2004 FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

Session 7: Questions/discussion

Rosh Ireland: Could I just clarify, Bruce, on that very last point that you put up: you said that they were issues that people had 'nominated'. On your handout the question read, 'Which one of the following is more important?' I want to ask which actually it was, because there were two that were missing off there biodiversity and freshwater management and I wonder whether they came up.

Bruce Hawker: These were prompted questions. We nominated a range of issues for them to respond to. So that answers the first point, I think.

There were a group that said, 'None of those' that was 1 per cent but even bearing that in mind, I think you would see that global warming and promoting clean air are still very much the biggest categories that people responded to. Does that answer your question?

Rosh Ireland: Is there a reason, then, why you didn't nominate biodiversity or fresh water?

Bruce Hawker: Well, we talked about reducing salinity as one of the issues. We tried to get it into, I suppose, a group that we thought most people were likely to respond on. And that, of course, is part and parcel of the process of polling. You can do open-ended questions in polling, and that happens from time to time, or you can try to identify for people the key areas and see what they think about it. I don't think there was any real thinking that went into why we would not have nominated fresh water, but salinity obviously comes into that category, I would have thought. Correct me if I am wrong.

Lynton Crosby: Could I just add in relation to that that there is no doubt amongst ordinary voters 'the' environmental issue taking them out of their local environment and the amenity of their local environment, which I talked about before is water. They link it to global warming, and it has increased recently; I suspect it is linked to the experience of drought and water rationing, which a lot of places are having for the first time in a very long while.

We recently did some work for the National Farmers Federation which was released publicly. It showed that amongst all of the issues that farmers need to deal with as challenges they face, the health of the Murray-Darling system ranked the highest. So there is a strong community understanding of the challenge of water. But when you think about it, it is a very practical experience they are having it's a very practical experience, and that's my point.

Richard Denniss: You often hear political representatives say things like, 'Yes, that's all very well, but we know people really vote with the hip pocket and we'd rather give them tax cuts, blah, blah, blah.' Is either of you providing polling to political parties that confirms that view, or is that just a prejudice that they have in their head and that all the polling in the world is not going to shift? If we believe that people think the environment is important and they can nominate their big concerns, how do we actually get political parties to take that seriously, rather than dismissing it as warm and fuzzy?

Bruce Hawker: Well, there are any number of issues that people make up their minds on, as to how they are going to vote. Economic management, those sorts of issues, the hip pocket, are very important considerations, there's no doubt about that. All you can do, I think, is look to research and look to community responses on specific issues they might be in particular electorates or they might be across the board to start to agitate for change. That's all you can do. You have got to get organised and respond appropriately.

It will vary from time to time, particularly if people think that their hip pocket is going to be affected by inappropriate environmental outcomes. They will make those connections. I sort of thought that was Kyoto was meant to do, but that is one of the things that people need to concentrate on. I just know that years ago, environmental issues always lost out to hip-pocket issues. If there was a question of jobs versus trees, the answer was, 'Sorry, the trees have got to go.'

I don't think it is quite that simple any more, and as I said before, sometimes at a local level it has got to do, quite perversely, with the value of the property the people are sitting on. For the first time they are living in wealthy environments: they might have been very humble homes in ordinary suburbs, but now they are actually of some value and people don't want to see a tanning factory, a tannery, coming down the street, or some other environmental hazard being introduced into their community because (1) it is bad for them and their children, and (2) it is bad for the price of their homes. Seize on that, if that is what you need to do, in order to make politicians understand the importance that you place on those issues.

John Coulter: My remarks relate to what Kate Crowley said earlier. I thought your remarks regarding Garrett Hardin, given that he was coming from a background as a biologist and you are coming from a rather different background, reflected that difference very much. When Hardin was talking about freedom as the recognition of necessity he was, of course, quoting Hegel. It wasn't his remark. And it seems to me that in the context of this conference that aphorism could well be writ large, because one of the things that many of us seem not to be doing is recognising what is necessary if we are going to survive as a species.

My question to you is this: Hardin also used the expression 'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon'. And that was Hardin; he wasn't quoting anybody else. Now, if that is not the best expression of democracy, I don't know what is.

Kate Crowley: Just on the first part of the question: it was interesting, looking at the green political theory textbooks, to see the extent to which they went outside their discipline. I guess, in fact, green political theory grew out of the survivalist discourse. So there is a disciplinary borrowing in environmental-political analysis that is just integrated through it; they use biologists, economists, a whole range of other people et cetera. 'Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.' Yes, in preparing for it I thought about that as well. But to put that point aside and leave it there as a good point, I think the stigma for green political theory came when it got into its ecological authoritarianism state that is, prefacing liberal democracy with ecological pre-conditions and it has been trying to backtrack and get itself out of that ever since.

Actually, that was more noteworthy and attracted more criticism than subsequent attempts, not quite parallel but maybe starting a decade later, at looking at how to enhance the democratic state how to dismantle the coupling with liberalism and democracy and enhance democracy per se as a way around this problem. There has been a lot of good work done, and I think the 'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon' would fit really well. And again I refer to Robyn Eckersley's The Green State as now representing the state of art in that endeavour.

Bryan Furnass: I would like to comment on Kate Crowley's point that there is very little mention of linkage between population and environment in the political science journals. I would maintain that that is an unscientific viewpoint. In other words, it is unscientific to talk about population without thinking about environment.

In an analogy with the health sciences, there used to be a debate on 'nature or nurture'. Now that is finished. We realise that both are important, and social issues as well. In other words, we have got to lose this disciplinary tunnel vision or myopia and start thinking a bit more widely about the whole. If political science journals can't do this, then I suggest they rename themselves the Journal of Political Rhetoric.

Kate Crowley: There are all sorts of problems with political science journals, and I haven't mentioned the difficulties of getting anything environmental into the journals of political science, let alone getting in anything holistic about the environment, and certainly it would be unseemly to get anything in that had any sense of advocacy at all about it because of the need to parade as a science. So there are a lot of problems with political science generally.

The other thing I find is that it is really interesting to try and discuss something that is not there. In what terms should we discuss something that's not there? So we can talk about the reasons about why what is not there could be written differently if it were there, which is a part of your point.

I appreciate the point; I think it's a good one. The thing that shocked me was that there was nothing in Environmental Politics, which is a premier international journal. So what interests me, if I follow this up as quite a tantalising case study of non-politics, non-policy, non-decision making and 'non', is how you can actually discuss something that is not there. And you do come back to a lot of those sticky issues in theory that people are trying to avoid.

I didn't look at the international relations journals, because I don't publish in that area, but it would be interesting. I think mainly the debate would be about immigration politics.

Alexa McLaughlin: This is actually a comment, I suspect, because I am going to raise something that I suspect is not in the consciousness of most of the people in this room.

I have chemical sensitivities, and so there is a huge overlap between my objectives for example, for clean air and those of people in the environment movement. What I have noticed in the health area is that if you look at this at an academic level, there is a debate in the health sciences about whether that is actually a mental illness or whether it is a physical illness. Even more importantly, there is a debate in the community. There are individuals in the community who I don't think are being informed by the scientific debate, because that is hardly ever in the press, and yet hold an awful lot of prejudice about people.

So I would love to find a way in which we can get it into the health debate, get it into the community, instead of there being a lot of prejudice and avoidance.

Charlie Blumer: I was interested to hear the presentations of the two strategists, as to how the parties take their lead from opinion polling. You may have had the benefit of a range of different views expressed in this forum over this morning and yesterday. Is there the possibility of the parties being able to provide some leadership on these issues? Or has the current PM just been successful in his destruction of any regard for educated and informed opinion?

Bruce Hawker: Certainly on the Labor side I think they do treat environmental issues very seriously. You see it at both state and federal level. It is pretty difficult to do it from opposition but, to give you a for-instance, Mark Latham has made it quite clear that Labor, if elected, will sign up to the Kyoto accord. Now, that has got to be as front-and-centre as you can get on climate issues. So that would be my response to that comment.

Lynton Crosby: The reality of leadership is that as a political leader you have to balance a range of competing perspectives in the community. That is what, essentially, a democracy is about. One person's responsiveness is another person's ignorance. That is, you can say something is not displaying true leadership because a leader is responding to what the community is demanding of them at a time, whereas others in the community, if they felt their views were being ignored, would say that you were not displaying leadership. So it is a difficult balance; it is always a difficult balance.

This government put enormous resources into the Natural Heritage Trust, which, interestingly, as an environmental initiative probably has greater community support and regard than any other environmental initiative in the last 30 or so years. I go back to the four points I talked about. You can say you have an entitlement to have your voice heard, but every one of us has to earn the right to be heard. Whether it is the Academy of Science or the business community or whatever element of the community it is, we have to earn the right to be heard because the reality is that there are a million different voices out there, all expressing different opinions, all expressing different views, all competing to be heard by governments in terms of allocation of resources and so forth.

So you have got to ensure more effectively, if that is your bent, that you are communicating in ways that engage people and make your advocacy relevant to the ordinary citizens of this community who vote at every election.

Charlie Blumer: Could I put it differently, then? Why have you spent this amount of time this morning telling us about the results of your telephone surveys and the man in the street, sure, to some extent is important but without any discussion of what might be learnt from the learned academies that you have just cited but which it is quite evident receive little regard in your calculations as to how to become the party that is in power?

Bruce Hawker: I am sorry, I don't quite get that. What we are trying to do is to provide you with a snapshot of what people are thinking at the moment. What you then do with it is a matter for you. I think that is the point that Lynton was making, and I would agree with that. It is up to you, if you are concerned to agitate on those issues, to get organised and to make it an issue.

Kate Crowley: I just wanted to say, with regard to polls, that 86 per cent of Tasmanians are against old-growth logging but both major parties have a platform of accelerating old-growth logging, hence green democratic theorists' interest in how to get greater democracy and less of a coupling of democracy with liberalism that is, the primacy of economic objectives. So you can try to set agendas and you won't necessarily get politicians responding to polls.