Howard the Future-Eater not a good example of sustainability, Bill

The Howard government is providing an example of unsustainable economic management by using the income generated by mining royalties in order to pay for tax cuts, and the National Party Finance Spokesperson Bill English is wrong to think that is a sustainable option.

"Minerals are a kind of natural capital and for Howard to use to the royalties from mining to fund tax cuts is completely unsustainable," says Russel Norman, Green Economics' Spokesperson.

"In Norway, they use the revenue from their oil fields to invest in a superannuation fund for the future — a super fund that is the biggest in the world and has ethical investment guidelines. They do not consume their natural capital, they invest it as financial capital and plan to live off the earnings long into the future.

"In the tradition of The Future Eaters, the book by Australian of the year Tim Flannery, Howard is eating the future of the next generation of Australians instead of investing in it. Bill English is mistaken if he thinks that is an example of sustainable economic management.

"In New Zealand we are consuming our natural capital in a similar way in the way we are allowing industrial scale dairy to unsustainably consume the water aquifer beneath the Canterbury plains in order to gain short term profits from the booming milk solids market.

"National need to learn that sustainability is more than a slogan."