Our Population Our Future:
Conference Summary
by Dr Pamela Kinnear
October 9, 2003, Canberra
I feel the need to leave this conference today on a note of optimism, because so many of the issues on today’s agenda can easily leave us feeling that the problems are too big and too daunting to address. Barney Foran’s presentation helped to lift us out of the mire a little by saying that all is not lost and that we have 20 good years ahead of us to make headway on the serious environmental and human problems we face. However, while 20 years may sound like a long time – it will be gone in the blink of an eye. This means that any optimism we can find nevertheless has to be realistic. However, this has one very clear advantage – standing with toes hanging over the very edge of something very high tends to focus the mind! – it forces us to examine things that normally go unexamined – usually because they’re uncomfortable or too hard.
I think that today’s discussion has touched on some of these things. I’d like to raise a few key points that struck me during the day:
- An interesting theme that has surfaced today as we’ve discussed the tough issues has been the interaction between individual behaviour and choices and the context in which those choices are made – that is, to what extent can we sheet home responsibility for our social and environmental problems to individual behaviour or to wider forces?. This surfaced today in relation to two sensitive and personally challenging issues – first, population health and obesity, and second, personal lifestyle choices and consumption patterns. However, Tony McMichael helped us to find a way through this conundrum in his nicely phrased point that while it is possible for individuals to ‘swim against the tide’, this is not a sufficient basis for social and economic policy. Policy needs to do more about the strength and direction of the tide in which individuals ‘swim’.
- The ‘tide’ as it were, has been the primary focus of the day’s deliberations – with our principal questions focusing on what determines the direction and the pull of the currents. A clear message to emerge from the presentations we’ve had today is that the dominance of, and relentless pursuit of, ‘economic growth’ is directly implicated in most of our current troubles – be they physical, psychic, social or financial. The presentations have settled on the view that the current way of organising economic life in advanced capitalist economies is not sustainable.
Two solutions have been presented either implicitly or explicitly throughout the day
- The first is to try incremental reforms that allow us ‘have our cake and eat it too’ – the primary solution being found in technological advance. What is not clear, however, is whether time is on our side for this strategy, nor is it clear under what circumstances technology will be a panacea, or when might it simply perpetuate existing problems or create new ones.
- The second is that we reinvent our society and economy according to new values that give less weight to material goods and consumption (an emphasis on ‘revolution’). Again, however, we need to ask to what extent is this a reasonable or feasible goal, whether this can be achieved without economic collapse or major upheaval, and how we deal with the inevitable ‘losers’ in such a major overhaul.
This leads us to the third theme that arose during the day which can be characterised by the question: how does society choose?
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A range of techniques for choosing were raised either implicitly or explicitly throughout the presentations and the discussions. They include:
- Better cross-disciplinary sharing among academic and scientific communities. However, I would add that cross-sectoral fertilisation is also important – between the academy and government, communities, and business; between Federal, State and local governments as well as improved cross-portfolio sharing in government.
- Develop and agree on a ‘list’ of values and principles that can form the vision of our new society. Craig Emerson gave us exactly such a list when he listed his seven principles for a fair and sustainable society. While I think there is considerable merit in doing this, I would also caution that doing so carries an inherent danger of using ‘motherhood’ terms and statements. Fine sounding words and phrases are not only difficult, if not impossible to disagree with, but also mask vast differences in underlying assumptions, methods to achieve the goal and pictures of the ultimate vision. We had a good and concrete example of how difficult and politically sensitive it is to operationalise fine statements during the tensions experienced as we listened to confronting views about multiculturalism and immigration from our speaker Rad Leovic.
- An important ‘gap’ in our discussions today, however, I believe, is the issue of leadership – a factor often so critical in determining social choices. We need to more closely examine the role of leadership in drawing out the best (or the worst) in us as we grapple with the conflicts of our individual lives and the world around us.
More than anything as we face the difficult debates, we have to be careful and honest about the implications of the issues we have discussed today. Choosing new values to dominate our institutional structures is not easy and is a highly political task. Because these issues involve deep seated fundamentals that affect real lives and material conditions, they are likely to leech out of the confines of polite debate such as we have experienced today – and certainly out of the familiar (to us) circles of academia, politics and bureaucracy. This means that we need to find more innovative ways of broadening the debate beyond the type of people who attend conference such as this, and engage with others who are less ‘like us’ to hear the disagreements, the fears and the hopes, that are no doubt abroad.
So, while we should do all we can to have creative, bold and productive debates we must also anticipate and deal with the hurts and disagreements that change will bring. Courage and a spirit of adventure are no doubt essential ingredients for finding a sustainable future, but our pursuit needs also to be conducted in a way that is respectful, equitable and genuinely democratic.
I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in the discussions today – the presenters and the delegates for a stimulating and inspiring conversation.
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