profit-making groups maximize their resource-grab simply because, if they do
not, a competitor will get in before them. And with the exploitation of
resources there exists individual, corporate and in some cases a national com-
pulsion to consume now, or lose out to a competitor. This regressive situation
is exacerbated by the instinct of individuals, corporations, and nations, to
dump their waste products and commodity discards into the atmosphere, the
water bodies, somebody else’s backyard, anywherewhere the impacts of dis-
posal are nil or negligible to the dumper.- Poverty dynamics.It is an irony that as the consumption of material goods
increases, so the proportion of the population trapped in unemployment,
imprisonment, and social poverty also increases. The poverty issue has many
facets. Prominent is the ageing of population, resulting in an ever-increasing
proportion of those in retirement nibbling at a pension cake provided by an
ever-dwindling proportion of taxed wage earners. This has the knock-on effect
of ensuring an eventual backlash from an over-taxed and undersized work-
force. More controversial is the emergence of an unskilled underclass merely
living out their informal, sometimes illicit, but always desiccated, lifestyles.
Pregnant teenagers do not get to that circumstance because their morals are
lax; they are merely accessing a desperate support option when little else in
the way of worth and identity is available to them. Other young people, par-
ticularly males, discover that they do not have the skills necessary for them to
get a job. For them first, there is welfare support; then possibly crime or maybe
the idleness of a retreat. All of this leads young adults to join a disaffected and
largely disengaged underclass contained by extra enforcement and security
personnel. - Property dynamics. The poor and the rich will always be distinctively profiled
within society; but when urban property holding, always selectively unequal,
becomes more so, urban society as a whole slides into ghetto arrangements
which compartmentalize and exacerbate the plight of the poor. Governments
can bring into effect some changes – such as starter homes mixed in with con-
ventional single-purpose housing projects – but powerful contra-forces deny
major adjustments. Property proponents lobby for an unfettered pursuit of
material aggregation and a regressive focus to taxation – and they largely
succeed. In this way taxpayer preference largely influences outcomes in settler
society nations. Wealth, connoting power, has come more and more to mean
control; in short a property dollar vote has come to influence not only eco-
nomic policy, but also social and environmental policy, far outweighing the
influence of individual voters. Ethnic minorities are caught up in this circum-
stance, but so also in a general way are the under-educated, the unskilled, the
aged, the children and the immobile. - Segregation dynamics. The level of indigenous ‘first-nation’ consciousness, inte-
gral to North American and Australasian societies, is an ever-improving part
of being, knowing and identifying with being North American or Antipodean.
The indigenous first people’s grievances and the inequities have left them dis-
advantaged and disempowered. Further apologies will have to be given and
restitutions made.
278 Practice