The cover of Labor MP Lindsay Tanner’s book Crowded Lives is filled with an unattractive, blurry photo of an overloaded power outlet, symbolising the author’s message. Tanner, also the Federal Opposition spokesperson for communications, persuasively argues in little more than a hundred pages that our lives are in overload with insufficient alternative energy sources to draw upon. We are driven by agendas of economic and personal advancement and are consequently increasingly diminishing the web of relational support that is vital for a healthy society. Tanner asserts that the key is to reverse the undervaluing of relationships.
Tanner acknowledges that in writing this book he has been influenced by a Christian, Michael Schluter, founder of the Relationships Foundation in the UK, who visited Australia earlier this year.
Schluter is famous for leading in the 1980s a successful campaign to stop the Thatcher Government’s attempts to allow retail trading on Sundays, basing the campaign on the need for families and society to have a shared dedicated day for building relationships. Although the success was short-lived, Schluter’s organisation has continued to press for public policy proposals to be subjected to relational audits as part of the standard assessment of their merits.
Tanner identifies how in the Australian context a focus on relational impacts would result in better outcomes across a wide range of issues, including working conditions, the use of communications technology, criminal sanctions, non-custodial parenting, and embryo experimentation.
I think Tanner is right when he says that our quest for ever more material possessions and individual fulfilment is unsatisfying and ultimately threatens our social capital, that store of goodwill and trust that glues our economic and social interactions. Our culture’s ready acceptance that money is the measure of all things makes it hard for immeasurable values like relationships to receive serious consideration in political debate.
Sociologist Eva Cox has already covered much of the same territory in her 1995 ABC Boyer Lectures A Truly Civil Society, including calling for social capital impact statements. Crowded Lives has also been criticised for outlining the problem, but not the cure.
However, I think that Tanner, a senior politician, deserves credit for attempting to, as he says it, “put relationships at the centre of political debate” and for calling on governments to take a lead in making it possible.
In a culture that gives priority to rewarding con-sumption, it is a significant step just to raise public consciousness about what we truly value.
