I HAVE been an archaeologist or a museum manager for 40 years. I know that throughout most of history, people have been reluctant to identify the phenomenon of overpopulation. Instead they usually choose to see ethnic conflict, genocide, migration, invasion, famine, drought, civil war, religious war, plague, pestilence, overcrowding or the failure of governments.

So, like many others, I sat almost speechless in the audience of The Courier-Mail's first Our Future, Your Say forum on growth issues on February 22 as Premier Anna Bligh and Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman trotted out the myths of growth, one by one.

They congratulated each other on both being victims of unavoidable growth, and on their success in supplying more infrastructure to meet growing demand. Conspicuously missing from the debate was the O word – "over-population".

Where Newman sees not enough buses, tunnels or bridges, I see too many cars and their drivers. Where Bligh sees a dry period and calls it a water crisis, I see too many people for a land of variable rainfall. Where the mining industry sees a skills shortage, I see excessive corporate greed.

When Bligh mentions the housing affordability problem and suggests a key solution is the release of new greenfield sites, I see a Government ignoring one of the most obvious prices that the community pays for the resources boom.

When Bligh says you cannot impose population caps, I am deeply puzzled. Is that not exactly what regional and neighbourhood plans do all the time?

When Bligh and Newman become fellow victims, shrug their shoulders and say "of course we need a national population policy" (to deal with the awkward issues they don't want to mention), I am amazed.

We do have a national population policy – it is to reward people for having more children, to maintain high immigration levels, and to ignore water shortage, biodiversity loss, loss of agricultural land, etc.

When Bligh says you cannot tell Australians to limit the number of children they have, she ignores the reality that every night and day, millions of Australian women and men actively take steps to prevent conception; what is unusual in world history is a government policy (and the culture that comes with it) encouraging people to conceive.

I want to hear something new that will break us out of the growth trap. We need government-funded studies of real alternatives to growth.

How about doing real, triple bottom-line accounting of the economic, social and environmental costs and benefits of closing the Galilee Basin coal fields for three decades?

Or how about creating a larger community of car-free people by a planning requirement that in all new inner-city developments, car parking spaces be limited to one park per two dwellings, supported by legislation requiring banks to lend to buyers of homes without parking spaces?

Will we Australians ever elect a no-growth or low-growth politician? As a history teacher said to me the other day, Australian history is working-class history. We like to dig and dam things, burn and build.

Bligh might get re-elected by wearing a hard hat, but not by quoting philosophers.

Growth is a mindset we must always challenge. And let us not avoid the O word – at least for the sake of rational and balanced debate, if not for the sake of our health and humanity.

Richard Cassels is director of Climate Leadership. The final of The Courier-Mail's Our Future Your Say series on growth issues is tonight, 6 pm, State Library of Queensland's main auditorium, South Bank. To register, email rsvp@brisinst.org.au

Originally published as State has too many people