One of the things we can do as businesses to survive short term, well to be specific, not do, is maintenance. I should be spending 10% of my gross income on maintenance. This is a bit of a rude joke of course. In the meantime I look 10 - 20 years out and wonder how my farm is going to look.
While I can survive like this for a good few years, the capital improvements on my land are rapidly aging. I need the funds to be able to fix stuff and improve stuff. Without this I see a spiral downwards. The good years when these buildings, fences, watersupply and infrastructure were built are long gone. The bubble in property conveniently overlooked replacing these structures at some point in time. I believe local authorities have a requirement to save for replacement and depreciation. Sadly the private sector has borrowed so much, spent their coin, with no thought to the future.
We not only have no growth at this exchange rate, we have no maintenance, effectively going backwards, where is that represented in the economists graphs.

A short-term,small-thinking appraisal. Globally, everyone else is being exhorted to export too.

Who to?

The flaw in the philosophy (to treat it with a grandiosity it doesn't deserve) is that the whole thing hinges on getting more and more folk - somewhere - to consume more and more (jointly and severally) while producing more and more as they do so.

Hey, forget sleep, don't do sport, don't relax. This is exponential expansion we have to have here - now let's see - double 40 hours is 80, double 80 is 160, double 160 is - oh shit, only 8 hours a week for sleep. Must have more offspring.....oops, I'm too tired.
And I have to go to the shops on the way to work........

And this on a finite planet, which we're chewing into at (best estimate) three times the sustainable rate.

Come on Mr Kerr - can you have economic growth (the increase of which is undeniably an exponential function) ad infinitum without the extraction of physical resources to underwrite same?

I say not. I say that Borwnlees DoC efforts and Heatleys ditto, are manifestation of the pending failure of your growth-based regimen.

That's the debate which has to be had, in this and every country.

Until it is had, this kind of stuff can only be seen as short-term bleatings from a dying religion.

It would be a joke, except for the untenable legacy our offspring will inherit.

Yes, there will be a demand for food. Globally unsatisfiable. We don't feed the starving now, though, because they can't afford our prices. That will only get worse.

And how we continue to do agriculture and fertiliser sans fossil oil?

We are now into the last possible 'doubling time' of them all.

Time we looked to sustainability, rather than growth.

What they appear to be doing is manipulating the CPI index. They always have but now they need to get really good at it.

Hamish,

The local council rates are based on your property values. Not that this is necessarily a good mechanism either, but at least we could get some satisfaction over the next few years of a rates-take collapse if property prices would fall by a significant amount in a relatively short time. Can't wait for the day we see massive property deleveraging and as a result have the councils severely sqeezed into a corner and having to deleverage (downsize/cut budgets/cut rates) themselves...

cntz - your dreaming
The councils work out what revenue they want, then divide by the value of properties in their area.
If the property values half, then the rate per $100 of value doubles. (that why they are called 'rates')
Same rates revenue, same value of rates per property (all things being equal).

Within the current (failing system) I tend to agree with Roger. However the system is sick from the top down. We need massive global monetary reform to fix this debt based fractional reserve F#$%% up!

A must watch is the documentry 'The Secret Of Oz' :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cq9yEVcGIU&feature=player_embedded