 | A Sustainable Futures Fund for a Fuel and Climate Emergency | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | The Bullroarer - Monday 10 March 2008 |  |
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We must wholeheartedly endorse Ians personal growth to date, however he has a long way to go in that he stills feels that GROWTH of some sort can be maintained, and it also looks as though he believes a little of tweeking at the edges of government will enable Queensland to ride the backslope!!
It is not only a Zero Growth Economy we need, but a Negative Growth Economy, the backslope alone will bring this about, but we will need political action to salvage a decent lifestyle for the many. As our access to energy declines, so will our wealth and this will bring about a great many redundancies of occupations that now cater for the wealthy society we currently are. The biggest area of redundancy I can see is in Ians own electorate whose main industry is the hospitality industry, and we saw from the Pilots strike of the late 1980's showed how quickly the hospitality industry of Queensland declined with reduced air travel!!
The big backyard of Ians Queensland requires a great deal of energy to maintain as one state, they should be looking at least a division into three if not more states. That way rail to an ocean node will make transport more feasible, and cut the need for internal transport significantly.
I think the idea of "growth" he is referring to is "improvements in the availability of goods and services to a consumer" (i.e. the economist's definition), which is not the same as growth "we all have and make more stuff and we dig more stuff out of the ground and we throw more stuff out" (the consumerist's view and/or environmentalist's view).
They're not the same. For example, if you come up with a way of doing making something more efficiently but you make exactly the same amount of it as you did before, an economist would consider that growth. The drivers of this kind of growth are better education and training and more research and development.
What Ian is saying is that we need to do growth driven by education and R&D rather than growth by greater capital leverage or increased inputs. Which is I suspect what Sololeum is saying as well.