The Privatisation of Public Space or Personal Responsibility?

I have just Googled free parking for Canberra City and have been given a map with prices ranging from $2.70 for 2 hours to $15.70.  

My questions are:

Why do I have to pay to park?

Who decides the prices?

Why do they range widely, how are these prices set e.g. cost of service or demand and supply?

What happens to those who have no money?  Is this inclusion?

Is the roads and spaces owned by the public through he tax system? If not, why not?

In economics they talk about public goods they include – roads, energy, water, lighting, hospitals, emergency services. typically collective and shared goods and services that the community use.  I remember in the 1980’s when Users Pay arrived.  This was the beginning of the privatisation of public goods and services.  There is the argument that the pricing of services means that they can be shared more effectively.  As population expand there are less spaces re: car parking. Thus if people pay they won’t stay long.  However, the other side of that argument is the freedom of movement and choice.  Obviously if a price is put on a space then people on limited incomes have to choose.  Those with plenty of money just pay.  There are also issues of workers having to move their cars every two hours rather than have a solution where they can work without worry.  If there was concern for wellbeing at the centre of decision making then would these types of decisions be made?  

In economics often taxes are measured by factors like equity (fairness) as those on higher incomes pay less proportionately than those on low incomes. It is cheaper for me to drive my car than to pay for a bus.  Let’s look at problem solving.

The problem let’s argue that there is more people and less space available.   On the other side of the issue people want to be able to move free and do what they desire to do, and park without interference (costs, fines).   So how could we affect the demand for spaces?  I will do a brainstorm:

* re-zoning commercial space away from public space;

* set up free transit zones

* smaller cars or shared vehicles

* Bike paths and bikes with a kenetic means of moving faster

* Public consultation to gain insights into the needs of people

* Set prices at a medium price that is fair for all with reductions for car sharing/pooling, elderly, disabled, children etc.

* Use price as a regulator but not a profit making business.  Inevitably greed will move price upwards and social mobility will decline.  

* What if there is enough and the poverty mentality is what drives both sides?

What I see is a changing mindset from what was a social policy framework around governance.  Today it has a compliance framework and it is set by price.  These prices are privatised which is why when you Google free parking in Canberra you will see the wide variation in prices.  The carpark owner decides how much.   The point about public ownership of space was driven by the fact all pay taxes and there is a collective usage around a product or service.  Given there is scale involved or economies of scale meaning the price falls given more people are using the service.  This creates a lower medium/average price so it is affordable for the public.  However, the costing of public space in my mind has more to do with shifting values away from collective benefit to private benefit.  I smile when I think of those corporateers who would evoke ‘socialism’ at this point or a fear of ‘communism’. I smile a lot as it is not at all the reality.  It is common sense to collect taxes to then be able to distribute products and services for the majority so that there is an equalising effect across society.  This creates a sense of parity (equality) which lessens discrimination and the sense of shared ownership.  Personally, I like this better but ultimately I tend to see the big picture of the earth and see that no-one owns anything. We tend to operate in little bubbles of our own consensus reality (education, shared beliefs) and we see this as our world.  We compare it to other worlds (nations) and we copy what has been done overseas and gain a sense of ‘rightness’ as others are doing it.  Yet the notion of social parity as an economic principle is slowly disappearing under the weight of balance sheets and vested interests who see loss in change rather than the expansion of a cake.  The more we give the more we gain is a universal principle.  The more we take the more poverty enters our psyche.  Being powerful co-creators of life we then mirror this sense of poverty by seeking more.  Why would you need more if you have enough?  Somehow you feel something is missing and keep seeking expansion.  Perhaps this was the silent motivation behind economic growth.  The sense of more is security, more is status, more is success thus mirroring the very abundance of nature.  We feel secure when we feel abundant.  Yet there are other mindsets that can see that life does provide if we allow it without resisting life.  So rather than focusing on expensive carparks we can focus on free.  I typically do that and always I find something. Yet I marvel at the arbitrary costing of public space and how even moving around is costed.  It does make me smile.

I grew up in Canberra and I remember when buses were free.  I remember when car parking was free and housing was affordable.  The reason I wanted to go into the city is to walk around my home and remember my childhood.  I will create a way to do that but for now I will smile at what I have realised.

Canberra changed from when I was a child, the government was the dominant employer back then.  Jobs were plentiful and whilst we were not rich by any means, we had enough.  It was a clean city and in those days we were all exploring life.  I wasn’t cottonv-wooled (protected), I was allowed to go out and do whatever I wanted.  So I guess within my DNA I have known freedom.  I have known friendliness, as this city was very friendly, it was like a big country town.  I love the Brindabella’s around Canberra and the Snowy Mountains near Cooma.  There are many beautiful places.  Yet today you can see the privatisation with more contractors being employed as Government services are contracted out.  This is problematic as secrecy heightens through the notion of private interests.   This is a right field comment but it just flashed into my mind and perhaps it is going to open up some interesting pathways.  I watched a documentary on Fukushima last night. Refer ABC documentaryhttp://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2015/s4468353.htm  You may recall the nuclear reactors in Japan that were seriously damaged by the tsunami that hit Japan after the earthquake shocks.   A Journalist was walking around the plant (amazingly without protective gear) and assessing the deserted village and towns around this site.  Apparently there is a 700km contaminated zone, interestingly this includes Tokyo (Tokyo is around 250 km away from site), but how can they evacuate 50 million people?  The tsunami wiped out many villages and towns, wiping them off the face of the map.  The central problem at this time was that little information was being made available by the private company to the government in order for it to deal with the reality of the problem.  A private company’s reaction was to keep quiet as they assessed and sort to deal with the problem.  Yet it was a national disaster that required government intervention.  So private interests were not working for the collective quite clearly as they sought to risk manage this situation which was beyond their capacity. The disaster was far worse than people thought and even the emergency person at this nuclear site had never considered the possibility of an earthquake or tsunami, so they were unprepared.

What was interesting about this was the issue of Hiroshima came up and apparently the Hibakusha (survivors) were treated with caution as the fear of contamination was there. This issue arose again with the Fukushima situation for those who lived closer to the site.   The clean up (if that is possible) is something like 40 billion, incredible amounts of money.  The Japanese I feel have to deeply reflect on nuclear, I sense this is a national issue for them and they were promised the clean energy and social advantage of this, the outcome was not in their interests.  So profit making for plant like Fukushima is obviously the incentive, lack of natural resources (coal) is the incentive for the government and I assume cheaper energy would be the outcome for the people. Yet the push for this given profitability could make problem solving one eyed (blind spot) given the nuclear fall out question. So we see what we want to see in corporate/government interests but what are we missing in respect to public interest and in this case, the interests of the entire planet.  There was a push for nuclear power here in Australia and they called it clean energy but it seems to have been sidelined.  I sense the mining industry power here.

So back to the public/private debate and in this case the loss of public space to pricing given income disparities between people.  What this really reflects is the shifting power away from the public.  When pricing of public goods happens this signals that the power is shifting to private interests.  The argument in the past has been that government is inefficient and that the private sector does it better.  I think any large organisation has issues of bureaucracy and inefficiencies given work takes on a routine and many just do what the hierarchy tells them.  This complacency happens in large corporations as well.  Corporatisation of public assets/services has brought in the accounting paradigm and cost centres.  Today everything has a cost and increasingly this is imposed on the public.  Wages have not had a commensurate increase as unions are slowly disappearing (power rebalancing with employers), national wage setting has disappeared (National Wage Case), business occupies both sides of government and democracy is increasingly a slogan rather than a lived experience.  So life inevitably will become more expensive as profits can be made. Thus self interest over public interest.  The nature of business is to be rationale rather than emotional or feeling based. We reward calculated decision making that justifies the bottom line.  This type of thinking does not have an awareness of the social contract, social needs, every day realities of people and how complicated life has become.  It does not have a deep feeling of service for the community, it is about service to self that can be marketed as best interest but in truth is really about profit.  That is the reality I see.

So how to live within this paradigm? I believe keep focusing on what you really want and see it emerging. I do see change definitely as I know there are finite limits to growth.  In the case of Canberra, similar to the mining industry, this city experienced big injections of money into the economy due to wealthy contractors. The housing prices went up given people had a higher means of paying what the market asked.  Local Government wants the taxes, the employers so it will seek to woo business to improve economic growth.  It is the nature of the game you could say. However, we are all interconnected, we are all creating the times we live in energetically, we are all deciding what will happen based on what we believe.  The world at this time is finding it is reaching environmental and economic limits and the consumer, is increasingly pauperised (cheap labour) does not inject more money or demand into the economy (multiple propensity to consume MPC), the internet is spreading ideas rapidly and becoming a level playing field or you could say a free market from an economics perspective. That is information is freely available and people can make decisions on that. People are sensing the world is not going in the direction they want and they can confer with others.  They can get together and form groups. So in one way the control paradigm through the money system is tightening, yet on the other side the information system is opening up.  I believe we are on a tipping point of great change where the illusion of the narrow band of beliefs in how we live will be irrevocably changed.  We will have to change the way we think in order to adapt to the new environment that is emerging.  We are awakening across the world to our own inner power where indeed we always choose.  In some ways the democratic system was probably an intuitive feeling in harmony with the universal laws in that we always choose by what we do and don’t do.  Inevitably we get what we vote for.  So I guess the times we move through can be squarely laid at the feet of the human family.  We can take sides turning one into the evil other or we can see our own reflection of fear and insecurity creating that other (the need for money).  What if we change our thinking and believed we had all we needed and we got what we focused on?  What then? What if we knew we were equal?  What if we saw fear and greed as the real enemy not people?  How would we change what we value then?  We are indeed in interesting times.    

What I love about allowing myself to flow in this blog is that I find myself working my way back to truth.  If I want to find an enemy that could be easy to do and then I become the victim.  This underlies the fear of the loss of public space.  But if I come to the honest conclusion that my own fear of insecurity is what creates the need for money, as I can recall many times feeling I need money, then I can return to personal responsibility for being a co-creator of my world.  So do I change the world or change myself?  Do I deal with my own fear or do I impose my fear on others.  That in truth is the reason why there is a price on public space. 

I think the answer is clear now.

I will go and have fun the parking space will just turn up in the perfect moment. As my universe is free.  

Is this thought dangerous?  Only if you believe in a limited fearful universe.  Ponder that. What is the reality?  What you believe will be.

 NB:

This blog is free to you as is much of my work. So I feel that from love freedom arises as we realise we are One. This is not a catch phrase this is literal in the sense that we are all connected, we come from the one source of life.  What we do to/for others returns to the self, all ways.