15 min
The right to repair. Ft: Shane Rattenbury MLA ACT Greens Podcast
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- Government
I gave a version of this speech to the Inaugural Australian Repair Summit last week and I’d like to share the important issue of the Right To Repair to the online audience now.
This is a really important issue, and one that I’m very passionate about, both as a Minister for Consumer Affairs, but also as a Green and an environmentalist.
The summit had the very specific intent of engaging with Government, policy makers and industry to cover detailed and thorny questions arising from the emergence of the Right to Repair movement in Australia – itself a response to ongoing and large-scale trends.
But I think it’s appropriate to start from a much wider angle in order to better prepare us for zeroing in on the nitty gritty – and perhaps even to suggest a guiding philosophical viewpoint.
I’m actually talking about our essence as human beings.
One of the universal attributes of the human species is our creativity, our inventiveness, our ingenuity. Throughout human history and pre-history, those have been intricate, connected things, both within individuals and across cultures and societies.
You only have to look at ancient crafts like knitting. The earliest surviving pieces of knitting are several socks found in Egypt and dating to between 1000 and 1300 AD.
When I look at these amazing thousand-year-old socks I’m struck not just by how inventive they are in a technical sense…
Like, who first had the idea to use a pair of needles to create these endless interlocking loops? We have no idea. Was it someone just fiddling around with a piece of string and some sticks?
… and not even just by how practical and carefully thought out they are, with proper heel and toe shaping, and tapering calves, and fine cotton yarn.
… I’m struck by how creative and how beautiful they are, in a way that’s entirely superfluous to their practical function. Yet this superfluous beauty is a common factor across a vast proportion of these kinds of artefacts. It suggests not just that knitting these socks was probably important to their creator, but that creativity and what you might call emotional ownership is an integral part of human ingenuity.
We tend to take these kinds of intricate patterns for granted now, assuming a team of sock designers, and complex industrial-scale machinery.
But back then, it would have been an act of personal artistry, combined with the practical inventiveness of knowing how to thread those different coloured strands on the inside of the sock so that they didn’t spoil the pattern.
There’s a whole huge explosion of creativity and invention behind these socks.
Again, we don’t know how long – years or decades or centuries - it took to get from those first awkward loops on two sticks that we can imagine, to flat, clumsy garments, to shaping and patterns like this, but it illustrates another element to the connected nature of human ingenuity – the way ideas spark from one person to the next to the next, like batons passed in a relay, improved upon or reimagined with each pair of hands and eyes, from the first wooden wheels or simple canoes, to an aircraft’s retractable landing gear or a 400-metre-long container ship.
But there’s a paradox at work in our modern civilisation, thanks to thousands of years of this relay of ingenuity.
Most of the stuff all of us use now, we couldn’t make from scratch in a pink fit. In that sense, our own inventiveness as a species has robbed us of ownership of our inventiveness as individuals.
Yet surely such a fundamental human attribute as our creativity and our ingenuity, and our ownership of those things, has to also be considered a fundamental human right – as important for us to access as the right to air and water and shelter and food.
The right to tinker with our stuff, to get it fixed or changed or improved, to manage it how we want, make it last as long as we can.
The right to get it repaired.
Which gets us to the point we’ve arrived at
I gave a version of this speech to the Inaugural Australian Repair Summit last week and I’d like to share the important issue of the Right To Repair to the online audience now.
This is a really important issue, and one that I’m very passionate about, both as a Minister for Consumer Affairs, but also as a Green and an environmentalist.
The summit had the very specific intent of engaging with Government, policy makers and industry to cover detailed and thorny questions arising from the emergence of the Right to Repair movement in Australia – itself a response to ongoing and large-scale trends.
But I think it’s appropriate to start from a much wider angle in order to better prepare us for zeroing in on the nitty gritty – and perhaps even to suggest a guiding philosophical viewpoint.
I’m actually talking about our essence as human beings.
One of the universal attributes of the human species is our creativity, our inventiveness, our ingenuity. Throughout human history and pre-history, those have been intricate, connected things, both within individuals and across cultures and societies.
You only have to look at ancient crafts like knitting. The earliest surviving pieces of knitting are several socks found in Egypt and dating to between 1000 and 1300 AD.
When I look at these amazing thousand-year-old socks I’m struck not just by how inventive they are in a technical sense…
Like, who first had the idea to use a pair of needles to create these endless interlocking loops? We have no idea. Was it someone just fiddling around with a piece of string and some sticks?
… and not even just by how practical and carefully thought out they are, with proper heel and toe shaping, and tapering calves, and fine cotton yarn.
… I’m struck by how creative and how beautiful they are, in a way that’s entirely superfluous to their practical function. Yet this superfluous beauty is a common factor across a vast proportion of these kinds of artefacts. It suggests not just that knitting these socks was probably important to their creator, but that creativity and what you might call emotional ownership is an integral part of human ingenuity.
We tend to take these kinds of intricate patterns for granted now, assuming a team of sock designers, and complex industrial-scale machinery.
But back then, it would have been an act of personal artistry, combined with the practical inventiveness of knowing how to thread those different coloured strands on the inside of the sock so that they didn’t spoil the pattern.
There’s a whole huge explosion of creativity and invention behind these socks.
Again, we don’t know how long – years or decades or centuries - it took to get from those first awkward loops on two sticks that we can imagine, to flat, clumsy garments, to shaping and patterns like this, but it illustrates another element to the connected nature of human ingenuity – the way ideas spark from one person to the next to the next, like batons passed in a relay, improved upon or reimagined with each pair of hands and eyes, from the first wooden wheels or simple canoes, to an aircraft’s retractable landing gear or a 400-metre-long container ship.
But there’s a paradox at work in our modern civilisation, thanks to thousands of years of this relay of ingenuity.
Most of the stuff all of us use now, we couldn’t make from scratch in a pink fit. In that sense, our own inventiveness as a species has robbed us of ownership of our inventiveness as individuals.
Yet surely such a fundamental human attribute as our creativity and our ingenuity, and our ownership of those things, has to also be considered a fundamental human right – as important for us to access as the right to air and water and shelter and food.
The right to tinker with our stuff, to get it fixed or changed or improved, to manage it how we want, make it last as long as we can.
The right to get it repaired.
Which gets us to the point we’ve arrived at
15 min