The imagination and drive needed to build Sydney's train network and the Harbour Bridge mauy years ago no longer exist.
- Jounalist Michaol Duffy, writing in the Sydney Morning Herakd on 2 Feb 2008

Underlying the conception and implementation of Gaian democracies will be an altogether different set of values and assumptions. Here is an alternative value programme,which Hartmut Bossel proposed as the basis for just and sustainable societies.

• The world is a system of interacting substems that have evolved together and depend on each other.
• Society depends on a functioning ecological base and a finite, partly renewable resource base.
• Future development depends on [the] long-term viability, sustainability and evolutionary potential of the global system and its partner systems.
• The principle of partnership applies to present and future human and non-human systems.
• Diversity of autonomous systems is a prerequisite of sustainable evolution based on the ecological carrying capacity of each region.
• The self-organising potential and diversity of natural evolving systems is seen as the model for the development of sustainable societies.

There is already an air of resignation, tinged with guilt, in individuals and decision-makers alike; we cannot face the implications of getting out of the car or refitting the economy for the period beyond the oil age. But that time is coming at us fast. It is too easy to respond only when the horse has already bolted. It is too difficult, too many feel, to argue for the switch to public transport, to generate the taxes to create a transport system that feels great to use as much for the well-off as for those at the other end of the scale. This means rethinking density and sprawl. But everyone knows the economic equations and urban formations that make this work as well as the tricks that seduce the user: city regions with hubs and nodes, incentives like park and ride, and disincentives to travel by car.
- Charles Landry, in The Art of City-Making.

For those who like to be challenged, this is a good time to be a farmer or an agronomist.
- Lester Brown, in Plan B.

The technological and economic aspects of the problem are, thus, not quite as challenging as many imagine. The real difficulty is political. Climate change is one of the hardest political problems the world has ever faced. Because it is global, it is in every country's interest to get every other country to bear the cost of tackling it. Because it is long term, it is in every generation's interest to shirk the responsibility and shift it onto the next one. But that way, nothing will be done.
- from "The Heat Is On", Economist, Sept 15 2006.

It is hard to imagine today, when big public works projects such as New York's Westway are held up for fifteen years in the courts, what the go-go years were like. ... The astonishing thing about the Grand Coulee - about the whole era - was that people just went out and built it, built anything, without knowing exactly how to do it or whether it could even be done. There were no task forces, no special commissions, no proposed possible preliminary outlines of concievable tentative recommendations. Tremendous environmental impacts, but no environmental impact statements.
- Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert

As the state election draws nearer, here are some tips on decoding the pollie-speak.

• Beware big-vision statements. Unless there is a process for implementing these promises and a promise of a timetable, they're probably just there to make you feel good. (Who could forget Bob Hawke's "By 1990 no child shall live in poverty".)
• Promises to make Sydney more liveable, affordable, less congested. Unless there is an integrated plan with firm dollars and a timetable, ignore these. They are not worth the paper they are written on.
• Beware promises to do pilot projects. These are there to make you think something is happening when it's not. The residents round the M5 East tunnel are still waiting for the pilot filtration project, promised in 2003, to get off the ground.
• Don't believe anything that doesn't have dollars allocated. Most governments announce the cost of a promise over four years - the number of years of forward estimates of the budget - so often figures sound more impressive than they are.

If you can admit error, you can get on with fixing the problem. But the managerial ethos is wedded to the idea that problems are not solved. They are managed.
- John Ralston Saul, in The Collapse of Globalism

The Luddites were not opposed to progress. They just wanted to be included, wanted not to starve, not to be humiliated.
- John Ralston Saul, in The Collapse of Globalism

The corporation´s legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others … Today, corporations govern our lives. They determine what we eat, what we wear, where we work and what we do. We are inescapably surrounded by their culture, iconography and ideology. And, like the church and the monarchy in other times, they posture as infallible and omnipotent, glorifying themselves in imposing buildings and elaborate displays. Increasingly, corporations dictate the decisions of their supposed overseers in government and control domains of society once firmly embedded in the public sphere. Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalisation, that makes them vulnerable. As is true of any ruling institution, the corporation now attracts mistrust, fear and demands for accountability from an increasingly anxious public. Today´s corporate leaders understand, as did their predecessors, that work is needed to regain and maintain the public´s trust. And they, like their predecessors, are seeking to soften the corporation´s image by presenting it as human, benevolent and socially responsible.
- Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

The goals of business and the goals of government are different – or should be. That, by the way, is why “partnership” between these two should always arouse intense suspicion. Managers, acting in their professional capacity, ought not to concern themselves with the public good: they are not competent to do it, they lack the democratic credentials for it, and their day jobs should leave them no time even to think about it. If they merely concentrate on discharging their responsibility to the owners of their firms, acting ethically as they do so, they will usually serve the public good in any case.
The proper guardians of the public interest are governments, which are accountable to all citizens. It is the job of elected politicians to set goals for regulators, to deal with externalities, to mediate among different interests, to attend to the demands of social justice, to provide public goods and collect the taxes to pay for them, to establish collective priorities where that is necessary and appropriate, and to organise resources accordingly.
The proper business of business is business. No apology required.
- From “The Good Company: a sceptical look at corporate social responsibility”. Survey in The Economist, 22 Jan 2005.

The great virtue of the single bottom line is that it holds management to account for something. The triple bottom line does not. It is not so much a licence to operate as a licence to obfuscate.
- From “The Good Company: a sceptical look at corporate social responsibility”. Survey in The Economist, 22 Jan 2005

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. If what you are doing is not working, do something else.
- John O'Connor and John Seymour, in Introduction to NLP

Again, there are a range of views on what the over-riding measure of our development should be. In economics the measurements that come immediately to mind are either Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which are the key performance indicators for most economies. However many argue that these only measure what we consume and do not reflect whether our life, or standard of living, is improving. For example if the number of motor accidents increases dramatically GDP would increase due to increased expenditure in hospitals, car repair shops, litigation etc, but this would not be an improvement to our lives.
- Frederik Preisler, writing in the University of Queensland Centre for Transport Strategy newsletter, April 2004.

True, the average rate for the year as a whole, though on the high side, is not too bad, but that is like assuring the nonswimmer that he can safely walk across a river because its average depth is only four feet.
- Martin Friedman, in Newsweek

Education is not just a matter of learning things. There's a difference between education and knowledge. It's the difference between Christy Turlington's phone number and Christy Turlington.
- P J O'Rourke

Glenn Martin was making B-26 bombers, and they were crashing and killing kids right and left. So I said to Martin, 'What's wrong with these planes?'
- He said, 'The wing-spread isn't wide enough.'
- So I said, 'Then why aren't you making it wider?'
- And he said, 'I don't have to ... and besides, I've got a contract.'
- So I said, 'All right. If that's the way you feel, I'll see to it that your contract is cancelled and you won't get another.'
- 'Oh', he says, 'if that's the way it's going to be, I'll fix it', and he did.
- Harry S Truman, as reported by John Ralston Saul in On Equilibrium

If you want to know why we've changed, why we've become a more litigious culture with an increasingly opaque, costly, unpleasant, process-dominated, technicality-obsessed, attritional legal system, then look in the mirror.
- Paul Sheehan, drawing attention in the Sydney Morning Herald (6/5/02) to the 150% increase since 1972 in the number of lawyers elected to the Australian Parliament.

I feel strongly that one disadvantage of a federal constitution is the ability of governments to duck for cover when leadership or statesmanship is required.
- Ted Butcher, in Australian Transport in the 21st Century (AITPM Annual Conference 2000)

We also had 529 historians but not one futurologist.
- Bernard Salt, reflecting on the professions uncovered by the 1996 Census in Australia in The Big Shift

There's a strong human tendency to want everything, and to deny that trade-offs are usually necessary. Because of their positions, politicians are often more tempted than most to indulge in this magical thinking. Trade-offs between quality and price, between speed and thoroughness, between approving a possibly bad drug and rejecting a possibly good one, between liberty and equality, etc., are frequently muddled and covered with a misty gauze, and this decline in clarity is usually an added cost for everyone.
- John Allen Paulos, in Innumeracy

The great attraction of nation-building projects is that the high hopes, the construction jobs and the votes come up-front, whereas it's not until the money's spent that you discover whether you've lumbered yourself with a white elephant.
- Ross Gittins, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald 6/9/2000 ("The Dome" gives further food for thought on these lines)

It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of before; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.
- The late great Richard Feynman, in The Meaning of It All

The development of a climate of fear that dissuades citizens from speaking out on matters of public interest and discourages activists from continuing the "honourable tradition" of civil disobedience is a threat to democracy and healthy political debate.
- Sharon Beder, in Corporate activism against civil disobedience Engineers Australia May 1999.

One distinguishing feature of any profession, unlike other occupations that may be equally respectable, is that membership entails an ethical obligation to temper one's selfish pursuit of economic success by adhering to standards of conduct that could not be enforced either by legal fiat or through the discipline of the market. There are sound reasons to continue pursuing the goal that is implicit in the traditional view of professional life. Both the special privileges incident to membership in the profession and the advantages those privileges give in the necessary task of earning a living are means to a goal that transcends the accumulation of wealth. That goal is public service ... which can take a variety of forms.
- Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court, 1989

To know - that is, to have knowledge - is to instinctively understand the relationship between what you know and what you do. That seems to be one of our biggest difficulties. Our actions are only related to tiny, narrow bands of specialist information, usually based on a false idea of measurement rather than upon any knowledge - that is, understanding - of the larger picture. The result is that where a knowing man or woman would embrace doubt and advance carefully, our enormous, specialised elites are shielded by a childlike certainty.
- John Ralston Saul, in The Unconscious Civilisation

The play does not operate in a vacuum, of course. It can be affected. New actors may appear, existing power bases may erode, new power bases may emerge, economic conjunctures may take on new forms, social structures may change, genealogies and case histories may be written, and environmental problems may become so serious that even conservatives find themselves unable to defend the status quo ... This is the stuff of which the future is made.
- Bent Flyvbjerg, in Rationality and Power : Democracy in Practice

In a very real sense, the modern Australian city is designed as if its citizenry were all fit, employed, middle class, Anglo-Saxon and male. This is the group which is the subject of most urban studies and provides the workforce for planning, finance and governance for the city. Demographic evidence, on the other hand, makes it clear that this group, while the major decision-maker, is a minor client of the city. One Australian in every four has some disability, one in ten is unemployed, one in three has a non-English speaking family background, and there are two genders.
- Valerie Brown, Including the Intangible and the Strange

Unfortunately, State and local governments are structured to fund the people who provide the means rather than the people who provide the ends, i e accessibility.
- John Mant, 1994 press interview

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