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Vote Bruce Carnwell for PETRIE
Make your preferences count!
Reasons to vote for me !
* NO Uranium mining - at all - anywhere in Australia
* Climate Change is the most critical issue to confront Australia - I have solutions
* Without an environment there is no economy !
* Peak Oil - it will change the way we view the world
* The divide between the rich and poor is greater now than ever before when so much money has been made from the resources boom
My Campaign Launch
I am a Democrat for many reasons but the primary reason is
because our party will address the hard issues and talk about them; even when
they are not sexy and often not politically popular! To our amazement and
surprise the same politicians who discount our views and policies when they are
first announced end up adopting them a few years later. We used to have a party
slogan “Always years ahead …” and this has become very true in the current
campaign.
I am also a Democrat because our party has a vision of how Australia can be: environmentally and economically sustainable, embracing of cultural and sexual diversity and a shining example of human rights in practise! But flowing through all this is a common sense approach to change; the best way of ensuring change is effective and long-lasting is to bring the people along with you. This is common sense! Forced change that doesn’t take into account differing views will result in sections of the society being alienated and angry. These people then end up voting for extremists like Pauline Hanson, Family First and the Liberty and Democracy Party.
We meet today on the edge of the beautiful iconic Moreton Bay. It is not an overstatement to say that this environment is under critical threat. Our quality of life is being threatened in a way none of us have before experienced.
There are two parts to this threat being climate change and peak oil and they are linked in a way that is both positive and negative. Climate change impacts are already apparent in our changing weather patterns and the horrific impacts on glaciers throughout the world. But there are far more subtle impacts on the invertebrates and fish that are not so well known. There is also a body of evidence that chemical nature of seawater in our bays and estuaries will be impacted which will drastically change the microcosm that the fish and seafood depend on. As more CO2 is absorbed into the water it becomes more acidic which dissolves the shells of tiny organisms and corals. The key issue here is the rate of change; the environment changes all the time and plants and animal species adapt to these changes or become extinct; what we are talking about now is change on a scale that is unprecedented. Some species will do better and others will do far worse, and we are in many ways going into these changes blindfolded because of the past denial of our Fed. Government. Another aspect of this is the possibility of a ‘tipping point’; a point where the rapid human-induced change triggers other environmental change that magnifies the problem. A clear example of this are the recent fires in California; an environment that shares a lot of similarities to our own!
When the price of a barrel of oil reaches 100 USD even the most optimistic supporters of ‘endless’ supply start having doubts. We have been burning this non-renewal resource at an increasing rate over the last 50 years and the consequences for climate change and our society are becoming clearer. The negative linkage to climate change is that as supplies of easily accessible oil dry up, attempts are made to find replacement fields or use conversion technology such as coal to oil, oil shale or oil sands extraction. These conversion processes are expensive both in carbon emissions and economic impacts. Also the ravenous search for oil will take us into pristine wilderness areas and environmentally sensitive regions unless these areas are marked as no-go zones. We are lucky that the Great Barrier Reef is off-limits due to some of the legislation that the Democrats have promoted. The positive linkage of the price of oil to climate change has appeared in the USA and Europe where consumption has been recorded as decreasing. But across the world consumption is increasing rapidly.
On one level both of these threats may seem to be unremittingly dire and there is an element of the last days of Rome creeping into Australian society. At both the government and community level there is an unwillingness to address these critical issues; by acknowledging them as being ‘society-changing’ the party will stop … this is the concern that Al Gore expressed; if something is too depressing self-denial is a great solution!
But
the Democrats don’t believe that our future is all doom and gloom! There are
critical issues that we must address but we have both the technology and the
money right now to address them. But we must act now because any further delay
will mean that changes will be more dramatic and cause more dislocation. One of
the positives is that the solutions to both of these threats will be
synergistic: using solar power to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen does
not produce carbon dioxide pollution and will also provide a liquid fuel for
transportation. This is just one example of renewal technology and this is a key
point. It is unlikely that there will be just one solution to our climate
change crisis and energy needs; in fact there will be many solutions which in
turn pushes our economy forward and provides both jobs and job satisfaction. It
is a crime that Australian innovators are forced to seek capital funding
overseas rather than being backed by our Australian government. The number one
impediment to a clean green energy-sufficient environment is lack of seed
capital to enable brilliant ideas to become prototypes, and effective prototypes
to go into production. This is where our Federal Government should be injecting
the massive budget surpluses via an investment mechanism known as
income-contingent loans combined with a co-contribution scheme. This would
enable innovative companies to take a punt on a project that might not work out
in the end but is currently showing dramatic potential. If the concept is
developed through into a saleable outcome the loan would be repaid from the
profits made. If it failed or was not cost-effective only the initial outlay
would be lost. What I find most annoying about the current campaign is that
there is no attempt to use the huge surplus funds that we are getting from
corporate taxes as a result of the resources boom to address seriously these
issues. This could be our last roll of the dice and we are currently throwing
the opportunity to invest in our quality of life away!
There are many other issues in our community that are of concern but I don’t imagine you wish for me talk at you for another twenty minutes so they will have to wait for another time.
Thank-you for your interest and your patience!
Bruce