‘We continue to put fertile farmland under bitumen and McMansions, while compromising agricultural production for open cut coal mining and fracking. Living in a fantasia where we’re somehow exempt from global efforts to end the world’s fossil fuel dependency, we do our utmost to sell coal internationally and to dismantle our nascent, fragile renewable energy industry.
‘Then we degrade our research capacity, with cuts to the CSIRO and the Australia Research Council. We can’t even find the money to properly support advanced initiatives like the Synchrotron. And we choose to be led by people who seem to despise our universities, and do their utmost to limit the entrepreneurial adventurism of graduates by ensuring that they are loaded with debt.
‘What our arriviste neo-cons don’t seem to understand is that US federal governments of both the right and the left consistently transfer massive amounts of public money to support private industry. Principal sources are the US departments of defence, energy and agriculture.’
(Laureate Professor Peter Doherty, The Drum (ABC) 14.7.15)