The day, the land, the people

While we cannot know what some future nation that has adapted to Australian conditions would be like, we will know when the transformation is complete, because then we will be living sustainably, and for the first time our children and their children will have a long-term future here. Such a culture will almost certainly still contain elements brought from elsewhere, but in all of its truly important aspects – those that touch on our interaction with our land – it will have been transformed by the dictates of the unique Australian environment.

The single most important change is the need for all Australians to achieve true environmental sustainability. An extraordinary start has already been made in the area of primary production, but much more remains to be done. The development of a population policy is central to this process. Such a policy, I believe, would result in better environmental and humanitarian outcomes. Australia’s population policy should be based on recognition of the environmental constraints of our land, our economic needs, and the social desires of its people. The only way that such a policy can be achieved is for the nation to engage in a broad, vigorous and truthful debate, accompanied by a Government inquiry that is charged with setting an optimum population target. Once the target has been decided we should redesign our immigration program in light of it, with an eye to more flexibility and greater fairness. Before the inquiry has done its work it is not possible to say how large the immigration intake could be, but almost any imaginable scenario would allow for a reasonable level of immigration.

The development of such a policy would take much of the hysteria and negativity out of the immigration debate, for an immigration program firmly embedded in a population policy will transparently serve the national interest, and thus have the support of most people. It would also result in a better humanitarian outcome for those involved, because the intake could be framed over a longer period than the current annual intake, allowing us to accommodate those caught up in international emergencies.

Another advantage of such a policy is that by examining environmental impacts in order to set the population target, we would highlight our most unsustainable environmental practices. These could then be intensely targeted for remediation so that our overall environmental impact was lowered, allowing for a larger population if that was what we wished. It would be important for the population target to be reviewed every five years, as that way we can track change. Then if environmental conditions improve, we can, if we wish, increase it. Ideally this important national process would come under the purview of a Minister for Population rather than a Minister for Immigration. Their responsibility should encompass all things touching on population change, including issues such as maternity and paternity leave.

Some people have extremely negative feelings about population policies. It’s important to remember, however, that our schemes of social support for parents and children, and our immigration program, add up to a de facto population policy – one that has not been carefully thought through as a whole. No one has oversight of it, it is not clearly demonstrated to be in the national interest, and there is little acceptance of elements of it in the community. Others argue against a population policy on the basis that it would be preferable, in terms of achieving sustainability, to reduce consumption rather than concentrate on numbers. While focussing on patterns of consumption is important, it is vital to realise that population is the great multiplier of environmental impact, and that sustainability cannot be addressed without considering it.

The darkest horror lurking in the imaginings of 19^th century Australians was that this wild continent might somehow claim them, or their children, to itself. Today that dark, lurking fear – that this wide brown land might somehow claim us as its own – is, I suspect, our best hope for a sustainable, long-term future. For we have realised that we have no other home but this one, and that we cannot remake it to suit ourselves. Instead we must somehow come to terms with its conditions, to surrender our ‘otherness’ and thereby find our own distinctively Australian way in a very different, large and sometimes threatening world.