Speaker: 'The Collapse of Globalism' - John Ralston Saul at Sydney Town Hall at 6pm today

Author John Ralston Saul is in town for the Sydney Writers Festival and will be speaking at the Sydney Town Hall this evening at 6pm. Bookings can be made through the Sydney Writers' Festival 2010 website.

Ralston Saul has updated his book 'The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World.'

'For more than a decade, Saul has been arguing that it is high time to completely rethink the primacy of economic fundamentalism, to discard what he sees as the flawed, 1970s ideology of unfettered free-market globalisation. "The recent European bailout adds fuel to his argument", he says. "This is the outcome of globalism? That we're more in debt than we were in 1973? We're not having a conversation about what worked and what didn't [in globalisation], and we have to have that conversation." [SMH 17th May 2010, p6]

Ralston Saul says we had the chance to reform the system - but that was before the global financial crisis.

"Nevertheless, I think democracies are capable of reforming the system, and there's a long list of things that need to be done. One of them, shut down the business schools, they're at the core of the problem... for the last thirty years there's been a sort of intellectual cleansing in economics department, so there's only one way of thinking." [ABC, 18th May, 2010, by Adam Spencer].

Read More about Democracy and Globalisation

Saul also in his most recent book, 'The Fair Country', analyses what he sees as the parallel between Canada and Australia in respect to geography, the extreme climate, and the essential importance of Aboriginal people.

GoTo his website