Integration panel: Questions/discussion

Jenny Goldie: This is a comment, not a question. I would like to agree totally with Stephen Boyden's third point, that the bottom line is ecological sustainability. If we can't achieve that, then we have got nothing else.

That brings me onto what I wanted to say before, that I believe in interdisciplinarity and what it can bring but, like pigs, some disciplines are more equal than others when we are determining, say, an optimal population size for Australia, and I would say that ecologists are more equal than the other disciplines when we are trying to determine the answer to that particular question of what is an optimal population size for Australia.

Charlie Blumer: What Jenny has just said inspires my question as well. I was going to ask Stephen Boyden: I believe the way he puts his question is indefensible – there is a bottom line, but I think that as it is put it is not so useful for developing policy or responses to the question. I think that the world is not going to suddenly have the lights turned out on it; it will be a gradual process. For example, we have been speaking today about Adelaide, with its unsatisfactory water supply. Inevitably, those with most access to resources will be able to look after themselves, while the poorest will be at the sharp end of this spoliation of the environment and the shortages that will accrue.

I think we have to recognise that it is going to happen across systems at different times and in different places, and this is the one thing that I have found most useful from this population point of view: there is no absolute number – 22.3 million – which is the number that this country can support. It is going to depend on time and place. And I think that as we can start to address questions like that, on the more particularities of the issue, we will be able to make better progress and reach more agreement on how to get ahead.

Alexa McLaughlin: I want to say something quite different from what has been said so far. What I am hearing is a group of academics who are talking about disciplines all the time, and working between them, and the implicit assumption from what I am gathering is that you have got to be one of these experts to participate in the discussion. I have to say in the ACT we have consultation fatigue over the huge range of issues that the politicians and others have had us involved with, so I am not suggesting another round of hugely consultational stuff.

But there are two things. If you are trying to get the good ideas, you can go around and collect what people know, and often people outside of academia have got some good ideas. But even more important than that, it is the conversation – the conversations you know you have between each other add something. It is more than what each person says, it is what they hear and how they react. Similarly, people outside of the academic disciplines also can make a greater contribution from being part of the conversation.

So my comment to everybody in this room is: as we go forward with these questions, at the end of the day people in the community get a chance to be part of the decision making, in the sense of listening to the public debate, commenting back, voting, whatever, but there is actually a place for them to be part of the rigorous development of ideas and not just the decision making. A lot of the activities that you have been involved with, whether it has been the online discussion groups or even this sort of conference, are open; it is not a closed shop. But what I want you to do, when you think about what you do next, is not to make it a closed shop either, because in fact good ideas don't have to come with the heading, 'I work at the ANU,' or, 'I've written this paper.' Good ideas about all of these issues can come from all through the community.

Alan Rich: Yesterday I put a question to Professor Withers about his view of ecology and where it sits, and to me his answer in favour of the three-legged stool model showed a real challenge for groups like this to address interdisciplinary barriers, if you will. My question is to whoever from the panel cares to comment on it: how you might see a way forward to bridge that particular type of barrier between economics and ecology.

Doug Cocks: This is what devolutionists call drift! Ian Lowe says he is going to cover that question later.