If we want Progress and Recovery we need to expel Labor .

Nation Building = more BS ; It might save Labor but that's not our Plight , Saving our Identity and Integrity is .

I wholeheartedly support the strategy advocated by Leigh Ewbank here, and I was pleased to sign the referenced Open Letter to the Prime Minister. My book 'Crunch Time'(Scribe, September, 2009) went into practical detail on such matters.

It is a real policy contradiction that a government which can find 30 or 40 billion dollars for national public broadband investment, to make our internet surfing faster, or 30 odd billion for a new submarine fleet to guard us against non-existent enemies, can only find 650 million dollars for renewable energy national investment in the 2010 budget. Also, that it has hardly begun to spend the 4.5 billion dollars allocated in previous budgets to reducing carbon emissions. And that all these national investments are conditional on private sector co-funding. Indeed, we need a real new vision for a nation-building decarbonisation project. And Leigh is right, the route to it is through better informed public opinion.

God save us from Nation Building!

It's all politicians for politicians, they've got their grandiose idealistic dreams, never cared about us, ordinary people, or had second-thoughts about their "right" to experiment their ideas on us, who have no interest in all that and never gave our consent to being pushed and shoved around.

When will they just go away and allow us to live our lives peacefully?

So after destroying our nation,Labor will rebuild it? Our political system has become totally self serving and in my view corrupt. Govt and the large Corporates are colluding to screw the masses.

Good points Arjay,yuyutsu and Garum.

Really this article makes little sense particularly as Labor is in the process of dividing the country using the old class warfare lines.

I see the author is part of a "think tank". I shudder to think what passes for thought in a "think tank" these days.

Intellectuals are becoming less insightful than the population they seek to manipulate.

I hope we never have a CPRS forced upon us. Its likely to send us all broke.

Nation building and the Snowy Mountains scheme model is surely the right approach.
However before it becomes party political the idea of a National Zero Carbon will have to become popular as a proper national goal of which most people will be proud.
Once it becomes a " motherhood " issue the political parties will scramble to adopt it.
If so, then this is an educational issue; when people understand that carbon induced climate change is actually a challenge to our survival, and that conversion to a carbon free economy is relatively easy then the necessary decisions will be made.