Open forum: Follow-up ideas

Doug Cocks: Val, can you see a structure in the group presentations of question 2?

Val Brown: You can see a pattern in the points that have been made. So far the concern has been mostly with the boundaries and interactions between disciplines, how they can be brought together. There were only a few points about being transdisciplinary across all disciplines and only a couple of points about 'from the disciplines out' – taking your three categories, Doug. We can go over the repeated points later.

Doug Cocks: That might be interesting. Tony, have you got anything to add to that?

Tony Capon: Thanks for that, Doug. The thing I want to add is that I think we do have to be very realistic about what the Academy can achieve and what we might all have to take responsibility for through our professional associations and through the institutions that we work in.

Doug Cocks: Before we come back to structure and prioritisation, are there some really big suggestions that somehow escaped all this toing and froing that we have been going through? Is there anything that you feel really could have been mentioned in 'What can we do, where can we go from now?'

Gina Newton: I heard it said a lot that the population-environment issue should be subsumed into the sustainability issue. I wonder if people might like to suggest ways that we might think about doing that, without the issue being lost.

Doug Cocks: Okay, take that on board. We might be able to fit it in at the end.

Anna Robinson: One observation that I couldn't help making is that we have a large room here and there are quite a few young people, but we have not heard from them. Maybe we have got a generational gap here as well as an interdisciplinary gap.

Russell Darnley: Two speakers have mentioned the international connections. I would just like to make the point that sustainability isn't something that we can attain without treatment of those international linkages. We aren't an island in the sense that we are impermeable. We are biophysically connected, we are socio-culturally connected. I am a bit surprised we haven't talked more about that. We do when we start to talk about the movement of populations, but we have not been really talking about it in environmental terms at all. If we are talking population policy, in a sense, it seems we have to be talking population policy for this region. Australia is a legal-political concept. It is a question of scale. If we start to look at the factors that impinge on our environments, on our nation, these are not constrained by legal and political processes; these are much broader and at times global processes.

John Coulter: I just wanted to return to what the minister said right at the beginning of the conference yesterday morning, when he said, quite clearly and unequivocally, we are not living sustainably. Now, two of the speakers at least have said, and I think Colin mentioned it a moment ago also, that it is difficult to deal with the population question in terms of a specific number. And one of the speakers yesterday talked about needing to look at this regionally.

Given that we are not living sustainably – and I think Barney [Foran] talked about the reciprocity between per capita environmental demand and population – it seems to me the direction is reasonably clear, that while one can't fix a particular number, the two things that need to be done, in broad terms, are to move towards limiting population and limiting per capita impact, that we work on both those things and somewhere along that road, through an iterative process, we will hopefully discover that we have achieved sustainability.

Doug Cocks: Okay, but in terms of the present discussion, are there things which this group or its agents might do to progress those two priorities you identified?

John Coulter: I think we have heard a lot of people throughout the two days talking about the complexity of the issues. The broad features – namely, population and per capita – as the two factors which are driving us towards unsustainability are clear, so the things that need to be emphasised are the very fact that they are the drivers, and they are the drivers that have to be addressed.

Of course, the per capita impact then brings you into areas of water and energy and resources of all other sorts, and the population one brings you into issues of immigration and fertility. But it seems to me it provides a policy direction in terms of immigration numbers. Somebody said we are not making decisions on population. We are making decisions on population, de facto. Governments are making them for us. They are setting an intake every year, in terms of intake itself and in terms of the budget. We have seen Costello saying, 'One for your husband, one for your wife and one for the country.' So even though I guess that mechanism might not work to increase fertility, the intention is certainly there. And perhaps the Academy should be saying something about that, because that is one of the drivers.

Doug Cocks: In your last sentence you got to the sort of thing that I am interested in: the Academy should be saying something about that. I say that because that is what I am hoping for from everybody. Let me put it this way: what can we do? It is not the Organising Committee, it is 'we'. What can we do?

Has anybody detected structure in all this melange of suggestions that we have got up here? We have had a top priority suggested. Are there three big themes or something? If Barney Foran were up here he would ask whether there were 10 big themes, but we haven't got time for 10, Barney. So are there three big themes – two big themes?

Habte Tesfaghiorghis: One of the things the Academy could do is to clarify what the population-environment debate is, first, and then prioritise for us what the debate is all about, because it is not clear for all of us. For example, we have been talking for two days and the interdisciplinary part is clear, but just what is the population-environment debate? So the Academy could say something about that, and then later about what the government, say, is doing about things like immigration or sustainability.

Doug Cocks: Do you see the Academy as the main actor having carriage of this?

Habte Tesfaghiorghis: As an independent body, at least it can state what it sees the population-environment debate is.

Julie Klein: I just wanted to share a thought. When I work with institutions and help them think about how they can be more conducive to interdisciplinary research and interdisciplinary education, I always like to say that the best strategy is a portfolio of strategies. It is very important to think along two scales – that is, what can we do that is at the micro, the meso and the macro levels, those multiple levels, and what can we do in terms of time, in short-run, mid-range and longitudinal. To think about it in a very rich and a systemic way really does embed long-term structuring of change.

We talked in our group not only about a big thing, in the kind of leadership the Academy can provide in a very large, visible way, but in addition to that the way that imperatives can be mainstreamed into existing organisations by helping people think about these objectives as a normal part of business.

Rosh Ireland: From the very beginning of the conference we had the statement that what we are trying to do, the goal, is sustainability. We had the polling figures to say that the vast majority of the population say we are not doing enough for sustainability. We have come back a few times to the question about how to define it and what the indicators are, and where it goes in relation to economics. And underlying that, it seemed to me, the frustration was that despite having all these goals, the decisions that are getting made are weighted more towards economics than sustainability. The question is why that was happening and what the Academy can do about it.

We had a point made by a couple of the media people that there is a great deal of scepticism in the population about communication. I think the reason a lot of the decisions default more towards economics than sustainability is that there is a lot of scepticism when you communicate to people that the sacrifice that they have to make economically is actually a worthwhile sacrifice. That may be why the default decision goes towards the short-term economics, and if that is a question of trust and credibility, then that is an area where the Academy, which has a great deal of trust and capability behind it, could make a contribution.

Doug Cocks: Has anybody got a really good suggestion as to how we fill in this last five minutes? We are not going to get our action plan; we never said we would. We are not going to synthesise all this, but is there some overarching view of what is going on here which is going to be of considerable help to us tomorrow when we try and sort this out, as to where we go – to have something which we can hold up and say, 'These are the practical recommendations and outputs and so on from this meeting'? Has somebody got that sort of comment to make?

Alan Rich: This is just a quick comment to answer that question for those, perhaps, in the Academy and the movers of the conference. I suggest you take a look at the Wentworth Group's models for problem solving. Perhaps there are some models there that you might brainstorm.

Tony McMichael: Doug, the way you framed the question or the challenge is a bit intimidating, and I suppose one feels a little presumptuous in responding to it.

I was interested to hear Cliff Hooker's reference to the Joint Academies Initiative and I think that is important in the first instance, to try and clarify these issues across the Academies, across the various member disciplines. I think it would be a good second step if we could, perhaps again through the Academies jointly, tackle the question of trying to foresee plausible future scenarios in Australia, because this is quite an attention-grabbing technique. Barney Foran's group has shown how it can be done, at least for the physical economy.

There has been a lot of work going on on this sort of front internationally in the last decade, trying to take account of alternative future worlds that are driven by either economic growth or environmental conservation or sustainability or other values, or combinations of values, and this scenario-building exercise, drawing on the insights of many disciplines, produces a range of very interesting alternative future worlds that is the sort of thing that will focus people's minds on where we might be going. That in turn, I think, then leads to saying, 'Well, how do we get to some and how do we avoid the others?' So that would be my suggestion.

Doug Cocks: That's a lovely suggestion. Maybe we will end up on that.