To come to grips with  the pressures of an ageing population — estimated  to be about at about 35 million in the late 2040s —  Treasurer Wayne Swan’s Intergenerational Report this week cited fiscal restraint, higher productivity, higher participation, tax and health reforms as keys to sustainable growth.

Growth is good is the dominant world view.  Endless growth is not sustainable, and makes little sense.  Growth for whose benefit, and for how long?  Humans are the most remarkable species (language complexity, ability to manipulate the environment, to organise complex and sometimes massive tasks; travel and communication urges). We need to come to a dynamic balance with the remnants of nature.  Let’s call these planning world views “the old way” and “the new way”.

We understand the old way because we are in it — part of the cultural momentum of the past 100 years, which provides us with so much.  But the old way is unsustainable — the world, resources, soils, water, low-impact energy and particularly petroleum — are most finite.  The old way bets on human prowess to wring more and more out of less and less; the productivity increases demanded of our intergenerational slide into increasing numbers of older Australians.

The argument for high immigration of young and energised people is as appealing as the cigarette advertisements of the 1950s —  smoking sooths the throat and eases coughing.  The immigrant young will in turn grow old.

Australia is the driest inhabited continent, with the oldest surfaces on earth, home to the oldest continuous human cultural practices.  We are brittle; we are fragile and need a new way of planning, where our values are placed as the key engine for what we should do.  Values for sustainability have been thrashed out internationally over the past 30 years: Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD).  Those values, as a start to sustainability implementation planning generate principles, which when locally applied, lead to local practices (Goudie 2009).

Local water, energy, food and needs-meeting is the mantra of the new way.  New planning weds needs-meeting with home location.  Putting social, cultural, economic, environmental and long-term needs and knowable realities such as peak oil ahead of “growth at any cost” means the cessation of urban fringe growth now.  It is embracing the approach of Rob Adams, Melbourne,  in placing increased population in 5-8-storey, low energy, high livability apartments around transport nodes and existing transport corridors.

Australia cannot take many of the 90 more million people on the planet each year.  We do not have the intrinsic, life-sustaining resources to build and satisfy an extra Canberra worth of roads, pipes, cars, shops schools (insert your own very long list) year after year after year.

Our ageing demographic?  Live more simply, use less; consume less; share more. Cut waste; reduce our carbon/ecological footprint.

Reconfigure government to a rational national approach in defining values and principles for the long term.  Use science.  For example, refining waste water for drinking uses half the energy of desalination.  Make decisions on good science; on good sense and try to minimise wastage from inept “self protection and power gain” embedded at the heart of most large organisations.

Open the most frightening of “E” debates: full-functional-prior-consent euthanasia.  This should be a high moral debate, listening to the end-users; the key revolution of “the new way” of planning: Listen to the end-users, listen to those there already.

Reference: Goudie DD 2009. The emergent science of engineering a sustainable urban environment. Water, Air, & Soil Pollution: Focus. VWA & SP. 9/5-6, 469-484.  SpringerScience+BusinessMedia, LLC.

Dr Douglas Goudie is a lecturer in Sustainability Planning at James Cook University, North Queensland