“Growth doesn’t have to be a dirty word,” Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said ahead of the Growth Management Summit she hosts today and tomorrow.
Of course, she’s right: “growth” is no more good or bad in the abstract than the direction west. It all depends on where you are and where you want to go.
At the Growth Management Summit we’ll hear lots about planning for population growth, but very little about why we would want our population to be rapidly growing. For a conference about growth, the relative merits of slow versus fast population growth, let alone population stabilisation, are curiously off the agenda.
The Queensland government has developed a clever online tool for the conference, which allows users to play with a range of variables for south-east Queensland. You can rank different priorities, such as public transport, large houses and preservation of agricultural land, and see how your choices affect the overall urban form of the region.
In many ways, it’s what we need more of from government — engaging tools that allow us to think about future options and trade offs. But there’s one variable you can’t tinker with: population growth. It’s taken as a given.
The point of the conference, then, is to persuade us that very rapid population growth is desirable, inevitable and manageable.
Well, I’m all for better management. So let’s get our hands dirty and look at what rapid population growth really means for environmental policy.
First, carbon pollution. The Rudd government has committed to reduce Australia’s pollution levels to 60% below 2000 levels by 2050. If our population stabilises at 27 million in 2050, that means a per capita reduction of about 72%. That’s tough enough already. But if our population is 36 million by 2050, a 79% per capita reduction is required to meet the same goal, with even more ambitious reductions thereafter as our population continues to grow. So carbon-intensive activities such as eating meat and flying in planes will have to be more expensive in the high-growth scenario.
Next, water. The Victorian government has set Melburnians a water use target of 155 litres per person, per day. If the city grows from its present population of 3.8 million to 5 million, Melburnians will have to cut their water use to 118 litres per person per day. If Melbourne goes to 6 million, the daily target should be 98 litres. Say hello to level-eight water restrictions.
Finally, land and biodiversity. Population growth is causing environmental degradation on such a scale that ACF last week nominated it as a threatening process under the Environmental Conservation and Biodiversity Protection Act. Restoring ecosystem health is much more than just protecting what’s left. Re-connecting fragmented habitats through biodiversity corridors is a centrepiece of many state environmental strategies. The SE Queensland Regional Plan recognises the need to identify “areas currently developed or cleared that can be rehabilitated to restore connectivity”.
Currently developed land, to be restored for biodiversity? That will be hard enough as it is, but nearly inconceivable when you consider the housing demands of a rapidly increasing population.
So if they are being honest about the management challenges of a growing population, advocates for rapid growth must be prepared to spell out their plans for 79% per capita cuts in emissions, water use of below 100 litres per person per day and housing densities that allow for the reversion of currently developed land to biodiversity corridors. And that’s just to be consistent with current government environmental policies.
I would genuinely like to see such a plan, but it doesn’t exist and isn’t in the works.
In fact, the best existing regional and urban planning frameworks — Perth’s “Directions 2031”, the SE Queensland Regional Plan, Melbourne 2030 — are all at risk of being superseded by population growth.
Perhaps we should return to the original question: is rapid population growth a good idea in the first place?
Recent polling suggests most Australians don’t believe rapid growth is economically beneficial or environmentally benign. And the government may not even believe its own rhetoric: just last year, the Australian government told the United Nations that population growth is one of the “major current and long-term threats to Australia’s biodiversity”.
Perhaps growth isn’t a dirty word, but neither should it be pursued for its own sake.
Isherwood: ACF a noxious pest
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) is a virulently anti-human body, introduced into Australia from Great Britain by Prince Philip, and should be classified a “noxious pest” for its destruction of Australia’s productive base, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood declared this week.
Mr Isherwood blasted the ACF following its call for Australia’s human population to be classified as a “key threatening process” to biodiversity under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
“Human beings are a natural threat to only one thing,” Mr Isherwood said, “The power of the British oligarchs like Prince Philip.
“The British system, to this day, is the system of oligarchy, in which the born-to-rule elite hold real power, and see the masses of people as the ‘human herd’ to be managed, and culled.
“The ACF is an example of how they created the green movement to do it.”
The CEC National Secretary said the history of the Australian Conservation Foundation proved the oligarchical pedigree of the green movement.
In the same era he was still a renowned Indian tiger hunter, Prince Philip established the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1961 with fellow oligarch, and unreconstructed Nazi, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and British Eugenics Society President Sir Julian Huxley.
The WWF was their population-reduction charity: in a globalised continuation of the British aristocratic tradition of monopolising game hunting on their vast English estates, and brutally prosecuting as “poachers” any hungry soul who’d do so little as snare a rabbit to feed their family, the WWF raised enormous sums of money from the expanded European aristocracy and their corporations like Shell, Rio Tinto, Unilever and ICI, to designate vast lands in still-colonial Africa as game parks, to be “protected” from the human population.
Inconveniently for the modern, image-conscious greenie, the pompous Prince Philip tended to blurt out his agenda, accustomed as he was to easy agreement from his fellow aristocrats; he once said, “You cannot keep a bigger flock of sheep than you are capable of feeding. In other words conservation may involve culling in order to keep a balance between the relative numbers in each species within any particular habitat. I realise this a very touchy subject, but the fact remains that mankind is part of the living world. … Every new acre brought into cultivation means another acre denied to wild species.” [emphasis added]
In 1963, while on a Royal tour of Australia, Prince Philip called for the creation of an Australian WWF, which was formed as the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1964 under the presidency of Sir Garfield Barwick (the man who in 1949 spearheaded the private banks’ legal assault on Ben Chifley’s plan to assert national control over Australia’s banking system, and later gave Sir John Kerr the advice to sack the Whitlam government in 1975, for the threat it posed to the British oligarchy’s control of Australia’s resources by its proposal to “buy back the farm”).
The Prince himself was President of the ACF from 1971 to 1976, followed by H.C. “Nugget” Coombs, who once said, “The whole [human] species had become itself a disease. …the human species was like a cancerous growth reproducing itself beyond control…”
“The ACF seeks to destroy Australia’s productive industries, and stop infrastructure development, because it is those things that support our human population,” Mr Isherwood pointed out.
“For example, it’s the ACF that has led the charge to shut down the Murray-Darling Basin, because it is our nation’s food-bowl.”
He warned, “If they can convince Environment Minister Peter Garrett—a former president of the ACF!—to legally classify people as a biodiversity threat, they will be on their way to turning all of Australia into one of Prince Philip’s game parks.
“It’s time we recognise the ACF for what it is, a royally-introduced noxious pest, and kick its genocidal agenda out of Australia,” he concluded.
Robert are you quoting the CEC for comedy value or because you believe they actually have a useful contribution to the public debate?
I subscribe to their newsletter. Mostly because the conspiratorial nonsense it is filled with makes me laugh out loud.
“Bligh’s tool” can you factor in a government with the foresight to actually “plan” properly for the good and needs of the population, without being weighted too heavily for “certain political imperatives”? Or, after only a few thousand years, is that “science” inconclusive, with there being “too few models” to go on?
Nice balanced article there Crikey.
Can we have someone supporting an increased Australian population for some balance, to point out the necessity for a growing population to support our standard of living and our current aging population?
Here’s a little exercise. Try substituting the word ‘cancer’ for growth, in every mention of ‘economic growth’, ‘population growth’, etc – just as a way to take to heart some of the impact of our impossible dream of limitlessness and a ‘standard of living’ that is posited upon living by damage to the rest of humanity and the biosphere.
Or if we can’t wean ourselves from the word, let’s try living it in a way that has more fit with reality. (Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ was not the one with the biggest muscles, jaws and rapacious teeth by the way; it was the one with the most congruity or ‘fit’ with the ecological niche that had brought it into being as a species.)
For example, growth in skilful means of living more cleverly and with less superfluous so called ‘choice’. Growth in re-skilling, growth in ingenuity, frugality, imaginative response to crisis, growth in the store we set in generosity, growth in recognising greed as a shame job. Growth in maturity as a species, because to live as if the world is unlimited, and purely here ‘for me’, is to be a big fat roly-poly baby of an adult, who doesn’t even know that they have pooed their pants (but knows for sure that someone is to blame for the mess!).
Growth as in grow up. The first thing that is then apparent is that there are already too many of us and we have to mitigate the rampant population of rampant economic ‘growth’ that is a cancer fast eating up our grandchildren’s future.