What will the new managers really change?

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.