A Chat with Tim Flannery on Population Control

Tim Flannery, Senior Research Scientist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, is an outspoken advocate for informed and vigorous control of populations. His best selling book, The Future Eaters suggests that we're eating ourselves out of house and home...an appetite that's lasted for thousands of years.

The first of Quantum's tenth birthday profiles on leading scientists.

Tx Date: 13/9/95

Reporter: Karina Kelly
Producer: Peter Kirkwood
Researcher: Owen Craig

QUANTUM IS 10 !

Quantum is 10 years old! Over the last decade, science has had to face new challenges, and there have been new developments in all the important areas of science - in many instances these have revolutionised the way we do things, cope with problems, or look at the world.

Over this series of Quantum, we'll be looking at some of those big areas - how they've changed over the last 10 years and where they are now. And we'll be asking experts to tell us what the next decade has in store for us - where will science be in the year 2005 when it comes to dealing with some of the big questions and problems confronting humankind?

In the first of these items, Quantum asks Tim Flannery, senior research scientist at The Australian Museum and population expert, to look at the future of population in Australia.

POPULATION EXPLOSION

Summary
In Australia at the moment, population is a hot topic. Can our country sustain even the number of people we already have?

In the mid 1980s when Quantum began, it was boom time in Australia. It was a period of unbridled optimism and, with no long-term population policy, the Hawke Government advocated an aggressive population expansion.

But now the mood is very different. This year the number of Australians has just nudged past 18 million. After one of our worst droughts, and a severe economic recession, the notion of population control is being seriously discussed and debated - perhaps for the first time.

With the present rate of growth, by the year 2000, our population will be 19 million. By 2005, it could be 20 million.

Tim Flannery
Tim Flannery is a senior research scientist at The Australian Museum in Sydney. He's an expert on Australian mammals, and endangered and extinct species. But he's also put human activity under the microscope.

In his current best seller - "The Future Eaters" - he argues that we Australians have devoured our resources at the expense of our country, and future generations. He is a vigorous advocate of population control.

The interview:
Q: Most developed countries don't have population policies. Why should Australia have one?

Flannery: Australia should have a population policy because we have an increasing population. A lot of developed countries don't. But we have an increasing population and a very unusual ecology and those two factors together, I think, mean that we need to plan carefully.

Q: Why is it that you believe Australia, which has an area the same size as the United States, can't support a similar sort of population - hundreds of millions ?

Flannery: Really because the ecology of Australia is so different and so unique. Land size really has very little to do with the number of people you can support on it. Witness the Antarctic which is larger than Australia, and no one's suggesting in could even support a million people. The tiny island of Java which is very, very rich and fertile can support a hundred million. But Australia's ecology is very, very limiting.

Q: But what is it about the Australian landscape that makes it so unsuitable for supporting a larger population ?

Flannery: Well, Australia has by far the world's least fertile soils so hat half is fertile and average as comparable soils overseas. It's just very old land. A very ancient landscape. The soils here are a fossil resource, they're millions of years old. And its very, very difficult to make a living from it. And you can see that in Australia today where our agriculture is in crisis. I mean 70% of our soils are degraded. The annual input of agriculture into the overall Australian economy is relatively declining and mining is taking its place so what we're doing is moving from the sustainable use of a renewable resource into exploiting a non-renewable resource which is mining, in a hope of continuing this growth. And that trend should be worrying for people.

Q: What do you think the ideal population of Australia should be ?

Flannery: Well, my personal estimate is that's probably going to lie somewhere between six and 12 million. But the great tragedy for the nation is that we don't know the answer to that question. We've never asked it sensibly. I may be proven to be wrong, but I don't think I'm going to be greatly wrong. The answer may be 20 million, but it's certainly not going to be 200 million.

Q: How would we control our population?

Flannery: Well, the main and easiest thing to control really is immigration levels because that is what's contributing to the major population growth at the moment. We're below replacement level as far as births go, but we do have a very large number of baby boomers having children which is causing a temporary increase in numbers. But really, in the long term, it's going to be immigration which will cause the big change.

Q: Your strong stand on population has earned you the criticism of being a racist. How do you respond to that?

Flannery: All I can say is that I think there's a place for immigration and always will be in Australia's population policy. I don't care in the least where anyone comes from - it's just total numbers that really worry me. My concern as a scientist is simply to ensure that we have a sustainable future in Australia.

Q: If we are to curb our population, Tim Flannery believes we need to change the image we have of ourselves and our country: we must get away from the erroneous view that Australia is a fertile and empty land just waiting to be filled.

Flannery: I think many Australians see themselves living in antipodean United States of America that just needs more population to become a huge southern giant. And that, I think, is clearly not true. The real future of Australia will lie in being a small, stable and affluent, confident country. Not a large ailing giant which we'd become if we tried to follow that option. Things that grow forever in the natural world are called cancers and they eventually bring about the downfall of the system.

Q: So where should we be in 10 years from now?

Flannery: In 10 years from now I'd love to see us with a population policy in place with an ultimate target perhaps set two centuries in advance that we are gradually heading towards and with a much more flexible immigration policy that would say if there's a terrible crisis overseas and we need to take in 200,000 or 300,000 refugees in a year, we by all means do it. But in the context of the overall policy so then, in the long term, we may have lesser numbers for another decade or two after that. So that we would have a more humane and humanitarian immigration policy, a more flexible one, we'd know where we were going in the long term and we'd be headed for sustainability on this continent.

Q: That's where we should be. Where do you think we will be ?

Flannery: We're the people who are going to make the decisions, and if we end up making no decisions we'll actually end up in fact , making a decision after all, because we'll continue with the present policy which is a directionless population policy heading for limitless growth.

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