Australia’s population growth expectations have been revised; Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan yesterday revealed a prediction of 35 million by 2049. Most of the articles in the links below regard this as a good thing; a “challenge” rather than a concern. 35 million may seem small compared to the populations of many countries, but take into consideration that most of the Australian continent is desert, fresh water supplies are scarce and its soils are ancient and infertile.
From the Herald-Sun, 18/9:
“Higher fertility and migration triggers Aussie population boom”.
“Population boom ‘a recipe for tragedy’ ”. Senator Bob Brown seems to be one of the few politicians who does have a clue. Short article reproduced below:
Australian Greens leader Bob Brown has taken issue with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for expressing enthusiasm for a growing population. The Federal Government has released revised estimates showing Australia’s population will increase from 22 million at present to 35 million by 2049, boosting 2007 estimates by more than 7 million people.
Mr. Rudd said “it’s great” from an economic perspective that Australia’s population was growing as other nations experienced a decline. But Senator Brown said Mr. Rudd needed to explain how population growth would affect economic prosperity. “This population boom is not economic wisdom, it is a recipe for planetary exhaustion and great human tragedy,” he said.
The environmental campaigner pointed out that when Mr. Rudd was born in 1957, the world’s population was three billion. “There are 6.8 billion now. There will be 9 billion by mid-century,” Senator Brown said, adding economic growth needed to coincide with a steady population.
From The Age:
“Millions of reasons for celebration – or concern”, 19/9. MP Kelvin Thomson is another of the rare politicians who find growth a concern.
But as anyone in Melbourne knows, there are drawbacks to rapid population growth. Labor MP Kelvin Thomson is worried: “We are sleep-walking towards environmental disaster.”
Mr. Thomson says 30 per cent of Australia’s bird species are already under threat, and wildlife habitats are falling victim to increased urbanisation and food production. And trying to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent while raising population by 60 per cent, he says, is “trying to fight with both hands tied behind your back”.
“Another 13 or 14 million people will not give us a richer country, it will spread our mineral wealth more thinly and give us a poorer one,” he says. He wants the Government to aim for population stability, not growth.
“35 million Australians? Start preparing now”, 19/9. This editorial treats such predicted growth as a “challenge” and says we must adapt to it. I say, bullshit!
Many Australians will respond to all this with a deceptively simple question: why not cap the population? Closing borders to a growing global population in a world of finite resources would be problematic, but the main reason that is not a good solution is a demographic one. The forecast proportion of people aged over 65 has been revised down slightly to 22 per cent in 2049 – it is now 13 per cent – but that still means a much smaller proportion of Australians will be of working age. Migrants are significantly younger on average than the general population, so their arrival improves the ratio of workers to non-workers. Immigration is needed to ensure the workforce is big enough to fund and provide the services that all of us require.
“Congratulations – it’s a boomlet. (But now the fun starts…)”, 19/9. Much the same: population growth will do wonders for the economy; it is a “challenge”, blah, blah.
From The Australian, who are even more clueless: “Population is destiny”, 19/9.
Meeting the needs of millions more Australians will also demand realistic investment in much-neglected infrastructure, especially dams and transport. It is clear the national interest is best served by growth. In a region where our neighbours are increasing by hundreds of millions, economic and population growth are essential for our long-term survival. The post-World War II axiom populate or perish should be updated to “populate and prosper”.
The usual argument of “demographics” is given in all articles; we must continue to encourage a high birth rate and import younger workers to support an ageing population and to further economic growth. But that is merely delaying the inevitable; both groups will age too and will require even more young people to support them. Where does this insanity end? Such a policy in a world of finite resources is ultimately unsustainable and environmentally devastating.
Some published letters in The Age from the last few weeks on these topics:
2/9:
It’s no business for big business
Senator Chris Evans’ claim that immigration should be the nation’s labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants, especially younger, skilled workers, is absurd (“Migration rules set for revamp”, The Age, 31/8).
The Australian population should be our normal source of workforce. Decisions about who comes to Australia should not be left to employers. Big employers have a long history of making bizarre ambit claims about the numbers they propose to employ. Often the real aim is to create a surplus of job seekers and thus bully governments into giving the go-ahead for short-sighted projects to create jobs.
The livability crisis should be a higher priority than importing “skilled and willing” (read “temporarily more docile”) workers from elsewhere.
Senator Evans bizarrely claims that his “attempts to have a more sophisticated debate about the topic have totally failed”. What efforts?
The book Overloading Australia documents him claiming in May 2008 that net immigration was less than half what the Bureau of Statistics says it was. Recently he claimed immigration had been “slashed”, when it was soaring. Now he admits we have “an unprecedented, unplanned migration wave”. He should resign and be replaced by a minister who serves the Australian electorate, not vested interests.
– Mark O’Connor, co-author, Overloading Australia, Lyneham, ACT
It’s time to debate, people
I agree that it is “time for a reality check on immigration policy” (Editorial, 1/9). I would go further and say it is time for a national population policy. Tim Flannery, in his Australia Day address in 2002, indicated that a population policy was vital for Australia to have an environmentally sustainable future.
He said the way to achieve such a policy was for the nation to engage in a truthful, vigorous debate, together with a government inquiry charged with setting an optimum population target. Once the target had been decided we should determine our immigration policy in light of it. This, Flannery believed, would take most of the hysteria out of the immigration debate.
In my view, the bipartisanship way the major parties have kept immigration policy debate out of the public arena is an affront to democracy. I believe an appropriate forum for debating a population policy would also act as a prophylactic in keeping irrational ideologies out of the debate.
– Arthur Bassett, Blackburn South
Questions about the boom
The boom in immigration, resulting from the wholesale granting of permanent residency to international students on the basis of skill credentials obtained here, is at last being reviewed.
The demographic distortion from this influx may have resulted in increased unemployment and disaffection among migrant and native young people.
Any net benefit from the “education industry’s “export” earnings might not withstand examination, with the money cycle involving repayment of loans from Australian earnings, plus huge long-term costs to Australia. Issues include the diversion of educational resources to service this trade and the downgrading of the perceived value of Australian qualifications.
– Forbes Sprawson, Hampton
11/9:
Mad Max future
I suggest David Spratt relax (Comment, 10/9). Federal and state governments are looking far beyond the coming decades when our country runs out of natural resources, and have formulated a long-term plan to base our economic and social future on the film industry.
Decades ago they tested the waters with Mad Max. Our response to the notion of living in a barren wasteland, killing for petrol to run obsolete machinery and drifting into extinction was enthusiastic. Now, thanks to our politicians, our descendants can all look forward to becoming permanent extras in an apocalyptic wasteland dystopia.
– Ray Leung, Elwood
“Jared Diamond on Australia’s overpopulation problem”, (We) can do better. The chapter “Mining Australia” from his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive make for alarming reading; some paragraphs below:
The fallacy behind this policy of “filling up” Australia is that there are compelling environmental reasons why, even after more than two centuries of European settlement, Australia has not “filled itself up” to the population density of the U.S. Given Australia’s limited supplies of water and limited potential for food production, it lacks the capacity to support a significantly larger population. An increase in population would also dilute its earnings from mineral exports on a per-capita basis. Australia has recently been receiving immigrants only at the net rate of about 100,000 per year, which yields an annual population growth by immigration of only 0.5%.
Nevertheless, many influential Australians, including the recent Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, the leaders of both major political parties, and the Australian Business Council, still argue that Australia should try to increase its population to 50 million people. The reasoning invokes a combination of continued fear of the “Yellow Peril” from overpopulated Asian countries, the aspiration for Australia to become a major world power, and the belief that that goal could not be achieved if Australia had only 20 million people. But those aspirations of a few decades ago have receded to the point where Australians today no longer expect to become a major world power. Even if they did have that expectation, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Singapore provide examples of countries with populations far less than that of Australia (only a few million each) that nevertheless are major economic powers and make big contributions to world technological innovation and culture. Contrary to their government and business leaders, 70% of Australians say that they want less rather than more immigration. In the long run it is doubtful that Australia can even support its present population: the best estimate of a population sustainable at the present standard of living is 8 million people, less than half of the present population.
[…]
As for freshwater itself, Australia is the continent with the least of it. Most of that little freshwater that is readily accessible to populated areas is already utilized for drinking or agriculture. Even the country’s largest river, the Murray/Darling, has two-thirds of its total water flow drawn off by humans in an average year, and in some years virtually all of its water. Australia’s freshwater sources that remain unutilized consist mainly of rivers in remote northern areas, far from human settlements or agricultural lands where they could be put to use. As Australia’s population grows, and as its unutilized supplies of freshwater dwindle, some settled areas may be forced to turn to more expensive desalinization for their freshwater. There is already a desalinization plant on Kangaroo Island, and one may be needed soon on the Eyre Peninsula.
[…]
To those of us inclined to pessimism or even just to realistic sober thinking, all those facts give us reason to wonder whether Australians are doomed to a declining standard of living in a steadily deteriorating environment. That is an entirely realistic scenario for Australia’s future—much more likely than either a plunge into an Easter Island-like population crash and political collapse as prophesized by doomsday advocates, or a continuation of current consumption rates and population growth as blithely assumed by many of Australia’s current politicians and business leaders. The implausibility of the latter two scenarios, and the realistic prospects of the first scenario, apply to the rest of the First World as well, with the sole difference that Australia could end up in the first scenario sooner.
Fortunately, there are signs of hope. They involve changing attitudes, rethinking by Australia’s farmers, private initiatives, and the beginnings of radical governmental initiatives. All that rethinking illustrates a theme that we already encountered in connection with the Greenland Norse (Chapter 8), and to which we shall return in Chapters 14 and 16: the challenge of deciding which of a society’s deeply held core values are compatible with the society’s survival, and which ones instead have to be given up.
