Tasmanian Greens Senator Christine Milne made a good speech in the Senate this week about infrastructure spending and how we can solve peak oil, global warming and energy security issues in one go by shifting to an expanded, smarter grid with large scale renewable generation - and at the same time address the problem of our economic dependence on fossil fuels, which becomes ever more risky to our economic well-being as time passes by.

From Hansard (PDF - starting at p38):

I rise today to support the Nation-building Funds Bill 2008 and cognate bills. It has been apparent for some time that Australia desperately needs to invest in infrastructure, and there has been a dearth of that in the last 10 years of the Howard government. There has also been in that time incredible pork-barrelling and failure of many of the public-private partnerships, which delivered us some white elephants around the country that the community is going to long live to regret. We have now a coincidence of a global financial crisis and the climate crisis. Indeed, we have peak oil as well.