How will world population impact us in 50 years?

START OF TRANSCRIPT

Paul Willis:
Well, good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the University of Technology Sydney. My name is Paul Willis, from the ABC science program, Catalyst. You may have seen me on the program. Anyone recognise the face? How many of you have been watching Inspector Rex instead? My wife put her hand up. That's why our ratings are like they are.

First of all, I'd like to acknowledge the indigenous owners of UTS and its environs, the Gadigal people from the Eora nation. And I'd like to acknowledge their continued ownership over these parts of Sydney.

Tonight's event is the sixth in the UTS Speaks series. Now is that the sixth in series or the sixth just for 2009? So these guys have been very busy organising events, just having six of them in the one series. It's quite an impressive feat.

The hypothetical tonight will be digitally recorded. I gather that UTS are putting it on their website. And ABC Fora will be recording it as well. I gather that it may be going out on ABC2. It's almost certainly going out on Radio National. So when I come to ask you questions, please don't use rude words. Otherwise, we'll have to put it on Triple J.

If you have a mobile phone, could you please turn it off? Do not switch it to silent, because it can still interfere with the radio mics. If your mobile phone goes off, we will shoot you. Simple as that. Let's make no mistakes.

There is a slight ruse that we're going to be pulling tonight, ladies and gentlemen. And we need your cooperation. We are setting this as a hypothetical in the future. And we have five very talented brilliant people. I'm going to get the introductions done first of all for 2009.

Please welcome Professor Eamus, who is a plant physiologist and eco-physiologist, our environment spokesperson, Derek Eamus. Distinguished professor at the UTS Faculty of Business, professor in the school of management, Dexter Dunphy. Dean of law at UTS, Professor Jill McKeough. Big breath on this one. Director of Operations and Development for the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Nursing Midwifery and Health, Michelle Rumsey. And next to me here, Adjunct Professor of Australian Journalism for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS, Peter Manning.

As I said, our hypothetical is going to involve a ruse. That ruse is that we are actually setting this in the year 2050. You'll find out why as the evening unfolds. If what this means for you as an audience is, when I come to ask - or if you come to ask questions through me, please be mindful that tonight is actually 24 June, 2050, not 2009.

If you want to refer to an event that happened today or this week or this year, please make sure that you phrase it in the terms of back in 2009, they did blah, okay. It's a small ruse. But it will help the evening along. And I think you'll see that the reason why we're going to entertain this ruse tonight will be a useful vehicle for us to be able to discuss some really difficult issues.

Now, as I said, we are recording for radio. And one last slight ruse that I'll ask you to do, so that we can introduce it, when you listen to it, they'll be an introduction probably from Lynne Malcolm or someone else at the ABC. And then there'll be this wave of applause. And I'll start speaking after it. So I need you guys to create for me a wave of applause.

Good evening and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to an evening that promises to be one of the most monumental moments in the history of mankind. For tonight, 24 June 2050, the nine billionth person will be born onto this planet. We need to ask many questions about how we got here, what we could have done differently and can we really survive with nine billion people on the planet? I'm being told by my oracle that that person will be born within the hour. And it is with trepidation and excitement and expectation that we wait for that event.

To discuss the state that the world is in today and how we got here, we have a very distinguished panel. I would first like to introduce Derek Eamus, who is the chair of the Global Environmental Assessment Authority. Derek, would you be so kind as to give us your assessment of the state that the world is in tonight?

Derek Eamus:
Well thank you, Paul. First cab off the rank, which is always a bit of a worry. But as chairman of the Global Environmental Assessment Authority, I have come here to give you, the audience, a brief overview of the state of the environment, a few global perspectives, but mostly from an Australian perspective.

Now as you all know, we expect the population of the world to reach nine billion sometime this week. And I'm going to describe some of the issues that might be confronting Australia, as a result of that nine billion population.

Now of course, as we know, in 2050, global warming and its associated effects on climate continue to have major impacts that are still unfolding, despite our almost universal reliance on nuclear power, in Europe, in America, Australia, Russia and Japan.

On average, temperatures are two or three degrees warmer now than they were back in 2000. Unfortunately, this has come along with a five to ten per cent decline in rainfall across most of temperate Australia. This fact, plus the fact that our population in Australia is now 50 million, has had a dramatic impact on agricultural practices and the economy of Australia.

For example, we now see in Australia, in 2050, beef production has almost entirely ceased because of the inefficiencies of converting water to protein through a cow. The former food basket of Australia, the Murray-Darling Basin, has not seen any flows for the past 27 years and is indeed overgrown and built upon along 80 per cent of its length.

Australia has finally embraced the let the deserts bloom philosophy that was first suggested by my authority 25 years ago. Nuclear power, desalination plants, coupled to localised solar power generation, has allowed 35 million of our 50 million population to move to the semi-arid regions.

Sea level rises of 60 centimetres since 2000 have occurred. And this has caused massive seawater intrusion to our coastal aquifers. This, plus the reduced recharge of aquifers, because of reduced rainfall, has reduced groundwater stores in the nation to 40 per cent of what they were in the nineteenth century.

Because of our unplanned increase in population to 50 million, mostly through unannounced immigration, we are now heavily dependent on foreign aid. In particular, Europe and China provide substantial aid to Australia to keep a large number of people in Australia from migrating to Europe and America.

There have been some positive benefits in the Australian economy. First, local capture, recycling and reuse of water, refuse and bio-solids has reached the mandated target of 90 per cent. This is the first time the aggregated Australian data shows we, as a nation, have achieved these targets.

And second, earnings from nuclear fuel reprocessing and nuclear fuel storage facilities have reached 10 per cent of GDP. Whilst that was an unpopular decision when it was made 10 years ago, the opening of the first reprocessing plant and storage site in central Australia has shown this can be a significant income stream.

Our voluntary one child policy, initiated five years ago, has had no observable impact on fertility rates across Australia or indeed anywhere in the world. Consequently, some form of compulsory birth control policy is now seriously being discussed by the world advisory government, located in Beijing. Thank you, Paul.

Paul Willis:
Thank you very much, Derek Eamus. As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, we have many issues to discuss this evening. Looking from a perspective of economics and business, it's my pleasure to introduce Dexter Dunphy, who is one of the senators of sanity. Dexter, you may wish to recap for our audience exactly who the smarty-pants 30 are.

Dexter Dunphy:
Yes, we are known as the smarty-pants 30.

Paul Willis:
Sorry. We'll need to get a microphone to you.

Dexter Dunphy:
Oh sorry. We are known as the smarty-pants 30. But formally, we're known as the senators for sanity. And the senators for sanity, and there are 30 of them, are a think-tank associated with the world government. The senators are not aligned with any power block and have a history of questioning the status quo. They're future oriented and speak for future generations, both human and other species.

The original senators were thought leaders in the second decade of this century, who achieved widespread public recognition for pointing out the insanity of governments claiming that they were supporting emissions reductions, while pouring billions of dollars into the coal industry and into subsidising roads and automobiles, rather than public transport systems.

They exercise a lot of influence - that's the new senators - exercise a lot of influence when a majority of them agree that a particular government or corporate intervention is insane or when they give support to initiatives that they see as sane. They have widespread grassroots support across the world.

Coming to world population, yes, world population is about to reach nine billion. But it's facing large scale collapse due to global warming. The melting of snow and ice has increased sea level by half a metre, with a major impact on coastal cities as we've heard. Melting glaciers have also devastated low lying countries like Bangladesh, low lying agricultural areas, once the most fertile and productive sources of food, are underwater.

Now as far as economics is concerned, as a result of major environmental catastrophes and financial catastrophes, economics has been discredit and is now regulated to being a sub-discipline within ecology, which you would appreciate, Eamus. All subject in the business curriculum are now delivered through Oracle, which you'll hear about a little later, and are grounded in ecology. Universities have largely disappeared except as quality control on knowledge management.

Throughout society, the idea of ever increasing economic growth is seen as the ideology of the cancer cell. Most major groups in society are committed to achieving a sustainable world community. The arguments are really over how to do that, just as in the previous century, everyone agreed that economic growth was good, but the arguments were how to get it and how to distribute the benefits.

As far as business is concerned, world events and value change have had a major impact on business. The global business world is dominated by Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern multinationals, which specialise in exchange of commodities that countries cannot produce themselves. There are only about 300 major multinationals. Most of the rest of the multitude of businesses are relatively small and operate in networks where needed. Financial services companies are highly specialised, as most financial transactions are simple and instant.

As the price of oil rocketed in earlier decades, many airlines failed and the few that remain charged greatly increased fares for global travel. Travel miles have dropped dramatically and the Oracle network is used for most business transactions. Overall, in wealthier societies, the trend has been towards a reduced material consumption and increased importance given to the service sector. Even in Australia, 10 years ago, the government introduced food rationing, after widespread failure of the Murray-Darling river system, which we've heard about, which was the food bowl for eastern Australia.

Different countries are taking different development paths to a sustainable future. The transition to a more sustainable world varies. But China, for example, has pulled back from the brink of ecological disaster just in time. The communist government was overthrown by a military general. The new Chinese government is seizing the leadership of the new post carbon sustainable industries. They're responsible for major innovations in technologies and are franchising new production processes and systems that conserve resources and produce zero waste.

The current closure of coal fired power stations throughout China threatens the stability of the Australian economy, which has become increasingly dependent on coal exports. Governments in most countries now issue formal contracts to companies, which are licenses to operate. If companies damage the environment significantly, these licenses are revoked. Sustainability has become the main game in town. Thank you.

Paul Willis:
Thank you very much, Dexter. Jill McKeough is from the Planetary Law Council. And she will be outlining her vision of the world from a legal perspective, here in 2050. What's it like from the law's perspective?

Jill McKeough:
Thank you, Paul. Well, in 2015, the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, there was a huge upsurge in civil liberties and interesting constitutional rights and freedoms and a radical civil libertarian group took over parliament. And with the abolition of the states in 2018 and Australia becoming a republic in 2024, the charter of freedoms party now has most politicians in both houses, lower and upper house.

And due to the financial crisis about 40 years ago, religion has grown enormously, and particularly the US evangelical brand of religion. At that time, those people started presenting themselves as being the antidote to the consumer society, the people that could give a good set of values, help you to bring your children up properly, in a world of plenty.

And they started making a virtue out of the sort of recession living that had been popular about 50 years before that. And now saving water, reducing carbon footprint, all of these things started to emerge as the new set of values, as I said, around 40 years ago.

And what's happened since is that there's a new snobbery in food and fitness and self-sufficiency. And around the turn of the twenty-first century, during the noughties, as we now call it, this is regarded as an astonishingly self-indulgent and unhealthy period. People smoked. They drank alcohol. They took drugs. They were overweight.

The voluntary one child policy that Dexter has mentioned, no problem at all, because actually now women are universally educated. And the most potent factor in reducing population growth is actually the education of women. So things are starting to look up a little bit.

As a result of this health kick that everyone's on really, health insurance now is much cheaper than it used to be, but there is a very advanced form of what used to be called community rating. And now people are individually assessed, using all the information that's available through their personal Oracle implant, which we'll explain more about later.

And this personal profile of the DNA, what their mother ate when they were pregnant, what their grandmother ate when she was pregnant and so on, all of this information can be fed into decide how much medical insurance you should be paying. But at the same time, the civil libertarians are saying that this is outrageous and there needs to be a great deal of control over personal privacy.

And in fact, back in 2009, 41 years ago, the Australian Law Reform Commission produced a report on privacy and also a report on government secrecy. So there are these competing values of greater increase in transparency and reduction of government secrecy, while at the same time safeguarding personal secrecy.

Legislation these days is drafted in a wiki style. Something is put up on the web. And I'm glad you're finding this amusing, because I plagiarised this from a newspaper article 41 years ago, which I read about yesterday, if it were 2009. But anyway, this wiki - a model is put up and people get on and they make suggestions and alter things. And they introduce their own issues. And ultimately, the world government body that Dexter's mentioned comes up with a final approved version. But there is a really - there is a great deal of democracy because of this ability to interact through Oracle and through this wiki system.

Ever since the Victorian bushfires of 41 years ago, no environmental measure is taken anymore without evidence based reason for doing so. And there is a great deal of public debate about whether what is generally accepted as being a good thing to do, such as not back burning or not clearing fallen logs and so on, whether or not this is really a good thing to do, whether or not what we traditionally think of as environmentally sound is actually environmentally sound. So there is also a lot of resistance, I think, to being told what to do by government.

One of the things that's happened is that legislation's been passed to prevent manipulation of consumer purchasing behaviour or voting behaviour or religious instincts. We know a great deal more about the human genome. We know that people do actually have an urge to believe in something. There is actually a gene for religion that's been isolated. And it is possible - it is possible to influence people's emotional state in all sorts of ways.

And so this protection for personal privacy is competing with the idea that you can actually manipulate people. And the most elite form of education is a natural education where you don't have a chip implanted in your brain, where you don't have any enhancement of your intellectual powers, where you actually develop yourself through physical and mental training.

And this is regarded as going back to the values of our great-grandparents, about 100 years ago. Now there's lots more I could say about the world. But…

Paul Willis:
And I'm sure we'll hear lots more as the evening unfolds. What a retro chick, hey. She used to - she read a newspaper. Who's ever heard of that? Thank you very much, Jill. Are we a more healthy planet today than we were 50 or 100 years ago? The state of the world's health today, in 2050, is the grounds for Michelle Rumsey, the advisor to the World Health Corporation. Please welcome Michelle.

Michelle Rumsey:
Thank you, Peter. I'm sad to say that the globe's not doing as well. The health kick that Australia's on not going so well. On the whole, we're a healthier, wealthier and we're living longer. But at what cost? We've got a lot more information on documentation. So we understand disease patterns, health work force, migration, infection rates. And everybody has a personal health record. So we know exactly what's going on with each and every individual.

Populations are living in mega cities. Populations are going towards the areas with clean water. Health [quantives] and poverty still exist, of course. But they're in more extremes. Globally, as our good friend, Jill, has said, women have been followed on from the world health millennium development goal of number three. They're equitable and empowered and they've sorted themselves out and it's a fantastic place to be for women.

Climate change has created a lot of issues around illness and injury. I don't believe there's much insurance left. There's been too many global natural disasters. Industry's just - the insurance industry just can't cope anymore. There's lots of issues around malnutrition, diarrhoea and vector borne diseases like malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever. They're all around. They're commonplace now.

There's many disasters, heat waves, cyclones, floods, droughts. And asthma and respiratory disease still lives on. As far as health, there's influenza and pandemics. We have a couple of characters, I believe, might exist. There's a character that might be something like a Wally, who would be something like a slightly larger character who might have low bone density and there may be a Mr Bean-y type character, who'd be a little bit more schitzy and absorbed with all the GM foods they eat and many allergies. So slightly quirky characters.

Mental health, I reckon there'll be lots more - there's lots more mental health around at the moment. And that's because people are isolated in the way they communicate. As far as treatment goes, we know that this new baby that's just about to be born will probably have a stem cell taker and we'll be able to articulate their personal health. We'll be able to work out what their personal health's going to be like for the rest of their life.

Gene therapy is alive and well and we can look at the whole variety of gene therapies. There's more access to affordable drugs. There's drugs in GM foods. Is that a good thing? There's slow release drugs in our microchips for a variety of disorders and diseases. We can have body scans whenever we like, to work out what's going on.

Nanotechnology, that's an interesting one. The mesothelioma of the past has now become nanotechnology. We can rebuild bones. We can maybe implant insulin for diabetics. But is this a good thing? Is this going to make us healthier in the future? Artificial hearts. We're overweight. We're having a problem. We've had a heart scrub tablet, but it didn't quite work. Maybe we can just have a new artificial heart.

As far as the workforce goes, who knows? There'll be a variety - there's a variety of health workforce. But I think biotechnicians have really taken over the health workforce, because that's the way the health is going now. We're looking at gene therapy all over the place. But we also have an ageless workforce, because we can come and go in our workforce when we want.

Quality of life, we haven't got such a good quality of life at the moment. Some of the feelings Jill was talking about, lack of choice, lack of control. Individual isolation. We're spending about 90 per cent of our days looking at glowing rectangles, informing ourselves. I think that's about my summary of where we're up to, Paul.

Paul Willis:
Well, doesn't it sound like a rosy world? Thank you, Michelle. The Honourable Peter Manning is the Federal Minister for Media, the Arts and Sport. And we could have no better commentator on the state of the media and culture and sport than the federal minister. Please welcome to the stage the Honourable Peter Manning.

Peter Manning:
I used to be the global minister for all those portfolios, but I was demoted recently, as a result of a faked email, which was introduced in the global parliament the other day.

Paul Willis:
I should just say, for legal reasons, alleged.

Peter Manning:
Alleged, of course, yes. So as the Minister for Australia, I've got to say that it's a very different environment to what we've had even 10 years ago. You'll remember that, in 2020, that period that they used to call convergence of media actually brought together smell. And that was an amazing advancement, not just sound and vision, and smell. And you could talk and smell the people around the globe.

And then, of course, five years later, came touch. And so that sense of touch, of course, sexualised the entire media that we had, so that eventually, by 2050, where we are today, we of course have the Oracle, which I'm sure Paul will explain to you in a moment, which basically enables everyone, certainly in Australia, but probably on the planet, to be wherever they want to be and to experience whatever they want to be - whatever they want to experience.

So that's the media in which we exist. And of course, facts have disappeared, because we have endless witnesses to everything. You can be wherever you want to be at any particular moment and you are a witness to the traffic accident in Kazakhstan and to anything else that happens and your view of what happens is as good and as valid as anyone else.

So what we have, of course, is a galaxy of star presenters who are the analysers and the interpreters of our world and who are the philosophers in a sense of our world. And much as France, in 41 years ago, had a philosopher as one of the stars of stage and screen on a thing called television, today we have a whole band of such people who are fabulous out of the humanities stream and they are the people who interpret all these experiences that you're having, given their wisdom.

So that's the - when we talk media and when we talk mind control over anything, what we're talking about is the acuity, the wisdom that comes from these philosophers and analysts and interpreters in our media. And of course, we're still talking about a publicly owned media and a private media, because extraordinarily the ABC now occupies a massive part of the federal budget of the entire nation, as a result of its continuing successes, decade after decade.

But what is the media - what have we been talking about, with these analysts and these interpreters and these philosophers? Well it's interesting because the major one we've talked about is green terrorism. Because as the planet has declined and the politicians have failed us over these past 40, 50 years. We had that terrible period in the '30s, when green groups took control themselves.

You'll remember that remarkable event when the whole of the federal parliament was itself blown up by environmental activists and the terrible carnage that occurred of my fellow members. Ever since then, this has been a major talking point in the media, because basically green people felt that democracy had failed them.

That's the first one. The second one is, of course, as we've become virtually the fifty-first state of the Chinese nation, then there's been a bit of reaction to that among what you might call the old Anglo-Celtic Australians, who now number, I think, about 10 per cent of the nation.

And while we remain good friends, of course, with Indonesia and Vietnam and so on and so on and so on, there are still groups that remember the great days of that incident called Cronulla back in 2007. And they've staged all these riots that have occurred at different points over the last 30 years. And that has been a continuing and very strong strand of Australian contemporary history, as it has been for 250 years. So our problems with race continue. And that's one major, major element, as we've become an Asian nation. So that's the second one.

The third one is a worry about - and this is like a 250 year old worry as well - what is Australia? Why do we think of ourselves as Australian? Since we have a Vietnamese Australian president, woman at the moment, whose name, I think, was Nyung.

Paul Willis:
[Shina Hung].

Peter Manning:
Yes, that's right. There's 20 million people in Melbourne and 25 million, of course, bigger city, more cosmopolitan, in Sydney. Why do we need to have a nation? Why does Vietnam need to have a nation? Should we be breaking up into ethnicities in a sense around the globe? Celtic ethnicities and Hindu ethnicities or Indian ethnicities and maybe Chinese ethnicities of various kinds.

So the question of - which has been an age old question about what is Australia? What is it really about, et cetera? What is its identity? That continues to be the third strand of what the media actually discusses. So I'll leave it there and leave you to explain, Paul, the incredible centrality of the chip.

Paul Willis:
The Oracle and the chip. It's incredible how technology infuses itself into our lives so that we don't even recognise it. And I thought an interesting way to kick off discussions tonight, from the comments that we've already had, is to reflect briefly on the influence that the Oracle network has had on us. This is the small thumb-sized computer - it's a Quantum computer which is implanted in the back of your neck and can tap into your central nervous system.

Anything you can input via your senses can be recorded and distributed around the world, instantaneously. This is the perfect communication guide and entertainment. You can literally have dinner with someone on the other side of the planet and taste what they're eating and smell the meal. There have been, as was alluded, some rather perverse incidents, where people have been doing rather strange things to people on the other side of the planet.

But the Oracle, as a way of being able to put everybody in the planet in contact with everybody else, at their discretion of course. There are filters built in there. You can't just barge into someone's brain and start taking over. But isn't that a good thing? Isn't that level of interconnectivity, where you can communicate with one person or a million people, at a mere thought, isn't that a positive development in our world? I mean, people used to have to use things called telephones.

You'd like to lead off on that one.

Peter Manning:
Well no, I do. As the minister for the chip…

Paul Willis:
No, the Oracle. The chip - I'll explain the chip in the moment.

Peter Manning:
Well the Oracle. I'd have to say it's an excellent idea and it has been introduced with great sensitivity to the privacy legislation. We've gone through a process of consensus and consultation with the community. That pattern was set by the previous 27 Labor governments, going back to Julia Gillard's government.

Paul Willis:
She became prime minister just after…

Peter Manning:
Very quickly, yes.

Paul Willis:
…that unfortunate chopstick incident with Kevin Rudd. Is that right?

Peter Manning:
Yes, that's right. Yes, yes, yes. Bad joke that.

Paul Willis:
Oh yeah. Him dim sim, I think, was the headline, I remember. But well you see the positives of the Oracle and another positive is here tonight. We have 360 people in the audience in this room with us and my Oracle's telling me that we have 42,520,256 - sorry, no that football match was starting in Taipei. We've got 32,149,562 members listening on Oracle tonight. They will be participating and we'll be getting their questions.

If you have a question, by the way, for our panel tonight and you wish to submit it via Oracle, just contact my producer. I have to filter my questions so that I can concentrate. Just think about Peter Brown, 619 - sorry, 8333 9576 and you'll be put through to my producer and his question will be put to me and I can put it to the audience for you. We will be coming to questions from the audience of live people here, what a novelty, of having people actually congregate like this, since the laws were changed to diminish the size that crowds were permitted to be. It's wonderful that we've had the exception for tonight's event. We will be getting questions from you a little later on.

Okay. So that's the positive side of the Oracle. Michelle, you've already commented that there is a negative side to the sort of interconnectivity that people with their iPods and mobile phones, they used to dream about this sort of stuff. Is it a dream or a nightmare?

Michelle Rumsey:
I think it's a nightmare. We're having a real problem. I mean, people just - their mental health, depression. We just don't know what's going on at the moment. We've just got to try and get some touch back in the world. Not this fancy touch that you say. I'm sorry, you know. Touch, it's not real touch. Smell's not so bad. But the real touch we need back in the world. We need some real communication.

Paul Willis:
But there are obviously health benefits from the Oracle. Because you can literally, you can go to the doctor. The doctor wants to know how you feel. He can instantly feel the pain that you're feeling. He can smell what you're smelling. He can actually experience, without actually physically injuring himself. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a gynaecologist. He experiences every birth of each of his patients via the Oracle. Surely this is a good thing.

Michelle Rumsey:
Look, you know, patient and public and consumer choice is fantastic. And to be able to get to anybody you want and scan the world for the best practitioner to have a conversation with and dress them as you want, so you can have conversations. That side of life is fantastic. But you still need communication and touch and feeling to enable you to have a proper healthy life.

Paul Willis:
Dexter, what about the disparity though of the availability of this technology? I mean, in Australia, it's relatively cheap and most Australians have a connection to the Oracle network. But I think that, all up, there are only 6,492,129,242 people actually connected to Oracle. Because there is at least a third of the world's population that are simply too poor.

Dexter Dunphy:
Yes, well because of the ecological catastrophes, we've seen large areas like Bangladesh submerged and so on. So we have seen an increasing, if that was possible, from the early part of the century, an increasing disparity between the haves and have-nots in the world and also within some nations, like China, for example, where whole areas have been devastated by the melting of the glaciers and so on.

So that, by the way, has caused real problems with - they went fairly heavily nuclear and some of that waste now is spread out across part of China, which has again affected the disparities. So there are whole sections of people across the world who are basically dispossessed, who are on the move or locked up in extensive prison camps, under guard, to keep them from migrating. And most of these groups don't have access.

There are also other groups, part of a general, probably part of a general sort of group, the shadow, which I don't think you've mentioned, but I think you might say a bit more about in a moment.

Paul Willis:
Yes.

Dexter Dunphy:
Where they've either refused to be chipped or get into the new Oracle system or have retreated and taken out the chips and have retreated into local communities with all of the traditional human touch and human community. And I think they're arguing very strongly that a lot of the ill health comes from the fact that we basically were tribal people and that all of this telecommunication stuff is all very well, but it's quite unhealthy. And they've gone back to a more traditional style, growing their own vegetables and looking after them…

Paul Willis:
Twenty-first century luddites, is what you're talking about.

Dexter Dunphy:
Yes, that's right, yes, essentially. Quite. And on the other hand, if you talk to the business, the senior executives in the big companies, they point to the real advantages in terms of financial transactions, the ease of doing business across the world and so on, that goes along with this whole system.

Paul Willis:
Well that touches actually on the twin system that we have of the mini chip. These were introduced, starting about 30 years ago, voluntary, the small chip. Again, most of us forget that it's even there. But it carries all of your medical records. And then they introduced the GPS so you could be tracked as to where you went.

And the function of it being a funds transfer device, so that you know - I mean, apparently it was only about 30 years ago that people were still using coins and notes to make transactions for what - they called it cash. We don't need that anymore. It's all in your chip.

Now that's got to be a positive development, hasn't it, that you've got a chip that, at any moment, people know where you are and they know your state of health? Your medical records are carried there. Jill, is this a good thing?

Jill McKeough:
Well, as I was saying before, the elite experience for children these days is to go to a school where they don't allow them to be chipped or to be Oracled either. The big advantage for children is that they can pay for their school lunch with their Oracle chip. But otherwise, their brains get overwhelmed. There's been a lot of work done on the plasticity of the human brain. These children need to learn to filter. They need to learn to understand. They need to learn some basic skills.

In fact, education has gone back to a lot of rote learning, to load up the original hard disk, within the chip in it. And there is a strong civil libertarian movement not to have yourself chipped in any way until you're 18.

Paul Willis:
There has been arguments to and fro on that. But a medical chip, by itself, is surely a useful thing.

Michelle Rumsey:
It's useful in the fact that, if you're very ill, you've got all your medical records there. But from a confidentiality point of view, sharing information around, have it always being on track. Back to mental health, it's not healthy. It's not happening for us.

Paul Willis:
But so many lives have been saved by people who are laying there unconscious and a quick swipe from the ambulance and you know exactly who they are, where they've been, what happened to them, what their medical condition is. Their lives have been saved by this wonderful chip.

Michelle Rumsey:
Yes and that can be held in a record. That's very good. There's some of that is very useful. But it's not good across the board, no.

Paul Willis:
Okay. Well they will…

Peter Manning:
Can I…

Paul Willis:
Peter, please.

Peter Manning:
…to say that no more private school boys have been lost in the Blue Mountains doing Duke of Edinborough expeditions, as a result of the chip. We've all, you know, plucked them out of the Blue Mountains and brought them back.

Paul Willis:
Yes, but also, since the British got rid of the monarchy, there's been no Duke of Edinborough awards anyway. Sorry, what's that, Peter? Oh, okay. Robert [Manbecke] from Botswana is on Oracle and he wants to bring the conversation back to the question of population. He says there's too many people. Why didn't you white guys sort it out earlier? That's what he said.

The history of the reason why our population has got to the levels that we are today is largely through affluence and people over-breeding. Is that a fair proposition? Why have we got nine billion people on the planet today?

Dexter Dunphy:
No, I don't think that's a fair proposition. I think the over-breeding took place, in fact, much more amongst the poor and impoverished. I mean, it makes - from a traditional economics point of view, it makes sense to have more children if many of them die, because you want someone to look after you in your old age.

So what has made a difference - so a lot of that population growth that we've experienced, it's brought us to this nine million, has come not from the affluent countries. There is a perception there, with those countries that have a strong fundamentalist faith, as in America, as in - well your Christian fundamentalists - and as in some aspects of Islam also, Islamic countries, where there's a strong emphasis on having many children.

But apart from that, most of the growth took place in poverty. Now that has largely gone down, as Jill said, the education of women. It's not only the education of women. It's also microloans to women in those areas, which allowed them not only to be educated, but also to actually set up small businesses. And I emphasise the fact that these loans were to women and not to men. Because women, because they have responsibility for children, proved to be much more reliable to give the money to them to run the businesses.

Paul Willis:
But the argument runs that nine billion people wouldn't be such a problem if such a large proportion of them weren't affluent people, who use too many resources.

Dexter Dunphy:
That's true. Traditionally, the affluent countries were into the growth fetish and they were the ones who were using major resources. But then they were followed by countries like China and India, which carried away by media at the time, wanted to copy the western lifestyle.

So around 2010, for example, the Indians introduced a USD 3000 car, which actually became more popular in Europe first, but then flooded the subcontinent. And so what turned out was it just proved impossible, in those countries. They replicated the problems caused by the economic growth fetish of the west. And it now has led to a revulsion against that a new ethic. But nevertheless, we got the population growth.

Paul Willis:
Jill and then Derek. Derek first.

Derek Eamus:
Thanks, Paul. I would like to unpack the question why is it we've got too many people? And there's never a single answer to a question that complex. And there's never a single bullet to answer it. So I would suggest there are a couple of interweaving lines of argument.

The first is perhaps the idea that the self is sacrosanct in western culture. And western culture has been, for 250 years, predicated on the idea that the self is more important than the state or than the community. And therefore, you tend to have the selfish concept of grabbing resources that you can. So that's one issue.

The other issue that's been alluded to, in the last 50 years, across the globe, is the reliance on short electoral cycles. If you have elections every three or four years, no political party in its right mind is going to canvas the idea of reducing its population numbers through a voluntary or a mandated population control measure. And so the move that we're seeing now, in 2050, through to the rest of this century of far longer electoral cycles, may move towards reducing population growth.

And then there's always been, for the last 250 years, the frontier culture, which has been that there's always some new land to explore and so there's always a new set of resources to go and grab. It's only now, in 2050, that we realise there are no new unexplored cultures and we now realise that finite resources really are hitting us on the head. But it's taken us to this point, in 2050, to get to nine billion before we started to actually unpack the idea we do need a one child policy across the globe.

Paul Willis:
But these issues didn't occur in the last five or 10 years. You can go back to Malthus at the beginning of the 1800s. He predicted that this was going to happen. And then Paul Ehrlich, back in the 1960s, produced a book, The Population Time Bomb. It was just largely laughed at. People could have done something a long way back, small things that would have affected the future outcome. Instead, nothing's happened. Why not?

Derek Eamus:
Nothing happened over that timeline because technology was always being seen as the saviour. And technology, you had the green revolution. We've had biotechnology revolutions. And we've had other technological solutions that have allowed the population to keep edging up and now we're going to hit the nine billion. The question really for us is are there any more technological fixes left for us to go to 9.9 and a half billion.

Paul Willis:
Jill, are there ethical ways of restricting population growth that maybe we should have entertained? We have heard the idea of educating women does have an effect on population growth. But unfortunately, it seems to have been implemented too late. Are there ethical ways of cutting population?

Jill McKeough:
Well we're living in an age of extreme democracy, where voting is done almost instantaneously through Oracle. There's no question of people not being able to turn up to the polls. What's happened in Iran, of course, as we saw about 40 years ago, those democracy riots, an alternative electronic society got set up there. And eventually that became the reality. That's occurred in Australia as well.

Now the result of that is that people who are being told what to do by the government actually have a great deal of voice and influencing. And I've already mentioned the wiki method of legislation. So one child policies, mandating them don't really work. People will pay the fines. They will - they want to run their lifestyle their own way.

They have the solar cells on their roof. They collect water. They think that they can have the children they want without the carbon footprint. So they're not - and it's partly what Derek was saying as well. People have a very strong drive towards self-determination.

So what does work is the economic drivers that Dexter's been talking about and I also mentioned earlier. So really, it's not possible to legislate for these things. It has to be done through people deciding to do it themselves.

Paul Willis:
John Langdon, from Bristol in England, is just coming through, saying that what you're not taking into account is historically, if you look at the graph of the population of the world, the only times it goes down is in times of war or in times of disease. John, that's not a very polite question.

Peter Manning:
Can I come in?

Paul Willis:
I'll put it to you anyway. Should we be considering population control measures such as having wars and increasing disease?

Peter Manning:
Can I come in on that one? I think that's right. Both Malthus and Darwin, for example, pointed out that the ultimate controls - they both pointed out, Darwin in particular actually, that every species try to increase its numbers. And it's held back essentially by other species preying on it, which is our equivalent of war, I suppose, and by running out of resources. And historically, civilisations have collapsed when they ran out of resources and their numbers have collapsed and so on. So war…

Paul Willis:
Isn't that what we're facing?

Peter Manning:
War, famine and so on. If we look at Africa, at the moment, for example, what we find is that Africa is getting back to stable population. But it's doing it by the old-fashioned methods of military wars and starvation and disease. So Africa is out of control as a continent. It and Australia are the two continents that have been most affected by global warming.

And of course, Australia has experienced a dramatic rise of population due to migration. I think 100 million we've now reached. A large proportion of those are really boat people, right, who've come in. And the parliament's currently looking at the possibility - the navy has been strengthened - and looking at the possibility of literally blowing anymore out of the water, which is a very debatable thing…

Paul Willis:
But this is a debate that's been going on the last 30 years, since people started to turn up in Australia. The term that was coined by the elder statesman of the time, Malcolm Turnbull. He came up with the phrase uninvited migration. And now, 70 million Australians have been here for less than 30 years.

They've turned up from South-East Asian countries, some as far away as Africa, in fact. And they are escaping famine. They're escaping war. They're escaping environmental devastation. And Australia's not alone. Every other country that has got any resources left is facing the same problem. And you can't just torpedo the boats on the way in. That's not allowed.

Peter Manning:
Of course, for the last 20 years, of course, we know that these people haven't been coming as they used to in the first decade of this century, by 400 people on leaky boats. They have been coming by aircraft carrier from China.

Paul Willis:
There were a couple of those…

[Over speaking]

Peter Manning:
…sinking these boats is certainly an ethical problem. But probably a military problem as well.

Paul Willis:
Jill, the question of people migrating around the planet. It can't be stopped, can it? I mean, if people simply keep moving the way that they have been, you can't put up barriers. There's no effective way of stopping them, is there?

Jill McKeough:
No. But as Dexter pointed out, there are millions of people incarcerated in refugee camps and kept under military control, so they actually can't move. And they are becoming whole communities. In fact, there are now three and four generations of children growing up. And they've ceased to be refugee camps really. They're just towns.

Peter Manning:
Can I add that not all these refugees are destitute? A lot of wealthy Dutch, for example, have actually created Noah's Arks. They're floating islands that they have desalination plants. They're highly armed against the pirates who are roaming the world. And they produce everything they need. And they move around the oceans, because they get more fish and so on that way. This is Dutch ingenuity. And population in Holland's…

Paul Willis:
But that's a resource heavy solution that only a small population of Holland, what, 52 million, only a small population like that can consider such a resource rich response.

Derek Eamus:
That's right. So you refer to Malthus and your Bristol question in England, said can't we just reintroduce war and famine and disease. Well he's probably a lot closer to the mark that he realises. Because that's exactly what we are seeing globally. We are seeing resource based wars.

The Israel Palestine problem is now entering its seventh or eighth decade. And this is very much dependent on access to groundwater, which is being depleted globally. So we are seeing large numbers of resource wars. We all recall, or some of the older members of audience, recall the wars that were happening in the year 2004, 5 and 6, when people were just looking for oil that time. The wars now are all about water and decent soil for agriculture.

Paul Willis:
But the part of John's question that I left out was he said shouldn't we be encouraging these wars to try and bring population down? Rather than just the current stand-off tut-tut they're having another war over there, he actually suggested we somehow encourage people to have wars, so that the population goes backwards.

Peter Manning:
Can I say that's a particularly English solution?

Paul Willis:
Look at what they did with Prince Charles.

Peter Manning:
That's of course what they did with India and Pakistan, you know. That's what they did in Africa. And that's what they did in Ireland, with the Irish famine. I mean, the English have been past masters at killing off hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, to lower the population and have higher economic standards. So that's an old idea really. And I think…

Male:
Forward thinking obviously.

Peter Manning:
He should go back to Bristol and just have a good time.

Paul Willis:
My producer's telling me that at least 241 million Poms are currently jamming the Oracle and want to ask a question of you, Peter. I think we need to move on. Michelle, we do, in most of the world, enjoy better health through medical breakthroughs. There's the cancer vaccine. We haven't seen someone die from cancer for 30 years. Although, if you asked the No Vaccine Network, apparently they say that no-one's ever died of cancer. But cancer has been eliminated.

You refer to the heart scrub pill, whereby one pill and you get rid of that plaque build-up in your veins and your arteries, so that heart disease has plummeted. These are all good things. But they've contributed to more people on the planet. How does that dilemma play out? Should we actually think about maybe taking away the cancer vaccine, of allowing people to get arterial sclerosis, so they pop their clogs earlier?

Michelle Rumsey:
It's a hot debate. You're absolutely right. It's back to the economics of health, I think. We've had that debate for many years. The more healthy we get, the more money we spend on keeping people alive, the more people there are alive. It's a tricky one.

And I was intrigued a little bit about the migration issues as well, because one of the issues I was thinking of earlier was the area around health professionals. And actually, as much as we don't want migrants, some of these people will actually help look after us. Because as our population grows and people get older and older, there's not going to be many people around to look after us.

So there's a whole variety of issues around the health issues. And I don't know if Dexter can add to some of the economics of that. But it's a tricky one.

Paul Willis:
Sorry, Jill.

Jill McKeough:
I was just going to say that one of the things that civil libertarians like is the right to euthanasia. And euthanasia's become much more acceptable.

Paul Willis:
Voluntary.

Jill McKeough:
Voluntary euthanasia. Yeah. But there is also - in many parts of society, there's an implicit assumption that there is some sort of resource balance between keeping someone alive and letting them decide that it's time to go. Now, about 40 years ago, some research was done that showed that something like - and Michelle might remember the facts better than I do - but something like 75 per cent of medical resources were being spent in the last three months of a person's life. And that sort of cost benefit analysis started to take on a rather hard edge, in terms of the population then deciding that they didn't want to subsidise that.

Paul Willis:
We have a question from our live audience this time.

Question:
Oh hello. I'm in my nineties and I'm still working for Planning and Review at the UTS. I didn't think I had any children…

Paul Willis:
At least you can work from home these day.

Question:
Well, I didn't I had any children until a few years ago, when I finally gave in and got the chip, that I found that an ex-boyfriend of mine had stolen my DNA and they contacted me. But I was just wondering why no-one's mentioned the terra forming of Mars. I mean to say, Malthus didn't take into account the new territories in America and you're not taking into account Mars and Zero G technology.

Paul Willis:
Dexter and Peter, we were discussing this just the other day, weren't we, with the failures of the space exploration program.

Dexter Dunphy:
We have a small community on the moon. But it's a very small community, very highly expensive. It's just proved, beyond the world resources, particularly in these times of financial and ecological crisis, to put large - we haven't found any more planets that are equivalent to the earth. So putting something on Mars has just turned out to be financially unviable and ecologically unviable.

So desirable as those alternatives might seem, we're stuck with one earth and that's the problem. We have too many people on the earth and there are no more continents to be discovered. And Derek referred to the green revolution. Well the green revolution, yes, allowed the population of the world to increase dramatically, had a marked impact on India.

But that impact was - that was to increase food supply in relatively short term. What we then found was that the green revolution had poisoned the water and exhausted the groundwater, it poisoned water and poisoned the earth. And so we've gone back to more organic means of farming. But the result of that is we have a lower food supply than we had before.

Paul Willis:
Derek.

Derek Eamus:
And the other reason we don't have large numbers of spaceships flying off to Mars is simply that, every time this proposition has been put to the global population, they've responded by saying, until you've fixed up what's gone wrong here, we're not going to allow the political parties access to the finance that you would need to send a spaceship to Mars. They want the resources focused on the problems we have here now.

Paul Willis:
The political landscape of Australia and the planet have changed out of sight in the last 50 years, now that we do have the global government located in the Cayman Islands, which is constituted, for those of you who forget these facts, every 50 million people on the planet get to have one representative in the World Global Council. So Australia has two representatives on the council. China currently has 432 representatives. India has 425. And there are 1199 councillors. Although apparently, when our nine billionth person arrives this evening, they will be looking to create one more extra councillor.

What affect has it had on the way the world has run? Some people say that the whole global government idea is a furphy. Others say that it's actually helped us to implement legislation on a global scale for issues that are global.

Derek Eamus:
Well as chairman of the Global Environmental Assessment Authority, I must, of course, fully endorse the idea that we do need a global authority to look after global issues. I mean, I recall gravely reading papers back in the 1990s, when things were still printed on paper, and 2000 and such like…

Paul Willis:
I saw a sheet of paper on HyperBay the other day, going for 150 bucks. What a bargain.

Derek Eamus:
It was. Yes. I've got one myself. But there was debate there about how to tackle the global problem of global climate change. And of course, Australia was at the forefront of thinking. No, that wasn't Australia, sorry. There were a few countries that were suggesting caps and trades for carbon. Then there was suggestions of going nuclear. And there was a whole range of suggestions to do with global issues. And of course, nothing got done because there was no global authority.

And so I think the change that we're seeing in political landscapes across the world and moving towards more global perspectives is only but a good thing.

Paul Willis:
Jill, would you care to comment on what nations have had to give up politically in order for a world government to operate?

Jill McKeough:
Well, as we learned from the European community, it's a giving up of sovereignty. It's a giving up of being able to run the local scene yourself. And so what we've seen is a great amalgamation of power at the world level. But the local government is extremely important, because that's where the water reticulation, the garbage collection, the community plots where people grow their vegetables, are all dealt with.

And so those councils have a lot of power over everyday life. But the actual global policies are being run by the global world authority. And really national government and state government, in Australia…

Paul Willis:
Local government, since the states were abolished.

Jill McKeough:
Well that's right. It's basically gone. But what we have seen at the same time is a lot of people forming into their own little groups, often their religious groups or based on some policy. They don't have formal regulatory power, but they do have a great deal of influence on opinion. And so we see that big contrast between the global governance at the one level and local at the other. And there's not much in between these days.

Paul Willis:
We have a question in analogue form.

Question:
Hello. I'm wondering whether any of the panel would be interested in explaining what went wrong with the East Timor solution. About 2015, when it was very obvious to most people that East Timor's population was growing far too fast with the fertility rate of around about seven children per women, that something needed to be done about that.

And the suggestion that had been put forward was that they should have to suffer the consequences of their choices. That is that the people of East Timor would have to live off East Timor. And that idea was put forward as being the sort of thing that perhaps every country could take up. That is that you would have to live off your patch. That was suggested as an idea for sustainability into the long-term. Can you tell me what happened to that? Why did that disappear by 2050?

Paul Willis:
Tough love on a planetary scale.

Peter Manning:
Can I answer that one because there was quite a lot of discussion in the media about that and whether that was a prototype? You'll remember that what we found was that East Timorese coffee and East Timorese fish were fantastic. And the East Timorese ended up very hypo fish eaters. And as a result, became quite creative in language skills and literature and painting and so on. Their output just soared through the roof.

So there was quite a deal of discussion about whether the East Timorese solution was good for everybody, fish and coffee. And the general answer was, of course, no. But East Timor itself went very well for a very long time. And of course, it's now got a population of 50 million, as we know. I think it was a bit of a…

Dexter Dunphy:
Can I just come in on that one? Because to some extent, that solution has almost been forced on us. Because the emergence, well the - as we reached peak oil essentially, we handled that situation, to some extent, by moving to electric cars and so forth. But nevertheless, the price of oil rocketed, as demand for oil went up, particularly from India and China and the Middle East. And so oil became much more expensive.

As a result of that, the embedded costs, which had never been put in to the economy, of moving food to and from, right around the world and so forth, across the nation, et cetera, et cetera, all those embedded costs were actually then put in. So the idea of taking stuff around the world, particularly consumables, is basically gone. So countries have been forced back into largely looking after their own food provision.

We had a little incident. Most of you wouldn't be old enough to remember. But in Cuba, around the turn of the century, it was isolated, first of all by the United States and then trade wise and then isolated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. And what we had there was a little preview of how an economy can survive without oil.

And what happened there is what has happened in much of the world. They went back to their own local communities. Even highly educated people became farmers part of the time and so on and so forth. So we've been forced back into producing most of our - or a large proportion of our food within our countries, rather than trading it between countries.

Paul Willis:
Derek, as we just alluded to there, we have made various changes to the way that we do things. We now have electric cars for commuter transport, as well as really good public transport. I mean, you can't fault Sydney Rail, can you? We've gone nuclear, so that we closed down all of those filthy polluting coal fired power stations, even though we are…

Derek Eamus:
And yet strangely we still are the largest coal exporter to China.

Paul Willis:
Yes. Well is it factors like that that meant that we still went up two to three degrees in global temperatures and sea levels came up half a degree?

Derek Eamus:
Yes indeed.

Paul Willis:
Or half a metre, I'm sorry.

Derek Eamus:
Yes indeed. In fact, it was well known, even as far back as 2002, that if you ceased omitting carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere globally, you would still see warming, because of the lag phase. And the lag phase is very significant. And that's one of the things that is very apparent in the global ecology today.

For most of earth's history, ecology has been an equilibrium. But for the last 200 years, humankind has been pushing ecology off its equilibrium. And so we are now living in a globe which is very much dis-equilibrium. And we really don't know where the new equilibrium's going to be found.

Paul Willis:
What should we have done? I mean, if I can give you a magic wand and take you back 40 years, say, what would you be encouraging them to do then that they didn't do?

Derek Eamus:
Go nuclear across most the globe as soon as you can would be the first. And I fully endorse the views that we've had that educating women in probably the most effective and important way of reducing fertility rates globally.

Paul Willis:
So there, you're actually connecting a - and this is an argument that's been made widely - the connection between population and climate change. Climate change isn't a problem in itself. It's a symptom of population.

Derek Eamus:
That's right. One of the most worrying things you read in the history books of the whole period from the 1960s through to the present in 2050, is the absence of any real informed broad-scale discussion of population carrying capacity, anywhere in the world.

Paul Willis:
We have another analogue question.

Question:
I was interested to hear the comment about aid, that Australia was getting so much aid from Europe and China, I think, was stated. I shouldn't have been surprised because I have been chipped. But be that as it may, that information passed me by.

Paul Willis:
The Oracle is not perfect.

Question:
So my question is surely we can't be relying on aid from Europe for too much longer. What is Australia doing to try and lessen its reliance on aid?

Paul Willis:
We became dependent on aid, didn't we, when we lost our agriculture?

Derek Eamus:
We became dependent on aid because the population of Australia became so large through unwanted immigration because of the loss of water resources, soil resources, in the Asian region. And Australia, in the year 2000, was relatively empty. And so we became a magnet for people. But clearly, we can't sustain the population that we currently have, which is why we are dependent on aid.

Paul Willis:
Well I've actually got - my grand-dad was saying that, back at the turn of the century, that there used to be groundwater over large areas of inland Australia, which supported agriculture. And that groundwater's disappeared in the huge drought they had at the beginning of the century.

Derek Eamus:
Indeed. It's not just the droughts that we're seeing, but also the reduced rainfall across most of Australia has reduced recharge. Sea level rises have gone up. So that's caused seawater to enter all the coastal aquifers. They are now saline and can't be used for agriculture.

The one thing that we are doing to reduce our reliance on aid is we've become the largest repository for spent nuclear fuel. And we are not only the largest repository for spent fuel, we are also the largest recycling plant of the world for nuclear fuel. And this is now estimated to be 25 per cent of GDP within the next 50 years. It was an unpopular decision at the time, 10 years ago, to go nuclear and become the centre for recycling nuclear power. But it's economically very sensible.

Paul Willis:
And it's ironic because they've only just finished scraping off the over-burden of the Olympic Dam deposit that was - it's taken them 80 years, hasn't it, just to get down to the good stuff, the uranium there?

Derek Eamus:
Yes. There was a certain amount of political pressure from all the other governments that, if we were going to export the uranium, perhaps we had some obligation to take some back and deal with it.

Paul Willis:
Yes, sure. Close the cycle.

Derek Eamus:
Yes.

Question:
I'm kind of wondering whether, back in the early noughties, we actually had a crossroad that we could have chosen to go back towards transition model versus forwards towards the hell on earth model which we're currently facing. The transition model being localisation of food, localisation of energy, localisation of population growth, localisation of health management, education systems.

And indeed, the Oracle is in fact part of the problem. Information overload. The brain has billions and billions of neurons. But there is only a certain amount that we can process. So we've actually been information overloaded into becoming dumb and believing that technology is the solution to the problem. I actually think that technology's the problem, not the solution, the crossroads.

Paul Willis:
Comments from the panel.

Jill McKeough:
We did see, 41 years ago, in Piermont, the first 100 mile restaurant opened. And as I mentioned before, there was, at that time, a lot of snobbery around acting locally, eating locally, not using fossil fuel to transport food. The local education movement really took off among - and local everything really took off among a number of people.

This is where the local governments came in. Because they were, as I said, having community gardens for people that didn't have their own garden and so on. But it was reasonably widespread. But in pockets. It was not really something that was mandated, nor was it something the whole population took to.

Paul Willis:
Peter.

Peter Manning:
Oh, I just - I think that's unnecessarily and illogically blaming the Oracle. The Oracle gives us the power to think beyond technology. And not only to think, to feel and to experience. There are many, many examples of it, of things, experiments that have been happening in Zambia and Brazil and Palestine and so on and so on, where the use of water, for instance. These projects have been taken by people who have been using their noggin or Oracle well and have started to do those sorts of things in their backyards in Marrickville and Hornsby and Bondi.

So when you can do things like that, you can transfer Zambia to Bondi, good experiments, I think that shows that the Oracle is a fabulous invention, as long as it's not taken as the answer to everything. I remember back in 41 years ago, The Guardian Weekly was something where I read and got some wisdom from. Now, the Oracle, there's no such thing as The Guardian Weekly. The Oracle has, if you think potato, you'll get a Kazakhstan potato and how to grow it in your backyard. That's fabulous.

Paul Willis:
I think Michelle disagrees. Is that right?

Michelle Rumsey:
I totally disagree. I agree with you, Sir, totally. I think, back in time, back in 1978, we had the Alma Mater declaration. That was looking at primary healthcare. We were trying to really look at where we were with primary healthcare. We were looking at health for all by 2000. Well we didn't get there.

But again, in 2009, WHO tried again and they're looking at primary healthcare. I think there's a crossroads that was missed back in 2009. I think maybe there's an opportunity. Thank you.

Paul Willis:
Well there are so many other areas that we could discuss here this evening. We could go on for hours. But the Oracle is calling me, with some important news. I did actually want to touch on the collapse of a major churches in Australia, when they had their tax exempt status removed.

That wonderful case with the Mountain Melodies Church. Remember that. Where they actually predicted the day of the Rapture and the Modern Lunatic Society, an offshoot of the Australian Sceptics, challenged them to sign over the deeds to all the church for the day after the Rapture. That court case is still going on. Can you believe it?

Peter Manning:
Oh Paul…

Paul Willis:
But the important news - sorry, Peter. I will have to cut you off there. Because the important news, ladies and gentlemen, we are now nine billion people. In a surprise twist, although it was largely predicted that this would in fact be a Chinese young person, in fact, although the 8,999,999,999th baby in the world was in fact Chinese and the 9,000,000,001th has already been born and she's Chinese, in fact the nine billionth child is a New Zealander.

Her parents have already nominated her name as Briony MacKenzie. And I would like, by way of wrapping up tonight, to go around our panel and ask, one by one, if they can paint a picture for us, what sort of future Briony faces as we head into the second half of this century. Let's start with Peter. What sort of future do you see for Briony?

Peter Manning:
I think a very difficult future. I think Australia and New Zealand are at the limit of their capacity. I think individualisation in your own home has sparked a whole lot of mental problems. Family life is not absolutely fantastic at the moment. So the growth pattern for Briony, I think, is going to be difficult.

I think technology is going to be excellent. I think the state of the planet is right on the critical edge of falling off the edge. There's a potential catastrophe that Briony will be the first generation to experience.

Paul Willis:
Michelle.

Michelle Rumsey:
I'd really agree with a lot of those sentiments and just say that mental health could be a real issue, if we continue on that way of just looking at a screen constantly.

Paul Willis:
You're worried about the mental health of a New Zealander.

Michelle Rumsey:
I am.

Paul Willis:
That's an interesting paradox.

Michelle Rumsey:
Dexter.

Paul Willis:
Dexter.

Dexter Dunphy:
Well, in one sense, Briony was fortunate to be born in New Zealand, because water supply is not a problem in New Zealand, as it is in Australia. The weather pattern has actually been kind to them, kinder than to us. So she is growing up in an environment where there aren't extreme water shortages. Also, there hasn't been quite the same growth in population as…

Paul Willis:
No. There are only 50 million.

Dexter Dunphy:
Yes, in New Zealand. So there's a bit more space. She's also a woman. The opportunities for women are generally better than they are for men, in this new world. But nevertheless, she faces a world which is rapidly running out of resources. Population is in fact plateauing at this point.

But there's lag effect in the climate change is a worry, because we've had two to three degrees warming. More is predicted because we weren't able to - we made some choices early on not to take action, effective action on climate change. So this lag effect has been extended. Global warming could go up to five or six or even seven degrees. In which case, it's finished for most of the human population. Briony might be part of that. So it's a mixed bag for her.

Derek Eamus:
I think she's going to enter a world blessed with a very high technological capacity, but unfortunately also a world damned with a low political capacity to make informed decisions based on science and based on principles of sustainability. So that's a challenge for her as she enters adulthood.

She's also going to enter a world where the differential between the haves and the have-nots is just as big as it has been for the past 250 years. But what is interesting is that those who have may not be those who have in the future. I think we're going to see quite a significant shift between who really does have the resources. Those people today will not be the same people in 50 years' time. So she'll be part of that transition.

She's going to enter a world where energy demands are being met through nuclear power, but the things that can't be generated, like water, soil and air resources, are being depleted globally, leading to still considerable mass migrations around the world.

Paul Willis:
Jill.

Jill McKeough:
Well I'd just like to end on a note of hope really. She's a symbol of - she's become immediately famous on Oracle for being that big…

Paul Willis:
The nine billionth child.

Jill McKeough:
That's right, the nine billionth. People are waking up to themselves. They're realising - this sort of debate's been going on for years now. People are starting to become much more aware of the issues, much more self-sufficient, trying to live within the resources. Population has plateaued. She is living in New Zealand. Fortunately it's warmer - well for her it's warmer than it was.

There is plenty of water. Her parents are determined that she will have as normal a childhood and upbringing and possible. I think that there will be some improvements by the time she's older.

Paul Willis:
Ladies and gentlemen, could you please thank our panel? Jill McKeough, Derek Eamus, Dexter Dunphy, Michelle Rumsey and Peter Manning.

I'd just like to end with a dedication and an acknowledgement. The dedication of course is to Briony MacKenzie, the nine billionth child born into the world. Despite the rather gloomy future that she may be facing, may we all wish her a long, happy and healthy life.

And an acknowledgement. An acknowledgement to the politicians, to the religious and social leaders, to the captains of industry and to the common people of the last 50 years, people who could have made a difference if they'd actually tried. And the acknowledgement to them is, if you had the last 50 years over again, what would you do differently?

Good night. Go in peace.

Well, I'd just like to say thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. This has been an experiment for me. I've never done anything like this before. I'm quite pleased. I think it worked very well. You guys helped make it happen by playing the role that you did. Our fantastic panel did a wonderful job, being very inventive and very thoughtful about their predictions for the future.

A little bit of housekeeping. Please take your glasses to the tables outside. Don't leave them in the lecture theatre. A vote of thanks to the guys running the cameras and the sound and the lights. This gentlemen down here, who's been sitting here quietly, trying to avoid being acknowledged, he is in fact the guy who's made it all happen tonight, Robert Button.

Thank you very much.

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