Page 689 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 22 February 2012
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There are many economic benefits as well as environmental ones from this approach, and I am very pleased that the Assembly did support the Greens motion this morning. It is disappointing that the government did not recognise all the opportunities that we so urgently need to avail ourselves of if we are to respond to the challenges before us.
The next part of Ms Porter’s motion talks about the continued expansion and maturing of our economy, our attractiveness for investment and our role in the region. Certainly our economy does continue to grow. We grew more than the national average last financial year. In fact, we had the second highest economic growth last financial year after Western Australia. We also had greater average population growth.
I would like to make a couple of observations about this issue. We need to look beyond GDP as the only measure of success. Dependence on growth is inherently unsustainable. We live in a finite world and we have to be very aware that we simply cannot continue to use resources at the rate we currently do. Increasingly, many economists across the world are recognising this problem and there is more and more literature available that recognises the problem and discusses means to address it. Probably the most well known of these is the book Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson.
I have spoken in this place before about the need to move away from the very simplistic “growth is good” mindset and think more about our total wellbeing rather than just the gross level of churn in our economy. We need measures that provide us with a better indication of the level of happiness and wellbeing in our community. We do have the measuring our progress website, which measures seven different indicators of our prosperity. I would reiterate my support for the initiative and I hope that it does increase in prominence and that our focus does shift towards these broader issues.
I have also previously spoken about the need to incorporate equality measures such as the Gini coefficient in our discussions about the economy so that we are aware of income distribution as well as average wealth. We know that we are, on average, a wealthy community and that using averages can distort the difficulties experienced by many who are low income earners.
I would make the point that a number of the indicators on the website have not been updated for some time. I do accept that some of the data is not frequently collected by the ABS and that nationally we do also need to address these issues and keep this information contemporary so that we can see what effect various initiatives are having.
Just on the issue of income distribution and the cost of living, I would make the observation that I have not heard the Liberals mention the Gini coefficient when they talk about the cost of living. It is concerning that they do not appear to have turned their minds to how our community distributes wealth amongst ourselves and how easy it is to complain about the cost of parking fees, when the real issue for most people or for many people in our community is how they are going to pay for food and rent.
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