Australia is the world's biggest coal exporter, accounting for over a third of coal exports worldwide. In 2018, coal overtook iron ore as our most valuable export. Scott Morrison's government has embraced coal, doubling down on supporting the industry, calling climate-based boycotts of coal companies "indulgent and selfish" and vowing to stop protestors. But what does our increased reliance on coal mean for the nation? For the economy and the environment? And where will it leave us when the world stops buying it? In this nuanced and insightful essay, Judith Brett looks at the consequences of Australia's coal addiction, from stalled climate-change policy to tensions between farmers and miners. She assesses where to next for a fractious Coalition and the Quiet Australians.

Australia is a wealthy nation with the economic profile of a developing country – heavy on raw materials, and low on innovation and skilled manufacturing. Once we rode on the sheep’s back for our overseas trade; today we rely on cartloads of coal and tankers of LNG. So must we double down on fossil fuels, now that COVID-19 has halted the flow of international students and tourists? Or is there a better way forward, which supports renewable energy and local manufacturing? Judith Brett traces the unusual history of Australia’s economy and the “resource curse” that has shaped our politics. She shows how the mining industry learnt to run fear campaigns, and how the Coalition became dominated by fossil-fuel interests to the exclusion of other voices. In this insightful essay about leadership, vision and history, she looks at the costs of Australia’s coal addiction and asks, where will we be if the world stops buying it? “Faced with the crisis of a global pandemic, for the first time in more than a decade Australia has had evidence-based, bipartisan policy-making. Politicians have listened to the scientists and ... put ideology and the protection of vested interests aside and behaved like adults. Can they do the same to commit to fast and effective action to try to save our children’s and grandchildren’s future, to prevent the catastrophic fires and heatwaves the scientists predict, the species extinction and the famines?” —Judith Brett, The Coal Curse

A brilliant collection of the best essays by award-winning writer Judith Brett, long revered by those in the know as Australia’s brightest and most astute political commentator.

Chapter 1: We didn’t Start the FireChapter 2: Food under Fossil Capitalism Chapter 3: Framing the Future of Food Chapter 4: Changing our Water Ways Chapter 5: The Getting of Nutritional Wisdom Chapter 6: Resilience through Resistance

This book weaves a social, economic and cultural history of Australia with rare first-hand accounts of the lived experience of change related to farming and agriculture. It provides a rich sociology of how living on the land has changed throughout Australia’s history. The book investigates the complex effects of the state on everyday life, using an historical agricultural case study of place to explore long-running sociohistorical processes of change examined through both a macro and micro sociological lens. This provides a multi-faceted perspective from which to examine economic, social and cultural transformations in each of these contexts and change is examined through multiple sites of expression: public policy and the role of the state; colonial processes of dispossession; social and cultural systems of value; economic change and its consequences; farming practices and lived experience; neoliberalism and globalisation and their social impacts; community decline and trends toward corporate and foreign land ownership. Each of these transformations impact upon lived experience and everyday life and this book provides grounded insight into exactly this relationship and process.

This book provides an analysis of the impact of the climate crisis on corporate law and theory in the coming decades as the world seeks to meet the target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Net zero targets are a particular challenge for an economy such as Australia which has a historical reliance on fossil fuels, and powerful interests arguing for the continued use of coal and gas. The book examines four recent corporate case studies in Australia. The first two follow the Adani group of companies and coal in Queensland and Rio Tinto and the destruction of ancient rock shelters in the midst of iron ore mining in WA. The book then covers the pension fund member Mark McVeigh, issuing proceedings against REST super in relation to long-run investment decisions and the need to take into account climate risk. Finally, it discusses Sharma, a representative action taken by school children against the Federal government in relation to expansion plans in relation to fossil fuels alleging breach of the duty of care. These case studies highlight some of the key trends and challenges in the intersection between corporate activity and the need to account for climate risk and adaptation, with Australia as a G20 economy having much to contribute to the global debate. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the field of climate and environmental law, as well as corporate law and theory.

A deep investigation of neoliberalism's proselytizers in Eastern Europe and the Global South Where does free market ideology come from? Recent work on the neoliberal intellectual movement around the Mont Pelerin Society has allowed for closer study of the relationship between ideas, interests, and institutions. Yet even as this literature brought neoliberalism down to earth, it tended to reproduce a European and American perspective on the world. With the notable exception of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, long seen as a laboratory of neoliberalism, the new literature followed a story of diffusion as ideas migrated outward from the Global North. Even in the most innovative work, the cast of characters remains surprisingly limited, clustering around famous intellectuals like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Market Civilizations redresses this absence by introducing a range of characters and voices active in the transnational neoliberal movement from the Global South and Eastern Europe. This includes B. R. Shenoy, an early member of the Mont Pelerin Society from India, who has been canonized in some circles since the Singh reforms; Manuel Ayau, another MPS president and founder of the Marroquín University, an underappreciated Latin American node in the neoliberal network; Chinese intellectuals who read Hayek and Mises through local circumstances; and many others. Seeing neoliberalism from beyond the industrial core helps us understand what made radical capitalism attractive to diverse populations and how often disruptive policy ideas “went local.”