Philip Machanick, Greens candidate, Moggill
Transition Towns Kenmore Candidates’ Debate
18 March 2008
I was pleasantly surprised last year when I heard that the Transition Towns idea had made it to Kenmore. We cannot wait for governments to act in a time of crisis, a time that requires a major transformation.
Much of the failure of governments to act on the need for transformation is a failure of imagination. Someone needs to lead the way by showing what can be done, even if on a smaller scale than a government-driven transformation.
Here I would like to quote Margaret Mead:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
How major a transformation are we facing? The changes we will need to make over the next years and decades are as big as the changes since the nineteenth century, with its gas lit streets travelled by horse and buggy. The twentieth century changed all that with the development of commercial air travel and the car, with cheap fossil fuels driving not only transport but also the apparently marvelous clean form of energy, electricity.
But that era is fast drawing to a close, and we must be ready for a new era, or we will be left behind as surely as those who believed the horse and buggy was the way of the future in 1909.
This urgency is caused by a failure of imagination that has slowed the pace of change, until we are faced with an increasingly urgent task of coping with carbon emissions reductions, a task on which we are way behind.
Two key issues are converging to drive change rapidly: peak oil and climate change. 30 years after Henry Ford first mass-produced his Model-Ts, horses were still in wide use. That is the natural pace of large-scale change, and we must face up to the fact that this time, because we have been so slow to get started, it will have to be faster.
If we do not try to get ahead of the worldwide current of change, we will be swept away by it. Our fossil-fuel dependent economy will collapse; our coal exports increasingly falling out of favour.
The choice we are facing is as stark as it is real. Get rolled over, or get into the lead.
Let’s see how change plays out close to home as well as for the state as a whole.
Climate change threatens food supply; we know the general trend, but cannot predict precise changes in weather patterns. It is therefore crazy to destroy prime farmland with projects like the Traveston Crossing dam, and coal mines out to the west of us in Felton and the Darling Downs – even more so when the future demand for coal is becoming uncertain. Food supply is also threatened by high energy costs; farmers should be included in energy production through solar and wind farms on unproductive land, and second-generation biofuels production, that does not compete with food supply.
Travel will unavoidably become more expensive, especially with high-emissions technologies. There are two remedies for that in and near cities: improved electrified public transport to reduce the need to drive cars, and better placement of facilities and services to reduce the need to travel. Once you have everyone in electrified public transport, you can clean up the electricity supply. For Brisbane, the Greens propose a light rail system that would bring the city closer to the outer suburbs. We also propose two new solar thermal power plants for the state, as a first step to clean base-load power. Other obvious steps, back in Moggill, include local health facilities and more schools in the outer suburbs.
In an era of expensive energy, we may just score the advantage of rediscovering the concept of community, a neighbourhood where your kids go to school, you go to the doctor, you spend your leisure hours, you get to know your neighbours and the elderly need not be lonely.
What’s more, if we no longer had pure dormitory suburbs – and here I think of the ex-pineapple farms in Moggill – many more of us would work close to home. How good would that be?
In this new world, building roads like the Kenmore Bypass no longer makes sense: we will get around by public transport, and use our cars for leisure. How many people, in any case, like to drive their car in heavy traffic?
Another big source of traffic – and of unacceptable danger to children – is travel to and from school. The dangers of school drop-off zones is one of the most frequent complaints I hear. A comprehensive school bus system would not only take cars off the roads, but make our children a lot safer.
Back to health. There are many good arguments for large tertiary hospitals. You can’t build a team of top specialists unless they have enough cases to keep in practice. On the other hand, the increasing cost of moving people means that small local hospitals make sense. These smaller hospitals would cover emergencies and routine cases, with the big tertiary hospitals covering the more difficult cases. So we propose a small local hospital be built somewhere in this electorate.
The state Labor government has the balance wrong: they are moving the Royal Children’s Hospital to a smaller site, and have no plan for small local hospitals.
For the longer-term, we propose building on our world-class research to develop the clean energy technologies of the future that the rest of the world desperately wants. I’ve worked in top universities and research labs. The talent we have here is right up there. Why then do we allow great innovations in solar technologies to slip out of our grasp, to be commercialized in the US or China? Queensland is the sunshine state and, the state government tells is, the smart state. Why not put these two together and become the smart sunshine state?
One of the things you so often hear is that doing the right thing by the environment is all very well, but where do we find the money?
I have some ideas on that. To fund our little local hospital, let’s draw a line through the destruction of the Royal Children’s Hospital. We could build a pretty good local hospital for a fraction of the $2-billion saved.
To fund a transition to clean energy and to fund the great clean energy research we know we can do right here in Queensland, in our great universities, in the CSIRO right here in our own electorate, I’m eyeing an even bigger chunk of misallocated money. The state government is planning on spending over $30-billion on doubling our capacity to export coal by 2015. How crazy is that? Haven’t they heard there’s a worldwide movement to cap carbon emissions?
Let’s grab back as much as we can of the money that’s being allocated to crazy projects, projects based on a nineteenth century mindset, and use that money to build the economy of the future with real green jobs, jobs in delivering safe, clean, efficient public transport, energy-efficient homes, clean energy and communities we can all be proud to live in.
We don’t need the Kenmore Bypass. We don’t need the Traveston Crossing Dam. We don’t need to redouble our efforts to export coal. We do need to gear our economy, our lifestyle, our way of doing business for the future.
The smart sunshine state. That’s what the Greens stand for.
