Good Environmental Choice Australia (GECA) CEO Kate Harris recently had an opportunity to listen to Honourable Minister Angus Taylor on the challenges and opportunities of both town and country environments. Minister Taylor is the Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation and the Liberal Member for Hume.
Some of these challenges include:
Productivity and innovation: The need to produce more, but with less; for millennia, humanity has strived to do more with less while still managing to thrive.
Affordability and accessibility: Everyone needs access to work and significant housing within cities and beyond city limits, and these require workable transport and infrastructure.
Liveability and sustainability: Turnbull and Taylor agree that cities are there to serve the community and not the other way around.
According to Kate, cities of the future will still attract the big business and growth and should, therefore, be ready for it and find community within it. The growth of industry will be in service-based economies and there’s a need for strong digital capacity to achieve technological and economic transformational opportunities for both cities and rural areas.
With such a focus on driving economic growth through technology and products, and producing more with less, Minister Taylor sees the importance of disclosure and transparency as well as the need for standards to ensure best practice for these products and services.
Kate agrees with Minister Taylor on many things including the need for transparency, for standards, for collaboration, and to do more with less. Both also see a need to move towards more service-based business, a sentiment that aligns well with GECA’s capacity for certifying services as well as products. Above all, they see the need for standards that go above and beyond the ‘business as usual’ approach, to make sure they’re doing the right thing for the environment and for the health and wellbeing of communities, whether they are city-based, rural, or global.
