In terms of reality, I would say the following: everything that all of us have been talking about, this brave new world that we must all face and move into, will be more transformative than was the Industrial Revolution. That's how profound and how deep I think the change will be, and it will be necessary to be able to match targets with reality.
This is why, when I hear the word “targets” and I am asked by people if they've been costed out, I'm much more interested in the debate we've not had, or many of us have not had in this country--and, I would argue, in most other parts of the world--that if we are truly moving to an environment where we are facing the degree of constraints that many of us believe we are facing....
I shared a platform with David Suzuki two weeks ago. He was asked what would be the optimum number of people on the planet that would ensure sustainability. His answer was 200 million people.
Hmm. We have, at last count, about 8 billion people.
So how do we deal with this? It will require a fundamental transformation in all our thinking, not just for the tax system. I feel that for the last 15 years we have been fiddling at the edges of this whole thing. This debate is now beginning to get very serious.