Session 5: Questions/discussion

Ross Steele: Peter, I was just wondering if you could elaborate that last point, in that it is often simplistic, I think, to ask why developed countries who are such big users of the world's natural resources would be so concerned about a population growth decline in the future. And what is the nexus with environmental impact?

Peter McDonald: I think developing countries are becoming very aware of the environmental impacts of population. There is the growth of mega-cities, absolutely huge cities, around the world – 25 million people and more – and the planning and running of those cities, and the environmental degradation, the air pollution et cetera. There is, in various places, deforestation related to the extending of settlement, as well as soil degradation because of the cropping systems, and water shortages. All of those issues are becoming, I think, much more a part of the developing country agenda now.

Another interesting example which has arrived recently is China's phenomenal economic growth and its implications for the demand on resources. The present oil price is somewhat related to that.

So there are real issues emerging which bring the three disciplines together, I think: the demography, the economics and the environment. And there is a lot of attention being focused on those. I have got some information here about what is going on in the population field with regard to environment; I think there is much more going on from the 1990s, much more attention of demographers to the environment field – not necessarily in Australia, as Katharine has been pointing out, but in other places globally. And the International Population Conference next year in Paris has many sessions on population and environment.

Jenny Goldie: You talk about the projections of 9.2 billion, at which the world will stabilise, as a good news story because it is half the projections of 17 billion from the 1960s. But are you aware of the Mathis Wackernagel study from a couple of years ago, commissioned by the US National Academy of Sciences? That said that the world had passed its regenerative and absorptive capacity back in 1979 and with every year that passes we exceed that limit by 1 per cent, so now we are at 25 per cent past that regenerative capacity – in other words, we are past the carrying capacity of the Earth.

I am just wondering: (a) are you aware of that study, and (b) are you and other demographers conveying that message to the various countries that are trying to increase their fertility rate, to say that maybe we do have an environmental problem with the existing world population of 6.3 billion and that it should be cut back, not allowed to expand to 9.2 billion?

Peter McDonald: The point I was trying to make is about population momentum. The chance of stopping it from going to 9.2 billion is very, very low indeed. And the more important ways that the world population growth can be slowed down are by slowing down population growth in countries like Pakistan and the Philippines, and in Sub-saharan Africa. That's where all the growth is in the future. Most demographers, consistently for the last 50 years, have been out there trying to deal with those issues, to bring fertility rates down.

So I don't think we should be holding up hopes that the world population is going to stop growing at 6 billion, where it is now, because it is not. It is the logic of demography. There are a lot of countries around the world that have age structures that look like this [demonstrates], and if they don't shift to zero-child families or one-child families, then the world's population is going to grow. There is no question about it.

I think we should be accepting those kinds of realities, not putting the head in the sand, and trying to deal with environmental issues in that context: this is going to happen, we work all the time to reduce fertility rates in countries that have high fertility – as we have been doing – and when it comes to countries with low fertility, you know I have an argument that in the end you have to stabilise population in some kind of way. You can't let it fall away; you have to stabilise the population. If you are talking about Australia, for example, if you want to stabilise Australia's population at the lowest possible level then you have a somewhat higher fertility and a low migration, rather than the reverse. If you have the reverse, you end up with a much, much bigger population by the time you reach a stable level.

So, from a demographic argument, very low fertility is not a good idea because eventually when you want to stabilise the population you are doing it through migration and that makes a bigger population for a country. But then, on the other side, I am sympathetic to the economic argument that huge falls, in a short period of time, in the labour supplies of countries is not good economics for those countries. Every country in the world that has a fertility rate under 1.5 reports to the United Nations that it is unhappy with its fertility rate, that it thinks its fertility rate is too low. So you are fighting a huge tide to say that we all should be 1.2 or 1.3.

Chris Watson: I am reading the environmental literature. They are saying that population will perhaps peak at 7 billion but it could perhaps drop back to 2 billion in a century, because of environmental stress and the rapid decline in energy supplies. It is going to be a tragedy if this occurs, particularly for countries like Australia, America and Europe that are so dependent, propping up this whole society with energy. I don't think, Professor McDonald, you have really taken into account what may happen, what might be forced upon us, if we become a bloody rat-race in the century ahead.

Peter McDonald: I don't agree.

John Coulter: I would just like to take up Peter's answer to the previous question, in the Australian context. Yesterday morning we heard the Minister open this conference by saying that the 20 million people now living in Australia were not living sustainably, and he catalogued many of the indicators of that. He then went on to say that the present Australian government was giving the 'highest priority' to developing a sustainable Australia.

You have said, and I think we have agreed on a previous platform, that population growth in developed countries does not necessarily correlate with economic growth, that the two are independent variables – not true in underdeveloped countries, as you have said today. Given that, and given that the federal government is at the same time increasing the intake of migrants, what advice do you have to the federal government, which seems to be wanting to increase the migration intake, when you are accepting that an increase in population will not lead to economic growth, the federal government is saying that it is giving the highest priority to sustainability and it is saying that we are not living sustainably now? Surely those things put together would indicate that your advice and everybody's informed advice to government should be that the migration rate should be decreased.

Peter McDonald: The one problem with migration statistics for Australia at the moment is that they have collapsed. Although there are numbers published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the numbers now published are highly questionable. We have argued that at the present time we don't actually know what Australia's migration is. It is somewhere between 90,000 and 130,000 per annum but that is a very big range, compared with the way we used to measure migration.

Another factor is that migration now has moved very much in the direction of temporary migration, as distinct from settlement migration. This is really the big change in Australian migration, and the government has been stimulating that very much, as you say. The driving force behind growth in migration is more foreign students, more people coming here to work on a temporary basis and filling skill shortages and all of that kind of thing.

My attitude to that is probably that that is good policy, in fact. There are some rorts and so on; these appear in the papers from time to time and they have to be controlled. The government has also now shifted its permanent residence policy to offering permanent residence to foreign students in Australia. Again I think that is probably good policy, because these are people who are very much attuned to Australia and can settle in very easily, and if they have got a job then that is all the better.

So my view about migration has been – and it is published – that the levels around the current level are about right, that if you have migration around the current level, fertility around the current level, Australia's population rises to 25 million or 26 million over the next 30 or 40 years and then stabilises and has zero population growth after that – and a very nice age structure, for all kinds of reasons.

John Coulter: But unsustainable, by the Minister's admission.

Peter McDonald: Well, you could get another Minister – have Peter Costello up here and see what he says.

Katharine Betts: I think it is interesting that you think the numbers are about right, Peter, but we don't know what the actual numbers are! Fair enough. We do know that the size of the program, at 133,000 permanent migrants, is the largest we have had for over 10 years. It is very big, and we have a very large and uncapped temporary program. Of course, a lot of the temporaries do switch over and become permanents, but that doesn't add to the 133,000; it is factored in to it. And I agree with what Peter says, that allowing international students to apply for permanent visas after a while is probably a better idea because they have already become acclimatised to the country.

But I think there is an aspect of the immigration debate beyond the actual numbers that we need to think about. That is what Barney Foran was telling us yesterday, that if we are going to cope with increased numbers we need to somehow or other reduce our rate of metabolism – I think that was the way that he expressed it – to perhaps 50 per cent of what it is now, perhaps 30 per cent of what it is now. That is going to require enormous sacrifices and enormous change, and my argument is that we won't be able to make those sacrifices and bring those changes about if we don't care, if we don't think of ourselves as an Australian people with a future, with a love and concern for each other and for the land that we all share.

And it becomes harder to generate that sense of nationhood, that sense of peoplehood, the more the population is temporary, just arrived, not quite sure whether they are staying here or not, not quite sure whether this is the next step on to an interesting career in Frankfurt or somewhere.

So I think there are these social and psychological aspects of the immigration program that we need to think about as well and that are closely tied to the environmental problems. And this I think is an area where interdisciplinary research would be helpful. In what circumstances will people agree to cut back on their lifestyle, cut back on their environmental footprint?

Some years ago I heard a comment from a rich man who had taken to heart the environmental message, and his response was, 'If this is the Titanic, I'm going first class.' If we all think, 'This is the Titanic and I'm going first class, and to heck with what happens in 20 or 30 years' time because I won't be here,' then we are doomed. We need a collective spirit in which we care about what happens in the next 30, 40, 50 years when most of us here are not going to be around.

You don't get that kind of self-sacrificing spirit if we are just a bunch of people who have lobbed in to Australia for a few years and then are going to lob off somewhere else when an interesting job offer overseas comes up. Yes, we need that kind of movement at the fringes, so that new ideas and new people come and go. But unless there is a solid core of people with a commitment to the Australian people and to the Australian land, then I think we are going to be in a pickle.

So, regardless of what the actual immigration numbers are or might be, we do know that the planned program is 133,000 and that is a large number of people. And I think there are some social and psychological aspects of that tied to the questions that were raised by Barney [Foran] and others yesterday.

Alex Wells: Yesterday Barney Foran showed us the very clear link between resource consumption in Australia and population growth, resource consumption being a pretty good surrogate for environmental damage. This question, I suppose, is to Professor Betts, because you said that people who claim to be concerned about the environment or rate it very highly are, paradoxically, also the people who want high immigration. I am just wondering if you could maybe explain that. Have you gone into the thought processes that these people have, to result in that particular paradox?

Katharine Betts: Yes, it is something that I have certainly thought about and tried to explore. Obviously, there are committed environmentalists in this room, including sterling representatives of Sustainable Population Australia, who don't fall into that category. But the kind of people who switched to voting for the Greens in the last election, for example, voted Green because they were concerned about the boat people and the 'Pacific solution'. Now, they had every right to be concerned about these things, and the Green party was one of the two parties that were flagging that they were going to do something about this and not going to use the inhumane practices of the Howard government. So if that was your main concern, and as the two mainstream parties both had the same sorts of policies, to vote Green was a clear option.

What we can see in the environmental movement is that the mainstream environmental movement groups, like the ACF in Australia and the Sierra Club in the United States, are really torn by their sentiments about international human rights and social justice as it applies to population control in one country. If it means 'us' having fewer children, that's okay, and it is all right if it means 'us' being told that we have to reduce what we consume. That's okay; it's all right to blame ourselves. But once you start saying we should be very careful about the number of migrants, then you start to breach these international human rights and international social justice principles – which I respect. They're excellent ideals. It is just that unless we think through clearly about the implications of that for the kind of national communal spirit that we are going to need to draw on to solve our problems, then we are just talking windy rhetoric and making statements about our moral principles.

So I think that we do need to think through what is the most effective way to help other people. Is an open borders policy, where people who are suffering, people who are afraid, but also people who have got nous and money, can get to where they need to be, or where we cream off the scientists, doctors, nurses from the Third World because we are too tight to train our own? Is this really the best way to run an international aid program? This is the kind of area where I think the environmental movement has been really terribly hung up on the fact that if they say anything about immigration control they are going to look like selfish people, isolationists and racists. You can document that in the history of the ACF and also in the Sierra Club in the United States, which is why groups like SPA have formed, because they weren't able to press for their population ideals through the mainstream environmental movement.