Fed: Academic says climate change a chance to build nation

AAP General News (Australia)
12-12-2007
Fed: Academic says climate change a chance to build nation

EDS: Embargoed to 0001 AEDT Wednesday, Dec 12



CANBERRA, Dec 12 AAP - Tackling climate change could bring about positive structural
and cultural changes not seen since the postwar period, an academic says.

Sociologist Michael Pusey said measures to cut greenhouse gas pollution were a unique
opportunity to build the nation rather that constraining development.

"It is likely that a constructive adaptation to global warming will give rise to structural
and cultural changes of a kind that we last saw in the aftermath of World War II," Professor
Pusey, from the University of NSW's School of Social Sciences, said.

"Economic history teaches us that war transforms the relations between the economy,
political culture and the state."

As examples, he said post World War II Australia had seen mass immigration, infrastructure
projects like the Snowy Hydro Electricity Scheme and taxation reform.

"Facing up to global warming has the potential to focus our national imagination in
the same way," he says.

"It presents us with challenges that obviously call, not only for incremental changes
at the household level, but also for whole of government action at the national level."

Among possible changes, addressing the Murray-Darling Basin's water shortage could
transform federal-state relations and bring rural and urban Australia closer together.

Prof Pusey, who has written critically about economic rationalism and conducted the
Middle Australia surveys, will discuss the social impacts of climate change at a public
lecture in Canberra tonight.

AAP pw/rl/cjh/bwl

KEYWORD: CLIMATE PUSEY (EMBARGOED)

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