As Lily and Bart enter the polling station to cast their votes for the bioregional council elections of Gippsland they are assailed by a plethora of party volunteers. A throng of partisan hands clamour to re-program their hologram ‘how-to-vote’ cards – a necessary aide given that there are a total of 247 candidates standing for election. Bloody politicians, muses Bart. It’s no different from the days of the old state-based ballots.
In Australia State governments were abolished in 2024 following a national referendum held early in Gemma Pinnell’s term as the nation’s first “green” Prime Minister. With hindsight, their demise was inevitable. One fiasco had followed another in rapid succession, particularly in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. Besides, most important political agreements were now hammered out either by the expanded Asia-Pacific Regional Council (APRC) located in Beijing or by the World Forum in Abu Dhabi.
Public anger was originally sparked by the deteriorating state of public health care. An inability to address problems related to paramedic services and the costs of acute hospital care came to a head in 2013 when an emergency meeting of the States’ health ministers led to the closure of several major hospitals, including Melbourne’s Austin & Repatriation Hospital and Sydney’s Royal North Shore. An estimated 172 people died during the crisis from ‘inadequate or unavailable’ treatment.
Then the ongoing debacle over water allocation and pricing, sewage outfalls, desalination issues, environmental flows and the apparent inability of State politicians to stem the profligate use of water in the cities - particularly in more affluent suburbs. This led to widespread agreement about the importance of the “green” agenda and contributed to the final demise of the States. The new laws had outlawed the automatic sprinkling of garden lawns in the hot summer months, for example, and made it illegal for city residents to own top-loading washing machines or to use non-recycled water for flushing toilets. But such strategies were largely viewed by an increasingly sceptical community as too little, too late. Australian cities were still running out of water.
The resulting erosion of public confidence, the continued decline of the tax base, and the handing up by Federal Parliament of many of its powers (including economic regulation and the various Commons Trusts) to the World Forum and the APRC, meant that the bioregional community councils were now the primary stamping ground for political aspirants.
Lily and Bart are third generation members of an intentional community on 500 acres just outside the town of Sale, in what was previously called Victoria, now the Gippsland Bioregion. Such communities proliferated on the coastal fringes of Australia at the start of the twenty-first century in response to a growing dissatisfaction with urban sprawl, transport gridlock, pollution levels and the indiscriminate verbal and physical abuse immediately categorised by psychologists as “city-rage”.
New Life, Lily and Bart’s community, is one of a growing number of self-governing, sustainable social ecosystems around the world. Around 130 New Life communities exist in areas that were previously in need of economic revitalisation, including Gippsland, Tasmania, Sicily, Ecuador, New Zealand, Brunei, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Zimbabwe. New Life members are responsible for developing their own infrastructure needs, including health care, aged care, education and technical support, while food and energy comes from a combination of permaculture and concentrated solar power energy production.
Unemployment is a thing of the past in these communities. ‘Reciprocal contributions’ between residents and the community are agreed before the Community Residence Contract is signed. Once accepted into the New Life fraternity, each member receives support by the community for life, while the community continues to benefit from the member’s trade, knowledge and life experience. Income is typically generated from the sale of ceramics and other crafts to visitors (these communities are still a source of curiosity for many city dwellers), local barter schemes, currently administered (and taxed) by bioregional councils, as well as global on-line consulting projects. Consulting work is paid for in World-Credits, whose transfer, like all financial flows in the global financial system, are taxed by the World Forum at a rate of 1 per cent.
The New Life community in the Gippsland Bioregion was recently profiled in the e-zine ‘Grassroots’ for their innovative use of lunar and planetary phases to increase crop yields, using data collected by World Forum funded satellites operating around Earth’s moon and at the edge of the solar system. Lily and Bart were delighted that this initiative was receiving so much attention, particularly as they had both played such a significant role in its development. They were now preparing to fly to the New Life community in Sicily where the Council had requested an urgent inter-community knowledge transfer.
Lily’s brother, Jack, was nothing like his younger sister. He had never been particularly drawn to community life. In fact the Sale community had always considered him to be quite a recluse. For his part, Jack had always hankered to live in the city and leaped at the opportunity to start a course in entrepreneurial metabonomics at the Asia-Pacific University of Medical Technology a few days after his 38th birthday. He now lives in a high security apartment suburb in inner city Sydney that, like all five-star energy rated developments, is protected from toxic pollution levels by an atmospheric dome.
Jack and the 2,000 other residents of this suburb-complex (typically single or childless couples aged between 35 and 70 ) are mainly global professionals working for the diplomatic, trading or civil society divisions of global corporations. He earns enough to pay for his studies by working evenings as a specialist ‘hawk’ for Urban Seed, an organization funded by private corporations who’s mission is to keep track of some 50,000 ‘crakes’ (destitute adolescents inhabiting the city fringes) by means of radio frequency ID tags. ‘Hawking’ is fairly dull and routine work for Jack, but at least he can visit live concerts from the comfort of his media-cocoon while scanning the radio waves for delinquent crakes.
Jack’s apartment, his pride and joy, is part of a fully self-contained neighbourhood with restaurants, bars, cafes, lifestyle stores and parklands clustered around a central ‘village-square’. Jack tends to avoid the village square on Friday evenings when holographic street entertainers, meticulously restored in every detail from actual clowns and buskers of the late 20th century, draw huge crowds – crowds that once attended sports events in their thousands before apathy turned to indifference and cocooning became so popular.
Basic commodities, such as toiletries and educational services, are purchased on-line using virtual supermarket walk-throughs. Like most residents in the complex, Jack has no need for a kitchen, eating out in the conveniently located café’s within the complex or “ordering in” one of the 5000 synthesised meals programmed into the nano-café that replaced kitchens in most Australian homes in the mid-21st century.
Jack rarely leaves the complex – he has no real need as his community provides everything he could want or need. There is still the odd occasion when he hankers for contact with ‘reality’ even if it is sanitised somewhat and viewed through the safety of the electrically powered smart car supplied by the Body Corporate. He does, however, take full advantage of the luxurious health and fitness facilities available free of charge to all residents.
Energy to his complex is sourced from the global energy grid that, under a World Trade Organisation agreement in 2012, allows China, India and a few South American countries to continue to produce coal-generated power until 2080. This was only possible due to the advances in sequestering technology and the collocation of associated industries into energy eco-parks based around the waste from energy production. While Australia has four of these parks (located at Bowen, Lithgow, Moe and Jaranderup) most domestic energy contribution to the global grid is from Desertec Ltd's massive concentrated solar power complexes located in strategic hot spots around the world.
In Australia, the largest Desertec facility is located in the Great Sandy Desert. It supplies around 80 per cent of Australia's total energy needs and also exports under licence to New Zealand and several countries in the APRC bloc. The remaining 20 per cent is supplied by the conspicuous kilometre-high solar towers dotted across the landscape. These towers are built, owned and operated by Enviromission Ltd. Located in some of the most arid parts of Australia, these futuristic structures overcame early protests to become something of a tourist attraction - if still something of an eyesore for local residents.
While Jack’s complex no longer produces any non-recyclable or non-reusable waste products, there still remain many communities in remote Australia who continue to live off the proceeds of waste-storage contracts with such inner-urban communities. These agreements were entered into earlier in the century after pilot waste dumps on the Moon proved too costly.
Jack sees little of his partner, Rani, who spends most of her time away from home. While the Holonet enables techno-touch, it somehow isn’t as real as the real thing. A graduate in food technology, Rani is a senior food production adviser to the World Forum, which was established in 2030 as a result of a merger of the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation and The World Social Forum. Rani moves between serviced diplomatic-communes operated by the Forum throughout the world. Her work mostly entails inspecting production processes to ensure compliance with the detailed regulations established by the World Forum.
Currently, Rani is working on a contentious plan to set enforceable production limits on local communities producing organic food stocks in an attempt to provide a stimulus to the synthetic food industry, which is suffering after a major world-wide recall of synthetically produced noodles, soybeans and rice. Tensions between local bioregional and urban communities and the World Forum have escalated recently as global companies seek to lobby the Forum for increased limits on the autonomous production of energy, food and water resources by local bioregions and communities. The Forum has also had to intervene recently in countries such as Australia, where the Federal Legislature of Twelve failed to successfully meditate between bioregions in Southern and Western Australia over water rights.
The Blue Mountains Bioregional Council for example, is moving to implement the result of a citizens initiated referendum requiring the decommissioning of reservoirs in the region, now that it is entirely self-sufficient in water through rainwater collection, water recycling and moisture farming schemes. Naturally, the Federation of Sydney Suburban-Complexes is fiercely opposed to the plan, as they rely heavily on such external water sources.
While external relations between communities are often fraught, well-defined communities such as New Life are, on the inside, remarkably cohesive. A recent plan to regenerate the remaining grape crops of the loss making wineries of the Barossa Valley Bioregion into eco-parks and establish small-scale manufacturing plants for the now pervasive e-beverages (which provide the same psychophysical response as alcohol, at half the cost and without the side-affects) was developed by a broad cross-section of Barossa Valley community members, with generous assistance to those wineries and workers who will be disadvantaged.
The singularly passionate (and at times parochial) nature of many communities has become a headache for organisations like the World Forum whose mandate is to create equality across communities in basic human needs such as food, water, housing, education, opportunity and spiritual development through the administration of the various Commons Trusts designed to protect and maintain the wealth of the commons. The Forum also seeks to promote mutual respect and tolerance of different worldviews.
One instance of such provincial thinking occurred recently when a World Forum initiative to promote understanding of the diverse spiritual traditions practiced throughout the world was opposed by traditional religious groups who felt that the promotion of some of the smaller, more controversial sects was an attack on the validity of their own beliefs. Likewise, communities such as those of Lily and Bart, while incredibly knowledgeable about their own domains of interest such as astrodynamic agriculture, Wiccan-Islam and community capacity building, tend towards over-simplification and generalisation when it comes down to issues and people outside their direct sphere of influence.
The breakdown of filial bonds between Lily and Jack over lifestyle choices is mirrored from family to family and community to community. While some, like the New Life communities, are geographically congregated, others are credo-based, connecting only in cyberspace. No one foresaw the potential in the launch of the Holonet in 2020 for the emerging electronically connected communities to close out any perspective but their own – thus isolating themselves into a perpetually self-reinforcing worldview. With security the key issue at the turn of the millennium, the lock-out and lock-in cybergates meant it was keep taps on what goes on in these holo-communities, or to connect with them in any meaningful way.
A recent protest held by the civil society division of the global company British Hydrogen in support of a World Forum proposal to prohibit all forms of personal transportation vehicles requiring a dedicated energy source in favour of public transport modes, was portrayed by Bart as another case of those bloody hydros wanting to take us back to the dark ages.
Bart suspects that this is a view shared by many of his neighbours in the Gippsland Bioregion. Irrespective of how he might vote in the forthcoming election, he is convinced the coalition government (comprising the Community First Party, the World Forum Disarmament Party and two “Our Way is the Best Way” independents) will be returned. The more things change, the more they stay the same Bart muses as he leaves the polling station. I often wonder why I even bother to focus on anything but New Life for Sale.
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