Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

What it achieved was that Australia was the only developed economy in the world to have avoided the recession. We did it because we faced up to the hard challenges then and we are facing up to the hard challenges now.

On the question of carbon pricing, I had the opportunity over the course of the break that we have just come back from to visit much of regional Australia. On the question of carbon pricing, I conducted forums in at least 10 communities and invited the stakeholders—

An honourable member: And they loved it!

They did love it because they had a government that was prepared to engage them. These were local governments, these were regional development bodies and these were community action groups that knew they had to face up to this challenge. The common theme for all of these regional development forums was that they knew they had to face up to two fundamental challenges. The first was the recognition that they had to diversify their economic base. They looked around and saw the regions which had diversified their economic base and they were the ones that were succeeding. The ones that had the narrow base, the ones that were reliant on one industry alone, were the vulnerable ones. Think about Cairns, built around tourism. The dollar is hurting them, just as much as it is hurting manufacturers. But look at Townsville, just down the track, which has a diversified economic base, and it is not suffering the same level of high unemployment. That is the difference: economies that have embraced economic diversification. The second key ingredient that all these communities were embracing was the need to face up to a cleaner energy future. They express it in different ways: they want a cleaner environment in which their kids and grandchildren can grow up and they want to leave a legacy for them in the future; they want liveability; and they see opportunities—opportunities in green jobs and opportunities in terms of renewable energy options—and they were embracing them.

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