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l. Basic Requirements For Sustainability

1.1 Our long-term relationship with this continent should be one of stewardship. This requires both population sizes and a range of lifestyles that can be sustained through generations to come, by the renewable resources of the earth.

1.2 We must act immediately to control:

(i) the loss or impoverishment of our soils;

(ii) the destruction of flora and fauna;

(iii) the pollution of our rivers and degradation of our groundwater reserves;

(iv) the pollution and congestion of our cities;

(v) the nation's contribution to the greenhouse effect and ozone hole; and

(vi) the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources.

1.3 Such depletions of the nation's biological and resource capital cannot be reversed while our planing remains dominated by the twin goals of:

(i) growth of per-capita consumption and

(ii) growth of population.

We should revise all polices that commit us to living beyond the biological means our continent affords.

1.4 Our first responsibility is to act wisely within our own continent. We thus demonstrate regional survival through ecologically sustainable policies providing a model for other nations and leaving ourselves able to help them.

2. Growth and Sustainability

2.1 Any steady percentage growth of consumption, or population, or both is exponential and leads to recurrent doublings of these factors.

2.2 Any such steady percentage growth of consumption, or population, or both, will in time become unsustainable on a planet of finite size.

2.3 POPULATION DOUBLINGS

The banker's "1 to 70" rule of thumb states that 1% per annum growth (or compound interest) means a doubling of capital every seventy years; 2% growth means a doubling every 35 years, and so on. If Australia's population continues to grow at its recent rate it will double in about fifty years. Sydney Melbourne and other cities could grow to three or four times their present sizes within the lifetime of children born today. This must not be allowed to happen.

2.4 I = PAT The impact on a country's resources and environment is most clearly explained by the Ehrlich equation:

Environmental Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology or I = PAT, where P = Population size, A = Affluence, which is the average individual consumption, and T = an index of the environmental demand that a Technology imposes to supply goods consumed. Communities need to limit the size of all three factors: it makes no sense to pretend that only one or two of them are important.

2.5 Today, even those planners sympathetic to the environment cannot avoid imposing further burdens on it in order to satisfy the needs of ever more people. We must work on all three fronts:

(i) to stabilise or, better, reduce our population;

(ii) to change our personal lifestyles to use less energy and finite resources; and

(iii) to adopt less damaging industrial and farming practices.

2.6 The claim that population is only one of three factors governing environmental damage is misleading because:

(i) if any factor is doubled the damage is doubled;

(ii) no factor is easy to contain; and

(iii) any factor that doubles requires something else to be halved.

Australia is currently pledged to reduce by twenty percent its contribution to the greenhouse effect. If our population doubles over the next 50 years, the per-capita allotments of petrol, coal etc. will have to be halved.

2.7 Industrialised populations such as Australia's are the equivalent of very much larger less-industrialised populations in their levels of fuel and resource use, pollution, greenhouse effect etc. An extra person in Australia uses about 100 times as much energy as a person in Bangladesh, for example.

2.8 An over populated country is not necessarily a crowded one. Even India and China have large areas that are sparsely populated. Overpopulation is better defined as a condition in which the community cannot live in its environmental "interest" and so must deplete its "capital".

2.9 Australia must inform other nations that this continent is not well endowed with fertile and watered lands. In fact the whole of our arable land is roughly equivalent in productivity to a middle-sized European country. With erosion and salination out of control, many scientists doubt that Australia can feed even its present population indefinitely.

2.10 Each nation has an obligation to conserve the various species and habitats that occur within its borders. Australia is already one of the world's most ruthlessly cleared countries. The surviving remnants of our unique native species and natural habitats are the more precious for their scarcity, and need to be carefully guarded: both for their own sake and in trust for all Australians.

2.11 The argument that Australia should bring within its borders the maximum population it is now able to feed is mistaken for the following reasons:

(i) present yields may not be sustainable;

(ii) we rely on export earnings from a surplus of food products

(iii) some countries already depend on our food exports; and

(iv) humans are not the only species with a right to exist on this continent.

3.Global Climatic Change

3.1 Before human populations overloaded the globe, specific biotypes like rainforests or mangroves could expand or contract, moving into different areas as the climate changed. The system was dynamic, and its biological diversity could survive major global changes. Today, cropping and grazing monocultures (characteristic of centralised human societies) have reduced natural habitats (and with them the planet's heritage of biological and genetic diversity) to vulnerable remnants. For instance genes for resistance to pests and diseases are vanishing every day. Global warming may render futile Australia's present policy of protecting a selection of species in isolated national parks.

3.2 The expanding ozone hole will allow higher ultraviolet radiation which may diminish the fertility of the oceans and soils. This effect may appear more rapidly than climatic heating. It will also induce an increase in skin cancer.

3.3 Governments and citizens have an obligation to act in advance to prevent gross climatic variations produced by human activity.

3.4 Despite Australia's relative aridity and infertility, clearance or re-vegetation of its surface could significantly influence climatic instability and long-term global weather.

4. Primary Industry

4.1 Australian agriculture is unsustainable because it depends on massive use of (mostly imported) artificial fertilisers, biocides and fossil fuel. These in turn cause increasing land and water degradation. Our present surplus of food is produced only with continuing loss of soil and of unrecoverable nutrients (e.g. in exported wheat). Our population growth increases pressure to produce food both for domestic consumption and for export earnings. This works against the introduction of sustainable cropland practices and will accelerate the degradation of our soils and waterways.

4.2 In agricultural terms, Australia is not a large country. Our total cropping area is less than that of two American states (Iowa and Illinois combined). Much of our cropland is subject to periodic droughts and floods as well as to salination and soil erosion. France produces twice as much wheat as Australia because it has better rainfall and soils.

4.3 Increased yield can at present be achieved only by more intensive farming. This means soils and waterways will be degraded even faster. By contrast, a swing to organic farming could reduce soil damage, or even restore the quality of the soil, and lower production costs. But with existing organic techniques, productivity per hectare would fall.

4.4 Australia at present produces about twice as much food as it consumes, and Australians assume they are and will remain rich in agricultural and environmental resources. Yet a mere doubling of population, perhaps in fifty years, will halve our per-capita resources of land, fresh water, seafoods and minerals and eliminate much of our primary export.

5. Economics and Development

5.1 In planning for future development, governments and industry rely almost exclusively on economic models. Yet accepted economic models take no account of a nation's ecological or non-renewable resource base. Failure to count the costs of environmental degradation and depletion of non-renewable resources distorts the measure of national progress given by GDP and GNP statements: e.g. a forest clearance or even road accident may show up as positive because they generate economic activity.

5.2 Economics is not yet a hard science. It cannot reliably predict even short term changes in its own indicators. Its conceptual models deal with limited factors of production, and serious error in them cannot always be empirically detected. Hence false and damaging doctrines can take years to be abandoned. In particular, all economic activity takes place within the biosphere's atmospheric and hydrological systems. Therefore it is subject to obvious limits to growth, which are well known to biologists but ignored by most conventional economic models.

5.3 New schools of ecological economists are developing rapidly, yet almost all the economists who advise governments defer to the outmoded Infinite Growth principle.

5.4 Hence government planners still assume that "development" (meaning unlimited and usually exponential growth) is essential to national management. Economists, developers, industrialists and political scientists tend to combine to sustain this view. By contrast environmentalists, demographers and biologists are under represented on government advisory bodies. No Australian government has espoused policies which restrict growth in GDP or population policies essential for long term survival.

5.5 An economic theory is inadequate if it fails:

(i) to supply a scientific base for sustainable development, taking account of the facts of ecology and biology (including the biochemistry of pollutants and residues);

(ii) to make reliable and equitable provision for the needs of future as well as present generations; and

(iii) to count both environmental and social costs, and also the depletion of non renewable resources.

5.6 The belief that steadily increasing population improves our economy and our living standards is debatable. Recurrent, population doublings are disastrous for the environment and eventually for the economy, since ultimately the two are inseparable. (Stephen Joske estimated in a federal parliamentary research paper that while 140,000 immigrants per annum brought $2.4 billion capital with them, we borrowed about $11 billion to provide housing and services for them.

5.7 Australia's chief exports are minerals, fibres, and food. None is likely be increased by a larger labour force; in fact they may decline with higher domestic consumption. Hence increased population implies a fall in per capita export productivity and a depletion of resources.

5.8 In a country where conditions, hours and incentives are fixed by award or union rules, the productivity of a worker depends essentially on capital investment (in machinery etc.) per worker. Claims that Australia desperately needs imported "skilled and willing workers" should not be taken as economic facts. Such claims are often made by those seeking to reduce either skilled or average wages.

5.9 Population increase raises the price of real estate, especially in the cities. This benefits property investors, insurance and banking sectors, and government revenue via taxes. It provides some employment and a short term gain in GDP and GNP. Yet these "gains" are paid for by the present and future ordinary Australians, e.g. when both parents must work harder and longer to afford housing either in an overcrowded alienating and competitive urban environment or in an over stressed rural environment. The wealth generated by real estate inflation does not produce export earnings. It diverts investment that could be used to restructure primary and secondary export industries. It may also bind governments and property developers in a potentially corrupt alliance which, in the name of economic growth, fosters socially and environmentally destructive projects.

5.10 Claims that Australia must fear a rapidly ageing population are misleading. Industrially successful and socially advanced European countries have higher average ages than Australia. We have never had so high a percentage of the population in their working years. Unemployed young are just as great an economic burden on the community and a greater social cost than the retired elderly, who perform a multitude of useful unpaid social tasks. Demographers agree that immigration has little effect on the average age of the population.

6. Immigration: Refugees, Ethics and Sustainability

6.1 Over the 1980s Australia had the developed world's highest per capita population increase, largely because it has the highest per capita net immigration rate. Net immigration roughly trebled between 1983 and 1989.

6.2 We have an obligation to correct the widespread misapprehension overseas that Australia is an "empty land". There is no "empty land" in Australia. It was never "empty" to the Aborigines, who knew, used, and elaborately mythologised all parts of the continent. Our high immigration policies have fostered the "empty land" illusion.

6.3 Moving immigrants and refugees to Australia has no significant effect in relieving the world's overpopulation. India alone has 16 million more people each year, China 17 million.

6.4 Moneys spent on relocating selected immigrants from undeveloped countries into developed countries [estimated at over $100,000 government investment per family] would be far more helpful spent in the Third World.

6.5 It is almost always better to help people in their own country than to remove a few selected individuals. These are often precisely the skilled or educated or dissident people the country needs. Pirating expensively trained skilled people from developing countries is the reverse of foreign aid.

6.6 Claims that Australia needs a steady flow of "skilled migrants" should be examined impartially. Is there in fact a shortage of skills? Are employers paying adequate loadings for skills? How many unskilled family members will follow each skilled migrant? Costs of migrant selection, processing and services are largely borne by our government; if employers had to pay these costs, would they still prefer to import skilled migrants rather than train people already here? What is the cost of supporting an Australian worker who is left untrained and unemployed as a result of importing skills? What are the environmental, social and urban-infrastructure costs of importing workers?

6.7 Fewer than ten per cent of Australia's recent immigrants were refugees or displaced persons. The total figure of 10,000 to 11,000 refugees did not increase significantly even during the trebling of immigration intake between 1983 and 1989.

6.8 Refugees do not necessarily require permanent residence. A refugee is by definition an unwilling emigrant. Political refugees in particular may not require permanent residence (i.e. permanent exile) so much as temporary but prompt succour.

6.9 Each nation has a primary responsibility to manage its own environment, industry, agriculture and population to ensure a sustainable long-term balance between population and resources. Without this, external aid is ultimately futile.

6.10 Nations that neglect this balance cannot be allowed to export the consequences as environmental and economic refugees. Such refugees ultimately transfer to their host countries the problems from which they sought to escape. Foreign aid tied to population/sustainability projects is a better solution because it addresses the problem at source. The money used to resettle one displaced family might often have prevented scores of others being displaced.

6.11 Each extra person in our affluent society places additional demand on State and Federal governments to increase the supply of electricity, oil and petrol, housing sites and services, building materials, roads, imports (and therefore exports) and jobs.

6.12 Even if immigration and emigration were exactly balanced, our population would continue to rise towards 20 million. Net natural increase is around 135,000 per annum. Since 1983, net immigration has fluctuated between 50,000 and 169,000 er annum. For net immigration rates above 70,000 per annum, demographers say our population will continue to grow indefinitely.

6.13 THE SELFISHNESS FALLACY

The common claim that Australia would be selfish or naive to seek to insulate itself from Third World overpopulation is usually based on false premises. These include:

(i) that most of our immigrants are from the Third World; (ii) that Australia is underpopulated;

(iii) that it can support a vast population; and

(iv) that it needs a larger population for defence.

Hopes of controlling world population rest largely on the self-interest of those national governments that act responsibly to gain legitimate advantages for their people. The selfishness argument would erode those legitimate incentives and allow standards to be set by irresponsibly overpopulating nations. The selfishness argument is also anthropocentric, ignoring our responsibility to preserve what remains of natural habitat and native species.

6.14 The description of Australia as a solitary island of selfish affluence in a planet of misery is rhetoric and not fact. When the selfishness argument is used as a defensive fallback by people or lobbies whose positive arguments for increasing Australia's population are narrowly commercial, personal or national, it can fairly be called hypocritical. 6.15 It is increasingly recognised that humankind has an obligation not only to just one species, namely itself, but to "the integrity of Creation".

6.16 Immigration and population growth over the past two hundred years have profoundly affected and continue to affect traditional Aboriginal communities. Almost all immigrants belong to the dominant economic culture, which contrasts with the "forever culture" of the Dream Time people.

7.War

7.1 The argument that war is a natural if unfortunate control on population is false. The world's population has more than doubled during this century despite continuous local wars and two world wars. The 50 million who died in World War II were numerically replaced within a decade. In fact the increasing competition for limited resources on this finite planet creates conditions for conflicts and increases risk of war.

7.2 War and the threat of war sustain massive military industries which distort economies, consuming vast amounts of non renewable resources for non productive returns. War and war exercises are profligate consumers of fossil fuel.

7.3 Defence experts now agree that population size is largely irrelevant to Australia's defensibility. In modern warfare the advantage is not with the biggest battalions but with the country whose economic strength enables it to buy or manufacture advanced equipment.

 

 

1/9/1993




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