Queensland government Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation Andrew McNamara recently made a series of points critical to the future of our children and grandchildren.

There has been much talk about that future in the past few weeks from candidates for the new Sunshine Coast Regional Council.

The two mayoral contenders have campaigned vigorously on their records – which are well worth examination, because ultimately the new mayor’s power will come only from his capacity as a leader.

Council decisions require a democratic process which affords each elected member, including the mayor, one vote. Voters have to decide which of the pair has the greater capacity to lead the new council and to work with councillors to make decisions that best reflect the will of the majority of ratepayers.

Mr McNamara’s address to the Brisbane Institute made it clear how crucial it is that we get it right.

There have been attempts to make “housing affordability” a campaign issue. The development industry has claimed that the release of more subdivision land is the pathway to that goal.

Urban Development Institute of Australia Sunshine Coast regional head David Oliver sees planning for growth and catering for its inevitability through state provision of adequate infrastructure as critical.

Respondents to the Sunshine Coast Daily’s recent Your Coast Your Say survey expressed concern about the rate of growth and the impact an increased population would have on their quality of life.

They may be surprised to find they have an ally in the Queensland Cabinet.

This is what Minister McNamara had to say on the subject of growth and sustainability.

“Population distribution, standard of living and sustainability are linked inextricably,’’ he told the Brisbane Institute.

“A long-term study pointing out the appropriate population distribution for Australia, including modelling of the impacts both of climate change and peak oil, must now become a priority.

“In the 21st century, the human race must finally confront the reality that in the closed system that is planet Earth, there are limits to growth.

“No matter how clever we are, there is no escaping the physical limits of the world’s resources. The laws of physics trump the laws of economics every time.”

Mr McNamara called for a focus on “smart growth” that was low-carbon, low-pollution and resource-neutral, and which added to the natural capital, instead of destroying it.

He said global demands on natural systems exceeded their sustainable yield by an estimated 25 per cent.

“We are meeting current demands by consuming the Earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse,” he said.

“With some notable exceptions, policy makers have been guilty of allowing sustainability to be cast as a peculiarly environmental issue, marginalised from the main game of economic development.

“Pigeon-holing it as a narrow environmental concept has led us down a path of accepting unsustainability in the name of jobs and economic development.

“Yet what have we done but draw upon the Earth’s non-renewable resources as if they were limitless, and create an economy that assumes – indeed demands – cheap energy to sustain the national and international movement of food and goods and water and people in ever greater volumes and numbers.”

Mr McNamara called for the building of a new economy powered largely by renewable energy, backed by a diversified transport system, and that uses and re-uses everything.

And he warned of the dangers of exponential population growth, quoting American biologist Edward O. Wilson, who said: “The rampaging monster loose upon the land is over-population. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct.”

Mr McNamara also quoted former NSW premier Bob Carr’s address to the 1997 National Conference of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population, in which he said unsustainable growth was degrading the planet.

“Australia must begin to think of itself as a country with a population problem,’’ Mr Carr said in that speech.

“Let’s throw away for all time the notion that Australia is an empty space just waiting to be filled up. Our rivers, our soils, our vegetation won’t allow that to happen without an enormous cost to those who come after us.”

Mr McNamara said that half a generation after those wise words by Bob Carr, they remained just as true and just as unacted upon as they were in 1997.

“In 1949, Australia’s greatest economist, Colin Clark, presented the keynote paper “World Resources and World Population” at the UN Scientific Conference on Conservation and Utilisation of Resources,’’ he said.

“He noted that the ‘conservation of soil, forests, stream flows and natural biological equilibria is certainly one of the most important and urgent tasks which faces us today’.”

It still is.

It can only be hoped that from the 50 people who have nominated for positions on the new Sunshine Coast regional council, voters can identify those who understand that “sustainability” is more than a buzzword and that it means more than installing a rainwater tank and a solar hot-water system in new so-called “green” subdivisions.

It will be not much of a future if they can’t.