Editorial: Much to do about nothing

In the 1950s, toasters were made to last. Faulty elements were replaced at home, or appliances were sent back to shops' repairs departments and, once fixed, returned by bicycle delivery boys.

Then, in the 1970s, when the economic growth-stimulant effect of WWII waned - along came planned obsolescence - someone's bright idea to create artificially the constant growth capitalism requires, by making stuff so flimsy that when it wore out, it was cheapest not to mend, darn, tinker or fix, but to throw it away and buy another.

The idea took off. The unsustainable result - the throwaway society - has been disastrous for both planet and people: precious resources plundered, workforces exploited, slave wage-rates exported with cheap imports, landfills full of toxic waste, local manufacturing wiped out, and the very climate allegedly imperilled - all for the umpteen billionth crappy toaster to pay for someone's Lear jet.

Back then I thought, what will they do next when it all turns to custard? Jokingly I speculated, perhaps they'll learn how to sell nothing.

After all churches had done it for centuries - selling answers to prayers, indulgences and salvation - and 20th century conceptual artists - such as Marcel Duchamp who tossed paper scraps off a balcony, and the artist from Verona who canned his navel lint - were onto it too.

Now, it's no joke.

Carbon tax is the environmental equivalent of religious indulgence and the internet is the very epitome of insubstantiality; a compelling but unstable miasma of avatars, vicarious community, dodgy information overload, instant communication, labour exchange, marketplace, transactions desk, entertainment hub and international stage.

Facebook is the glittering star. Worth allegedly $100 billion when it listed on a falling sharemarket in an environment of imminent global financial collapse, its shares plummeted immediately. I doubt this version of nothingness will save the day.

In the interim, whether they be austerians or stimulati, capitalist governments, including our own, continue to flog the dead horse.

I favour the stimulati. Spending up large won't work but it might postpone the inevitable long enough to think up a better economic model - something which serves people's needs instead of dictating terms, predicated not on profit and usury, but on breaking even.

"Growth" and "profit" are ways of saying "more". Wanting more is greed by any other name. Instead we need an equitable system based on everyone having enough, although "enough" is not an objectively quantifiable term so it's no good leaving the plan to inumerate columnists like me. I can barely count. In fact, as far as I'm concerned numbers are evil, to be avoided at all costs.

I propose an urgent (unpaid) global economic think tank.

Locally, the National-led Government's latest budget made small change by targeting easy game - children, the elderly, students and woodwork teachers and by making toast of heroic smokers.

In the circumstances I don't know whose words are most apposite; Bob Dylan's when he said something along the lines of "Just when you think you've lost everything you find you can lose a little more", or those of Graeme (the butcher's boy from Coronation Street) who said "The recession just got personal. It's all spiralling into a bottomless pit of despair".