Winter scene in the snow, Queenstown. New Zealand. Like other beautiful New Zealand locations it is under pressure because of the desire for growth.

OPINION: Back in 2014 several of Central Otago's great and good were brought together by the Queenstown Lakes District Council to discuss an advanced draft of the area's economic development strategy.

Vested interest was thick in the air, but that in itself that was no bad thing. These, after all, were the men and women whose engagement with economic practicalities was up close and personal. Theirs was an informed view and, properly filtered, a useful one.

Discussion quickly turned to the role played by tourism in the regional economy. There was an easy consensus on the importance of diversification. But the natural gravity of conversation was on tourism, getting more of it, and dealing with the things implied by it: population growth, infrastructure pressures, hotels, housing, and, the linchpin of it all, the preservation of the alpine environment.

Homilies on the importance of environmental protection were many. These may have had more to do with immediate economic self-interest than piety, but at least they were honest. The Lakes environment "was the goose that lays the golden egg". Care must be taken not to strangle it. Development must occur, but it must be sustainable.

The discussion was not unique. It was representative of conversations taking place in council rooms and community halls up and down the country. The industry focus in one place versus another might vary – tourism, horticulture, education, forestry, dairying – but the essence is the same: how to get more, faster and, oh if it can be managed, "sustainably".

Of course growth of any kind comes with its costs. But so acculturated have we become to the idea that the development can be 'sustainable' and therefore 'good', the downsides can often be minimised or even ignored altogether.

Yes, folks, you can have your economic cake and still stroll peacefully by expansive urban green spaces and pristine streams while eating it. The 'how' is generally something to be considered later … if at all.

But just calling something sustainable doesn't make it so, or even agreeable.

It has been 30 years since the notion of sustainable development entered the political lexicon. Coined by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, the term was intended to reconcile development and growth with the preservation of natural systems and resources.

The commission's report, Our Common Future, was groundbreaking. Cataloguing multiple threats to global ecosystems and stressing the need for urgent interventions, the report called on nations to adopt sustainable development as guiding policy.

But, in the face of continued population growth, species extinction, desertification, pollution and resource depletion, the concept has been and continues to be heavily, heavily criticised.

Seen as less of a scientifically based statement of the possible than political sop, it seems to offer more to developers wanting to allay public concern than it does a genuine path forward. The commission may have done important work, but, the critics say, sustainable development is what it can only be, an oxymoron.

But if the idea of 'sustainable development' is more imagined than real, then we have to question the merits of development and growth generally.

The problem is that growth has also come to be seen as a necessary good. It is the default measure of success, regardless of how real that success may be and how genuine the benefits.

Take immigration. An artificial economic stimulus, its true virtue seems to lie in allowing politicians to assert how clever their economic management has been … just as long as you don't look at the infrastructural, social, and environmental costs entailed.

Economists have done that looking and don't like what they see. As early as 1986 Amercian political economist Lester Thurow said that exponential population growth in developed economies was incompatible with long-term prosperity. More recently Australian economist Jane O'Sullivan has also pointed to the undesirability of Australia's year on year population growth, a conclusion shared in large part by the Australian Productivity Commission.

Meanwhile, here at home Shamubeel Eaqub and Sir Peter Glukman have separately pointed to the costs not just of population growth, but growth generally. Eaqub has gone further to ask why those costs aren't receiving the policy attention they deserve.

The question is rhetorical. Any examination of the real costs of growth confronts us with the uncomfortable prospect that growth may in fact not be the good thing we imagined it to be. This is not something vested interests, particularly a sitting government, want examined. Don't look at that; look at this over here. Shiny!

Policy wonks with a career spent running growth policies through the filter of sustainablity may have a different view of the merits of growth. But it would be hard to agree with any suggestion that it's all just wonderful in the face of the evidence of the past 30 years.

We have only to return to our Queenstown example where the incentives to deal constructively with the infrastructural and environment costs of development are both real and immediate.

Three years on from the strategy discussion and, no, the environmental goose has not been strangled. But there are plenty of people with their hands around its neck.

Tilt-slab commercial buildings have proliferated with all the architectural charm entailed. Housing tracts now make their inexorable way down towards Arrowtown, and the roads have become increasingly congested. Water quality has suffered and the noise of light planes and helicopters is ever-present. And still no-one is prepared to say "Feck off, we're full".

In this Queenstown is bellwether of where growth agendas take us, even in the face of narrow economic self-interest.

A national conversation about growth and its limits is long overdue. The question is whether the incoming government is prepared to lead it.

Doug Bailey is a legal and policy commentator.