Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to comment on His Holiness the Pope's recent encyclical Laudato Si, which translates as 'praise be to you'. I firstly acknowledge the excellent work that the Pope has undertaken since he has come to the papal throne in Rome. As a committed and practising Catholic, I certainly accept his right to speak on moral, social and ethical issues. In his encyclical the Pope says, 'I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home.' Indeed, I also want to do that. In his encyclical the Pope spoke about the environment and our responsibilities and the gap between the rich and the poor—all of which he is certainly competent and capable of speaking about. Unfortunately he did not address what is probably the most overwhelming issue confronting the globe at the moment, and that is the question of population and its control. I also have had difficulty understanding what I and others believe to be his criticism of the technological advancements that have occurred around the world—and I want to come back to that. Without doubt, the relief of poverty, particularly in the developing world, is because advances in technology in the developed world are increasingly being activated in the developing world.

As the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics and the influencer of so many around the world, the Pope in his encyclical should have addressed the issue of population growth. Since 1950, and projected through to 2050, the population of the developed world has been around 1.5 billion people. That figure is not changing. In fact, if anything, it is slightly declining. By contrast, in 1950 around one billion people were classified as being in developing countries and by 2050 that will grow by a factor of more than five up to eight billion people. In1800, there were one billion people in the world. It took until 1927—127 years—to double that figure to an estimated two billion people. It took only another 47 years to double that to four billion people in 1974, and it is expected that we will double that again, to eight billion, by 2025.

We see an absolute burgeoning population on a fixed surface of land area—that is, the globe that we have. In fact, it is not fixed. It is actually declining as we lose usable arable land through urbanisation, salinity and other causes of erosion. So in my view we have a circumstance where birth control is absolutely essential. As was pointed out in a newspaper article yesterday, life expectancy in Bangladesh in 1906 was 21 years. In 2014, it had jumped to 64 years—life expectancy in Bangladesh trebled. So you then start to ask: to what extent should we start looking at population control?

There was a very interesting experiment led by Bob Geldof in 1984. As we all know, at that time the country of Ethiopia was facing mass starvation through drought and loss of crops et cetera. The population of Ethiopia at that time was 40 million people. Bob Geldof, together with his friends in Band Aid, was able to raise a significant sum of money, of which some $150 million actually went to Ethiopia. In 1984 Ethiopia had 40 million people. But by 2014, with all of that aid, its population had jumped to just under 100 million people. That aid was not directed into areas that would sustain a population of 40 million. The population was clearly unsustainable at 40 million—given the drought, erosion and land degradation. The population has gone up by 2½ times in that country and it is still growing at three per cent per annum. And what are the issues confronting Ethiopia today? Deforestation, overgrazing, soil erosion, desertification and water shortage in areas due to poor management of water, crops and farming systems.

I do not know whether His Holiness is pessimistic about the future of technology, but certainly I am not. In the 1960s Norman Borlaug and others created what was known as the Green Revolution. He started out in Mexico in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With new plant varieties and new farming systems, with fertilisers and pesticides and with energy generated from fossil fuel, Mexico went from being scarcely self-sufficient to being a net exporter of wheat by 1963. And wheat yields in India and Pakistan doubled in the 1970s. Those countries went from being severely food deficient to being self-sufficient. The man is credited, in the Nobel Peace Prize which he was awarded, with saving up to a billion lives.

The point that is absolutely essential to make in this discussion is that technology and the opportunism of people led that revolution which we saw. If indeed, as the figures indicate, we are to have some 1.9 billion more people in our own region by 2050, we are going to have to be technologically innovative yet again. But this time round, unlike the work in India in the 1960s, we will be doing it with less land, less water, less money, less fertilisers, less pesticides and, indeed, with an ageing population. Therefore we have significant challenges. I make the point that the Chinese make: a hungry man is an angry man. Military leaders will tell you that right back through history, right through to 2015, most wars have been fought over access to safe, reliable supplies of food and water. The mass migrations that we are seeing in the world at the moment can be related to that.

The Pope speaks of global warming, but the current evidence contradicts this. The Pope speaks of the role of the UN. I was at the UN General Assembly in 2013 when the Blue Mountains bushfires occurred. It was Christiana Figueres of the UN who made the statement that the Blue Mountains fires were due to climate change. Well, I spoke publicly at the UN at that time. I came back to our leadership to tell them the reason the Blue Mountains fires occurred was not anything to do with climate change or global warming; it was a complete and utter lack of any reduction of fuels in the Blue Mountains forests over far too long a period.

We come to fossil fuels and renewables. There is no doubt at all that into the future renewables will play a larger role. If you look at the main causes of illness and death in poverty-stricken areas of Africa today, particularly among women and children, it is because, for example, they are using cow dung for cooking purposes in dwellings with poor or nil ventilation. That is what is causing the respiratory problems. Yes, at some time into the future we may well be able to use solar and other forms of energy to help them. In the meantime, the quickest and best way of assisting them and getting circumstances where they have energy available for cooking and other purposes is gas-fired and/or coal-fired generation. Renewables will occur, but of course in the meantime we have a bigger challenge.

The message I would leave is this: for any project to succeed, it must be economically, environmentally and socially sustainable. I say to His Holiness: laudato si. Praise be to you also.