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September 20, 2010
According to Michael Stutchbury, the Economics editor at The Australian, the current power sharing Parliament is akin to a political circus concerned with simply dividing the spoils of power. He adds that so far, there is no sense of post-election policy direction from Gillard, such as how her rejection of Rudd's "big Australia" translates into a growth agenda.
Note the emphasis on the growth agenda--and not on sustainability. We can infer that Stutchbury is not in favour of sustainable development. He is, for instance, all for plain old economic growth as measured by GDP as an as an indicator of wellbeing, and he reckons that the absence of plain old economic growth is a social disaster. Stutchbury comments:
The complaints of the business and policy elite boil down to the sharpest such critique of the political class in a generation. Labor is gutless, Abbott's Coalition is populist, the Greens are anti-growth and the country independents are rural pork-barrellers. In short, the political system is failing to deliver the policies required to extend Australia's remarkable prosperity.
Who are the business and policy elite that Stutchbury refers to? What are the policies that will deliver prosperity? Do these policies move beyond growth as measured by GDP?
Stutchbury's policy elite are mainly those who are critical of the Gillard Government for a variety of differing reasons reckon the China boom won't repeat the prosperity gains of the past decade and that Australia is not making the most of our China boom. However, the impression gained is that what matters for Stutchbury is not the content of the criticism per se, but the criticism itself. It's another part of The Australian's kick the ALP meme.
If we dig beneath this meme, then we find the criticism from the Business Council of Australia president Graham Bradley. Bradley says that Australia faces losing its competitive benefit of cheap coal and gas energy, that Labor has provided no blueprint for Australia's future energy supply, and that the "excuse" of minority government should be rejected.
It is true that the solar energy industry has virtually given up on the federal Labor government to provide a mechanism for the roll-out of utility-scale solar installations across the country. What then is Australia's energy future? For Bradley and Stutchbury it is nuclear power, which could efficiently supply one-quarter of Australian electricity by 2050. And the subsides that are required to ensure that nuclear power is economically competitive? They are not mentioned. There is no mention of a cost benefit analysis either, even though this is demanded of the national broadband network.
Senator Scott Ludlam in Old-tech nuclear power is not the answer in The Australian says that:
In no deregulated energy market, anywhere in the world, is the private sector putting up its own money to build nuclear power stations. The industry remains on subsidised life support everywhere and is making headway only in a tiny handful of countries with state ownership of generators and command and control energy networks. The net effect, as researcher Mycle Schneider has graphed in stark terms, is that the nuclear industry flatlined in the 80s, began to decline in 2002 and is headed for steeper decline, or in the best case stagnation, for the foreseeable future.
He adds that the reasons are a complex mix of ageing reactors, formidable project costs, the unwillingness of insurance companies to cover the astronomical liabilities of reactor accidents and the 65-year unanswered question of what to do with radioactive spent fuel for the next quarter of a million years.
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In Plain old economic growth is good for society Michael Stutchbury says:
The main thrust of his argument is that Australia needs to reverse our productivity slump through a new round of market-based economic reform.
The shift to sustainability and quality of life issues--eg., the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress report commissioned by French President Nicolas Sarkozy by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi is largely:
The issue is that the small underlying productivity growth limits our GDP potential.