It's difficult to know exactly how it's going to go forward. I certainly should state at the outset that I don't necessarily agree that the Department of Finance has been a significant blockage to creative thinking in previous years.
My approach to it is that I look at this area and the interaction of the economy and the environment, and it does seem like an area that is evolving. People are taking new approaches to thinking about exactly how we analyze the implications of our actions and how we measure those, because some of the issues you raised are difficult issues to measure. For example, even if one could agree that you wanted to measure them, they're difficult to bring into some of the standard practices that we have of how we measure wealth, accounting practices, etc. So it's new, it's novel, it's certainly not easy. But I think what I've seen in some of the work that's been done around...it is both doing work within the existing boundaries, obviously, because that's the way we understand it and best explain it to others, and some willingness to think that we really don't know all the answers yet in terms of how we best analyze some of these issues, how we measure and report them, and how we factor them into our policy thinking, which at the end of the day is the important factor. Whether we can measure it or not, if we can accept that this is a way of thinking about the implications of actions, then that can help drive our frameworks for assessing them.
So I guess if you ask what my approach would be, I think I've shown--despite the fact that I've been from the Department of Finance--an ability to try to think of issues in a creative way and in an all-encompassing way, to try to think of all the different angles. Yes, we often use the structures and frameworks that are most common to us. And I would apply this to the Department of Finance more generally. It has really shown an ability to take these complex issues and think about them in different ways. I think this is an area--and there are others--where I look and say the state of economic thinking is actually starting to move and people are trying to integrate different ideas into their analyses and outputs.
I'm open to those, and I will certainly try to encourage at the Department of the Environment that we are open to them in our thinking.