populate or perish: how its destroying Australia

abstract

Australia is a unique and delicate environment. This is often hidden by the harsh conditions which will kill you if you don't know what your doing. Gradually Australians have come to understand this and come to know and love their country. However this is turning around and I have seen quite significant reversals of comprehension and understanding of Australia and its environment in the last 20 years. At the same time the levels of / and nature of environmental destruction have not really abated.

The preservation of our natural beauty, our native flora and fauna and the proper management of our key natural resources (not just plain exploitation) depends not only on the government, but on the understanding of and engagement with this by the public. We are a democracy so the government is steered by the public.

In this article I try to present one aspect of the reversal of positive trends in this area and put forward what I see as being core factors.

Since settlement of this country the purpose of government here has been the exploitation of resources to make (in the first instance) a self sustaining penal colony, making a profit for England and eventually (after federation) it remained in that mode of shovel it out the door to the 'stakeholders'.

Untold areas of land were altered by land clearing, deforestation, farming, irrigation and other practices.

During the about the fifties we began a paradigm shift of mentality from Australia being "a strange place we find ourselves in" to "my homeland which I know and love". In that period a generation of people were born who's parents did not regard somewhere else as being where they come from, but that Australia was where they come from. People like Len Webb became interested in observing what we were doing wrong with the management of our land and became interested in saving it. This became known as the environmental movement.

I encourage you to take a moment to examine some of his photographic documentation works at Griffith University's collection here. It could be argued that from the early Governors of the colony of NSW sought to protect this land, but the movement to protect the environment among the people only really took hold in the generatoin born after the 50's.

Recently the movement of environmental protection has been derailed and become an agenda of social reforms and conflicting ideology which seems to fail to engage the public as once did the bid to save the Franklin River campaign. Indeed the slogan of no dams has morphed subtly to remove the idea of it being within world heritage areas in South West Tasmania.

Since the 70's and 80's the importance of the environment to Australians has passed its peak. We see now in the 21st Century that interest in Environmental issues, people are now no longer worried about the Australian environment, its degradation and losses of land.

I feel there is substantial evidence to support that part of the reason for this is that more and more the public know less and less about Australia in large part because less and less of the Australian public are from Australia.

discussion

A quick read of Australian history reveals we've changed substantially as a nation. Starting with the settlement we were at first just a colony of immigrants.

While the contribution of immigration to what represents Australian culture and our society, there comes a point where if we bring people in fast enough it creates a level of social turmoil (apart from the normal growth dynamic of any society) and "turning the cement forever will just result in stuff which will never set". In this discussion I will attempt to demonstrate that after starting out as an infant nation sometime during the building of it we have made wrong choices which I feel are detrimental to the ongoing strength of Australia.

After the cessation of Convict labour in the 1840's, our immigration levels slowed and we started to take on the character of an infant nation. People like Henry Parkes began pushing for the unification of the colonies and the formation of a nation and by 1901 we had become a federated nation and started down the path of becoming a country in our own right.

Clearly we were a migrant based nation at that time, but its important to observe that we were growing in population AND importantly growing in population of people who were born here. It is this point which I consider of greatest significance, as the longer you are here the more you are likely to feel that this place is your home and not look at it as simply a place to screw over to take your money home with you.

Some time shortly after WW2 we began a serious intake of migrants, which (perhaps) was based on the belief that we needed to have a larger work force. One of the men in government at that time was Arthur Calwell, who believed strongly in the need to increase our population. He pioneered the "Populate or Perish" theme which became embedded in the machinery immigration policy.



I'm sure he was a well meaning fellow, but I believe that the mechanisms he put in place have ultimately provided for the destruction of what is Australia and what is important to us.

There is an old adage "divide and conquer" and perhaps the surest way to divide a people is to bring in new ones all the time. I believe that the Populate or Perish policy did exactly that.

As you can see from some data the results of this policy has been the increasing decline of the population of Australians who were born in Australia with a steady stream of migrants. Looking at this ABS document we can see quickly that from about the time of Federation we became increasingly a nation of migrants ...

Fig 4.2 Australia's population born overseas(a)(b)


with (at the time of Calwell) something like 10% of Australians being born overseas. This of course means that 90% of Australians were born here.

Australia became a federated nation (not just a bunch of colonies) on the first of Jan 1901 (the first day of the twentieth century) and marked a time when Australians were wanting to become Australian. At that point in time the population was still something like 20% migrant, but it was turning around with increasingly more and more people living here who were born here.

The results of the immigration policy was to begin adding quickly to the size of the population. Which was just as it was intended. This can be seen clearly in this population graph below.



However as seen above it also returned the trend away from Australians being people who are born here to increasingly people who have moved here within their lifetime. Perhaps this is the fastest growing national population in the developed world and perhaps also the fastest changing one too.

Change is a double edged sword, as it brings both good and bad.

As a country we have very high urbanization, and interestingly it seems that the migrants who come to Australia prefer to live in the cities with "eight out of ten people born overseas lived in a capital city. Just over half were in Sydney or Melbourne"(source abs).

Which in my view can only increase the distancing of Australians from really understanding Australia. People who live in big cities (and make no mistake, cities now are quite different from cities at the beginning of the 2oth Century) are more likely to have disconnected and partially formed grasps of reality.
Its not unusual for city people to

• not know where water comes from,
  
• not know where sewerage goes or how its treated
• not know where food comes from
• not understand much at all about food
• be filled with unreal contradictions For instance "I want to eat meat, but killing an animal to eat it is disgusting"
  

No wonder less and less we see anyone give a shit about the degradation of the Australian landscape and the effects of pollution. Instead everyone goes on about CO2 as if its the main issue while benzene and carcinogens are poured into the air and water.

Because increasingly they come from elsewhere, live in the big city and have no kinship with the country people don't look at the landscape and see degradation. To see that you would need to have understood what it was 15 years ago, which you can't if you don't live in the area long.

It becomes more interesting when you look at where migrants live. For example according to (slightly old) ABS data Queensland has the greatest amount of the population who were born in Australia and WA has the highest.
STATE POPULATION DISTRIBUTION - 2001


Which is interesting, as Queensland seems to be the area where people born in Australia from Sydney and Melbourne come to to retire. Often because they're sick of the rat race and in search of a nice place to live.

Australia it seems is decreasingly interested in preserving the environment or addressing issues such as the rates of land clearing. I'm certain this is linked with both urbanisation and the increasingly migrant itinerant population.

Back in the beginning of the 20th Century while many Australians lived in towns, they were smaller towns and (relatively) many more people lived in the regional areas or even had family who still did.

Now its totally different and the gap between the 'bush' and the 'city' is widening.

With changes in what is the nature of migrants (like why did they come here) altering from "a place to live" to "a place to improve our earnings" and the social background they come from (was UK and Europe is now more broadly Asia) I think its unlikely we'll ever have such a strong core of people who shared the values of those who founded the country.

I'm not sure if its possible to turn this around, but it will take years for us to get back that critical mass of people born here and who regard this as their homeland and have enough knowledge of it to know what they're talking about.