Tasmania is at a crossroads and there is a great opportunity to make this beautiful island a place of renewal. The debates that dominate our island aquaculture expansion, forestry, tourism, renewable energy, are often framed in binaries: jobs versus environment, growth versus preservation, progress versus collapse. These debates are real, but when they harden into opposites, something deeper is lost.
Rudolf Steiner called this the hardening of the soul. In modern life, thinking becomes mechanic and abstract, feeling grows dulled, and willingness is outsourced to bureaucracies and machines. Carl Jung described the same danger in psychological terms: when opposites split apart, we risk paralysis or rage unless we awaken the Third, a symbolic organ of integration, a space that can hold tension long enough for something new, whole, and healing to emerge. The challenge before us is not just political or economic but tis spiritual and psychological. Tasmania needs the Third. Not neutrality, not compromise, but the courage to imagine beyond the binary.
The Third as Social Practice
The Third is not a theory, it is in fact a lived practice. It shows up in a community food hub, a biodynamic farm, a seed library, a convivial festival and even a thought process that holds complexity without jumping to a conclusion. ‘Third’ places and mindset are where imagination, justice, and reciprocity can breathe together. Third ways of thinking, being and doing act like acupuncture points in the social body: small but intentional mind and/or physical spaces that release vitality into the whole. Steiner’s vision of the threefold social organism gives us a map. A healthy society balances:
Cultural freedom: imagination, education, and spirit free to unfold.
Political equity: governance grounded in fairness and rights.
Economic mutuality: livelihoods based on reciprocity, not extraction.
Applied locally, these principles are deeply practical. They remind us that social healing begins not with abstract strategies but with lived experiments, participatory action, and transparent processes that keep head, heart, and hands together. I love the deep green design Prof Seaton Baxter (from Scotland) theory called “way of the prototype” - much of my work is based around this methodology.
Local Government: From Strategy to Practice
Nowhere is this more urgent than in local government. Councils produce endless strategies, reports, and consultation papers, yet communities often see little translation into practice. Strategy is not an outcome and true outcomes happen when policies take form in gardens, services, cultural initiatives, housing solutions: the fabric of everyday life. Fair local government means shifting from paperwork to practice. This doesn’t mean abandoning strategies, but holding them accountable to lived results. People in communities (rate payers) deserve transparency: to trace how decisions are made, where funds are spent, and how outcomes are measured. Without this, government risks serving mechanical and abstracted systems instead of people they are there to serve.
Imagine a local government that functions as an enabler, not just an administrator? Councils can support neighbourhood initiatives, co-design projects with residents, and facilitate cooperation across sectors. In this way, governance itself becomes a Third space: not caught between bureaucracy, process and populism, but a living practice that restores vitality to communities. Tasmania, small enough to be nimble and rich enough in imagination, has the potential to pioneer this. If we can re-root governance in action, ensure transparency, and honour community-led practice, we can show how local government can become not just functional, but regenerative.
Magical Farm Tasmania Festive Agriculture event 2025
Feminised Intelligence and Plant Allies
Ecofeminist thinkers remind us that what the world needs is not more domination but feminised intelligence: cyclical, regenerative, relational, rooted in care for land and community. This intelligence is already alive in Tasmania in community gardens, co-ops, and creative economies but it needs recognition, resourcing, and policy support. Even plants point the way. Yarrow teaches us to heal what is torn and to hold paradox. Rosemary sharpens memory and discernment. Nettle brings courage and vitality. Together they embody what the Third requires: integration, clarity, and action.
The task before us is not neutrality but imagination, beyond binaries. This heart shaped island Tasmania must reawaken the Third, and inspire other places to do the same. The Third is a space where grief can be honoured, paradox can be held, and new forms of life can be designed. The future of this island will not be built by choosing sides in collapse. It will be built in the Third space where we move from abstraction to life systems and community practice becomes the foundation of renewal.