Page 2404 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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These ideas sound like something from a eugenics movement publication, and I find this committee’s framing of the issue along these lines rather chilling. What are the results of pushing the population agenda? The outcome of this orientation, of course, is the fact that peppered through the report we get statements such as:
... in each state and territory, the population in the centre and inner suburbs of the capital city are contributing the most per person to the ecological footprint …
... researchers on ecological footprints are all in agreement about high population growth rates and high employment and income rates being strongly and positively correlated with large ecological footprints …
... the bulk of the ACT ecological footprint of the ACT and ACR is due to steadily increasing consumption of food, goods and services per person …
It goes on to say:
... the Australian Conservation Foundation has nominated human population as a ‘key threatening process’ to Australia’s biodiversity under the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.
It was alarming to note that a noticeable number of submissions understood the intent of this report, as it noted:
A quarter of the submissions to the Inquiry expressed an expectation that the Committee might orient the Inquiry towards proposing a maximum carrying capacity population for the ACT. Some also unambiguously argued that the ACT’s population should be limited …
That is on page 65 of the report. I note that recommendation 22 asks the ACT government to work with ACR governments to “prevent and mitigate” the adverse environmental impacts of population. In all these submissions and recommendations there is a push to limit population. I do not agree that this is a viable or desirable policy approach.
Then, of course, there was the shaky evidence. Yet much of what is asserted in this report implicitly concedes that it is based on inconclusive evidence. Hence we find this report attempting to fill the data gap for its agenda, yet at the same time making recommendations regardless of not having sufficient data. For example, it is firm in its position on population’s impact on our ecology, as shown in recommendations 19 and 22, yet it states:
The office of the ACT Demographer is located in the CMCD. While that office has published useful analyses of the ABS demographic data on the ACT, it has not published any on ACT population growth and population growth in human settlements surrounding the ACT, or how population dynamics interact with the state of the environment in the ACT or the ACR.
The report also mentions “peak oil” repeatedly in several sections and in recommendation 16, yet it has no empirical proof to base its assertion on, admitting:
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