
Personal responsibility in Australia has ALWAYS been community-focused. We lead the world in collective mobilisation to face problems, because we don't have all the historical baggage of political systems developed in the territorial politics of Europe. /7
Post 8 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
Right now with Covid, politicians indebted to that old European politics through inherited privilege here in Australia have taken away the 'grid'. The public health framework inside which any personal responsibility public health work we individually do works and makes sense. /8
Post 9 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
They've been trying desperately for decades, with the assistance of Murdoch media and think tanks, to graft that neoliberal/libertarian framework onto Australian life. It's not really taking though, because Australia's entire existence as a society rejects every.../9
Post 10 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
...premise of that framework. It's the framework of the people who sent us here as a penal colony, why would we want it back? Indigenous Australians also had a communal framework, before we arrived (and I'm sure we learned some of it from them, without even realising). /10
Post 11 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
When Australians use personal responsibility, it doesn't mean they want to look after themselves, individually. Australian society and politics is communitarian - not socialist, capitalist, communist, or any of those European categories. The 'community' is individual AND.../11
Post 12 of 12 · 25 July 2022 · 00:10 UTC
...collective, at the same time. Until we get rid of politicians trying to transplant centuries of European failed territorial politics into barren Australian soil, what's unique about living here will be constantly under threat. /end

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