A frightening document - "Australia from 1949 and into the future".

It paints a forlorn and bleak future.

That is assuming, probably correctly, that this political document charts the course for Australia for many years ahead.

One of the great pities in relation to it is the fact that, had it been prepared by an opposite number of his in the Australian Labor Party, there would have been far too little difference in fundamental philosophy.

Like the curate's egg, it is not all bad. But mostly so. There are so many contestable (to be polite) statements, conclusions, and omissions that it is hard to know where to start. But, to respect response limits, it might be appropriate to concentrate on one: the omission of concern for population pressure in Australia.

It is not contestible that the Australian continent's capability to provide the necessities for comfortably civilised society is rapidly going down the gurgler. Evidence is not in short supply: State of the Environment Reports; the Land and Water Audit; continuing information relating to salinity problems almost everywhere; and to the Murray-Darling Basin problems; Pressures on the eastern seaboard, and upon the south-west corner of Western Australia. There are heaps more, perhaps most disturbing is predicted increase of dessication. And the efforts to address them are running slow behind the rapidly advancing problems.

We are not like Singapore. We depend upon our own environment to sustain our people, wherever they live. Sydney imports grain, vegetables, and meat, from between Balranald and Dubbo - and beyond; energy and building materials from outside city limits. The cities are helping to beggar the bush.

Yet the retail and housing sectors tremble at the thought of consumption decline. And the government provides more consumers by increasing the immigration program; even though last year population was increasing at the rate of a million per four years. And the program is not helping the desperate in UN refugee camps throughout the world - but poaching trained professionals from overseas.

Into the future indeed!

With all due modesty I suggest that you read a copy of my What Was It all For? The Reshaping of Australia (Allen & Unwin) which will be published on 1 September this year. It picks up some of the points you make, but many others as well, and suggests that the story of the last fifty years is a heartening one, in which education, wealth and immigration have combined to build an Australia that is astonishingly better than its counterpart in 1950. How to keep it that way is the question, and I propose a way forward too.

Yes, there are worries ahead of us, but of course there were in 1950, as well. As a young National Serviceman in 1956 I was certain that I would be one the third set of Australian soldiers within 50 years to be fighting in the Middle East, if a nuclear war didn't destroy us first. We got through that, and we'll get through the anxieties ahead, too, provided that we keep our spirits high and recognise that we are a highly competent and creative society.

C'mon Don, can't you give us a sneak preview! ;-) At the least I hope you'll write one or two opinion pieces when the book comes out. Could help sales.

Alas, in these matters I am somewhat in the hands of the marketing people! But with regard to education, see my own contribution on this page further below, and the second article on education which I published with New Matilda in Issue 34.

Don, it's a tough ask - to produce a book that delivers a good map for the road ahead, yet will sell well. So, good luck.

You have noted that Australia is somewhat improved since the 1950s. Yes, and a good thing too. And the improvement would have been better if we had not been, in Russian parlance, "burning the furniture" to keep ourselves warm.

Duncan Brown's Feed or Feedback, published about a year back, has drawn a very clear roadmap for human society. Impeccably reasoned from irrefutable data, and well written. An absolute gem which should be essential reading for all members of society - but, it is almost invisible on bookshelves. So just being good is not enough to "spread the word". Almost the same applies to Mary White's books which wonderfully and accurately tell it as it is for Australian landscapes; and also for her Earth Alive, accurately portraying the human species as a component of, and composed of, the earth's biosphere.

So, I hope your book gets a good airing if it, like the above and also the Archbishop of Canterbury, fosters cohesion with the environment upon which we fundamentally depend. Without that, we live ever closer to a re-run of the old story of Boewulf and Grendel; but it will be, among many others, nuclear warfare re-appearing like Grendel; from the lair where it temporarily rests, to lay waste to feasting humanity.