Professor Ian Walker:

I will jump in very quickly. Dr. Lunn just reminded me of something that is relevant to this question and also to a couple of earlier questions, especially the one about education. In terms of this question of expertise, literacy, understanding and so on, we did some work a few years ago that looked at professional building modellers. There is this classic problem in the construction industry that every building uses more energy in practice than it was modelled to use. Therefore, we tested a load of building modellers. We had some objective data and we measured what they thought the reality was. We found that most of them were responding pretty much randomly. In fact, one quarter of the professional building modellers we looked at had an understanding of where energy was going in buildings that was worse than if they had just guessed the answers to the questions. They were systematically misinformed in one quarter of the cases. Even people who deal with sustainability issues for a living sometimes do not have the literacy necessary to make relevant decisions. I am glad I remembered that because it is a useful reminder of some of the limits we might be facing if we are going to try to address this through getting 5 million individual people up to sufficient levels of literacy. It is further grist to the mill for the idea that we should be trying to fix this through structural and regulatory approaches.

I really would like to give some credence to Senator McGahon's point about the notion of reframing this, however. There is research to suggest that this loss framing, that is, the idea that we must give things up to deal with ecological damage, is harmful and turns people off. It does not seem to be a very effective form of messaging. I would really like and would support the idea of looking for opportunities to frame this more positively. We heard the notion of the Celtic tiger mentioned earlier. A country like Ireland seems to me to have a real opportunity to take the lead in being the model for green technology and building those industries that are going to have to happen. There is no question that we are going to have to shift our industrial base to produce different things and live in a different way. There is an opportunity to be the person who redefines the notion of progress and takes hold of those opportunities.