Page 4945 - Week 15 - Thursday, 15 December 2005
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are not useful for transportation. In any case, it cannot be manufactured without the underlying support of a fossil fuel industry. Wind and solar energy have huge levels of embedded energy in them.
Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas. It is less abundant than most people assume and, as we all know, fraught with huge ecological drawbacks. To produce enough biofuels to produce an adequate substitute for oil would require almost all the arable land on the surface of the earth, and we would be producing food for cars rather than people. In short, although we are still using these alternative energy sources as supplements, they will be neither cheap nor probably sufficient to replace what we have come to expect and have come to see as a historical anomaly in this period of cheap energy. Given this information, it is obviously sensible for us to support all initiatives to persuade people to use more fuel-efficient cars. To the stick of permanent high fuel prices we should add other sticks and carrots, perhaps increased charges for parking where alternative modes of transport are readily available, or different charges for vehicle registration.
Of course there are many ways in which government can lead by example. In Canberra senior public servants get a car as part of their remuneration package, partly because of their work hours but also partly for artificial reasons that have to do with commonwealth government defrauding itself of tax. Middle-ranking public servants are encouraged to buy cars through equally artificial FBT arrangements. They are also encouraged to drive them long distances through the same FBT arrangements. In Canberra in particular, cars are associated with status and buses become infra dig, not because of the operation of the free market but because of the exact reverse.
In the long term, the main carrot would have to be the various price and social advantages associated with improved public transport. Having said that, there are certain facts about the ACT that we have to accept. Part of its misfortune is that much of Canberra’s development as a modern city occurred at the precise moment public transport ceased to be modern. The result is easily the most car dependent of all Australian capital cities, despite Walter Burley Griffin’s original design and original intentions. At the same time, Canberra has two distinct advantages which, paradoxically, are generally regarded as vices. Firstly, most people are employed by the public service—either directly or indirectly—and we are also a more qualified and affluent population than anywhere else in the country.
Secondly, Canberra has a centrifugal character, not a central city place like Adelaide or Melbourne. Its nominal heart—Civic—is really one town among five. In economic terms, Canberra is a government town. Governments are infamous for forever shifting the location of their offices, usually for the worst possible reasons. However, this suggests that Canberra has the potential, as well as the need, to contrive an overarching sustainability policy that combines economic development of these city nodes with effective land use and sustainable integrated transport to encourage more mature development of these centres and a more balanced distribution of the work force.
The approach I am suggesting is partly precautionary. We do not want Canberra’s peripheries to become Parisian style banlieux, detached from the main economy. More positively, a decentralised occupational structure is appropriate for an economy which predominantly relies on the public service, knowledge-based industries and personal services. Canberra is not a captive of topography; its industry is not dependent on mines
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