Political Capital

I don't know what you think Virginia, but I think a carbon price is important.

Because we need to price the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels - which has until recently been ignored. It is not sustainable to continue to ignore this major impact on our home planet.

But in reality a carbon price is just a small part of all the many actions that are needed to be undertaken by our government to rebuild the nation and make our part of the world sustainable.

We need strong leadership - determined and capable - and some political capital to rebuild the nation and make it great. All to deliver security for our children and grandchildren and their children.

We need to focus on three main things. Industry, Jobs, Services.

Industry - Right now mining seems to be in vogue. Surprising because it employs bugger all people - less than 2% of the workforce. I personally don't mind which industries are flavour of the month - providing that they deliver jobs and equity to Australian's. Jobs that are meaningful and equity that doesn't steal our heritage. 98% of our workforce is employed outside of mining but those industries are mostly ignored. Let’s get the various ministers together to focus on making them great again. And I don't mean tariffs - I mean competitive advantage. It will require a lot of *thinking* and probably even a bit of *doing*.

Let’s have a national debate about our industrial resources and how we can maximise their use for the benefit of all Australian's - not just the rich 1%.

Jobs - I don't really care where the future jobs come from - but wherever they do come from - we need to make them sustainable and we need to make them full time. Because right now they aren't. And I don't have a problem with the Peter Reith's of this world advocating for industrial relations *reform* but lets make sure that it is genuine reform that is of benefit to the people of the nation. And not the traditional Liberal party reform of *screwing the workers* to benefit the bosses. If the current ministers won't start this process and get the people engaged then we can be guaranteed that another *WorkChoices* like derivative will bob up soon - and screw us all.

Let’s get a real debate underway about what jobs we want and how we will deliver them and also the costs and benefits associated with them.

Services - Our government services need to be fixed. We live in a big country but the service delivery of our various governments suck. Particularly state governments. And it's not a resources thing - it's a priority thing. Our state and regional governments think they are in the business of feathering their own nests and doing what they did last century - let’s make their goal "quality of service delivery" instead of something else.

And let’s also ask sensible questions about what services we need. Some might be discarded and some new one’s added - we haven't had that conversation for decades - but we need to.

But who is asking these questions - and who is answering them?

And if our federal government is not going to take the lead on these things then they need to get out of the way and let the rest of us get on with it.