Media panel session: Questions/discussion

John Coulter: If you look at the OECD countries, there is no statistical evidence which supports the idea that population growth and economic growth, as measured as per capita growth of GDP, are related. That is not true in underdeveloped countries; in fact, in underdeveloped countries population growth is negatively, and reasonably strongly, correlated with poor performance in terms of growth of per capita GDP.

I think there are many people in this audience who would also argue – and there is quite a lot of literature on the claim – that economic growth is also not linked with human welfare, that it represents simply an increased throughput in material goods which are not necessarily linked with welfare at all. Up to a point that might be the case, but certainly in an industrialised country like Australia it is doubtful whether further material consumption is necessarily increasing human welfare in any significant way.

The ACF has a very good population policy; it was outlined last night by Phillip Toyne in some considerable detail. We have a federal government which is steadily increasing immigration. We have a federal government which has just announced a budget which wants – successfully or otherwise, but the intention is certainly to try – to boost fertility. And yet the ACF has been remarkably quiet on this. Why is it that ACF is not speaking out on its policy?

Paul Kelly: A couple of points. I have not looked at the OECD literature on this, but I think a lot of people would dispute what you have said. And one has got to look at trends. As we see population decline in rich countries such as Japan and a number of western European countries, often I think this is coupled with low economic growth rates for developing nations.

So I would certainly say that the jury is very much out on this point that you made at the start – that is, that there is no connection between population growth and per capita GDP increasing.

Secondly, as far as Australia is concerned, I think size of economy is quite important. One has got to look not just at per capita GDP but at the size and weight of the country overall. That is particularly important.

I completely dispute your claim that there is no relationship between economic growth and welfare and the general living conditions of people. And I think that most people would not agree with that overall.

Laura Tingle: I am also a bit sceptical about the statistics, John. But I suppose my point would be that this is one of those examples of where the media or, I suppose, anybody outside the disciplines has a real problem with all of the aspects of this debate, that the fundamental facts are so wildly in dispute. To say that these OECD figures just completely say that there is no link is one point, and the other point is that the per capita growth point in a political sense isn't really being used at the moment as an argument for the pro-immigration case, if you like.

It is a very muted immigration argument at the moment. You have got the Business Council, for example, arguing that we need a higher population for some of the reasons that Paul has mentioned, but nobody has really been out there linking it to individual welfare, which I find quite interesting because it has been quite a strong theme in the whole post-World War II argument, I would have thought, in a political sense – obviously, immediately after the war.

John Coulter: The assumption is that growth of the economy automatically means increase in human welfare, so you don't have to argue that point in the media.

Laura Tingle: No, I would hotly dispute that. I think that even in the debate about whether that much growth is good, in other senses, that is one of the things that are really unclear in people's minds, about whether economic growth per se at really high rates is a good thing.

I think it has been confused in the last 20 years, for example, by the current account deficit debate – the twin deficits theory, if you like. The various arguments that have washed across the political stage I think have left people very confused about whether economic growth is a really good thing, even in economic terms, let alone in terms of the environment.

Peter Garrett: John, just to address your question about ACF's involvement in the debate: I think that we play a measured role in this discussion, because I think it is a debate that is, hopefully, beginning to evolve.

The ACF, as people here would know, does have a fairly coherent and good population policy, one that Phillip Toyne addressed to you last night at dinner. But that sits within a context of a range of other policy positions on a raft of issues to do with the environment, and our primary way of framing these issues is around sustainability and the necessity for ecological modernisation, as you know.

With additional resources we may be able to speak more about population. I know Mike Krockenberger, our strategies director, has participated in fora, and I was very pleased to be able to participate today.

But our conviction is that it is a serious examination of the way in which the economy works, and the effect and implications that has for ecology and the health of our environment, that is the primary task for us to do in terms of our advocacy. And population still remains a subset of that.

Bryan Furnass: I can understand the difficulty in getting a linkage between environment and population into the press. One thing you did studiously avoid in this equation is consumption.

This country is suffering from a communicable disease which one might call galloping consumption or affluenza. We have the highest per capita use of water in the world, for the most arid continent. We have the highest per capita use of energy. And these are holy cows of short-term GDP growth.

Maybe newspapers can't dare to put their foot in the water, because this is attacking what we call our standard of living, which is invariably related to material standards of living. We don't recognise that we can reduce our material standard of living while at the same time improving wellbeing.

I think we have got to get rid of the stranglehold which the economic rationalists have on this country, and on newspapers, and try and open the debate up to say, 'What is the sort of sustainable future we want?' We have got to introduce the idea of reducing consumption into that pattern.

Paul Kelly: Well, I think things are changing. I think that, to look at the media, there is quite a degree of attention given to more efficient use of water and more efficient use of energy resources. I think these issues are being covered more in the media and I think this will increase.

You get a cycle set up, because once these issues go onto the political agenda – and they are now – and they are being addressed by governments, and they become part of the staple of the political debate – and this is starting to happen – then of course they will be increasingly addressed by the media. So I think there is movement there.

Tony McMichael: This follows on from Paul Kelly's immediate remark. You said in your comments that currently the media cover population and at other times they cover environment, but rarely do the twain meet. If we were to take as a premise that a primary objective of the media is to entertain, then is it not the case that single-issue columnists with clear, strong views will better satisfy that criterion than columnists that are going to be exploring the more complex and perhaps tortured relationship between things like population, environment, levels of material consumption, and offering the reader necessarily more complex and qualified views?

Paul Kelly: That's a very populist comment! I think you have got to be careful of that argument. I understand exactly what you are saying, and from time to time one sees columns of this nature, with people warning of more pessimistic outcomes or doomsday scenarios and so on. But I think one has got to be careful of that.

This can get a lot of attention, it can get a lot of short-term attention, there will always be a media appetite for this sort of idea from time to time and there certainly is in the mass entertainment industry, if one looks at the sort of products that are coming out of Hollywood. But I would caution you about pursuing that particular strategy too assiduously. I think that at the end of the day, to be taken seriously, one has to engage in the more tortured and agonising public policy debate.

Richard Denniss: I guess this is a brief comment and then a question. I think most people who work in newspapers or in media more generally know what a story looks like, and I think every politician now employs a journalist on their staff who knows what a story looks like. And therefore they know how to get a non-story into the middle of the public debate or to keep an important story out of the public debate.

Do you think the media has got a role to play in stopping bowling up the same delivery for the next 20 years? Do newspapers have a responsibility to report what is not in the news because the government does not want it there? Does the media have a responsibility to pursue a story when the government is determined to starve it of oxygen by insisting that nobody speaks out on it?

I guess what I am saying is that everyone has got a media adviser, everyone knows what a journalist is looking for in a story, everyone knows how to make it hard for a journalist to write a particular story. Are you going to let them keep doing that?

Laura Tingle: Well, some of us delude ourselves that every so often we actually do punch through, but there we go.

I would observe, in the context of this debate that is going on today, that that is not really what the issue is. I am very interested in the population debate. I don't have an up or down view; I am vaguely concerned about the idea that with not very much water we are trying to get a lot more people into the country, but it is probably about as informed as that. But I offer this as an example of the general public.

I think what I was trying to say in my remarks – and it comes out of what Paul and Peter have been saying today – is that there is a political debate and then there is a debate between experts. And one of the frustrations, which I think has probably become worse under the Howard government just because they have been very good at closing down dissent through a lot of institutional mechanisms, is that I think what has happened is that experts have lost their voice – I think Paul is right in this – and it is very hard to find people to start up a debate and use the media to get that debate going with a punch-through idea.

You have got this incredibly complicated issue, wherever you start it, about population and the environment. I suspect it will probably only move forward when you have a politician or somebody else coming through with some really quite radical but reasonable idea about what you do about it, or some new framework for thinking about it.

I think the media does try to punch through. The spin has become terrible, without a doubt, and accountability is awful. But I don't think it is an issue that is particularly relevant to this particular debate.

Jenny Goldie: I understand that in this country 26 per cent of advertising revenue comes from real estate. To what extent is your pro-population growth policy affected by the fact that you get so much revenue from the real estate industry?

Paul Kelly: I don't think it is a factor at all. Unfortunately, the paper I work for doesn't generate nearly as much revenue from real estate as our management would like. Quite clearly, as you would know, it is more the metropolitan-based papers rather than the national paper that tap in to the real estate market.

But when one is talking about these issues – and I will talk generically now – these sorts of questions come up a lot. I have to say in these cases I don't think the editorial output at all is a function of the advertising drivers. The editorial output is a function of editorial, and to the extent there is a problem, address it at the editorial level. And that's probably good news.

Laura Tingle: I agree with Paul, but I worked for the Sydney Morning Herald for a period of time, and before that for the Age, and although what he says is not disingenuous you would have to concede that there was certainly an interest on a Saturday morning in finding some real-estate story for the front page. That is a separate issue, says Kelly, but it was influencing what was going on with the front page.

I don't think it affects what the average reporter is writing about, or what the average columnist is writing about. But I think you would have to make that concession, that the broadsheets that live on real-estate revenue are always keen to pull in the buyers.

Anna Robinson: From your inside knowledge, how do you think the environment and the population would fare if, instead of having a multiplicity of state governments, we had one government?

Peter Garrett: That's a really good question, and I don't really know that I can answer it that easily.

It is pretty clear to me that, to take a state like South Australia, South Australia has genuinely serious problems with its domestic water supply because the Murray River is in dire health. It is going to be an expensive and very difficult problem to fix, and it requires significant political commitment and will to get water flowing down that river system.

But Adelaide is a city which has had net population loss, I think – correct me if I am wrong, John [Coulter] and others.

John Coulter: There has been very, very slow growth.

Peter Garrett: Yes, very slow growth, and I know that Premier Rann has been concerned about that and believes that it is necessary, in his state, in order for the infrastructure of the state to be maintained and the schools to be filled and so on and so forth, for there to be a kind of population steadiness there.

On the east coast of Australia we have significant movement of people from rural areas and also from some regional areas to the coast. I think from the figure that CSIRO and others are throwing at us – I can't remember the stats – a lot of us are going to be going living on the coast over the next 20 to 30 years.

If you had 'a' national government and there was 'a' national population policy, they would probably want to involve themselves in those issues and you wouldn't look at them on a regional basis. There may be efficiency merits in that, but politically I don't think Australians would be particularly pleased with it.

From an ACF perspective, we work with what we have got. It is a federal system, and we work with the state governments and the national government. And I expect that it will be that way for some time to come.