Laura Tingle has worked in the federal parliamentary press gallery for over sixteen years, reporting on politics and economics, including stints as political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, and as chief political correspondent for both The Australian and The Age newspapers. She moved into political reporting from economics, following a long period covering financial markets and deregulation for the Australian Financial Review and as economics correspondent for The Australian. She is also the author of Chasing the Future – a book documenting how the recession of the early 1990s changed Australia's political and economic debate. Laura Tingle has visited Europe and Japan on numerous occasions, including study trips to look at European monetary and economic union and the Japanese economic crisis. She is currently chief political correspondent of the Australian Financial Review.

Media panel session: Questions/discussion

Gough Whitlam, according to one of his former ministers, led an historic trip to Moscow as the Cold War still raged. As he was being shown around the treasures of the Kremlin, one of his Communist hosts approached him to say that, as a sign of the renewed ties of friendship between the People's Soviets and the people of Australia, the USSR wanted to buy Australia's entire wheat crop that year. Whitlam allegedly responded, 'Comrade, comrade, let's not talk about trade. Let's talk about art.' Whitlam strode on, leaving Australian trade officials reaching for their heart pills in his wake.

The story came to mind when I was reviewing some of the recent volleys fired across the great divide in the population-environment debate. Just how you will overcome that divide is something that the wiser heads here will contemplate; what I have been asked to do today is to offer some observations about why these issues are covered as they are (or they aren't) in the media. And I will take the tradesman-like approach and leave the art to Paul Kelly – and Peter Garrett, of course.

Let's consider the structure of the media, and particularly newspapers. That's where I work, but it is also the place where complex public policy questions fester first in the public mind before they trickle out to radio and television and end up being covered on Today Tonight as some variation on Two-Timing Trish.

People often believe there are all sorts of dark conspiracies determining how newspapers cover a story. The driving factors are often much more mundane. At the back of each news editor's mind each day is the information that comes from the fact that increasingly the pursuit of particular stories or issues is driven by market research, which creates for newspaper editors pencil sketches not just of who reads their newspapers but of the people who editors would like to read their newspapers.

There is also the brutal fact that the most influential newspapers in the country – that is, the papers read by both opinion makers and the electronic media who pinch their stories to fill their airtime – are run predominantly out of Sydney. That Sydney-central view of the world, whether they like it or not, influences both the two national newspapers, the Australian and the Financial Review, and also gives the Sydney Morning Herald much more influence than the generally declining quality of its coverage often deserves. (Take that as comment!)

The implications of this particular view of the world for the population debate are pretty clear. Population, and perceptions that there is too much of it in Australia – or will be – is a hot issue in a city with diminishing space, mediocre infrastructure and water restriction problems looming. The view of the population debate from Sydney is going to be much less inventive and welcoming than it might be if newspapers were all run out of some country town desperate to get a country doctor.

Then there are the reporters. Public policy issues tend to be covered on a day-by-day basis by reporters in a place where the issue is the hottest. That usually means Canberra, and that means working out of the parliamentary press gallery. In turn, the brutal truth of that is that the coverage of the stories often starts with the politics of an issue rather than the coverage of an underlying policy debate.

Reporters' responsibilities in a Canberra news bureau tend to be grouped into areas with vague overlap and allocated among junior staff. For example, industrial relations and legal issues and the Attorney-General's portfolio might be the responsibility of one reporter. Immigration might be grouped with employment issues and human rights. In a period where the environment might be regularly said to be important but is not a daily part of the news cycle, the environment round might be allocated to someone who also covers the resources sector and the agriculture round.

My point here is obvious: finding a journalist in Canberra who might be covering both environment issues and immigration and population issues is unlikely. Sometimes it might be taken up by a senior writer in a capital city as an occasional survey of a debate, but for an issue to really take hold in the media it has to have both lots of ideas being tossed around in it and some signs of progress.

My perusal of the population debate in the last couple of months as this conference has approached, whether from an environmental perspective or an economic one, suggests that not only do these two disciplines, or the various disciplines that are involved, not really inter-react; the individual disciplines don't seem to get much of a lively internal debate going on either. For example, the capacity of those who argue that we must boost the population, for reasons of economic growth, to vigorously argue the counter argument seems limited. That might change if there was any political momentum and commitment to make the population issue come alive, but the prospects here look bleak too.

Consider some recent events. Two years ago the Howard government handed down its intergenerational report warning about the ageing of Australia's population and the implications of that for the economy. It canvassed three ways of boosting the working-age population: more babies, more people in the work force and more immigration.

The problem with relying on more babies, we were told at the time, was that it meant actually taking people out of the work force to raise them. There was a big push to justify getting the disabled into the work force and a curious silence about the possibilities of using migration to substantially boost the work force. Two years on, in the budget just delivered, Peter Costello seems to have changed his mind and told us all to go out and breed.

Cynics might think that the original take-out on the disabled and the more recent one on families were just convenient intellectual dressing for the political fad of the moment. It also suggests an unwillingness by the Coalition to contemplate even canvassing the spectre of a higher level of immigration, even if it were to be sold as a way of boosting economic growth under any circumstances.

On the other side of politics, Mark Latham has talked of more immigration, but only if they don't all come to Sydney, and let's have less multiculturalism as well. Despite Labor's publication of a Chifley Centre paper on immigration and the regions, we have yet to see any actual policy aimed at doing what the pro-population growth camp argues: spreading migrants beyond Sydney. That would seem to give an implicit win to the environmental camp, even before the debate begins. Yet consider some counter cases.

I know Glenn Withers and others have argued convincingly that the current dilemmas over Australia's water supply and river problems are a function of agricultural usage and not population. But with water restrictions now in place in many Australian cities, and predictions of doom hanging over Adelaide in the medium term, most voters probably would not see it that way.

It is going to be interesting to see how proponents of the environmental arguments about Australia's future, and also those who argue for a sustained lift in population through immigration, break through the naked self-interest that currently seems to leave politicians too frightened to establish some new view of the country.

In the meantime, the two sides of the debate will probably continue to be covered separately in the media. At the Financial Review, for example, our agriculture reporter is looking at some of the papers at the conference today on the greenhouse issue, while our economics correspondent is looking at some of the papers on immigration. It seems never the twain shall meet.