An increase in leisure time – once a central goal of the labour movement – is sorely needed in western societies. In Australia, working hours for full-time employees increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and have only declined slightly since, despite significant increases in productivity. To add insult to injury, workers’ real wages in Australia are no longer rising in line with increased output.

For some sections of the radical and not-so-radical left, the idea of universal basic income (UBI) is the new utopian program. A UBI is a periodic minimum income guaranteed to all citizens, regardless of their employment, wealth, or domestic status. In other words, it’s a no-strings-attached state wealth transfer, a price-tagged right for precariat and tech billionaire alike. But there’s a reason why UBI has proponents among the libertarian right.

Debate: ‘It’s time … for a universal basic income?’ 6pm, Monday 11 December Ballroom, Trades Hall 54 Victoria St, Carlton Free food, free drinks, free event!

But can the UBI give all that is promised? I no longer think so. Indeed, the model currently proposed has the potential to strengthen racist policies, increase exploitation of migrants, escalate the environmental impacts of our current economic system, and further wealth disparity both locally and globally.

Recent news out of Finland that has caught the attention of global commentators. The small Nordic country is currently drafting plans to replace their welfare system with a UBI, which would see every citizen get an allowance of €800 (AU$1125) per month without restriction.

It seems to me that the utopian potential of Universal Income can easily be exaggerated, but so can its dangers and implausibility. There are struggles all around us which, on a daily basis, we’re forced to abandon and forget. Given increased power over our own attention wouldn’t make these problems disappear, even more would emerge. Material poverty, for all the most airtight policies and implementations, will likely never cease to exist.

The proposed Liveable Income Guarantee is a strong step towards eradicating poverty, and artists should support it. Poverty sucks, and besides, the more people that can afford to buy books and art, come to shows, and make work, the better. But we need to be more imaginative, more ambitious. We can and should be calling for a massive and urgent restructuring of our social priorities, the ways we measure value, and the way everybody works.

Because everyone would be assured a basic standard of living, a UBI would reduce incentives to undertake paid work. That is a feature of such a policy, not a bug. Most people would choose to allocate less time to income-producing activities (thereby reducing demand for a smaller pool of paid positions), and devote more time to other pursuits: charity and community work, leisure, caring, domestic work, education – and art.

I once worked in a call centre where a few of the interviewers would be regularly rostered to do phone surveys about female incontinence products. Asking strangers whether they lost a teaspoon, a tablespoon or more in volume per occasion is a tough gig.

Fembots, sexbots, killerbots, chatbots: all these and more are the subject of Tracey Spicer’s latest book Man Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future. But while the book offers an overview of the problem just as AI dominates the news, its critical analysis falls short.

Blurbed as ‘The stunning, explosive new novel from the bestselling author of The Museum of Modern Love, winner of the 2017 Stella Prize’, Bruny is, according to the Allen & Unwin PR department, a ‘searing, subversive novel about family, love, loyalty and the new world order’, ‘a cry from the heart and a fiercely entertaining and crucial work of imagination’, one that dares to ask ‘burning’ questions like ‘How far would they go? How far would you?’ and ‘What would you do to protect the place you love?'

The virus doesn’t have a front window that anyone can break in anger. Instead, it’s we that feel its slow, inexorable, uneven impact. While some can brace themselves against it, others are wondering if this time, they’ll be left to fall.

There is a second kind of anxiety, as we step out into the world we share with the virus. There is the question of how we have allowed ourselves to be moved by these events: how we will tell the story of what has just happened, how we will mourn.

Is utopian thinking a distraction from meaningful politics?

The general condition of malaise among a growing class of securely but meaninglessly employed people fosters contempt for genuine work, withdrawal from substantive forms of public life, a sense that things cannot change, and an ambivalence about the world bordering on nihilism.

The Queensland Labor Government recent decision to approve Adani’s groundwater management plan is one of the party’s more shocking recent betrayals of the environmental movement and progressive politics more generally.