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

We all know that the entertainment and arts industries can have more relevance to economic growth in a post-industrial society than traditional forms of manufacturing. That is obvious. I agree with you that some state governments have underfunded the arts. We need an investment in our symphony orchestras around the country. You only have to look at the relationship with China where they do have a longstanding appreciation of the arts. We could send our orchestras on trips and goodwill visits and so on and we could have real exchange, real jobs, real dollar investment in expanding the knowledge and service based sectors of our economy. But you are not going to get that unless you get a major investment in education, and I am talking about public education from preschool right through to tertiary.

This is one of the major problems in Australia. Not only have we gone back to riding on the sheep’s back by turning ourselves into a quarry and digging everything up, or cutting it down, but also we have underfunded public education. We have left our young people with horrendous debts because of HECS fees. We have hollowed out manufacturing by chasing cheap wage economies overseas. Well, now is the opportunity to change. We cannot keep on importing oil. We cannot keep on selling ourselves short by digging everything up and sending it overseas. We have to ask: what sort of nation do we want here in Australia; what sort of economy do we want?

Let us make the transition from a resource based economy to a brains based economy. Let us make the transition while we do have a surplus because we have benefited from high prices in the resources sector. Why not invest that surplus in education, in creativity, in the arts and in dealing with climate change and oil depletion? We can invest in commercialising a lot of the technologies which are out there and ready to go. Origin Energy has sliver cells ready to go. It needs $100 million but it will have to look offshore. Vestas has left Tasmania; it has gone offshore. Solar Heat and Power has gone offshore—I could give you a list of companies in the renewable energy sector which have gone offshore.

The Greens have also developed an initiative whereby we would train a lot of energy auditors to look at energy efficiency across the country. We would invest a large amount of money in upgrading residential housing across Australia so that everybody had solar hot water and insulation, and over time that would be paid back. It would be an investment of the current surplus in the nation and in the jobs associated with rolling out energy efficiency technology in particular, and upgrading the housing stock. It would also be a way of addressing energy poverty because energy prices will go up with carbon pricing. If you improve the homes in which people live, you make sure that energy poverty does not bite in the way it is about to.

There are opportunities. I suggest the minister avail himself of the opportunity of reading ‘Re-energising Australia’, which talks about re-energising the nation in addressing climate change and oil depletion, massive investment in public transport and massive investment in infrastructure through such initiatives. That would make life better in the cities. We would have cleaner air. We would have more competitive cities because we would not have the loss of amenity by being stuck forever in traffic jams in places like Sydney, for example. We would have healthier populations because people would walk more. There are a whole range of reasons why massive investment in upgrading infrastructure in our cities, particularly public transport, is an excellent idea.

There are a range of initiatives which the government can take up by way of regulation and investing the surplus, which would create jobs in manufacturing in Australia, rather than see some of our best brains have to leave the country in order to see their technologies rolled out. The classic one, of course, is Australia’s first solar billionaire, who had to go to China to make his billions. He could not do it in Australia because we do not have the policy settings to deliver the energy revolution that would boost manufacturing in this country.