Peter Verwer |
Tuesday, 22 December 2009 12:01 AM |
Add Comment
The news that Australia’s population is likely to grow by 13 million over the next 40 years has led to bulk orders of sackcloth and ashes.
Talk back radio and newspaper letter pages unleashed grim warnings along the lines of “each immigrant from a nonindustrialised country will, on arrival in Australia, become a carbon dioxide polluting unit at a tenfold increase”.
Others less inclined to abandon foreigners to poverty for the planet’s sake, called for “an ethical slowdown in population”.
Perhaps we should take a cue from the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (motto: may we live long and die out), which exhorts humans to stop breeding and so restore the Earth’s biodiversity. As they say, “it’s going to take all of us going”.
The call for a ‘population policy’ is not new to Australia and is generally code for population caps and lower immigration levels.
Just three years into the Australian Federation, a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate population, fertility and immigration.
This was to be the first of many official inquiries, including a National Population Inquiry in 1974, several reports by parliaments, the CSIRO and the Federal Government’s National Population Council in the 1990s.
Almost from the outset, environmental concerns were voiced by thoughtful scientists, academics and some business leaders.
Certainly by the 1920s, prominent commentators directly questioned the Australian continent’s capacity to carry a large population given environmental constraints, particularly the parched nation’s water supplies.
And yet, despite a century of inquiries, no national consensus on carrying capacity, immigration levels or Australia’s optimal population has ever been reached.
Of course, there are those who believe Australia has already exceeded its peak population level – Tim Flannery memorably cited a six million person figure, which he’s recently revised to 12 million.
Many see urbanisation as the slow burning fuse of the environmental time bomb.
For those who crave demons and the comforts of garment rending, cities offer an appropriate evil. “Cities account for 70 percent of greenhouse gases”, is a common refrain.
However, a recent article on the relationship between population growth, urbanisation and climate change by David Satterthwaite in Environment and Urbanisation magazine1 ought to give pause.
Satterthwaite shows that many of the world’s fastest growing cities have the lowest GHG emissions.
It’s not population, but consumption that shapes environmental impacts. In fact, cities and urbanisation provide the technological answers to climate change.
Monster cities, such as New York, average emissions one half to a third of their lesser counterparts.
You’d think the Greens would be fans of population caps.
However, Lee Rhiannon, a NSW Greens politician and aspiring Senate candidate, recently remarked, “Now I’ll tell you something that I believe is not an answer, and that is to set a fixed number for Australia’s population and to set immigration accordingly.”
While Ms Rhiannon is against baby bonuses and high levels of business immigration, her main argument is that “Australia has a moral obligation to help fellow human beings”.
Her counsel echoes former Lord Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who at the recent Property Council Congress said anti-immigration policies were “simply bloody selfish”.
The Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has declared himself a proponent of a large population. In his recent “Building a Big Australia” speech, he declared, “I actually believe in a big Australia, I make no apology for that.”
He specifically called for Australia’s nine governments to plan for a large population by designing better urban strategies and outlined eight standards of good planning.
Backing the Prime Minister in a speech to the Property Council, Finance Minister Linsday Tanner said the Federal Government would consider “linking [state government] compliance with the [PM’s] criteria to all future infrastructure funding”.
This is the approach the Property Council has called for – a national competition policy-style model that ties carrots and sticks to strategic planning performance.
Australia does not need a population policy that sets limits (or even growth rates) based on dismal maths or crude science.
It needs to embrace a strategic planning culture. If Australia’s population is likely to reach 35 million by 2049, we need to
devise a 50-year infrastructure design and roll-out program pronto.
As Tanner said, “The primary source of stress on our urban and natural environments is bad management, not population growth.”
1 Satterthwaite, David, “The implications of population, growth and urbanisation for climate change”, Environment and Urbanisation 2009: 21 (pp 545-566)
Peter Verwer |
Tuesday, 22 December 2009 12:01 AM |
Add Comment
