• Peter Mares

07 September 2010The election campaign showed how we don’t seem able to have a rational debate about population, writes Peter Mares in Inside Story

WHEN I was a teenager growing up in Adelaide in the 1970s, the prominent local environmentalist John Coulter – doctor, founding member of the Conservation Council of South Australia and, later, a Democrats senator and party leader – was calling for a public debate about population and its impact on Australia’s fragile ecology. In 1994, launching a House of Representatives report on Australia’s Population Carrying Capacity, Labor’s Barry Jones called for an “ongoing and informed community debate on population and resource use in Australia.” Now we have Dick Smith, a new convert to the cause, funding his own documentary to promote debate about population. Is this the debate we never start or the debate we never stop having?

Public concern about population numbers seems to ebb and flow and the most passionate campaigners often suggest that there is a degree of complicity among the major political parties and the media to keep it off the agenda. It’s true that there is no good reason not to talk about population. Coulter, Jones, Smith and others are well-intentioned, intelligent people raising issues that are worthy of investigation and discussion. But talking about population is not easy…

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Photo: Postwar immigration minister Arthur Calwell (left) with the Kalnins family – one of whom was “the 50,000th New Australian” – in 1949. National Archives of Australia