AT NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, 30 AUGUST 1997
AUSTRALIANS FOR AN ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE POPULATION(AESP)
Population flow out of Sydney, the capital city of New South Wales, to other parts of Australia is about equal to population inflow from other parts of the world. Is the cost of living and the pace of change becoming too much for the average citizen? Land speculation is rife and continuous property development has transformed the city into a spectacular warren of concrete canyons. It is hard to see how the city will cope with the growing demand for water by industry and citizens.
The following is the full text of Premier Carr's speech:
I became interested in it when in the early seventies I saw Paul Ehrlich speak on the ABC's Monday Conference, and he clarified for me the impact of some of the great forces shaping the world.
You've got to remember in the early 1970s when Ehrlich spoke about the possibility of something we now call the Greenhouse Effect there was nothing like the scientific consensus that exists about it today.
Ehrlich spoke about those terrifying statistics, the doubling of the world's population every 35 years and the fact that in a country like Kenya the population of the world doubled every 17 years ... but of course when Ehrlich came to Australia's position he delivered the greatest shock because he said Australia is in fact already overpopulated and then as you'd be familiar with his argument he went on to explain that we judge this by the point at which a country's population begins to dent its capacity to provide a sustainable living for its people in the years hence.
Australia has got enormous difficulties because of the vulnerability of our soils, our water and our vegetation. We have less robust vegetation, a less robust river system and less robust soils than any other continent. The fact is that all our rivers could fit into the Mississippi and take only part of its flow. Our soils are so fragile they can blow away. In the Western division of NSW we've lost two-thirds of our vegetation cover and that has rendered us even more vulnerable.
We've got to dispose once and for all of the notion that Australia is an underpopulated continent, an empty continent waiting to be filled up. We're not in that position. In Australia the pressure of population is having a very marked effect on our capacity to provide a secure environment capable of sustaining the incomes of our people in the years ahead.
There are so many examples that bear this out. Our river systems have produced in recent years the longest outbreak of blue-green algae that the world has seen. Consider this: population is growing along the east coast of Australia at a rate equivalent to a new city the size of Canberra every year. You can see it in the new suburban housing estates on the north coast of NSW or along the Queensland coast. Up at Byron Bay the local council is saying 'no more population because our sewerage system won't take it'.
On the mid north coast of NSW we had an outbreak of hepatitis linked to the overdevelopment and the population growth in that region. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what caused this outbreak but it represents the pressure on the delicate coastal ecology of the population growth. And the result was that sewerage had an impact on the ecology of the lake and on the local industry - the oyster industry. Now there is a classic example, that all of you can hold up, as the pressures of population growth beginning to dent our capacity in the future for sustainable economic activity. There is an industry hurt by the environmental impact of unsustainable population growth.
Sydney is already one of the biggest cities you'd find in the developed world - bigger than any of the cities of Germany, except Berlin - and Sydney suburbs are being transformed before our eyes into high or medium density suburbs. So that lovely quality of life we were able to offer our people through low density suburban living is being lost - as it must be lost as, reflecting population growth, our city either goes out or goes up.
Ladies and gentlemen, these are the realities we see around us, and they reflect of course what's happening around the world. I think of the position of China, a population of 1.2 billion people. No water from any of its rivers is drinkable, from its major rivers, not even drinkable after boiling. You go to Korea and you talk to people there - they say Korea is polluted by the enormous build-up of industrial pollution in the air over neighbouring Chinese provinces.
Pollution, the pressures of population and development, know no boundaries as Chernobyl taught us. California - what a happy world that is going to be, when in the next couple of decades they suburbanise the entire central valley of California. What a splendid jewel of civilisation that will be - the suburban housing estates right up the central valley of California, with that great American contribution to our times, the shopping mall, being the embodiment, the very perfection of the species in the 21st century. What a happy world it will be.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think people are ready to grasp the argument that the unsustainable growth in population numbers is degrading our planet and that Australia must begin to think of itself as a country with a population problem. Let's throw away for all time the notion that Australia is an empty space just waiting to be filled up. Our rivers, our soils, our vegetation won't allow that to happen without an enormous cost to us and those who come after us.
We come to the economic arguments, and I'm looking forward to reading the papers that'll be presented on that this theme at your conference today. It strikes me that we can depend on economic growth that comes in an easy fashion driven by population growth. You've had that in south Queensland : the new suburban estates, the shopping malls - that's worth a few percentage points of economic growth, but it comes at an enormous cost.
On the other hand, we can sustain jobs and economic security by using our brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products we produce here - the food and the fibre and the mineral products we produce here. By elaborately transforming manufactures - we're beginning to prove as a people that we're good at that. By promoting our health innovations to the world. By promoting excellence in education to the world. By selling these services.
That's a smart Australia. Giving security to its people by thinking intelligently. It's not a lazy Australia, that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building houses and shopping malls.
Tim Flannery put it well in his book The Future Eaters. He argued that Australians have devoured our resources at the expense of the country and future generations. In an interview on Quantum he said, when he was asked why he thought Australia needed a population policy when most other developed countries didn't have one, "Because we have an increasing population - a lot of developing countries don't - and a very unusual ecology. This means we have to plan very carefully, because if we end up making no decisions, we'll actually end up making a decision after all because we'll continue with the present policy, which is a directionless policy heading for limitless growth".
I think those words bear thinking about at a conference like this. Let's look at what policies we need to stabilise the Australian population as soon as we can. Let's look at those policies that enable us, having stabilised the Australian population in the second half of the next century, to begin winding it back, so that we can save our river systems, save our natural environment, and not pass on to the Australians of 100 years' time an utterly degraded inheritance.
Let's recognise that we've got one of the most vulnerable ecologies in the world, and it's barely struggling to sustain the pressures we're putting it under at the present time. My Government has tried to help this debate by getting out a paper on immigration and planning in NSW. What I've found is that the citizens of NSW are ready for this debate.
When I've made calls for a population policy I've been heartened that the ethnic communities have understood entirely that it is possible to have a debate on this driven by ecological concerns. I've met the Ethnic Communities Council of NSW after making some of my comments on the need for a population policy. They've understood entirely that there is room for a debate driven by the ecological imperatives.
Let us recognise that we've got a very sophisticated population. People understand these arguments, because they look at what's happening with blue-green algae in our river systems. They look at the impact of population growth in the Sydney basin. They know what's happening to the Murray Darling Basin. They know, they sense in their bones, that we cannot go on relying on a population growth year by year to achieve our objectives as a nation and not pay a very high price.
I think of some of our achievements in the last two and a half years in Government. We've declared 40 new national parks, including the huge one in the south east of NSW, the South East Forests National Park. We are about to announce a huge package on water for the Sydney Basin. We've increased the price of water in the country and produced incentives to prevent the wasteful irrigation practices that have occurred in the past. For the first time we're allocating water from our river systems to sustain inland wetlands and bringing them back to life. Sustaining, reviving bird populations in central NSW. We've put the forestry industry on a sustainable basis. We've co-opted people in forests to restructure, to enable us to set aside high conservation areas as these new national park reserves.
Now all these are very significant achievements. But 100 years from now I don't want Australians to be going into those national parks and looking at a few token exhibits of what this ancient continent once resembled, and then leaving the boundaries of these nature reserves and seeing a degraded inheritance - a country with damaged rivers, with little native vegetation, with every indicator of degradation.
That's the great challenge we face - a sustainable population for this continent. It is a great challenge because we've got two great assets : we've got an educated population that can follow these debates and think about its future when presented with the arguments, and we've still got a great deal of the natural world, despite the impact of 200 years, a great deal of the natural world still to save. An educated population and a lot to save. Now, that's a combination you don't get throughout the developed world, but we've got it here.
On the other side of the ledger, there've been few parts of the planet that have sustained such a massive impact, such heavy change, within a short period. It might have taken 400 years on the North American continent before people made the transformation that Europeans have made on this continent in a little over 200 years.
So that's the argument, these are the issues you're grappling with at this most important conference. There's no gathering more important than this taking place anywhere in the State. I congratulate you for being at the head of this debate. Future generations will applaud you for putting these issues on the agenda and arguing them through.
So in congratulating Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population, and for the effort that's gone into this conference, I wish you well in your deliberations here today. Thank you.
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