The Locust and the Bee

“If you want to make money, you can choose between two fundamentally different strategies. One is to create genuinely new value by bringing resources together in ways that serve people’s wants and needs. The other is to seize value through predation, taking resources, money, or time from others, whether they like it or not. Your choice, in short, is whether to be a bee or a locust.”

These words are from a book, The Locust and the Bee, by Geoff Mulgan. It offers us some excellent metaphors we can use in thinking about our community and our wider society. The relatively detached way that the lower SW lived for most of its European history has left it somewhat naive regarding the risks associated with predator attacks. The situation we are experiencing here is far from unique; it has been repeated throughout the developed world. The degree to which predators are prepared and able to destroy those three pillars of the triple bottom line; our social, financial and environmental conditions, in their relentless pursuit of profit has in the past been moderated by their capacity to conduct business at a distance and to avoid any of the consequences.

Obviously doing trade a few hundred years ago was a very different matter. The predator had to exist in the same space as the creator, which would mean he had to experience the consequences of his actions, and before the advent of the corporation a man could be ruined if he was overly ambitious. The development of fast travel and electronic trading made distance no handicap, and the conjuring up of that wonderful instrument of trade the limited liability company have combined to create locust friendly trading conditions that offer a gloomy future for the bees.

The subtitle for Geoff’s book is, To take or make, the roles of creators and predators

“.... the bee has served as a metaphor of the best side of capitalism. It is quietly productive, providing benefits to many. It is also intensely cooperative, and blessed, like the best markets, with a collective intelligence that far outstrips the sum of its individual intelligences.

The predatory side of capitalism is symbolized by the locust: locusts are parasites and well-designed to harm the innocent. They strip everything away in a mindless frenzy. We fear and dislike them for good reason, and for thousands of years they have stood for a power that can destroy both environments and human life, appearing in both the Bible and the Koran.”

I see these metaphors at work in our shire. We have faceless property development companies trading in land, taking the value from sales of that land away from the shire to be distributed to the investors, many of whom live in the Eastern states or overseas.

Our local and state government do not require the developers to pace the housing stock to the economy and available employment, we continue to have houses built with no attention given to the quantity or quality of local employment opportunities. This means that many of the houses built are bought purely as investments. Some of these are then rented to community members who do not get included in the shire’s annual community satisfaction survey. The people are renting because the property prices have been kept high by the corporations, who rarely consider building small affordable housing. Once locked into a high rent situation with no prospect buying our local government treat this section of our community as non-citizens. When further development plans are mooted then those renting will not be notified, but the remote investors and corporations who have a financial interest only in this shire will.

Another group buying homes where there is no employment are the retired. They are lured here by clever advertising that informs these unwary folk that a bush garden is easy-care. That this is a place they can relax in. In reality the whole of this shire is a high bush fire risk area and in 10-15 years time we will have a huge burden of elderly residents unable to cope with their easy-care lives on the bush block. This is of no interest to the predator, they have taken their profit.

Individual investors who buy residential houses here, taking advantage of the generous tax incentives, and possibly with the intention of moving here when they retire, are also predators if they then rent them as holiday homes. For years our shire presidents have told us that our rates have to be high because we are subsidising tourism. Ask why?

It is true that some of our residents are employed in tourism, mostly in low paid jobs. But many more of those jobs are undertaken by transient workers, brought here just for the purpose of servicing the needs of the tourism industry. The subsidy in our rates in an imposition on the bees to benefit the locusts, and we should demand much more detailed information before accepting that this is fair. Do the bees rely on the tourism industry? If they do, and our permanent residents are dependent on tourism, then maybe we need strategies to develop a more sustainable economic environment. To be dependent on an industry that needs perpetual subsidies is not wise or sensible. If it isn’t true then we need to stop subsidising one industry to the detriment of all residents.

The sad thing for many of those individual investors is that they have bought homes here because they loved the community as well as the landscape. The Greens may do a good job of protecting the physical environment, but when these retirees move here the social fabric will have worn away and this could be a very different community in 10-15 years time.

However, Geoff Mulgan does hold out some real hope for the future. It was connectedness that moderated trade many centuries ago, and today connectedness can once again change the game plan in favour of the bee.

“My argument is that capitalism may indeed call into existence the public necessary for it to be transcended, but in a very different way from that imagined by Marx. The decisive force will be connectedness rather than concentration: but ultimately connectedness alters interests and perceptions, and connectedness in one field, such as trade, spills over into other fields. It spills over into personal relationships, into cultural awareness and then into moral awareness, as investors and consumers become interested in the consequences of their choices and actions. This was, surprisingly perhaps, the prediction made by Adam Smith and others at the dawn of modern capitalism. They assumed that the market would bring with it civility and even empathy, and rein in the scope for predators: growth and reciprocity were expected to be twins. For them civilization meant both a growth in capacities to act and a shrinking of opportunities to exploit.”

A simple first step is that we can ask that all our citizens are included in the decision making for our community. Tenant or land owner, we are all citizens. Apart from the simple matter of social justice the shire’s stance is nonsense because the tenant is a ratepayer, indirectly as part of the rent.

We can question, and discuss, how far we believe that a mere financial investment bestows rights to determine the decisions and directions that shape our society and economic activities here in this shire. We can ask if our community would be better served by developments that meet the aspirations of those who reside here, and will live with any consequences.

We could decide that we will not discuss any development of land or industry without full disclosure of who we are dealing with. When the cowboys ride into town we are entitled to know who they are, where they came from, and to take up references from their previous developments. That is just being prudent. Land is not just an asset like any other. If an inappropriate development is undertaken in our shire it will affect our quality of life. We will bear the consequences, and the consequences may be borne by our children and grand children.

Back in the day..... We remember Cedarvale Holdings, The Fini Group, Ironstone... and a whole raft of other legal entities that shrouded in mystery the men who took profits from land development here. The original intention of the corporation being a separate legal entity was not to deceive, but today it is so often used for that purpose.

In today’s connected world how hard would it be to identify the investors behind any significant development? And if the corporations wanting to trade with this shire are reluctant to divulge who they are, what they have been doing before arriving her, then should we welcome them?

The book, The Locust and the Bee, is in our local library, as is the DVD, The Corporation, both well worth spending an few hours with.