Page 3216 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 23 August 2017
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We also consume goods that are created through some very destructive processes. We create overseas pollution in effect from the plastics, chemicals and fabric dyeing of the things we are consuming. Those of us who saw the Four Corners report on waste will know about the impact that our consumption behaviours are leading to.
The next part of the equation is technology. Clearly, how we do things makes a considerable difference to our ecological impact. One I have just talked about is in terms of our electricity supply. We can get our electricity from fossil fuels, or we can make the choice, as the ACT has made as a community, and before that as many citizens of the ACT made, to get our electricity from renewable energy.
Technology can be fairly subtle. One of the bits of technology that I am quite interested in relates to how we plan our city. We can sprawl out to everywhere, and that will have a huge impact in terms of transport costs, or we can have more compact cities, and that will certainly have a lower impact as far as transport is concerned, and probably in terms of other infrastructure as well.
I would like to point out that there are alternative approaches to prosperity. Over the last decades, clearly the ACT community and Australia as a whole have become more prosperous, but it is pretty hard to argue that we have become happier. Increased prosperity seems to be linked to increased mental illness, and in the past 10 to 15 years it has been linked to greater inequality and greater environmental damage.
Most economists and national statisticians will agree that the GDP is not a particularly useful measure of whether things are getting better in any way for a community. A good example of this, of course, is war and natural disasters, which add in general to a country’s GDP, even though they destroy lives and capital, both built capital and actual capital. Alternative measures for national prosperity are being developed internationally. We have probably all heard of Bhutan’s national happiness index, which I think is a wonderful idea.
In all of this, there is a real role for government in terms of our ecological impact, and thus on the impact of increased population. The government controls a number of key impacts, such as water and waste. Both of these things are supplied and maintained by our government. I mentioned earlier that our government has committed to buying 100 per cent renewable electricity. The government basically controls our transport system. While we individually buy cars, it controls the road system and it controls the public transport system. The decisions that it makes will make a significant difference to our ecological impact, and thus to the impact of any population growth.
The Greens, of course, are very much in favour of a renewable energy target, and we are very much in favour of the target of zero net carbon emissions from Canberra by 2050. We are incredibly pleased that in this budget we have finally reached the point where there is greater investment in public transport than there is in roads. If there were a Greens majority government we would attempt to do a lot more than that: close the loop on waste and be a world leader in reducing environmental impact. We would look much more at food security, and in particular at local production—looking
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