Equal & Inalienable Rights to the Earth
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008
Dr Terry Dwyer
HENRY GEORGE COMMEMORATION ADDRESS
Tuesday 2 September 2008
Sixty people gathered last night on Henry George’s birthday to hear the Commemorative Address. The venue was the Conservatory, just across the road from where Henry George himself spoke to a packed house at the Exhibition Centre to a rumoured 10,000 people in 1890
The Athenian historian Thucydides wrote of “the great and the good” but the phrase may connote cynicism or irony. Tonight we honour the memory of a genuinely great and good man. Henry George spoke truth not merely to power but to that more capricious master, the voting public. He always preferred to appeal to men’s reason and their better natures rather than to score easy political victories on the back of some sort of class envy or hostility.
In that spirit, tonight I want to pose some questions concerning equal and inalienable rights to the Earth, to ground, water and air and to ask “When and how should one allow enclosing the commons?”
The avarice of Henry VIII launched the great enclosure movement and saw the common people reduced to landless rural and urban labourers. We are still living with the consequences of that great enclosure and those which succeeded it, such as the engrossing of the lands of the Australia, against which some of the founding fathers of Federation such as Sir Samuel Griffith and Sir John Quick wrote.
But today we are seeing a new enclosure movement. The “great and the good” of the political and business establishment and the wizards of high finance, blessed with the incantations of many priests from the temples of science, are now saying that we have entered a new period of scarcity where we must – for our own survival – consent to an enclosure of the carbon and water commons. Just as we needed to surrender the over-grazed common lands to selective private ownership to secure their better management, so it is now being urged that water and air are limited resources which should be subjected to some form of licensing or rationing – whether by free grant, by auction or by taxation.
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