Page 3215 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 23 August 2017
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Population increase is a major concern. As population goes up, our greenhouse gas emissions almost certainly increase. Demand for water rises. Farmland is lost to housing but at the same time we need more farmland because we need more food to feed more people. Waste production goes up. And on and on it goes. I could spend all of my next nine minutes talking about that.
Our environmental footprint has significantly increased over the 60 years that I have been in Canberra. When my family first moved to Canberra, we moved in to Yarralumla. We were told, “How could you live in Yarralumla? It is the end of the world.” People usually laugh at that—and I am glad I have got one laugh. I have a picture of our house there. We did not have a road to it. It was a dirt track. There was a sheep paddock. There were no trees and no roads; just this little house and nothing. I have a picture of us on it. Our environmental impact was a lot less then. The increased population of Canberra has led to a much greater environmental impact. But the world has not increased in size. It has not increased in resources. We cannot keep increasing our population.
Population growth also increases our demand for infrastructure. That is what Mr Pettersson’s motion talked about. As I said, I agree with the concept that we have to provide infrastructure for our population. We just have to look at what population is sustainable for the world.
Population increase is driving up demand for hospitals and schools. It is increasing traffic congestion. It means that we have to build roads and provide more public transport. It puts a huge financial burden on the ACT government. Mr Barr pointed out that the federal government would give us more money if there were more of us, but that is a scheme that does not really work. We are not actually making a profit out of more people, and certainly the world as a whole is not getting any better, in order to support more population.
I refer to a debate in this place a couple of weeks ago. Ms Cheyne brought forward a motion about birth control, and abortion in particular, and the need to reduce population growth in a humane way is one of the reasons I strongly support both of those things. The best way to reduce population growth is to ensure that every child is a wanted child, and that we have laws and legislation that enable women to make choices about reproduction.
The second part of my little equation is consumption. People make their ecological impact through the goods and services they consume. That is, of course, why the ecological footprint of Canberra is so high. We have the good fortune to be an affluent community, but this good fortune comes at a cost. It is the impact that we make on the world and our local environment.
We are working on this. We have made the commitment to turn our electricity supply into 100 per cent renewable by 2020, and I am very glad that that is on track. But there is a future challenge to go on from that. We are currently importing a lot of embedded carbon in the goods we consume, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the buildings we build and the furniture we put in them. You name it; we are importing it.
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