Green ICT Blog

Author Graeme Philipson
Sydney, 2 June 2009

The political wrangling over Australia’s proposed emissions trading system (ETS) has descended into name-calling and blatant intellectual dishonesty. I’m no great fan of the government’s proposed system (a carbon tax would be much simpler and more transparent), but it’s a reasonable starting point.

But the National’s Senate leader, self-styled maverick Barnaby Joyce, was quoted in The Australian newspaper on Monday 1 June as saying the proposed ETS was "a piece of policy that comes direct from the manic monkey cafe of inner-suburbia nirvana-ville straight to you." Great contribution to the debate, Barnaby.

He also said that ETS stood for "employment termination scheme". This is the same man that defended the mining industry’s employment report, ridiculing the idea that green jobs would be created as “fantastic mystery stuff”.

That mining industry report has gone off the boil a bit now, but it has become notorious for being used by the industry’s supporters as claiming that 23,510 mining jobs would be “shed”. No, guys. That very report, which you comissioned, said that 23.510 fewer people would be employed in mining over coming years than would be the case without an ETS.

The report actually said that there would be many more people employed in mining in coming years (just not as many as would be the case without an ETS). A lower growth rate is a very different thing than a decline, no jobs will go – rather, fewer jobs will be created. Get it right/

The report also totally ignored the prospect of jobs in other sectors making up the shortfall. It’s not a zero sum game. Many other reports, from the Australian Conservation Foundation, the CSIRO and others have predicted significant jobs growth based on new green technologies – hundreds of thousands of them. These are the jobs that Senator Joyce dismisses.

It is a fact of life, amply demonstrated by history, that technological change causes jobs to shift from one sector to another. Agricultural jobs replaced hunting and gathering, manufacturing jobs replaced agricultural jobs, services jobs replaced manufacturing jobs. Now green jobs are replacing brown jobs. There is disruption, but history is all about disruptions.

Whether human-induced climate change is a reality or not is not the issue. I believe it to be the case, and the evidence for it to be overwhelming, but the important thing is that enough people in government also believe that to be the case that our regulatory environment is changing, which means the economics will change, which means the structure of our industries will change. Jobs will be lost here, and will grow there.

Those arguing the opposite are not only on the wrong side of history, they are simply wrong. And when they resort to sarcasm and untruths, they simply indicate the shallowness of their thinking.

Graeme Philipson © Connection Research