What will the new managers really change?

Let's be clear. I am no fan of Tony Abbott or his Coalition government. I didn't vote for him, I have never voted Liberal or National in my life, nor will I.

Nor did I vote Labor, and I am not a big fan of recent Labor administrations either. And no, I didn't vote Green.

I don't follow the daily news cycle closely; I rarely watch TV news programmes, and the same goes for the newspapers. I find their biased and partial representation of what's going on in the world dishonest at best and, in the case of the Murdoch tabloids, disgusting at worst.

So I have deliberately not sought out news regarding Australia's new government. Yet inevitably, news filters through all the same. And Tony Abbott, and his new government, have not disappointed me.

Abbott revealed his mysogynistic traits in Opposition and earlier in his political life. So it is no surprise that he has appointed an all-male Cabinet, bar the token woman, Julie Bishop.

Abbott and his team built much of their political capital by appealing to the worst base instinct in Australians: racism. He and the-then government sought to outdo each other in a Dutch auction as to who might pose as the 'toughest' party on asylum seekers and refugees. So it's only to be expected that the treatment meted out to those who would seek shelter here is now even worse than it was under Gillard or Rudd.

Abbott and several members of his team are known to be sceptical about the increasingly obvious reality commonly called 'climate change'. (For a no-holds barred look at the phenomenon by reference to observed data, I suggest interested readers visit Professor Guy MacPherson's blog.) So it was no surpise that the Department of Climate Change was abolished along with the Climate Commission. This is of a piece with the more generalised 'anti-science' bias of the new administration, being only the second in living memory to have no dedicated Minister for Science.

Abbott poses as a macho, nationalistic figure. You could see him wrapping himself and his budgy smugglers in the flag after a dip at Cronulla beach. He and his team don't care much about 'the starving poor' in Africa or Asia. So it's no surprise either that AusAid has been abolished.

And there are many more cuts to come, as the chill winds of austerity that have entrenched themselves in much of Europe and North America now reach these shores. As new Treasurer Joe Hockey travelled to Washington DC and New York in mid-October to attend the meeting of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the G20 Finance Ministers, one Australian commentator remarked astutely that:

Hockey's visit had the character of a loyal servant of finance capital reporting for duty and receiving orders.

And herin lies a fundamental continuity between, not just Abbott's administration and Rudd-Gillard's, but with every Australian government since Whitlam. The really big, important decisions are taken elsewhere. And they serve other interests, not those of most working Australians.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

There are undoubted differences between Abbott's administration and the previous one. It is much more socially conservative, appealing more openly to base instincts of racism, sexism and homophobia. It makes little to no pretense of any concerns about environmental issues, climate change or otherwise. It will more ruthlessly advance the interests of finance capital, continuining and deepening the already deep cuts in certain areas of public spending that Labor began.

The fundamental goal of this government, however, is the same as the previous one: wring more 'productivity' out of working people and farmers, and exploit our natural resources more fully, in order to boost the rate of economic growth.

And again, no-one should be surprised: we live in a capitalist economy, and that economy must expand. It must grow – quantitatively. That is why, for example, Labor's National Food Plan set a target of boosting agricultural production by 50% and exports by 45%. The Coalition wants to double, or even triple, our production of agricultural commodities with its misguided Northern Food Bowl plan.

It all comes back to dollars, profit and growth. Money rules our lives, to the exclusion of pretty much all else.

What's wrong with that? I hear some readers ask. Well, nothing, except you can't eat money. You can't drink it, and you can't breath it. My advice to both parties: get back to basics. Study Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, and ask if your policies are going to secure all of those for this and many generations of Australians to come.

The relentless pursuit of growth, through the increasing financialisation of our economy (i.e. trying to maintain living standards and keep asset values rising through the taking on of more and more debt) is having perverse outcomes; and has been for many years. Even discounting climate change, biodiversity is disappearing at an accelerating rate, which severely impacts our own prospects for long-term survival. Inequality between people is reaching extreme, stratospheric levels, which in a scenario of prolonged stagnation is a recipe for a social explosion. And haven't we seen quite a few of those in recent years? Arab Spring, anyone? Occupy?

Even were we to accept these outcomes – extreme inequality, shocking environmental degradation - as 'the price of progress', the 'end justifying the means', we are still pursuing the wrong goal. Endless growth on a finite planet is not just a bad idea; it's not physically possible. Capitalism is encountering its biophysical contradictions. Contemporary global capitalism has become a zombie system, kept alive by the pumping into the system of trillions of dollars of funny money in the post-GFC phase.

This process has a limit, a breaking point; which will be reached. Perhaps next year, perhaps in two or three years. But soon. And then we will have a choice: do we try to continue to breathe life into a failing system which increasingly serves only the ultra-rich at the expense of everyone and everything else, probably through increased surveillance, repression and impoverishment of the majority? Or do we try to create something very different?

I agree with cell biologist Bruce Lipton, who says that humanity as a whole is facing its 'caterpillar' moment. We have reached the stage of maximal physical growth: the signs are there for anyone who wants to see them. The question for us all, individually and collectively, is: do we want to identify ourselves as 'imaginal cells', that set our organism on a path to a qualititative evolutionary leap – a radically different, more co-operative, social, economic and political sytem?

This is my question – my challenge – to our current generation of politicians. And to the country as a whole. It's a big challenge, but we have to face up to it, sooner rather than later. We might as well start right now.