When politicians use the word 'sustainability', it usually triggers red warning lights in my head, rather than flagging the presence of green policies. Political discussion of sustainability encourages misdirection and mirror play. The result departs as far as possible from true environmental policy.
One of Julia Gillard's first moves as Prime Minister was to change Tony Burke's title from Minister for Population to Minister for Sustainable Population.
It might seem to be an innocuous shift. After all, what's wrong with asking for a sustainable population? What's wrong with that mystic number that, as Gillard told Fairfax, 'our environment, our water, our soil, our roads and freeways, our busses, our trains and our services can sustain'?
Burke told ABC Radio National on Monday that his new job description 'puts a high priority on us making sure we can develop forms of measurement as to what's the environmental footprint, and to look at some of these environmental questions as well as transport, infrastructure questions, probably with a higher degree of focus'.
Cue the blinking of a thousand tiny red lights.
The shift towards a political discourse of 'sustainable' population growth allows parties on both the left and the right to associate a growing environmental consciousness with fears over immigration. Recently, internal Labor Party polling has shown that in Western Sydney, where the Labor Party's primary vote has dropped to 30 per cent, people's main political concern is the government's policy on asylum seekers.
At the weekend Gillard explained that, although she wasn't reopening the immigration debate, she was in touch with the pressures facing urban voters. Tapping into their fears, she said, 'If you spoke to the people of Western Sydney, for example, about a 'big Australia', they would laugh at you and ask you a very simple question: where will these 40 million people go?'
The number '40 million', which seems to suggest we're about to invite the entire population of Canada to come hang out with us next week, is in fact an exaggerated treasury estimate of Australia's population in 2050 based on current trends. But even apart from that, it's hard not to see this new discourse in a cynical light.
Burke agreed that it's 'true that if you're in an area where you can't get a seat on the bus, can't get a seat on the train, you're locked in gridlock in traffic, that you would ask the question that Julia