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Only capitalism can save the planet

Close up photograph of am electronic currency exchange rate board.

10 August 2010

Critics of capitalism have been crowing ever since the onset of the global financial crisis.

Capitalism has been blamed for nearly every one of the earth’s ills – poverty, pestilence, exploitation, environmental degradation, the lot!

Capitalism has been celebrated as the only cure for the earth’s ills – poverty, pestilence, exploitation, environmental degradation, the lot!

So, who is right?

Speakers

For:

  • Ross Gittins is Economics Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and an economic columnist for The Age, Melbourne. His journalistic experience includes editorial writing and stints in the parliamentary press galleries in Sydney and Canberra. Before joining the Herald he worked as an auditor with the national chartered accounting firm Touche Ross & Co. In 1993 he won the Citibank Pan Asia award for excellence in finance journalism. He has been a Nuffield press fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a journalist-in-residence at the department of economics of the University of Melbourne. He has written various books, his latest being Gittinomics (Allen & Unwin). He is married and lives in inner-city Sydney.

  • Lucy Turnbull is a businesswoman and company director. She is a director of the board of Melbourne IT, an Australian publicly listed internet services company with operations in North America, Europe and Asia. She is a board member of the Redfern Waterloo Authority, She was Sydney’s first female Lord Mayor and has worked as a solicitor and as an investment banker for many years. Lucy is currently the Chair of the  Salvation Army’s City of Sydney Red Shield Appeal, Deputy Chair of the Committee for Sydney and a member of the board of the Centre for Independent Studies, the Redfern Foundation Limited and the Turnbull Foundation.  She is also a board member of the NSW Cancer Institute. 

  • Geoffrey Cousins is an Australian community leader, businessman, activist and writer. He spent 25 years with George Patterson Advertising, becoming its Chairman and Chief Executive. As the first CEO of Optus Vision, he was responsible for building the first fully integrated telephone, Pay TV and high-speed internet service. He has been an advisor the the Australian Prime Minister, a director on many company boards and has been involved in many charitable causes, and was the founding Chairman of the Starlight Foundation. He came to recent prominence leading a campaign to stop the Gunns wood pulp mill in Tasmania. He has also campaigned to protect flying foxes and the Kimberley environment.

Against:

  • Steve Keen is Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the popular book Debunking Economics. He has written over fifty academic publications on topics as diverse as financial instability, the money creation process, mathematical flaws in the conventional model of supply and demand, flaws in Marxian economics, the application of physics to economics, Islamic finance, and the role of chaos and complexity theory in economics. His work has been translated into Chinese, German and Russian.
  • Kate Jennings is a poet, essayist, short-story writer and novelist. Both her novels, Snake and Moral Hazard, were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has won the ALS Gold Medal, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Adelaide Festival fiction prize. Born in rural New South Wales, she has lived in New York since 1979, where she worked in the finance sector on Wall Street for a time. Her most recent books are Stanley and Sophie, Quarterly Essay 32: American Revolution and Trouble: Evolution of a Radical, Selected Writings 1970-2010.
  • Paul Gilding is a former Executive Director of Greenpeace International. His 20-year involvement with social change organisations has enabled him to assist business in forecasting and taking advantage of emerging trends. In 1995, Paul established Ecos Corporation an international consultancy providing strategic advice on sustainable business issues to leading corporations including DuPont, SC Johnson, the Ford Motor Company, Placer Dome, BP (formally BP Amoco) and Suncor Energy as well as Australian corporations including BHP, Lend Lease, Pacific Power and Western Mining Corporation. He has received the prestigious Tomorrow Magazine Environmental Leadership Award, included in "Time's Global 100 Young Leaders for the New Millennium" and an Australia Day Award for Outstanding Achievement for services to the environment. In 1992 he was appointed a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.

Chair:

Dr Simon Longstaff is Executive Director of St James Ethics Centre. Simon spent five years studying and working as a member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Having won scholarships to study at Cambridge, he read for the degrees of Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy. He was inaugural President of The Australian Association for Professional & Applied Ethics and is a Director of a number of companies. He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Foreign Policy Association, based in New York. Simon has been Executive Director of St James Ethics Centre since shortly after it was founded.