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The Forum > Article Comments > Ideas the engine of new growth > Comments

Ideas the engine of new growth : Comments

By Craig Emerson, published 12/12/2008

There is nothing more powerful, it seems, than the power of a good idea created by a vivid imagination.

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Col, Diocletain, Yabby, well said. Ludwig, I've worked as an economic policy adviser to the UK, Australian and (aaargghhhh!) Queensland governments, and found that all the incentives are for excessive regulation and bureaucracy with little thought for public interest or costs and benefits. Governments and bureaucracies are fundamentally anti-innovation and entrepreneurship, they should be much smaller and less intrusive than they are.

Some years ago I read a wide range of research which found that economic growth was greatest when government's share of the economy was about 22%, rather than the 40-odd we have. I know you think (and I agree) that economic growth is not the main aim, but whatever the aim, a system which depends more on individual responsibility and intititaive will always out-perform a bureaucracy-dominated big-goverment one.
Posted by Faustino, Tuesday, 16 December 2008 9:16:26 PM
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Ludwig, my brother works for the public service, in a different
State and different field then you do. He is in the health sector.

According to him, its a very different situation, to the one that
you paint in your department, in your State.

He is one of these relatively uncommon people who hate waste and
take taxpayer funds seriously. He tells me that petty pilfering
is common and that the Dept will spend whatever they are given,
one way or another. Seldom is any surplus returned to consolidated
revenue.

One year his computer system was replaced, despite his protests that
his system was just fine. There was a surplus to be gotten rid
of before the end of the financial year, they would spend it one
way or another.

Now the Dept might limit spending on beds, nurses etc, so that the
headlines read about how bad things are. But there never seems to
be a shortage of money for administration. Those with their snouts
closest to the taxpayer trough, are doing very well, thank you.

Few public servants would understand what it means to compromise,
cut costs and compete. They should go farming, to learn about
the real world :)
Posted by Yabby, Tuesday, 16 December 2008 10:56:21 PM
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ARRRRRGH!

The ghost of T-Rex speaks:

Geothermal gradients from localised igneous surface features, to our cool leafy nests, sustained our evolution for 300 million years. The dead bodies of my compatriots, GEOTHERMALLY cooked to hi-octane perfection, have sustained your evolution for just 100 years and what’s left is too darn difficult to recover.

Don’t you get it? We didn’t need to evolve brainpower, IDEAS and manual dexterity & ENGINEERING. We had all the Entropy gradients for a dino-heaven. So we couldn’t drill for that GEOTHERMAL heat when it SUBSIDED. The gradients went & we became extinct.

And so too will you if you don’t drill for optimal GEOTHERMAL heat gradients … suckers.

Oh there were some times after: The African rift valley

(http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24778801-12377,00.html-The geothermal potential from the African Rift Valley is "at least 7000 megawatts")

whose radiant heat spawned your kind and the subduction volcanoes around continental rims that gave saber tooth and mammoth like megafauna the edge. There was even Stromboli, Etna and Vesuvius which breathed life and backbone into my kindred Roman spirits. But now there’s nada … nuthin’. So, its GEOTHERMALLY up to you. Drill DEEPER my pretties.

You have the technology but do you have the PRESCIENCE? Don’t waste your time just drilling for my unholy remains or expecting to run an economy on sunbathing silicon, or I’ll be seein’ y'all on the flip side.

Lower your ENTROPY Geothermally & ideas will come. Sit around public-service V Free-enterprise brainstorming and you will wind up in a deep pit thinking of ideas to pull yourself out by your thong laces.

ARRRRRGH!

Posted by the ghost of Mr T-Rex
Posted by KAEP, Wednesday, 17 December 2008 1:16:11 AM
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The two-posts-in-24-hours limit is a bit crippling here. So I’ve started a new general thread to continue this discussion. We’ve effectively hijacked Graig Emerson’s thread anyway…you are naught people, Col, Yabby and Luddles!

See ‘How good is our regulatory regime?’….if it ever gets approved. I submitted it some hours ago and it’s still not up. So I’ll post here…..

….
Yabby, I can remember good times in our department when funding and staff levels were much better. We had ‘excess’ funding to ‘dispose’ of sometimes at the end of the financial year. On a couple of occasions I secured helicopter trips out of that money, which were very useful for vegetation mapping and national park management purposes in areas that were difficult to access on the ground. In my opinion, that was money well spent.

Back then, our regulatory and managerial roles seemed to be up to scratch…and staff morale was good.

I think it's a good policy for managers to plan on having a moderate funding surplus close to the end of the financial year, rather than committing the lot and having nothing in reserve to cover unforeseen circumstances, or worse – running seriously overbudget. Then if there are no unforeseen expenses, there is no shortage of ways in which the money can be put to good use.

Of course, managers can’t plan to have a surplus if basic day to day operations demand the expenditure of all allocated funding.

Your view that there is “petty pilfering” or inappropriate expenditure just isn’t the case in my experience. All expenses have to be justified and accounted for. If there is one thing that is well-managed, it is this core financial aspect of operations.

This financial year we are heading into the red, just with wages. As people resign, they are not replaced. Morale is very low. Operational expenses have to be minimised. Our overall role is seriously compromised.

Anyway, if I may revisit the question that I asked last time;

Where outside of the public service would you find a much better standard of commonsense or intelligence, or managerial capability?
Posted by Ludwig, Wednesday, 17 December 2008 2:12:14 PM
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Faustino “Some years ago I read a wide range of research which found that economic growth was greatest when government's share of the economy was about 22%, rather than the 40-odd we have. I know you think (and I agree) that economic growth is not the main aim, but whatever the aim, a system which depends more on individual responsibility and intititaive will always out-perform a bureaucracy-dominated big-goverment one.”

similar to your post, my personal desire is for government’s intervening management of their share of the economy (I guess Tax as % of GDP or some similar global measure) to return to the lower end of the spectrum rather than increase with “churn” payments (a term which came from Usual Suspect originally) with people of reasonable income receiving benefits for children etc.

Or worse still, artificial taxes designed to inflict a particular social order upon us:
carbon taxes,
FBT and
the recent Alco-pop decree
as examples.

Better those people not be taxed in the first place, rather than be taxed and then qualify for government handouts.

To the main aim

Margaret Thatcher had a view on that, recognizing that

economics are (merely) the method; the object is to change the soul

and with inspirational remarks like

Let our children grow tall, and some taller than others if they have it in them to do so.

Better we are all free to enjoy the diversity of our genes producing unequal growth and aspiration,

than we suffer that equality decreed by a political system where we are only allowed to grow and aspire to some arbitary, confining limit determined by some remote and soulless bureaucracy.
Posted by Col Rouge, Thursday, 18 December 2008 10:05:47 AM
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KAEP's post, the 33rd in this comments thread, contains a faulty link. It gives you a 404 message, 'page not found', as it stands. It seems KAEP has inadvertently failed to type a space between the true last character of the URL he intended and an immediately following word in his own text. As a consequence the hyphen he typed incorporated the word 'The' as part of the link.

The correct URL is this: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24778801-12377,00.html

This link works. The short article from The Australian is worth a read. It includes the following claims:

"Kenya already has a geothermal plant, dating back a quarter of a century, that delivers around 115 megawatts, or just over a tenth of the country's electricity capacity."

and, in relation to minimising the risk and expense of proving up [new] geothermal prospects by a new type of exploratory drilling

"The pilot drills, some of which took place near the existing plant operated by power company KenGen at Olkaria, aimed at proving a new technology called micro-seismic and magneto-telluric surveying."

and

"[UNEP Executive Director Achim] Steiner spoke enthusiastically of geothermal as clean and "indigenous", a code word that usually means free from geopolitical risk and immune to market fluctuations."

Something for Australian governments to take on board, especially in relation to the prospective allocation of funding from the Federal government's $ 500 million Renewable Energy Fund, I should think. See, courtesy of Ludwig in another thread,: http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=113221

At least one Australian government, that of NSW, would appear well placed to be head contractor in emplacing such HDR geothermal energy into the existing publicly owned electricity grid, especially if it was able to prove up the known Hunter region hot dry rock prospect. We would need a good REF, wouldn't we, to oversee an 'open book' costing of such a project, one highly likely to be synergistic with other low-grade waste heat utilization possibilities from the existing coal-fired generation.
Posted by Forrest Gumpp, Thursday, 18 December 2008 11:24:12 AM
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