Dr. Tom McDonnell:

Yes. Let us not forget it was the deregulation policies of the 1990s that caused the great financial crash in 2008. People seem to have forgotten that.

On the Senator’s point on diversity in the workplace, the environment and the low-road and high-road models, a low unemployment rate can be achieved with either a low-road model focused on slashing costs and competitiveness – as in the UK, which has a low-pay problem now and has had no productivity growth in 15 years, by and large – or a high-road model, which is based on the notion of productivity.

That is a model based on innovation, learning and human capital. It is consistent with higher profits for business and higher wages for workers, and because it is focused on productivity, it is consistent with protecting the environment. In fact, it is the only way that economic growth is consistent with protecting the environment. Producing more with the same amount of resources or the same with fewer resources is the only we can preserve the environment longer term.

I want to make a point on one of the issues raised earlier. The more diverse or cosmopolitan your workforce or society is and the more open it is to new ideas, the more accessibility and availability of different ideas that you have not thought of because you are talking to the same people all of the time becomes manifest to you. One of the things in economic history that has been very significant for economic growth is the rise of the cities because people have come into contact with a greater diversity of people. Previously you came into contact with people that were just like you. You see someone doing something in a different way and you then apply it in a new economic context. In a firm, when you have people coming at things from a different perspective, whether it is a gender, an ethnicity, an age or a disability perspective, whatever it might be, that causes you to look at a problem in a different way and put those ideas into the mix. That leads to your company or society being more innovative at large. Having greater diversity in the workforce and having policies that make that possible such as public childcare, flexible hours, flexible working which allows people with disabilities-----