Page 1623 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 June 2022
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necessarily distinguish between good expenditure and environmentally harmful expenditure that does not really help us in terms of human happiness. I think it is going to be really interesting for us to work our way through those tensions as we start to look at the emissions and the impact of everyday consumption, as a government.
Here in the ACT, I am really please to say that we have already started this work. We have the wellbeing indicators, which are an attempt to look at what makes us healthy and happy, not simply what drives the bottom line. But I think we are going to get further and further into this work as we start looking more at scope 3. It is really exciting work to do. This is the start of looking at a genuinely circular economy. There is a lot of commentary at the moment about circularity. A lot of people talk about it, but there are not many governments that are genuinely doing it. I am really excited to be in one that is now fronting up and trying to do this really well.
We have got a lot of opportunities in doing this, and before I finish up I want to leave us with a tangible image, because it is sometimes quite hard to engage with some of these concepts. We have heard a lot in our COVID economic recovery about the expenditure bouncing—and that is great news for businesses—but one of the figures I have heard quoted a few times by our Treasurer, and I have read it in the Financial Review as well, is that one of the bounce-backs in our figures was from clothing and footwear, at 40 per cent. During and after COVID we all rushed out and bought more shoes and clothes.
It is a really interesting figure for environmentalists, because we know that we did not actually grow more feet during COVID. We did not suddenly have a new need for more shoes. We probably had less need for shoes. We were stuck at home and probably wearing them out a bit less than we had been. But, for some reason, all of that anxiety and all of those fears and all of the change that happened during COVID made us go out and buy shoes.
I confess that I am not an economist. I am a writer, so I have spent more time reading Douglas Adams than I have reading the Financial Review. Douglas Adams came across this sort of concept many decades ago. He talked about the shoe event horizon, and he painted a picture of a planet that was suffering massive social and environmental collapse. The way it came about was that one day there were just a few too many shoe shops in the main street and the people were not very happy with their lives. They would shuffle around, looking at their feet, and think that they might cheer themselves up by buying more shoes. So they all rushed out to the main street and bought more shoes. Eventually there were more and more shoe shops because everyone was buying shoes. The only way those shoe shops could compete with one another was to sell an ever-decreasing quality of shoes, which wore out faster and faster. Eventually the only thing that that society could make or sell were shoes, and everybody was very unhappy and no-one really won from that.
I do not think that we are up to the shoe event horizon, which is great, but I want to pause and say the great news is that we are talking about scope 3 emissions and we are talking about the genuine environmental impact of everyday consumption. That is great. We have so many opportunities here to move to a service-based economy and to start looking at what we actually need and what actually makes us happy, and it is
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