With the election less than 2 weeks away, it might be a good time to stop and take stock of what the major parties are saying, and whether their promises will lead to a better, more civil, and fairer society.
Way back in 1995, Eva Cox’s Boyer Lectures posed some questions and suggestions for what makes us a civilised society. Perhaps we can have a look back on that, and see what has changed, if anything, since that time.
“The idea of a more egalitarian society, of a fair go as a basic criterion of a good society, seems to have been lost from policy and political processes. The emphasis on economic criteria as the basic policy framework has resulted in an increasing invisibility of social connections that we need to nurture and value. In my 1995 ABC Boyer Lectures, optimistically called ‘A Truly Civil Society’, I put the case for communities based on human connections, rather than economies defined by financial exchanges. A decade and half later, social well being has lost even more political ground to market dominance which has now been invalidated by major global financial crises. The current economic shocks logically suggest it is time to change the taken-for-granted assumptions that have dominated public policy over the past three decades.”
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