Good points as usual James, (you doing Eco/Law right?) and you make a lot of sense
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Banking and Finance/LLB is what i'm doing. Dunno why i did Banking/Finance in hindsight when i could've gone the much more conventional option of Commerce/LLB, but anyway.
- R&D to make u beaut panels even better than what we've got (apparently we are losing our brightest & best to overseas developers!!).
Fair enough, i agree we could and should devote more government spending to R&D/innovation. What does get reported quite a bit in the media is our lacklustre commonwealth government spending on R&D over the last 15 years, and it's a poor reflection on the government for sure. The upswing is that there's high levls of private business R&D spending going on in Australia at the moment, so to some extent the private sector is picking up the slack. As relates to solar power R&D, the problem with government spending on R&D is the same as any other form of R&D - you can spend plenty over a long period of time and make minimal gains. The theory is that private enterprise should be better at 'picking winners' than the government could ever be and would invest R&D dollars better. Whether that's necessarily the case, i don't know.
But, on the topic of solar R&D in the private sector: have a look at what Ceramic Fuel Cells (ASX:CFU) are doing. Qutie interesting and good to see we look to already have some of the world's leading technology in this area.
Tax and Government subsidies/loans for businesses to tool up for manufacture for the increased demand
Perhaps, yes. Although, as you'd be acutely aware, Australia's future as a manufacturer is very limited; we simply can't do what they can do in China, Korea, and even some parts of Eastern Europe for the same price. We have our niches in manufacturing where we are still really good on a global scale, but generally we're uncompetitive in many areas by today's standards. If we wanted millions of solar panels, what we could perhaps do is design them to world's best standards, set up the manufacturing operations in China and then import them back here at lower cost.
Naturally, demand for workers in raw materials, manufacturing, installation and maintenance would follow
Yes it would. But our labour market right now is as tight as a fish's proverbial, particularly in the skilled blue collar sector, and it's likely to get worse long-term as the baby boomers gradually exit the employment market. So an increase in demand for workers wouldn't necessarily be a good thing; it would mean an increase in input costs (labour), for starters, and unless you 'create' new employees through migration or other means, you start taking employees away from other industries. That's why i was so ropable with Beazley's policy in last year's budget reply of reducing the number of skilled migrants; it was an absolute shocker given the circumstances we're in.
And as demand rises, so do production levels which as you know pushes prices down (I bought my litle bloke a DVD from Aldi the other day for $30!! What were they when they came out?)
Well, that's true that when demand rises, more producers enter the market and prices eventually fall. But supply usually takes a long time to catch up to demand, so in the short term if you had a sudden spike in demand, there'd be a sustained increase in price.
Also, DVDs and other technology items (like Playstations, for example) don't suddenly become cheaper because of increased production capacity. The reason why they become cheaper is because items like Playstations and DVDs use pricing methods known as 'skim pricing': when a Playstation first comes out, it costs $400 and Sony 'skims' the wealthiest 20% of the market; then a month later they drop it to $350 and 'skim' the next 30% of the market, and so on and so forth. Prices in that regard don't reflect market fundamentals, they reflect a pretty evil pricing strategy that marketers love to use to make more money for big companies!
As we get to be best in the world at it, an export market opens up which all the oil, power, gas company's would hate.
Yeah, the big fossil fuel companies would hate it for sure. So much so that they'd probably try to sabotage whatever efforts people make to develop alternative energies!
Quite apart from empowering the little bloke against the minuscule but powerful elite, COL should fall and the planet gets cleaned up
Well, the 'little bloke', like i said, is really playing to our inner callings. I personally don't believe we as a broader community are ready to embrace wholesale efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions because we can't get over the fact that it's going to cost money. Right now, it's far cheaper to burn fossil fuels and continue with 'business as usual', hence i can't see any drastic change soon. It'll happen some time in my lifetime for sure, but i don't know if such an attitude will be embraced before my olds kick the bucket.