“Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.” – Edward Abbey

Australia has a habit of treating growth not as a means to something better, but as an end in itself. Population growth. Economic growth. Productivity growth. Tax base growth. Housing supply growth. Energy demand growth. Always more. Always forward.

It’s the quiet, all-encompassing ideology beneath our politics. And even when our best policy thinkers challenge the consequences, they often leave the underlying assumption untouched.

Dr Ken Henry, former Treasury secretary and one of Australia’s most credible public policy voices, gave a powerful address this week to the National Press Club. In it, he argued that restoring Australia’s environment through new national laws is not just about conservation – it’s about long-term productivity. He made the case that nature repair should be understood as the most important economic reform available to us, more potent than tax cuts or deregulation. He supported enforceable National Environmental Standards, called for proper natural capital accounting, and argued that subsidised ecological destruction — like native forest logging — must end.

It was, by any measure, a serious, necessary and courageous intervention.

And yet. Like his earlier work on tax reform, Henry’s speech still assumes that the system we are in is reformable without first questioning the engine that drives it: a model of capitalism dependent on high population growth, property development, and GDP expansion.

That assumption may prove fatal — to his proposals, and to our ecological future.

Growth doesn’t trickle down. It piles up.

The most dangerous thing about Australia’s growth model is that it still performs a plausible impersonation of equity. It speaks the language of uplift, opportunity, prosperity for all. More people mean more workers, more homes, more services, more progress. But the reality — seen in stagnant wages, deepening inequality, ecological overshoot, and housing precarity — is that the benefits are neither guaranteed nor equitably distributed.

In truth, growth has become a vehicle not for shared prosperity, but for upward redistribution. Gains from migration-fuelled demand are captured by developers and landlords. Productivity gains are swallowed by profits. Ecological losses are displaced onto marginalised communities, future generations, and nonhuman life.

Ken Henry, to his credit, knows this. His proposed tax reforms targeted rent-seeking. His environmental agenda pushes back against extractive short-termism. But the deeper premise — that we can grow our way to sustainability, justice, and well-being — remains mostly intact.

Reform can’t work in a system built to resist it

Look at what happened to Henry’s 2010 tax review. Its land tax recommendations were shelved by premiers addicted to stamp duty windfalls and donor-class property profits. His mining rent tax was gutted by a campaign from fossil giants. His simplification of the transfer system was deemed too hard in a political culture hooked on middle-class welfare and bracket creep.

Now consider his 2025 environmental vision. It arrives into a planning and infrastructure regime where high net migration is not a demographic reality to be managed, but a growth lever pulled for fiscal and political effect. Biodiversity protection is undermined by “offset markets”. Urban expansion eats farmland and bushland alike. First Nations leadership is invoked symbolically but excluded structurally.

None of this is an accident. It’s the outcome of a model in which population growth serves property interests, ecological damage is externalised, and reform is tolerated only if it doesn’t interfere with accumulation.

From extraction to enclosure

The danger now is that even Henry’s best ideas will be absorbed and neutralised by the very system they aim to reform. Natural capital accounting? A tool for offsetting, not preservation. Biodiversity laws? Streamlined to maintain development velocity. Nature repair? Turned into a speculative market for corporate credits. The language of ecological stewardship is easily recoded into a new grammar of enclosure.

What begins as reform ends as replication.

Time to break the spell

If Henry is right that this is “our last, best chance,” then we must stop pretending that better data or cleverer incentives can fix a model that is ecologically and ethically exhausted.

Instead, we need to confront its ideological core:

• That growth will lift all boats

• That population equals progress

• That productivity equals wellbeing

• That “the economy” is something separate from the planet that sustains it

It’s time to call those stories what they are: myths. Comforting myths, lucrative myths, bipartisan myths – but myths nonetheless.

A final chance for clarity

Henry remains one of the few senior voices willing to speak hard truths about the future. But unless we challenge the systemwide addiction to growth that underpins even his own frameworks, his ideas — like his tax review — may be admired, then quietly buried.

The real reform now is not better policies within a broken system, but a rupture with the logic of endless expansion.

Growth, in its current form, isn’t neutral. It’s directional. And unless redirected toward restraint, regeneration and justice, it will consume every “last, best chance” we have left.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.