Victoria, once garden-state, now overpopulated - Kelvin Thomson's speech to PPLVic

An ecologist and an economist are swept off a tall building by a sudden gust of wind. The ecologist is horrified, but notices that the economist seems unperturbed as they plummet towards the ground. Why are you so calm, he asks? The economist replies, "because demand will create a parachute"? Economists, rather than ecologists, have been in the driver's seat concerning public policy for many years now, and I think there are plenty of signs that we are at risk of being swept off our tall building.
[This article contains the text of Kelvin Thomson MP's latest speech, to Protectors of Public Land Victoria Inc on the occasion of their 2016 AGM. It's full title is "Victoria, once the garden state, is now headed for population overload: how we are failing the next generation."]

According to the 2013 Victorian State of Environment Report the historic clearing of native vegetation in much of Victoria has resulted in the widespread loss of habitat and the decline of many species. Victoria is the most cleared state in Australia with nearly two-thirds of Victoria's landscape now modified for agriculture and urban purposes.

This, combined with ongoing pressures from further clearing, habitat fragmentation, altered hydrology, inappropriate land-use and fire regimes, and invasive species, puts enormous stress on land and biodiversity across Victoria.

Healthy land and biodiversity are essential for all Victorians. They provide vital services such as clean air and water, control of pests and fertile soil, and help to regulate our climate. These are necessary to support the production of water resources, food, fibre and timber. Healthy ecosystems are also important for our own health and wellbeing, providing places for cultural, spiritual and recreational activities.

Degradation of land and biodiversity resources impact on the services they provide. Biodiversity loss or decline can have significant consequences for natural processes such as pollination and nutrient cycling, decrease the availability of habitat, and impact on predator - prey relationships.

In severe cases, biodiversity loss can lead to significant alterations in ecosystem type and the functions ecosystems provide. It is important to maintain and, where necessary, improve the biodiversity and health of Victoria's ecosystems to ensure the continued provision of the services on which all Victorians depend.

The degradation of terrestrial ecosystems has far reaching consequences for many Victorian environments. Terrestrial ecosystems are intimately connected to aquatic ecosystems, including the marine environment.

Poor terrestrial health has implications for the condition of rivers, lakes, wetlands, estuaries and coastal waters.

Historic broad-scale clearing of native vegetation has also changed Victorian landscape functions in ways that are now presenting major challenges to land managers. Accelerated erosion, acidification, and salinity, as well as the loss of soil nutrients and organic content, are problems facing land managers.

Climate change is predicted to compound existing pressures on Victoria's biodiversity and ecosystem. Projections of significant shifts in local climates and increases in drought, bushfires and storms, will impact on Victoria's natural ecosystems and primary production industries alike.

Climate change is likely to threaten species with limited capacity to migrate, such as those restricted to particular habitats and fragmented landscapes, or those that tolerate only narrow ranges of temperature and rainfall. Ecosystems such as rainforest, wetlands, alpine areas and coastal and marine habitats have been identified as being at greatest risk in Victoria. Climate change will exacerbate current environmental pressures, and therefore the capacity of natural ecosystems to adapt to climate change will be improved if existing threats are addressed.

In addition to impacts on natural ecosystems, climate change also threatens agriculture and forestry through impacts on land health, water availability, agricultural yields, and increased damage from bushfires and storms.

A key driver of this environmental decline is rapid population growth. Victoria's population growth rate of 1.7 per cent last year was the fastest in the country, and Melbourne has continued its relentless 200 extra people every day, 1,500 per week, 75,000 each year growth for all of a decade now.

This rapid growth creates a pincer movement on the quality of life in our city. At the moment the most difficult issue in my electorate of Wills is the widening of the Bell Street ramp over City Link. Why is the widening happening? To accommodate increased traffic, which is of course a consequence of rapid population growth. What is the problem with the widening? The problem is that it brings the overpass to within 5 metres of the portable classrooms of Strathmore Secondary College, virtually overhanging the school, to the horror of parents and teachers alike. Why can't the portable classrooms be relocated? Because there is nowhere to move them to - all the available space has been taken up to cope with rising enrolments which are of course another consequence of rapid population growth. Is there a solution?
Yes, but it would involve a complete redesign and rebuild of the school, and the problem with that is that Strathmore has to compete for education capital works dollars with every other community in Melbourne agitating for a new school to cope with, you guessed it, rapid population growth.

It is noteworthy that the Property Council, Housing Industry Association, Real Estate Institute and other industry bodies who profit from rapid population growth have not been sighted putting their hands in their pockets to pay for the Bell Street widening, or a new Strathmore Secondary College, or any of the other things we need to cope with rapid population growth. There are more Elvis Presley sightings than there are of the property industry paying for the social costs of its activities.

The Queensland academic Jane O'Sullivan points out that maintaining infrastructure in a population growing at 2 per cent doubles, repeat doubles, the infrastructure cost for governments, who have only 2 per cent extra taxpayers to pay for it. No wonder we are seeing one term state governments and councillors getting chucked out every time there is an election. The task of keeping up with the infrastructure requirements of a rapidly growing population is basically impossible.

Another controversial issue in my electorate is planning. At the moment Moreland Council is proposing Amendment C159 to the Moreland Planning Scheme which would put in place 12 Neighbourhood Centres throughout the city. Developers would be permitted to go up to 4 storeys in these areas. Last week I went to a public consultation about this at the Pascoe Vale Swimming Pool. The fifty residents who were there were horrified at what is being proposed for the area around Pascoe Vale Railway Station, where they live. The artist's impression of it looked to them, and me, like some third world slum.

This amendment isn't coming forward because any residents have asked for it. I don't even think any local businesses have asked for it. It is the work of the Council planners themselves. They give the game away in an Information Sheet which states "Our population is forecast to grow by 41,504 to 214,320 people by 2036. New types of residential and commercial developments are needed to accommodate this growth" unquote. So as a result we will get high rise, and our backyards and vegetation will be quietly but relentlessly destroyed, at the very time when climate change means we need them most.

I do not accept that we should just assume and accept this extra 41,000 people for Moreland. If we build it they will come alright, and we will get the 41,000. But I think local residents are entitled to a real say in what happens in their street, and in their neighbourhood. We are not under any obligation to build it. These high rise buildings are making, and will make, the quality of life poorer in Brunswick, Pascoe Vale and Oak Park and beyond. We can and should say no to them.

Who are the advocates of rapid population growth? Well they are hiding in plain sight. Just last Monday the Australian Industry Group called on the Federal Government to increase immigration. It said this would boost the economy.What a lame idea. If more people come to live in your street, yes the total wealth of your street will be greater, but you personally won't be any better off at all. Indeed in terms of your amenity the chances are that you will be worse off. This shows the big end of town has pretty much run out of ideas and is bereft. They were the people who urged on us on the free market experiment.

For the past thirty years Australia has been undergoing an experiment. We have not been alone. Quite a few other countries have travelled the same path. Free market liberalism. It's hallmarks have been globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, free movement of goods and free movement of people. Its advocates said that it would strengthen the Australian economy, and make us more resilient to external shocks.

But far from making our economy more diverse and resilient, we have become narrow and vulnerable. We have much higher levels of unemployment than we did thirty years ago. We have much higher levels of youth unemployment, much worse long-term unemployment, and serious problems of underemployment. We have much larger foreign debt and much larger budget deficits. The distribution of wealth between rich and poor is becoming less equal. And the social problems generated by frustrated ambition - drugs, crime, mental health problems, homelessness - are on the rise too.

But the people who dug us into this hole are unrepentant. They want us to keep digging. They talk about the need for economic reform, which is code for more privatisation, more deregulation, and freer movement of goods and people. They talk about leadership, which is code for demanding that politicians do what they want, rather than what the voters want.

That is why I am so concerned that we are failing future generations, and why I have started talking a lot about intergenerational equity. I believe we have an obligation to pass on to our children and our grandchildren a world in as good a condition as the one our parents and grandparents gave to us, and I fear that we are failing in that task.

If our parents and grandparents did a better job than we are doing, how did they do it? Well in the first place Australia's population was much smaller, and growing more slowly. That made it easier to focus on solving problems, on making sure that people didn't fall through the cracks. But I also want to talk about the Australian Settlement, the economic and social model that we developed in the lead up to and following the years of Federation.

The dominant political debate at the time of Federation was the argument over free trade versus protection. Many of the arguments of the time sound familiar to our ears and ring true today. Bob Birrell writes in his book "A Nation of Our Own" that free trade was seen as the policy of the pastoralists. That is still true. It is the agribusinesses that push hardest, by a mile, in favour of the free trade agreements
that Australia has entered into in recent years.

And back then, as now, the protectionists were people who wanted to promote a diverse industrial base. Protection was also seen as crucial to the well-being of the working class. In 1901 the great Liberal Alfred Deakin - who the modern Liberal Party reveres in name while implementing policies that he was absolutely opposed to - declared that "If federal protection increases the manufacturers' profits, state laws
must provide that the employee shall secure his share, perhaps by means of special boards for wages and hours, according to the plan partly adopted by Victoria".

A similar insight into why the protectionists did not support free trade comes from the Bulletin's leader writer, James Edmond, in his 1900 tract "A policy for the Commonwealth". He says "No country ever became a great industrial state under free trade unless it had cheaper labour than its neighbours, and cheap labour means degradation and slavery... Nor can any nation, in these days of cheap freights,
remain a great industrial state under free trade unless it pays as low wages as the cheapest of its rivals, or unless its workers can hold their own by exceptional skill".

Observers watching the way in which nowadays the rich get richer while low paid workers are becalmed or going backwards might think Mr. Edmond just as relevant today.

The view of many protectionists and particularly the social democrats among them was that Australia should learn from the mistakes of the 'old world' and become a 'new world', free of both the social divisions and the strong class boundaries of the United Kingdom, and the slavery which had blighted the United States. We were to do our own dirty work rather than expect someone else to do it. Australia was not to be like America, where competition reigned supreme at the expense of workers' long-term well-being. This outlook was egalitarian, and helped give the Australia of the Federation era a democratic culture - that Jack is as good as his master, and down with "tall poppies", or at least those who give themselves airs.

Bob Birrell concludes that the Federation era and the "Australian Settlement" offers ideals directly relevant to our present dilemmas, and that it is a shame that it has been disparaged by Australia's cultural gatekeepers. It has been fashionable for years to deride the Australian economic and political institutions and culture of the Federation era, often referred to as the Australian Settlement. And the Settlement
itself was effectively torn up several decades ago. But I believe that many of the things done at that time served Australia well and indeed are key reasons why we developed a more egalitarian, more prosperous, fairer society than many other countries were able to accomplish.

Alfred Deakin expressly set out to make Australia a more diverse and self-reliant industrialised economy. He and his supporters were worried that Australia could become, in his words of 1905, an economy of "hewers of wood, drawers of water, shearers of wool, and growers of wheat". In addition the Deakin Government linked receipt of tariff protection to the payment of fair wages, establishing the Commonwealth Arbitration Court, which incorporated the principle of a living wage into its determination of industrial awards. Australia developed a reputation as a working man's paradise.

Australia was hit hard by the Depression, but the Australian Settlement and the Federation-era institutions survived the test. There was little social unrest, and after the Second World War Australia's manufacturing exports expanded and we enjoyed a golden age of prosperity.

The prospects for today's young people are nowhere near as rosy. We have fitted them up with an axis of financial evil - job insecurity, housing unaffordability, and student debt. So what might a new Australian Settlement look like? What might intergenerational equity in the twenty-first century look like?

I think five steps are crucial. First we should wind back our migrant worker programs, which have skyrocketed in the past decade. As recently as the year 2000 the then Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock said that net migration may average out at 80,000 per annum. A funny thing must have happened on the way to the Forum, because his government subsequently increased it to 200,000 per annum, where it still sits. In a stable or slowly growing population, workforce ageing will help solve
unemployment. As workers retire unemployed workers or young people entering the labour market get job opportunities. This is how things used to be. But when we are running massive permanent and temporary migrant worker programs, the unemployed and young people entering the market find themselves up against ferocious competition from new arrivals.

Second we should focus on education, skills and training. Just this morning the OECD warned that Australia needed to do better on education, saying our high school proficiency in science and reading is only around the international average, with a "high variation across students." And what has happened to technical and further education is a scandal. Back in 2008 political parties promoted the deregulation of vocational education. Competition between the TAFE colleges and new private providers became the name of the game. It has been a disaster. The private training colleges have been quite unscrupulous. Their interest has not been in the students, it has been in making money. They get students in and they churn them through. They have no interest in whether the students get the skills to find work afterwards. As long as the students, or taxpayers, pay them, they're alright jack.

Then there are the Universities. Labor Governments introduced student fees and uncapped student places. Now the Liberal Government wants to deregulate student fees. This would be a disaster. When I went to University there were no fees and places were allocated on the basis of academic merit. If fees are deregulated, the system will have been turned on its head. Academic performance and merit will
count for nothing. Your capacity to pay large fees, or more commonly your parents capacity to do so, will count for everything. How are academic standards and quality expected to survive such an onslaught? Some of the many billions of dollars we now spend on family payments would be better directed towards reducing, with a view to eliminating, post-secondary student fees.

Third we need to back science. There have been massive, short-sighted cuts to the CSIRO.

And we should rebuild engineering expertise in government, and insist that companies building infrastructure invest back into the engineering profession, for example through Cadetship graduate programs.

Fourth we need to back manufacturing. During the mining boom we acted as if it didn't matter if all our manufacturing went offshore. But to have all our eggs in the mining and agriculture baskets is foolish and short-sighted. We need a diverse economy, and manufacturing provides good jobs in the middle of society - not rich but not poor. It brings with it research and engineering expertise; the kinds of things
that distinguish successful nations from unsuccessful ones. We should be wary of entering into trade agreements that kill off manufacturing and render our economy narrow and vulnerable.

Finally, we should back the home team - Australia. Our personal buying habits, our government buying habits, and our foreign takeover laws should support Australian jobs and Australian industry. We should have food labelling laws that spell out what food is Australian and what is imported, so consumers can make an informed choice.

We should not enter into Trade Agreements that contain Investor State Dispute Settlement clauses or other provisions which act as a barrier to governments carrying out the wishes of the electorate.

I do not believe future generations will look on us fondly, if we leave them a legacy of a degraded environment, of weather extremes, of cities which are soulless concrete jungles, of job insecurity, housing unaffordability and student debt.

There is a lot that we can do to foster intergenerational equity, and create a new Australian Settlement, and it needn't involve trashing the environment. We have an obligation to give future generations the kind of opportunities that so many of us have had.

We need to do more to address the stunted circumstances that rob too many boys of the chance to become responsible, independent men, and too many girls of the chance to become responsible, independent women.

I know the Protectors of Public Lands have a particularly strong understanding of the importance of protecting our public open space assets for the enjoyment of future generations. In doing so you make an important contribution to intergenerational equity. I congratulate you on what you have achieved, and wish you every success in your ongoing work.