A Greater Australia: Population, policies and governance - CEDA

Section 1.2There has been over a century of debate in Australia about the relationships betweenpopulation growth and the environment. This chapter mainly focuses on the academiccontributions to this debate. A wide range of disciplines have been involved, from thephysical and environmental sciences to the social sciences and economics, and thishas produced differences in the way population-environment issues have been framedand analysed, and in the policies advocated. This chapter reviews the history of someof the key themes and issues, and explores the ways that the debate has evolved overtime.Australia’s carrying capacityThe population-environment debate in Australia started in the early 1900s with disagreementover how many people could be supported, or “carried”, by the land andother environmental resources of the young nation. The optimists, or “boosters” asthey were termed, spoke of future populations of from 100 to 300 million people. Theirarguments were based on comparisons with the United States and Europe, and theyviewed land simply in terms of its area, not its productivity. If an area of land in Europesupported so many people, then the same number could be supported in Australia,although in making these calculations the optimists generally did leave out a large partof central Australia as too dry.A vocal critic of this position was Griffith Taylor, the founder of Australia’s first universitydepartment of geography (at Sydney University in 1921). On the basis of inventoriesof regional resources and latitudinal comparisons with other regions in the world, heproposed that the continent could support a maximum of 65 million at the standardof living of Western Europe, and later reduced this to 20 million at a standard of livingcomparable to that of the United States. His estimates of Australia’s population carryingcapacity were based on the climatic potential for agricultural settlement and onindustrial development based on the known coalfields. 1Other estimates of carrying capacity were based on potential food production ratherthan areal comparisons with comparable but longer settled environments. 2 In the1930s, Mullet and Wadham used calculations of the food production capacity of theland to estimate that a population of between 40 and 50 million could be supported. 3More sophisticated estimates were produced in the second half of the century. Giffordand his colleagues, using data from the 1960s, calculated that Australia’s potentialfood production, combined with assumptions about agricultural technology, diets andstandards of living, could feed a resident population of about 30 million if 50 per centof food protein produced was exported, and up to 80 million with a lower proteinconsumption and no agricultural exports. 4 These calculations were revised nearly 20years later, producing estimates of “supportable” populations of from 96 to 206 millionpeople. 5 However, the authors of the revised estimates concluded that:“The dramatic differences between the population estimates of the earlier and currentstudies is good evidence that the specified procedures are simply incapable of beingused to infer anything meaningful for population policy.” 6The carrying capacity of Australia was the subject of an inquiry by a House ofRepresentatives Standing Committee in 1994. The Committee argued that thisdepended on human choices and not on the physical limits of the environment, andconcluded:A Greater Australia: Population, Policies and Governance27