The Big Picture Policy Blog

I have struggled for some time to explain an increasingly alien concept to friends, family, and to my colleagues and superiors at work: the concept of enough . We are each trained, from the moment we are born, to want more . More of everything - more money, more possessions, more property, a faster car, more expensive clothes, and so on, forever. I have had incredulous and occasionally heated responses from managers who, when asking what my goals are in terms of work progression, cannot compute the idea that "I have none; I have enough", or are almost offended that I would countenance doing more work without material or financial reward if it meant being able to help more people. These people are not uncaring, or evil - they are merely following their programming: despite having good jobs, (more-than-)comfortable incomes, and a level of material luxury that was almost inconceivable within the lifetime of their grandparents, we are conditioned to want not j...

So much of public policy is reactive, and the recent dire IPCC report evidencing that we have just 12 years to avoid a potentially irreversible climate crisis should be enough to spark an unprecedented reaction. In the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur shooting, the Australian government introduced sweeping changes to its gun laws, most notable amongst which was a government buy-back scheme that, in the twelve months it was in place, bought back and destroyed more than 1 million firearms that had recently been made illegal, funded by a one-off increase in the Medicare levy paid by Australian citizens to raise the required A$500million. There was strong opposition in some quarters, but the conservative Howard government pressed ahead with the policies; in the seven years following the buy-back, gun-homicides fell by roughly 42 percent, and gun suicides fell even further, by almost 57 percent. The policy was controversial and costly, but it was an undeniable public good, and has since ...