Can we trust the Greens on population?

The relationship between humans and the environment is our “impact”. In point 3 above the Greens incorrectly excluded population size from their definition of our “environmental impact” and here they are doing it again.

• globally, to improve social and economic equity and promote programs that empower women.

This is based on the idea that “affluent”, educated women do not have many children. But this notion may not be founded entirely in fact. (See another of my essays.)

14. implement the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action as endorsed by the Australian Government, by:

• increasing our contribution to programs that empower women and increase their access to a wide range of safe family planning options …

See my previous comment.

• increasing our overseas aid budget to 0.7% of GNP by 2010 as recommended by the United Nations, directed to the poorest, which often include women, with a focus on clean water and sanitation, education and high quality accessible health services, including sexual and reproductive health services.

This measure is much more constructive than the idea, previously implied in several clauses, that Australia can take in the surplus of other nations. In fact China and India together grow each year by far more than the total population of Australia.

15. ensure that Australian family planning programs, both domestically and overseas, are adequately funded to deliver services in the context of reproductive health programs which increase the power of girls and women to determine their own reproductive lives, and increase the understanding of men of their reproductive responsibilities.

But what level of funding is “adequate”? Is Australia going to solve the rest of the world’s problems or will we contribute according to our relative economic size? Such vague motherhood statements are of little value. This text also implies that men as a group are reproductively irresponsible - the same assumption as made by Wahabi Muslims who insist women must cover their faces (and everything else) in public.

16. prepare contingency plans for possible large scale humanitarian migration as a result of climate change.

So, the Greens are not just expecting “humanitarian migration” they are expecting it on a massive scale! It seems that population growth for Australia is inevitable. The (eco)logical extension of the Greens’ expectation of massive humanitarian immigration is that we should stabilise or reduce our own population numbers now to cope with it. We should also drastically reduce our levels of consumption (some would call this “lifestyle”) to free-up resources for them. Taken to its logical Green extreme (and there are extremely many poor people outside of Australia to take) this humanitarian migration will only end when we have become as crowded, poor and hungry as the rest of the world.

As I described previously, the Greens almost abandoned having any policy on population in 2006 on the grounds that it would be electorally unpopular. The rapid success of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA, aided by Dick Smith) in opening up this issue for debate has demonstrated how misguided this attitude has been. In 2010 it is as though the dam holding back the population debate has burst and a flood of concern has swept out over the nation leaving the Greens standing stranded on a shrinking island of denial. Their failure of advocacy on this core environmental issue has led to the formation of alternative political parties such as the Stable Population Party of Australia and Stop Population Growth Now (SPGN).

Little wonder then that I am now a former member of the Greens, as are many other environmentally concerned individuals who saw from the inside how electoral populism has come to replace environmental activism. Australia now needs an Environment Party - one that sees humans and their economy as completely dependent upon the finite natural world that supports it and that is willing to propose whatever actions are necessary to ensure our future survival. Selling Australians the greenwash of “business-as-usual only driving an electric car” and pretending that population numbers do not matter is simply electorally populist Greens spin.