2020 Tom Spurling Oration | Webinar Two

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to the second webinar of the 2020 tom sperling oration series my name is professor beth webster and i'm director of the center for transformative innovation transformative innovation and your moderator for this evening before we start i'll run through some webinar webinar housekeeping i ask that you make sure that you're unmute a recorded version of this webinar we will be made available we would love to hear from you throughout the session so please write your questions in the q a box if you prefer at the end of the session raise your hand electronically and we can unmute you if you'd like to ask your question directly to the keynote speaker professor sue richardson there's also an option to upload the questions in the q a box uh those of you who wish to share this evening's presentation please use the hashtag tom sperling oration and the cti twitter handle at cti swinburne or at center for transformative innovation for linkedin for those of you just joining us welcome i'd now like to hand over to the faculty of business and lawyers pro vice chancellor professor michael gilding who'll introduce and talk about our wonderful professor tom sperling and introduce our keynote speaker for this evening professor gilden thank you beth i will begin by respectfully acknowledge acknowledging the warunjuri people of the kulin nation who are the tradition traditional owners of the land on which swinburne's campuses are located and pay my respects to elders past present and emerging i also acknowledge all aboriginal and torres strait islander nations across australia their elders ancestors cultures and heritage so welcome everybody welcome to the second installment of the fourth annual tom spurling aeration i expend extend an especially warm welcome this afternoon to our distinguished guest and speaker emeritus professor sue richardson professor richardson i'm very much looking forward to hearing your insights today as we rally together and make what we can and embrace our new covert normal world there's never been a more important time to utilize our technological capacities and our insights to enhance the opportunities for the economy employment and research during this period of recovery so while i would have liked to be able to meet all of you in person i'm grateful that we're able to come together virtually and continue this not tradition of knowledge sharing and celebrating the legacy of professor tom sperling io professor sperling is one of australia's leading experts in innovation policy and commercialisation commercialization of science and technology he has been instrumental in the areas of science and innovation innovation for more than 55 years his extensive experience in managing the process of translating research into commercial products includes breakthroughs such as the polymer bank notes the 30-day contact lens and the myx water purification process in 2017 tom was awarded the prestigious australian and new zealand association for the advancement of science medal for his contributions to science we are extraordinarily fortunate to have him at the center for transformative innovation to share his expertise in science and innovation as well as his abilities to translate research into commercial products in a moment we'll hear from professor sue richardson sue richardson is a merited professor at flinders university an adjunct professor at both flinders and the university of adelaide sue taught for many years at the university of adelaide's school of economics and subsequently became professor and director of the national institute of labor studies at flinders university her research interests are in labor economics inequality the well-being of children and climate change sue is a fellow of the academy of the social sciences in australia a former president of the academy and currently is the chair of its policy committee and a member of its executive she is also currently a member of the senior advisory panel of deloitte access economics under the council of the australian conservation foundation from 2010 to 2019 sue was a member of the expert panel of the fair work commission contributing to the annual setting of the national minimum wage and award rates of pay she has also been a commissioner of the essential services commission of south australia and of the productivity commission she has been a director of the pipeline authority uh high-pressure natural gas pipelines enterprise investment venture capital and flinders technologies intellectual property she has also been a member of many experts and advisory panels for the south australian and commonwealth governments including on technological change energy policy nuclear power and migration in 2012 she was appointed to the national sustainability council and as a member of the expert advisory group on australia's adaptation to climate change she was a member of the national advisory council of the australian centre of child protection from its inception in 2005 until 2015. sue was made a member of the order of australia for his services to inclusive public policy and the social sciences in 2019 she was made distinguished public policy fellow of the economic society of australia i'm eager as i'm sure many of you are to hear professor richardson's insights on this topic welcome professor richardson thank you michael and hello to everybody that i can't see and to the handful that i can this is a pretty weird experience but nonetheless we'll do our best or i will do my best to make it engaging and i hope you go away with an idea or two at the end that you didn't have at the beginning so the topic of my talk is the workforce of the future and i'm going to begin by just saying a few words about how do we know what the future looks like before i talk about how we might know what the um and what the workforce of the future looks like and i'm going to give you some big facts about the labor market and then talk about some of the big changes that are coming that or already hit us that we're going to have to adapt to and which will influence the character of the workforce of the future so this is my own little recipe how do you know what the future workforce looks like well i always uh start with looking at where we are now and then looking at the trend recent trends because that tells you um what's sort of baked in and where we're going then i look at the united states as an indication of where we're likely to be going uh and in the process i'm always wary of uh particular types of major claims such as will all be casual gig workers needing to change careers every 10 years you know or more frequently in a working life um just as an aside let me say there's been almost no change in the proportion of workers are employed on casual terms for at least 15 20 years most gig workers for most gig workers it's not their full-time job they're doing it in addition to other sorts of work and there's been no evidence of changes in the average duration of of a job so i'm very skeptical of those sorts of claims let me just give you a couple of facts about the us as a place to indicate where we might be going the bureau of labor statistics in the us provide projections as to what they think are the occupations that are going to grow fastest and slowest and decline uh in the next 10 years and the workforce that they expect to grow most rapidly in the next 10 years is healthcare support followed by this this will have the largest numbers of new employees or workers the second largest number will be in food preparation and related after that the next highest growth will be in healthcare practitioners so healthcare practitioners and support workers are a very big part of the expected future growth of the american workforce following that then we have people with computer and mathematical skills management finance and business they expect substantial losses in people who work in office administration or in production so you can see that there is this hollowing out of the middle as it's sometimes called with the manufacturing solid blue collar well-paid but not requiring tertiary education sorts of jobs largely having disappeared and no sign of them coming back soon so that's the best that we can look to i think in terms of what's coming but i think this time actually is different we can't just use those a couple of rules of thumb to get a perspective of the future because first of all covert has produced this challenge to globalization and people are now not so confident that we should just import everything that we don't manually factor at home and be indifferent to what we're capable of producing ourselves and what we rely on imports for for example the government's federal government has announced a major investment in our future capacity to produce vaccines when it comes to the workforce there is an important equivalent i think australia relies heavily on migration as a source of the skills that it needs sixty percent of our population growth is migration rather than natural births and it's mostly pretty skilled migration now of course covert has turned off the tap for migration and i hope this causes us to think again about our heavy reliance on migration as a source of our skills partly because i think it makes us lazy in producing the skills or providing opportunities for our own work young people to gain the skills that we need for the future the other thing that's different and that i'm going to talk more about is climate change because this is happening now it's having an impact now on the on the economy and it is uh inevitably going to have a major impact into the future that we need to be preparing for now now on the screen you've got the next slide that i was going to talk about and that is just give you some big facts about the labor market for those of you who don't spend a lot of time thinking about this and the big story is that australia is a service economy the areas of the economy that employ the greatest number of people are like like america health care and social assistance 14 of all workers are in that industry the next biggest industry is retail then we have construction then professional scientific and technical services and education and training so again you can see it's this sort of high end and low end and not very much in the middle sort of a workforce but the personal services area the healthcare social assistance and retail it doesn't we don't uh separately uh have their accommodation and um of food but that's a big employer as well and just uh to make this absolutely clear that we're no longer making stuff manufacturing is seven percent of total employment mining is two percent and utilities is one percent so it's not surprising that that as the economy's evolved in this direction it's actually turned out to be quite favorable for the employment of women because we still have quite a separate division between the sorts of jobs that men do and the sorts of jobs that women do if we can go to the next slide please some more big facts um uh in order to import all the things that we're not manufacturing we need to export of the things that we're particularly good at and that's natural resources is the really big one by which i mean coal iron ore and gas with some others but they're they're the really big ones um and then we do export services education and tourism of big export earners and then so this is in order of value natural resources education tourism and agricultural products i'm telling you this because the changes that are coming from covert and from globalization and from climate change will affect all of those and hence will affect the labor force the demand for workers um it was a surprise number to me uh that 11 of the world trade in coal goes through newcastle so coal is a very big in export for australia we're digging up parts of the continent and shipping it overseas we're extremely good at doing this and the quality of the coal and the iron ore is high by world standards we use all the money that we get from overseas from coal iron or gas education tourism and agricultural products to import most other goods so machinery fuels vehicles medical equipment pharmaceuticals consumer goods they're the main things they're the highest what we spend most of our money on and we import them from overseas where they're made to cheaper than we can do it and often to a higher quality than it would be made if we were doing it ourselves we provide most of our own services as indicated and together with the things that have to be done you know in australia so you can't do import construction or telecommunications utilities civil works so these facts about the economy translate into facts about the sort of skills and occupations that are available for the australian workforce and as i mentioned before two percent of the workforce is in are mining but that produces a high proportion of the foreign exchange that we then use to buy all the goods that we buy um next slide please when we when we're thinking about workers uh i think perhaps a little sometimes a little bit surprising to uh um parts of the education system and even the public service in my dealings with them is that the appreciation that workers are very adaptable and that there's actually quite a low correlation between the qualifications people get and the jobs that they work in there are many people who have qualifications that are not needed for the jobs that they do and there are many people in jobs who don't have the formal qualifications that you would think would be necessary to do that job and there are many jobs that don't actually have a formal qualification of a specific type to do them many for example in management and in the public service and in the not large not-for-profit sector and so on i might say we want a university degree but we don't really care what sort it is so that's a level of education rather than a specific set of skills so first of all there's not a tight fit between the qualifications you get and the job that you have so how do people get the skills that they need for the jobs that they're doing and many of the jobs that we have do require high levels of skills well a great deal of valuable skills are actually learned on the job in the workplace you learn by doing it you learn by watching your fellow workers you learn by some formal courses within the workplace you get taught how to use new software or new machinery or whatever by often by the suppliers of those products you need a big good basic education to be able to learn effectively to be skilled at learning the things that you need to learn in the workplace to have that foundation and that capacity to learn but a great deal of what is actually used on the job in both the public and private sector is learned by doing it by being in the workplace and then gradually acquiring more and more skills workers do move from job to job quite frequently and in doing that they're learning each time a new set of skills a new set of relationships a new understanding of workplace cultures and so on so this gives us a great adaptability because if all the skills you needed were learned in the formal education system then your capacity to learn would kind of end when you left a university or today for high school and then you'd be stuck with that for the next 40 years of your working life but that's not actually how people adapt where unlike fixed capital as uh used by employers that can only do one thing people can are very flexible and and can learn on their own account or through formal instruction all sorts of new things as they go through their working lives so this means the workforce has a considerable ability to adapt to a changing structure of the economy and in fact we have done a lot of adaptation um in the post-war period manufacturing was the main employer and that's changed over time as you can see it was only seven percent of the workforce now and people have shifted into these other areas of healthcare the professions are very big area of employment and into the whole personal care area a great deal of which has arisen from the movement of women into paid work and the household then buying in services they would have provided for themselves in the past the important point i want to make here is that the faster the transition that's required the changing structure the changing structure of the economy the more difficult it's going to be for the workforce and for the employers because there will be a poorer match between the skills that the workforce has and the skills that the employer needs if you have to transition away from to give you an example manufacturing to aged care rapidly then you will find that many of the manufacturing workers aren't a very good fit for the needs of the aged care employers but if you can do it slowly and steadily the formal education system can support that and the people in the manufacturing sector or the shrinking relative shrinking parts of the economy who have the personal qualities that mean that they're attracted to personal services as a an area of employment will make the shift um and the um the young people can see where the future lies and will adapt to that in the sort of learning and early job experience that they have so the more rapidly the structure of the economy is changing the more difficult it will be to get a good fit between what the employer needs and between and the skills of the workforce and workers are like physical assets in the sense that you know they invest heavily in those skills that they have known perhaps rather unfortunately by economists as human capital but this human capital like physical assets can become redundant or stranded so you know you might be extremely good at um um machining um and and that's your particular skill but if nobody we don't have any manufacturing nobody wants machinists anymore then you're skilled that you've invested a lot of effort into acquiring in time will be of no value to you so and of course the employers in the new areas of the economy will say they can't find skills because the workers haven't yet had the time to adapt so the emphasis is if you're going to have a changing structure of the economy you want this to be slow and steady and as clear as possible what the future shape is likely to look like that's not where we're at at the moment so next slide please climate change is and much more so in the future will require a transformation of the economy i quite like this quote from the economist magazine in earlier this year drawing a parallel between the pandemic that we're in and the climate crisis so the pandemic is like watching a video of the climate crisis with your finger jammed on the fast forward button that is everything's happening very fast but they are absolutely right the harm from climate change it will be slower but it will be much more massive and longer lasting in fact it will last as far into the future as it's possible to imagine because every ton of greenhouse gases that goes into the atmosphere today is going to stay there for hundreds of years so to think about the future workforce we have to understand the impacts of climate change on the economy and on the sort of work that workers can do and of measures to mitigate uh the climate change that is to try and reduce the total quantity of emissions going into the atmosphere and to adapt to that next slide please um so the need to adapt let me just give you a few hints as to why i think that it's going to be a very big issue for australia and it'll be forced on us if we don't volunteer to reduce our emissions and to change the structure of our economy away from fossil fuels [Music] rapidly clearly uh um with a um a project a projected uh path that all of us can believe in and respond to we are we export fossil fuels as i that's why i showed you those exports earlier on we export in particular coal and natural gas and as i say we're very good at it we make a lot of money from it but that's only going to be possible for us if the countries to whom we sell this these fossil fuels go on wanting to buy it and the last dot point there points out that japan south korea and china that are the biggest importers of australian fossil fuels have recently committed to achieve zero net emissions that is in burning of fossil fuels by 2050 in the case of japan and south korea and by 2060 in the case of china at the same time other parts of the world are seriously committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions europe and the uk are probably leaders uh of course the us is a very big player here it's a very big emitter um it's also technologically very advanced and can contribute mightily to how we produce technologies that deliver what we want but without causing emissions had trump been re-elected the prospect for the global climate i think would be much more grim than it is with the election of biden the reason for mentioning this is because there's serious discussion in europe about putting punitive tariffs on countries such as australia that are not seen to be taking serious steps to reduce emissions and the biden camp is also thinking of this as a possible policy so these are the reasons why i think that it's not going to be just up to australia to decide the extent to which we're going to have to reduce emissions and the consequent changes to our economy and to our workforce that's going to follow from that could you give the next slide please now business as usual that is the sort of economy that we have at the moment doing the things that we're doing using the technologies and the workforce in the way that we currently are is actually not an option for us going forward and the reason that i say that is that climate change is now unavoidable it's actually happening we've seen it in the most ferocious and uh frightening way with the bushfires last summer but they're all the long drought that preceded that the drying of the continent that's happening particularly on the eastern coast on the south coast um that's causing um the threats of the collapse of river basins but also drying out our natural environment uh and making bushfires much more likely um the extraordinary floods that we've seen in queensland ten years ago or eight years ago whenever it was um the and so on they're examples of the climate change happening and it's going to get worse um even if we stopped emissions today which of course we can't the world is going to go on emitting greenhouse gases for many years yet but so we have to learn how to live with this and that's going to cause costs for us and it's going to cause a need to restructure just think of the heat stress the increasing number that we're already seeing quite dramatically in extremely hot days and what that does to all the workers who work outside uh civil uh construction for example or roadworks or uh in agriculture um who look after the gardens or the council um the there are going to be days when it's almost impossible uh to safely work outside the sea sea level rise is happening and we can just see the extraordinary collapse of the ice shelves in the arctic and the antarctic but the sea level is rising also because the ocean is heating up and that water expands when it gets hotter and that's going to cause loss to coastal properties and to the infrastructure associated with that the ocean acidification the loss of fish stocks will of course impact on the fishing fleets and the fish fisher persons and the coral reefs now of course you may recall that i indicated tourism was a major source of revenue of our export revenue the coral reef the great barrier reef the ningaloo reef they are very likely to die in you know the next 10 20 years from the massive heat marine heat waves that are causing the coral bleaching that'll have devastating effects on the fish stocks but also on tourism nobody wants to come and see a dead reef so the places that tourists want to go are the reef uluru and then uh to many of our glorious national parks and so on all of those are at serious risk uh from uh from climate change um through the loss of our unique wildlife and ecosystems as we saw with the terrible bushfires and the estimated losses of three billion animals so tourism agriculture regional regional australian construction these are all going to be seriously affected by climate change and it's going to affect our workforce and what we expect of them and the types of the shape of the economy into the future so the next slide please um just to put a little quantification on this deloitte access economics has just very recently put out there uh modelling of the future economy for australia uh where where we do and where we do not take action to reduce emissions and where the rest of the world does and does not does not it estimates that all that half of workers are in industries that are going to be harmed by climate change and about a quarter in industries that are highly emissions intensive or they export fossil fuels now i've previously made a case that the rest of the world is going to reduce its demand for our fossil fuels as they take steps to deal with climate change so the workers in those industries will have to adapt whether they like it or not whether the australian governments initiate that or not but dae also estimates that queensland and western australia will be the worst hit um partly because of course that's where a lot of the mining happens but also it's going to affect agriculture and as i indicated agriculture tourism and so on now they come up with an estimate of the gdp loss um into the future i find these numbers um you know mildly interesting they can't possibly know um but it but it will be big i'm giving you that estimate recent estimate from stanford university researchers that in uh 80 years time and that's in the lifetime of children being born today or being born 20 years ago it's in the lifetime of the grandchildren of those who are on this call who are lucky enough to have grandchildren it's in their lifetimes the gdp will be up to 30 lower per person in their lifetime caused by climate change so what do we do with all this well we have to start to adapt and we have to start to have a uh a government that [Music] grasped this with the seriousness that it requires and then sets out some strong indications that allow firms to know what the glide path in our case to zero net emissions will be and then the very best estimates that are very skillful public servants in the treasury and elsewhere are able to come up with as to what what this impact is going to be in the next 10 20 years that's probably as far ahead as we can look so the next slide please um if i can be a little bit more optimistic uh the transitions are inevitable um we are going to reduce emissions and to adapt we have to adapt to a hotter and more violent climate now the sooner we start i mentioned earlier on that workers can adapt if they've got enough time for the adaptation but the more rapidly you have to do it the more difficult it is and the more the loss of human capital and the more work firms won't be able to find workers with the skills that they want so we want to allow this adaptation to be to take time if possible and to have a clear path so that firms and workers know what the future is likely to look like and can take that into account when they're investing in their skills or they're investing in their own businesses so the new entrants many of whom of course are young wondering what the future looks like can decide that they're not going to become coal miners um and they may not even want to go into international tourism because that's looking pretty bleak um so that they might need to go to swinburne to find out where the future technologies might be leading you the other point i'd like to make as i'm an economist is that a free market um is is an extraordinarily adaptable environment that is if we allow the the future to unfold with the proper price signals uh in the market then the the main players the firms and the workers will look at those signals and they will come up with very creative ways of adapting to the future that those price signals are indicating so the first thing that we have to do to get on this optimus more optimistic part is to end the practice that we currently have that any enterprise or individual can emit as many greenhouse gases as they like without paying any cost and we need a glide path to zero net emissions like much of the west rest of the world has already committed to including china all of europe the united kingdom japan south korea and so on and that's the goal of the paris accord it's also all the states and territory governments have committed to zero net emissions by 2050. so australia really has this but we don't have a serious glide path and we certainly don't have any of the price signals that would encourage firms to move in that direction so i would argue and perhaps i won't have time to do it now but we need to put a price on these on these permits to emit and then trade in the right to emit and then the market will provide us with very valuable signals as to where the opportunities lie in a low emissions economy in addition we do need governments to invest and subsidise in low emissions technologies so let me finish with the last slide and the optimism that's embedded in there and this idea that australia can be is very well positioned to be a renewable energy superpower it's a phrase that was developed by that splendid economist ross garno who's written on this very eloquently and very powerfully that australia has greater comparative advantage in renewable energy than it does in fossil fuels we have the land mass the sun and the wind resources the skilled war workforce efficient capital markets and very important very low interest rates at the moment to really have a great renewable energy areas of our economy all our electricity can come from renewables and be abundant and cheap the very low interest rates is important because renewable energy requires expenditure up front while you build the solar farms and the batteries and the wind farms and the pumped hydro but after that it's very cheap because the wind and the sun provide all the rest of the inputs so if you have very low interest rates you can borrow to put in that those to build the capital and then have low repayments into the future and you have very low costs for running the renewable energy but the next important point is if you've got cheap abundant renewable electricity that then can be used to create energy-intensive manufacturing opportunities uh to provide transport electric cars to provide hydrogen which we can export or use for transport and all sorts of other important areas of the economy so in my view it's clear what we have to do the workforce will adapt we have the skills to the extent that we don't have it uh people will learn it as long as they get a reasonable notice and we should just get started on doing this thank you so thank you very much sir for that um terrific presentation um look i'd just like to start off um i'd like to start off by asking or the first question um adani what does do you have any knowledge about the economics of adani is it is it going to turn into a fully fledged coal mine or i i know there's capital works been going on but we we don't hear much about what's happening there because the obviously what you're saying i know india has said it wants to be self-sufficient in coal as well uh china presumably um is looking for you know it's got a huge uh transition in energy policy to make to hit its 2050 target um which will mean removing a lot of coal imports as well do you have any um information about adani look this is not an area of my expertise but an area of deep interest the adani coal mine is distinctive because there's a fully adani is a fully integrated energy company indian of course so they actually have power plants in india where they generate electricity using coal they also have a lot of renewables by the way a lot of renewable generation of electricity but they own the port they own the mine and they own the power plants that the coal will go to so they want to see a a fully integrated supply chain and they own every component of it one of the issues around them stepping back from the mine is it would then make the port um a stranded asset so they've got a lot at stake here and as i understand it they're you know they're very reluctant to abandon the whole enterprise because of the size of the investment in both the port and the mine now [Music] most of the major financiers in the world the the banks in particular have said they're not going to fund the adani mine um so they're having trouble raising the capital and they're saying they're not going to fund it presumably because they think it won't be profitable and that there's a risk that they won't get their money back so that's the market speaking the market is saying they don't think this is a great investment um but the fact that it would the coal would be used in the coal and fired power plants in india that are owned by adani changes the economic calculation within the firm right so i have a um pre-seminar email from stacey conash who's interested in wondering if we managed to curb or decrease consumption and move towards a no growth economy what effect would that have on the number of and quality of jobs the inequality of jobs number and quality number of quality of jobs okay now that's a very interesting question if we reduced our consumption um you know it goes to the question of what you mean by consumption if you mean we don't buy as much stuff then obviously we wouldn't have to produce as much stuff or we wouldn't have to import as much stuff and therefore we wouldn't have to export as much to get the foreign exchange to buy it but as i indicated at the beginning a lot of what we're spending our money on is not stuff it's actually services so by consuming less does she mean less going to the cinema uh less going to spend time at beautiful holiday play destinations less time and and money spent on aged care and healthcare and looking after people with disabilities less money spent on education and healthy does she she means less of all of that as well as less stuff then yes it would reduce the hours of work that we need that's not the same thing as reducing the number of jobs we could all work a bit less this would probably be a very fine thing actually a lot of people want more hours and they would like to work particularly those who work full-time this question is not asked very often but there was a a study done by the australian bureau of statistics asking people how many hours they did work and then how many hours they would like to work taking account of the effect on their pay and more people said there were more hours more people said they wanted to work fewer hours than said that they wanted to work more hours so we have a an over employment problem here so we could we could have a four day working week we could have everybody working what's now would now be considered part-time and then we'd have plenty of time to care for our oldies and to look after our children and to do our own gardening so as much work would be done it just wouldn't be done through the market or we could just spend more time you know being mistress of our own time jesse thank you robin has asked a question he has said there are significant employment opportunities in energy renewables possibly far more than traditional coal or gas um and he suggests looking at the solar wind farm being planned in the kimberleys for example in the kimberleys and the kimberley right yeah he says well there's more jobs i assume he means there's more jobs in the uh renewable energy being planned up there than in in the um carbon emitting uh energy sources of coal yes yes so this is kind of right and that's why i pointed out the numbers employed in in resources um two percent of the workforce and and only a fraction of those are uh mining coal and a great deal of that is not actually used in australia most of it's actually exported so the number of people who mine coal to go into our own electricity system is actually very small the issue about renewable to energy however goes back to that point that i was making that with renewable energy um the the expenditure is all up front and so of course the work is all up front as well right it's building the solar files building the cables and the transmission lines um building the wind farms building the batteries that's where the work is once you've built it it doesn't take very much to maintain it whereas a column line requires ongoing work and qualified power stations in involve ongoing work um now if you have continuing growth in the number of renewable electricity generators then you'll have ongoing jobs as you've built one you'll go on and build another there are some enormous solar and wind power plants being actively either built or in planning stages with funding with business plans and so on one in western australia near the pilgrim and one in the northern territory and they're planning on export of the electricity um after having supplied some local demand and you export the electricity by putting in a cable or you make hydrogen using the the um the abundant and cheap electricity you make hydrogen and you ship it out as hydrogen so i think that uh that that would not be difficult um to see a future renewable energy industry that employ more people in the current coal and gas industries so just on that um ian saray has mentioned um roskano and his arguments for our low carbon opportunities so ian's asked have his ideas received serious attention by any of our major political parties political arrest particularly around the development of energy intensive manufacturing regions in regional australia yes um well again this is not my area of expertise but i do keep close eye on it and i have seen recently uh senior people from both the major parties talking about very uh australia as a renewable energy superpower now that's roscono's phrase so they may not have traced the idea back to ghana's original book but the idea is spreading it's spreading through the public discourse and it's been picked up and as i say the private sector is moving with amazing creativity commitment they get climate change the private sector knows what's happening what it doesn't have is any signals from the government as to how it's going to respond into the future it's very confusing but the as i say there um the um forest uh twiggy forest and his fortescue is now has a plan to produce 235 gigawatts of renewable electricity around the world now that's about five times the entire australian consumption of electricity annually [Music] and he's part of the extraordinary development in the pilgrim which is going to be about 12 gigawatts i think now a gigawatt one gigawatt is approximately an ordinary coal fired power station so that's 12 qualified power stations we're planning on exporting um yes so they would then provide the electricity for the mining operations and the town and the pilgrim replacing diesel mainly and then they would make hydrogen right so the rest of that export the hydrogen or they'd use it in trucks of course hydrogen can fuel cars and then there's this um one in the northern territory which uh you know mike cannon brooks and other amazing creative people um are working on and they want they've got a project called sun cable um near catherine in the northern territory again huge put in and they're planning to put in a cable to singapore i think and trans and after providing darwin with the electricity that he needs and catherine and so export the rest so you know there's a lot happening out there um so i've got a question here from michael gilding how should universities be pivoting their offerings for the future noting um the mismatch between qualifications and actual occupations that you you've raised yes well i don't know about pivoting i i actually think that we're very bad at what used to be called manpower planning saying that we're going to need another 73 000 engineers or 15 000 doctors or whatever okay those efforts are always spectacularly wrong and i think that the essential purpose for a university should be to ensure that people have a good solid intellectual grounding in an area of human knowledge that they are interested in and then that they're adept at learning so that they can take that that grounding in the area that they're interested in take it into a field that interests them and they'll learn all the on-the-job stuff that they need to be a productive employee so this job ready graduate idea i actually think is not well-founded i think it's always been the business of business to employ people and then make them a good match for the particular job that they have because a lot of that very specific knowledge that a firm wants uh will not be valuable to you when you go to your next employer and i think it's the it's the duty of universities uh to provide you with skills that would be of value to many different employers so i'd concentrate on the foundation educational competences maybe some i actually i don't think that young people need work experience to be honest because they get it themselves it's not usually in the area of their future profession but they're all got part-time jobs they know what it's like to be in the workforce to be a good employer employee to arrive there on time and to be polite so yeah maybe facilitate that if you want to but i'm all in favor of a good solid stretching of the mind education of the mind knowing that in the next 40 or 50 years the specific knowledge will change and change and change again so i've got a question from aisha sheikh and this is about geothermal energy [Music] are there geothermal hot spots detecting under observation in australia and is this a substantial and pivotal renewable energy resource look at geothermal game this is not why i'm an economist but uh there is an interest in geothermal that it does seem to be an endless and environmentally extremely um friendly uh source of energy for us and you know the molten core of the earth is underneath every bit of the crust it's more accessible in some places than others and there were efforts of geothermal in the cooper basin in northern south australia um and then they got quite you know close to getting some action there i do remember they had they were drilling down um you know kilometers to get to the hot rocks down which they then pour the water but then turns into steam and and drives the turbines that was the strategy and i do remember when their hole was about two kilometers deep they dropped the drill bit down the hole there wasn't any way of getting it back so that was a setback i don't know where it's gone from there so i don't know what the future of geothermal is um but that will that will probably depend on the economics and the and the engineering um but if you put a price on emissions that's not not a trivial price it really bites people will come up with extraordinary innovations that none of us sitting in our desks could imagine that the human species is very inventive given the right incentives now i've got a question here from tom sperling this is a totally different tack what is the future of tourism of tourism in australia yes look i don't think that it's all that bright to be perfectly honest um maybe we have to rethink what it is that we want to offer but australia has a really i think shameful record in caring for our natural environment and it's our nature both the living and the geographic features that is our principal tourist advantage that's what makes australia such an attractive place it's the wildlife it's the um remote areas it's as i say the barrier reef and the uluru and ningaloo kangaroo island people go to kangaroo island um because of the wildlife and those experiences and we're doing a really shameful job in caring for those um you know you just see the destruction of uh through through logging and clearing and farming um and then as i say the drying and the heating um the bushfire royal commission has made this uh transparently clear so as the cso euro meteorology report on australia's climate that was issued recently uh we're getting hotter and drier and more extreme and that's going to put extra incredible stress on those beautiful parts of our natural world that are so attractive to tourism so maybe we have to think of other things maybe we have to think of cultural highlights that attract people or or you know the food and wine thing um something that that brings people here that's got them that's a more human creation rather than a natural natural world and just on that one the very last question because we're almost out of time robin has suggested that um the biggest growth in employment might come from evaluating to our minerals here onshore what do you think of that as a as an i think that's got a lot going for it you know we export the raw materials and then we import the manufactured what's been what they've been used for uh we do that with wool we do that with uh um alumina uh we do it with coal iron ore and you know most of our a lot of our agricultural products so that's the whole point if you've got abundant and cheap electricity you can do an amazing manufacturing things at prices that make you competitive on the world market so i think that is the hope for our manufacturing future indeed fantastic so so um we don't have um unfortunately we've run out of time we don't have time for to for more questions but i'd like to hand over to tom sperling who would like to say a few words of thanks yes uh thank you very much uh sue for that lecture seldom of eye has has a public lecture had such an emotional um uh roller coaster sue so um we started off being a bit optimistic we went pessimistic and we ended with some optimism i can remember in 1985 when i first was aware of your work in labour economics and and i was in the the office of the minister for resources and energy and the minister and i went down to newcastle to in it very optimistically i must say to look to to be at the opening of the new the new newcastle coal loader which as you point out was it exports 11 of the world trade and coal still so that was a period of optimism you took us through a period of a pessimistic uh time when you you indicated that um the things things are going to get get worse before they get better but fortunately at the end you gave us some optimism where you said that if we start now we need to start now we need to use the innovation and adaptability of the market and we need to have a government that's going to invest in in renewable energy and that caused cause us to have a deal of optimism about the future so with that that roller coaster lecture sue i thank you very very much for being part of this um three uh series of uh orations for 2020 and i only hope that while we all thank you for for uh uh educating us in this that that some of what you're saying is uh going to be educating our political leaders and our and our bureaucrats so thank you very much indeed uh for that uh marvelous lecture thank you very much tom and let me say it's an honor to be able to give a lecture in a review in your remarkable life so thank you to everyone for attending this session and don't forget this is part of a three-part webinar series next wednesday the 25th of november at 4 30 new york eastern standard time we will have mr bill scales who previously uh at what long uh history being chairman of the productivity commission head of victorian premier and cabinet amongst other things and he will now talk on how australia can create a lasting and positive economic and political legacy from covert 19. thank you sir again and i look forward everyone to seeing you next week good evening [Music] you

Channel: Centre for Transformative Innovation

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Id: TZSe1nCb0uA

Length: 64min 2sec (3842 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020