Peter Garrett As President of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), activist, and former member of the world renowned Australian group Midnight Oil, Peter Garrett is widely known as a passionate advocate on a range of contemporary Australian and global issues. A graduate of the ANU (Arts) and UNSW (Law), as a political campaigner, essayist and performer he is recognised as a singular presence on the Australian political and cultural landscape. Peter Garrett was the public face of Midnight Oil for 26 groundbreaking years. The 'Oils' were renowned for their fierce independent stance and active support of a range of contemporary concerns including the plight of homeless youth, indigenous people's rights and protection of the environment. During Peter's initial four year term as president of ACF, Australia's peak environment organisation, significant results were achieved for many threatened areas of the Australian environment including: Coronation Hill in Kakadu, the Wet Tropics rainforest and Shoalwater Bay in Queensland, and Jervis Bay in New South Wales. In 1993 he joined the International Board of Greenpeace for a two-year term. In 1998 Peter again accepted the position as president of the ACF. The past five years under his stewardship have seen ACF grow strongly, develop partnerships with NGO's and progressive business groups, and expand its campaigning into marine conservation and northern Australia. Peter received the Australian Humanitarian Foundation Award in the Environment category in 2000 and in 2003 the Order of Australia (Member General Division) for his contribution to environment and the music industry.

Media panel session: Questions/discussion

I was very interested to hear both our distinguished members of the press give us some perspective from the political end of it. I agreed with a good deal of what was said and certainly concurred at the least. But do you know what I was thinking at the time? I was just thinking about real estate agents, and I was thinking about those brochures, and I was thinking about the Saturday papers and the columns in the lifestyle magazines, and the extensive coverage that is given – particularly in Sydney, which is where I listen to the radio from – of the rise in property prices, and the glorious amount of free editorial that is provided in all of the suburban newspapers and free giveaways. That contains very strong encouragement to people for both the construction and the purchase of real estate. And I want to come back to that a little bit later on.

In my abstract I said that one of the things that we believe, is that the media is covering it. But the question that was put to me by the conference organisers was 'Has it influenced the debate?' and I think we would like to get underneath that to see who is influencing the debate.

It is influenced by politicians, by the way policies are developed; it is influenced by the scientific communities; it is influenced by people who make strong statements. And on the landscape we have got some strong statement-makers. On the one hand we have got Dr Flannery, and perhaps on the other hand we have got Richard Pratt – and ACF, I am pleased to say, works harmoniously with both of these figures and has good, interesting and constructive discussions about their views. We have Premier Bracks in Victoria, who is keen to see more people come to his state, and Premier Carr in New South Wales, who thinks that he needs to put up the walls. And it has been a simplified discussion, from our perspective, with these opposites quite often representing the way the discourse travels.

Paul Kelly is absolutely right: when you talk about population, if the media covers it, or you talk about the environment, where do they meet? Where is the nexus?

For us the nexus is to properly examine the ecological health statistics and some of the material that has already come before you and to recognise that you can debate population – and we will debate population in this country increasingly – but until we come to terms with the issues of sustainability and what sustainability means, and where population fits in to that, it will be a discussion that to some extent swings from these extremes, although it probably will become a little bit more sophisticated as it goes on.

We are pretty clear that we can't, or shouldn't, increase our population if we continue to have the similar economic conditions, if we continue to be the hot, heavy and wet economy that produces lots of greenhouse gases and wastes lots of water and uses lots of energy. Economically it produces results, but ecologically it produces bad consequences.

But we do think that there is a role for the media to think a little more carefully about the contribution that people like the building industry do play. They are significant contributors to our unsustainability, significant contributors to greenhouse emissions, and we think they have got some obligations as a result of that. But their role as boosters of population, and their economic stake in population increase, isn't something that the media, to my knowledge, has paid a great deal of attention to, if it understands that point particularly well or not. Perhaps there is just not a sufficient or adequate number of people who can actually dive into those issues, because of some of the things that Laura and Paul said.

When we talk about things like fertility decline, there has, it seems to us, at least been again some sort of oversimplification. There are a couple of things happening in this debate now that the Treasurer has raised the issue of ageing populations. The media has generally accepted the argument, pretty much straight away. Yet I guess we could say that it is happening to all developed countries: they are all ageing, even though we are probably ageing quicker than others – and scientists will tell me about the correctness or otherwise of that sort of Rex Mossop-ism.

It is true that decreasing fertility and this ageing have an extra dimension in Australia, because the declining population growth rate here is an important factor in terms of economic growth, because population growth is the major factor which drives the housing sector. And the media don't generally get on top of that particular tension that exists there.

The media is pretty sympathetic to the fertility issue, but again there is not a whole heap of evidence that fertility decline can be reversed like that. Most developing countries have got declining fertility, and it happens pretty much in parallel with the education of women. It may be that people are focusing on race, really, when they ought to be focusing on immigration. And I note Mr Turnbull's comments on some of those things. It seems to me the media needs to examine that more closely as well.

But, most significantly, the media doesn't seem to see, or doesn't often see, population as a subset of sustainability. Maybe that is a fault of conservationists and the conservation organisations, who have not been vocal enough about that particular issue.