Australia can be a renewable energy powerhouse, harnessing our tremendous resources of sun, wind, wave, earth and human ingenuity to replace our reliance on coal with 100% renewable energy within decades.

To make that transformation rapidly and efficiently, Australia needs a plan: we need to know where our biggest and best renewable energy resources are; we need streamlined consultation and approvals processes that bring communities together instead of dividing them; and we need jobs and infrastructure in the right place at the right time.

Christine Milne, 28th July 2010

Food security plan essential for the national interest

As TV programs from Masterchef to Food Safari show, we Australians love our food. But many of us, including our governments, are complacent about where it is grown and who produces it.

While people discuss the threat of obesity in the suburbs and in the seat of power, nobody talks about the threat of global food scarcity. No one in Government seems worried about where the world will source its food or the consequences of shortages. Few are concerned about land being bought by overseas interests, about farmers being driven from the land by low farm gate prices and trade rules which discriminate against Australian growers. In fact, the Labor government in its 2010-11 budget cut programmes for natural resource management and land stewardship in the face of climate change and peak oil.

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