It's an election year, and the Turnbull government's narrative is going to be vastly different to the Abbott opposition's in 2013. Abbott was elected off the back of an unstable Labor government, and an unparalleled scare-campaign around carbon pricing. The Turnbull government is taking a different tack.
Its new campaign declares 'we've always been good at having ideas. Now we need to get better at innovation: turning ideas into successful products and services.'
The video is packed with touchscreens, machines, microscopes and lasers. The message is clear: this is a technological revolution, driven by government.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's story of innovation is an optimistic one, but I worry we've some way to go before this vision can be realised. The techno-optimism of 2016 may yet prove to be too hasty.
Political campaigns to see the spread of technology can be as harmful as campaigns to hinder it. The communities that host the technologies governments seek to champion can react with anger and fear, and this can manifest in strange ways. If communities are left out of the process, visions of grand, sweeping change can be hindered, or totally undermined.
Consider the world of renewable energy. Government support for clean energy has waxed and waned, and as a consequence, development has been problematic.
It would have been impossible to predict that by 2016, Australia would have a 'wind farm commissioner', a dedicated $2.5million budget to research 'wind turbine syndrome' within the National Health and Medical Research Council, and an additional 'Independent Scientific Panel' to review and report on the current state of scientific research into 'wind turbine syndrome'. (A recent AUD$2.1m Canadian government study found no evidence of health impacts from wind turbines).
Concerns about the health impacts of clean energy, and subsequent political reaction and regulation, are somewhat baffling to countries that have seen broad community acceptance of clean energy through community engagement and ownership schemes, like Germany and Denmark.
In Australia, wind farms and utility-scale solar farms have been historically fully owned by developers. This works well in certain areas, but there is some research that suggests a broader system of benefit sharing can work to minimise community friction, which dates back to the early 2000s.
Risk perception theory explains that communities can often feel left out of large-scale installations near their homes, and as a consequence, are over-sensitised to health warnings presented in the media, and by anti-wind groups.
I can only assume that the innovation and techno-optimism