Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

You may refer to Donald Horne in that way, Minister for the Arts and Sport. That you should say that of Donald Horne just reaffirms to people what the coalition thinks about the arts. I will say that again: I believe, as Donald Horne has said, that imagination is the raw material of the future. As business strategists like Kenichi Ohmae have said, we have to accept—the developing and developed countries alike, such as Canada, Australia and the OPEC nations—that natural resources are no longer a key to wealth. As long as you have an economy which is natural resource based and you hollow out the manufacturing sector, as a price taker you are extremely vulnerable to global mass commodity markets.

As the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union has said, Australia has to sell 6,500 tonnes of iron ore to import one plasma TV. That says it all in terms of where the Australian manufacturing sector has got to. As long as the shiploads of coal keep going overseas, the shiploads of raw materials keep going out of the country in the volumes that they are and as long as people are getting good prices for those because of the booming economies in China and India, people will be congratulating themselves and saying: ‘Isn’t the economy doing well? Look at our surplus.’

But the point is that it is not sustainable into the future. There will come a time when Australia’s coal is not going to be purchased overseas because of the increasing impacts of climate change. We are already seeing other economies which are resource constrained moving to much more sophisticated economies. They are building much more efficiency into their manufacturing sectors. When the Prime Minister announced this week that the APEC aspirational target was a 25 per cent reduction in energy intensity by 2030, the Chinese must have been laughing. In their 11th Five-Year Plan they intend to reduce energy intensity in the Chinese economy by 20 per cent by 2010. These countries recognise that competitive advantage comes in trying to minimise the resources that go into every unit of production and that they need to value-add every unit of production.

I have been warning since I got into the Senate that the Australian car-manufacturing sector would go out the back door because we do not have high vehicle fuel efficiency standards in this country. But, no, the government kept rejecting the notion of tying government funding and subsidies to fuel efficiency. Instead of that, they just keep on giving the subsidies—$60 million to Ford and so on. Then China set a mandatory vehicle fuel efficiency standard so that Australian cars would be rejected from China because they do not meet Chinese fuel efficiency standards. So while the US car industry is in collapse because they are building big six-cylinder gas guzzlers, the Chinese and the Europeans are dividing the world vehicle market between them, the Europeans going for the very high end of the luxury vehicle market—still hybrids, still high-fuel efficiency, but at the luxury end—and the Chinese and the Japanese are going for the middle and lower ends of the vehicle manufacturing market. And the government is still sitting around failing to introduce mandatory vehicle fuel efficiency standards and failing to use the procurement capacity of government to switch over the government car fleet. Indeed, if you look at the taxi fleet around the country and the overall vehicle fleet in Australia, you find that it is nowhere near as advanced as the vehicle fleets in other countries because the taxis and the second-hand market get their cars from the government vehicles in the second-hand market. So if governments would take a lead on fuel efficient vehicles we would see that spread through the whole economy.

The same goes for appliances. As long as we do not have high standards we are never going to compete. I have that as my own experience in Tasmania with Tioxide, a paint plant. They argued that they would not meet high environmental standards because it would put them out of business. In fact refusing to make them adhere to higher standards meant that they did not invest in upgrading their capital. They allowed their plant to run down because they were allowed to and they opened up a greenfields plant in Malaysia. Had we insisted that they invest in upgrading their plant and equipment that would not have happened.

There is an enormous opportunity in Australia. Our competitive advantage is in our intellectual capital and renewable energy. We have some of the best brains in the world in the solar energy sector, in particular in the University of New South Wales, ANU and so on. We have got competitive advantage because of innovation and creativity. We should be nurturing that in this country by bringing in a policy framework which leads to the rollout of energy efficiency and renewable energy in the domestic, commercial and large industrial sectors and of course in all aspects of our economy. Imagine the jobs that could be created in Australia if we decided to make Australia the world’s best practice in terms of renewable energy, energy efficiency and vehicle fuel efficiency. We would see a whole range of new jobs. The wind energy people have put out a statement showing the number of jobs that they expect could be created if we went into large-scale investment in renewables. The great thing about the solar sector and the wind sector is that solar thermal plants, wind plants and so on are in rural and regional Australia where the jobs are needed. We could get out of irrigated cotton, for example, and put that land into solar thermal power generation. People do not lose their land, they do not lose their livelihood; they have a change from growing irrigated cotton, which is unsustainable, to going into producing solar thermal power. They are the sorts of innovative changes that could occur around Australia if this government showed some leadership.

But you also have to invest in education. If you want to have a sophisticated economy with innovation you must invest in education and in the arts. You need a major investment in education and the arts, and under this government we have seen the university sector run down across the country. The US free trade agreement and other free trade agreements have left us with the arts sector also vulnerable because of loss and lack of local content.