Sorry guys that I’ve have not posted earlier today. I’ve been digesting Professor Ross Garnaut’s final Climate Change Review.
Professor Ross Garnaut
If you live in Rural and regional Australia it’s pretty grim reading. Rural & Regional Australia has been the casualty in the last two decades as Australia has removed import barriers and persued free trade.
Granted that free trade policy has allowed Australia to prosper via the resources boom, however it is widely agreed that Rural & Regional Auistralia has paid the price.
Ross Garnaut acknowledges that fact in his report but warns that once again it will be Rural and regional Australia that will be impacted much harder by the ETS than folk in the cities.
In Chapter 16 of His Report – “Sharing The Burden in Australia”:
Bear in mind he is not talking about the impacts of climate change here he is talking about the impacts of an emissions trading scheme.
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From the commencement of an emissions trading scheme, costs of agricultural inputs-electricity, liquid fuel and fertiliser-will rise. This will particularly affect parts of the sector where energy costs and energy-dependent costs are a large proportion of total costs.
Regional communities and industries are likely to be more vulnerable to these impacts than urban centres, due to their reliance on agriculture and other natural resource-based industries, and low levels of infrastructure stock.
Regional communities, in particular farming regions, have already been subject to structural change to a much greater extent than metropolitan centres in recent history (Productivity Commission 1998).
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And Garnaut’s only response to helping farmers & rural people:
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“These are issues for policy in the longer-term future”
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In other words Rural & Regional Australia is once again treated as expendable by policy makers. From a Rural perspective the whole report is grim – I’ll write more about that in another post later this evening.
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