Page 2406 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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experienced the lowest wage growth but the highest increase in consumer prices in the country.
What are the implications on businesses? Concern for the implications of this report should not be relegated to households. The implication on business is also quite apparent. On two occasions the report has the construction, retail, and hotels, clubs, restaurants, and cafes as the second, third and fourth largest components of our ecological footprint. These are sectors that are vital elements that form the basis of our economy. Raise their utility costs, and this will be reflected in the prices passed on to Canberra households. Make it more expensive for businesses to transport their goods and services or get supplies, and Canberra households will pay. Make a business environment untenable to operate at a profit and businesses will leave town. This is what policy makers get when they forget about encouraging economic growth.
Turning to this report’s cost implications, no doubt the recommendations in this report would present additional costs to families and local businesses. Here are some: recommendation 12—develop a rapid, reliable and environmentally sustainable public transport between the ACT and the ACR and develop environmentally sensitive renewable energy generators throughout the ACR; recommendation 11—require full lifecycle footprint analyses of infrastructure proposals; recommendation 21—establish a procurement system that bases its purchasing decisions on whole-of-life environmental costings—and recommendation 22—mitigate environmental impacts of population growth.
Let’s bring some sense into all of this. The position that this report maintains is limiting. It does not consider all perspectives available to us. There is scope to equally frame this report within the context that views Canberra and region residents as more than just hungry mouths to feed. Given our role as the home of research and development to some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions and a prodigious hub of entrepreneurial activity, why not consider the issue of carrying capacity from the perspective of our ability to effect technological shifts, or the notion that land, capital, labour, technology and natural resources are not as fixed as we think when considered in the long run? Then again, this report comes from the perspective that condoned the destruction of scientific research that may increase the productivity capacity of our city and region. The ideological framing of this report would not see any problems with last year’s destruction of CSIRO crop research by Greenpeace. As such, this report may be seen as an opportunity missed.
Madam Assistant Speaker, as has been outlined, I have serious reservations with the ideological agenda of this study, the lack of empirical evidence directly informing its conclusions and the impacts such ideas will have on Canberra families and businesses. At a time when we are facing 4,200 job cuts to the commonwealth public service, courtesy of the federal Labor government, this report’s negative spin on economic growth, improved outcomes and more jobs is callous.
This report’s ideology does not allow for all sides of the issue to be considered. Its emphasis and underlying views on population are disturbing. This and the earlier example of the CSIRO case shows this report’s perverse outcomes if its first principles were honoured to its proper extent. It is not a position that I seek to support and, as such, I submit my dissenting comments.
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