Thirty two years ago, on this day, November 14th, 1994,
The Federal Government could generate thousands of jobs in environmentally friendly industries if it removed development impediments and boosted funding, a bipartisan parliamentary inquiry has found.
The report by the House of Representatives environment, recreation and arts standing committee says 20,000 jobs could be created by 2000 in the pollution-control industry.
Australia needed to capture only 2 per cent of the world market by 2000 to generate 150,000 jobs and $8 billion in business.
The committee’s report, tabled in Parliament yesterday, says the Government needs to coordinate more effectively its environment and economic policies.
“A tax on emissions of greenhouse gases or an energy tax in the form of a carbon tax could be introduced as a substitute for other taxes such as payroll tax, which are a disincentive to employment,” it says.
The committee’s chairman, Mr John Langmore (ALP, ACT), called on governments to swap rhetoric for action and overcome “bureaucratic inertia”.
1994 Boreham, G. 1994. Report Calls On Government To Nurture Green Industries. The Age, 15 November, p.5.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 359ppm. As of 2026, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that the Ecologically Sustainable Development process, where lots of these ideas about green capitalism had been put forward, had been kneecapped and then shot in the head by Paul Keating and his allies within the federal bureaucracy.
But if you are a believer in liberal capitalism and the power of the state, such as it is, then you keep on talking about nurturing green industries, because that lets you have red green alliance stories that you can soothe yourself with nice little lullabies, and you get some reports and some media coverage and a sense of progress and or influence out of it, even though it’s not going to happen, or certainly not the way you think it needs to, and not at the speed it need, you think it needs to.
What I think we can learn from this is that people are good at lullabies.
What happened next The green industries were not, in fact, nurtured.
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On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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Also on this day:
November 14, 1997 – Aussies want WTO to scupper UNFCCC
November 14, 2005 – Downing St blocked with coal
November 14, 2013, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s 50th #climate speech
November 14, 2014 – US and China sign climate deal, in part to troll Australian Prime Minister