Bob Brown urges green movement to get behind cuts to population levels

Greens founder Bob Brown says Australia needs to be a leader in helping drive down the ‘alarming’ rate of global population growth.

Bob Brown wants environmentalists to take a bigger role in pushing for a cut to global population levels. Picture: Matthew Newton

Greens founder Bob Brown says Australia needs to be a leader in helping drive down the “alarming” rate of global population growth as he laments the reluctance of the environmental movement to ­address the issue.

Dr Brown spoke out after Greens leader Adam Bandt this week played down the environmental impact of a growing population, with the issue likely to drive a wedge between the party’s dual support base of dedicated environmentalists and inner-city cosmopolitans who are in favour of high levels of migration.

With population increasing from 2.5 billion to nearly eight billion in his lifetime, Dr Brown, 75, said Australia should be “leading a global discussion” to avoid projections of an 11bn population by the end of the century. He said the global population should ideally begin to fall before 2100.

“It has more than tripled in my lifetime. It is nearly, but not as, alarming as the consumption of the planet growth rate. We are ­already using more than what the planet can supply and we use more than the living fabric of the planet in supply. That’s why we wake up every day to fewer fisheries, less forests, more extinctions and so on.

“The human herd at eight billion is the greatest herd of mammals ever on this planet and it is unsustainable to have that growing.”

Greenpeace, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Society told The Weekend Australian they did not discuss the issue of population growth.

Dr Brown said environmentalists were reluctant to talk about population levels because they were “frightened of the Murdoch media”, in reference to News Corp Australia publications. “Because in the past when someone comes out and discusses it they get ­walloped about division and the so-called detrimental side of discussing population,” he said. “We should be having a mature debate about it.”

At the National Press Club on Tuesday, Mr Bandt said he was more concerned about the global energy mix than population levels.

He would not say whether he was concerned about population growth rates in either Australia or globally. The Morrison government has a permanent migration cap of 160,000 a year.

“The big issue is how we produce the energy we need to survive,” Mr Bandt said. “My priority is getting energy at running on 100 per cent renewable. That makes much more of a difference than … population size.”

Population expert Katharine Betts, an adjunct associate professor of sociology at Swinburne University, said any environmental cause was “a lost cause without population control” and declared the Greens had “not been particularly helpful” on the issue.

“What you find is that if people suggest reducing the population (growth rate), particularly the number of immigrants, was that they immediately get clobbered with the racist slur,” Dr Betts said. “The Greens do seem to make that connection.”

She said many environmentalists stopped talking about population in the 1980s out of concern it sounded xenophobic.

Dr Brown said Australia should raise foreign aid to 0.7 per cent of GDP to assist education levels in developing nations. “When that happens population increase rates go down,” he said.

He also criticised the skilled ­migration scheme for “encouraging the rich to come to Australia at the expense of the humanitarian needs”.