Crikey readers divide into complicated camps on population growth — read on for a robust discussion on NIMBYs, Norway, GDP, air quality, housing density, racism, carbon footprints… and wombats:

Housing density:

Scott McPhee writes: As long as we are prepared to have medium-density cities, with the budget for the appropriate transport infrastructure, we can support the population increase. IT won’t harm the environment — it’s the cities! The problem is the NIMBY home owner brigade won’t accept medium density cities, which puts pressure on expanding the boundaries out, rather than up, and eats up the city-edge green space. We need to have better (sustainable) urban planning.

Water:

Morgan writes: As a farmer in northern Victoria and dependent on irrigation it does not appear logical to me that we can sustain a population much larger than 20 million. At present irrigation farming is at a maximum economically. In addition any increase will further devastate the environment. From my perspective Australia simply does not have sufficient water for continued population growth.

June Carter writes: With little or no water in our state (SA) and gardens and trees dying everywhere and water being the first option for sustaining life I reject ANY increases in migration population until this huge issue is resolved.

I would then only allow skilled workers into our country as I believe our young people will be unable to get jobs if we bring in too many unskilled workers.

Sustainability:

John Burke writes: Great to see this subject getting some Crikey space. You have asked for comment — here are a few points rather than a long essay! The fact of the matter is that our existing population has caused huge serious environmental problems — viz the Murray-Darling and the rate of extinctions. More people will accelerate the problems.

At our current rate of growth of 2.1% we shall have 44 million in 35 years, 88m in 70 years, 176m in 105 years and 350 million in 140 years — and so on. Do the maths — it’s frightening. Assuming that almost all of us think that over 100m is absurd the obvious question is what is reasonable? How shall we manage growth (positive or negative) to reach an agreed reasonable target?

The economic arguments about growth being essential are specious. Plenty of wealthy countries have a stable population and excellent standards of living, for example, Norway.

From an economic point of view the reallocation of resources away from industries such as construction into sustainable energy, health and other areas of the economy would be essential. Our clever economists need to be looking at those processes rather than assuming that resources are infinite. Exhorting people to reduce their carbon footprints when population is doubling every 35 years illustrates the futility of such a growth policy. Just to keep total emissions constant we would have to halve the per capita emissions every time the population doubled!

The Australia and the world have finite resources, sharing them between fewer people is the sensible thing to do while driving world population down to a truly sustainable level — say 3 billion people. Australia can have a world impact by demonstrating good practice at home and by influencing the rest of  the world through diplomacy, sharing of technology etc.

The people advocating unlimited growth need to be persuaded otherwise. It’s probably too late for the Harry Triguboffs of the world but political pressure can change politicians and governments can neutralise organisations such as the Business Council of Australia. Changing the influence of the churches and other such forces is probably just a matter of educating the population. There cannot be infinite growth in a finite world.

Jackie French writes: How does the average person know when Australia can no longer support its population? When the air quality in its cities becomes dangerous for the young, the old, the ill? When most vegetables are air freighted from overseas? When we invest in desalination to get fresh water from our taps? When programs for health, education, equality of opportunity are slowly eroded through lack of money?

When you are at the top of the food chain you can shut your eyes for decades to slow but steady degradation. Roos and wombats know when to stop breeding. Not us.

Chokyi Nyingpo writes: On Possum’s Pollytics blog I posed a question if Possum knew of any pollsters who are asking something along the lines of the following:

Do you agree/disagree that Australia can grow/produce enough food to sustain the proposed increase in population to 35 million? AFAICT, we seem not to be doing a good job providing/feeding as many as we have now let alone the incredible increase envisaged in this proposition.

Perhaps if pollsters include whether the day-to-day things people actually understand (imported food, lack of transport, no hospital beds, kiddy under-experienced police, etc..) we may get a better debate. Infrastructure is a nebulous thing at best in most people’s minds though, like motherhood, something they can’t do without. Would you be able to canvas these aspects? They’re missing so far.

Harry Cohen AM writes: There is not one environmental measure which is not made worse by population growth. Our growth philosophy is driven by economists and business people who know nothing about ecology and don’t understand that you cant go on using up non renewable resources for ever. We are constantly being told we need more workers for our industries but we do little to train our young who have high unemployment figures,to fill the gaps.The surveys you quote show what the majority of Australians think about high immigration rates but their voices are ignored.

Most European countries have relatively stable populations and are not fearful of ageing.We are slipping down the ladder as far as per capita GDP goes and it will get worse if we keep going down this track. I suggest your subscribers read Mark O’Connor’s book — Overloading Australia and get a better picture of what is happening to this country.

Hidden racism:

Cathy Bannister writes: This sort of survey can’t be accurately interpreted without some sort of clever, hidden index of racism and anti-racism. Certain populations might not really believe “that we don’t have the infrastructure and services to manage more population growth”, or might not really have an opinion on infrastructure at all, but answer yes, because it’s more palatable than being overtly racist. Conversely, less racist populations might answer that they disagree, because agreeing might be seen to be racist. The question “that immigration should be slowed as it causes too much change to our society” could almost be a measure of xenophobia but falls just short. It would be good to see a few questions covertly but accurately addressing this issue.

Economic growth:

Robert Edgerton writes: The world has too great a population. By any realistic measure Australia does not.  Hence, in a reasonable world Australia would not curb immigration, but increase it.  At the same time it must scrap the baby bonus (the most obscene legislation ever passed; encouraging those least capable of managing a family to reproduce in an overpopulated world in which child abuse is one of Australia’s worst social issues). We should possibly pass a Chinese style limit on children (ie. 2).

Our coastal area east of the Great Divide would more than match Japan’s land mass; bit ridiculous to claim that that area of fertile land with reasonable to extreme rainfall couldn’t support more than 50 million people by comparison.  Infrastructure can only keep up with growth with good planning or dedicated governmental contribution via higher taxes.

Ian Nance writes: Thanks for the opportunity to state an opinion.

  1. I agree that at present we don’t have enough services and infrastructure to support a larger population, both in the present coastal centres, and more importantly to me, inland. NSW has tried decentralisation of government services, but not aggressively. As a principle of Commonwealth policy, we should aim for massive facilities/services/economic growth away from present population centres with the intention of populating the current sparsely settled interior over the next half century. It happens this way in the United States, but we seem obsessed with settlement on the coast.
  2. Logically, a larger population will benefit our economy.

Dale writes: Why do some people (especially politicians on both sides) have a fixation and misguided belief that economic growth can only be derived through population growth? Planning needs instead to be focused on transforming or even re-inventing our economy (and the way we think) to a model that is not inextricably dependent/fixated on population induced growth.

Please ask yourself two questions:

  1. Of those people currently living in Melbourne, who wants it to have a population of 7 million? The answer as you realise, is well under 20%
  2. Can you name any large cities, ie. those greater than 5 million, that fare well in terms of a “liveability index”? (i.e. those compiled by Mercer etc). You can’t — because they don’t appear on any such lists.

There are other options available to grow the economy sustainably.

Finally please do not mistake this for a green or anti-immigration, xenophobic rant. It’s not, it’s just common sense.

Josh Dowse writes: Australia is a large and prosperous country that is still far from working itself out in environmental and social terms — amazingly far given the need to get these things right and the time and wealth we’ve had to do it. We’ve been worried about ‘the right’ population since 1788. We will and should continue to debate that.

But the debate has to be informed by constructive research, not survey questions like: “We just don’t have the infrastructure and services to manage more population growth” — Why ‘just’? If the population growth rate is stable, why ‘more population growth’ when you mean ‘more population’? Or “Australia has a fragile environment that cannot cope with a much larger population — if something’s ‘fragile’ and subject to something ‘much larger’, how can it possibly cope?”

On not sharing:

Rob van Driesum writes: Both sides of the population argument seem to tiptoe around the fact that it’s not about why we should or shouldn’t grow but about whether we want to share our country’s bounty with newcomers. Apart from the indigenous population we’re all recent arrivals, which is easily forgotten among the calls to restrict further access. There may be a case for slowing growth down a bit and there should be no shame in being slightly selfish about it, but to argue that Australia couldn’t handle more people if it wanted to betrays an island mentality.

Let’s get real. The contiguous USA, roughly the same size as Australia, is a superpower with over 300 million people. Many of them do it very tough but many others see their hopes and aspirations more than fulfilled. My previous home country of Holland, with 16.5 million people in an area less than two-thirds the size of Tasmania, has a United Nations General Welfare Index similar to ours. Next door to us, the population of greater Jakarta is 15 million-plus. They don’t (yet) enjoy our standard of living and don’t have our wonderful wide-open spaces and pristine environments to roam in, but meanwhile they survive and their economy is going gangbusters (sort of). Economies grow — in absolute terms at least — as populations grow: more people create more demand for products and services, supply grows to meet that (even government supply through taxation, eventually) and it more or less evens out. Lack of water? The desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, slightly larger than Queensland, manages a population approaching 30 million.

Whether you’d want to live in those places is another matter — you only need to travel a bit to realise what a privilege it is to live in Australia. But thinking that we can keep it that way by turning our paradise into a fortress and micro-managing growth is unrealistic in an interconnected world. And seriously arguing with facts and figures against more than 22 million people on the globe’s fifth continent is very inward-looking.

Bill Thompson writes: The question of what Australia’s population should be will best be answered by science. And the size of the population should be the last question asked.

For starters, the threshold questions as to Australia’s population limits include:

  • What water resources are available to support a given population?
  • To what extent will an increased population encroach on the available arable land, and therefore limit food and fibre production?
  • What steps must now be taken to halt and reverse the environmental degradation caused by 222 years of European occupation of this island continent?

All questions posed must be examined in the context of a future economy free of the need for fossil fuel, one that is self sufficient in meeting the needs of the given population, and one that does no harm to the Australian environment. In other words, we need to accept there are limits to growth, and we live modestly as a low consumption community.

The impediments to achieving these objectives include vested business interests coupled with those holding unenlightened religious beliefs. They foresee only a future where the economy must expand perpetually and the population continually increase. This should be seen as irresponsible attempts to maintain their dominance in Australian society. Well, we are more than just an economy and we should not be imposed upon by those whose beliefs we do not share. Let the debate be vigorous, and informed by the best available science.

Kay Halstead writes: Against all of it. Demand for food (we are already a net importer) in a country with old, tired soils. Demand for water in a water-shortage continent. Infrastructure planning is an afterthought, takes a long time to implement.

The deliberate policy to increase birthrate by baby bonus handout is unbelievably irresponsible — ask DOCS. The global warming phenomenon should make it obvious that the earth system is finite yet we imagine that human populations exploiting it should be permitted to increase infinitely. Our generation is increasing the burdens for future generations.

Bela writes: My view is that a bigger population is necessary for Australia to be a serious player globally in the future. Australia has had a free ride almost since inception by being able to outsource our economic and military security to first Britain, then the US. This has enabled us to have the luxury of strong economic growth without having to spend 5-10% of our GDP on defence which an isolated country might normally be expected to do.

In future this luxury is not likely to be extended as the US has clearly reached economic and strategic overreach and will expect rich allies like Australia to do more heavy lifting. To do this, a larger market, bigger tax base and critical mass will be needed to support a more independent existence over the next few hundred years.

The small population advocates do not seem to be thinking too far into the future, whereas the generation of politicians which experienced World War 2 was well aware of the vulnerability of Australia, hence their “populate or perish” philosophy which has resulted in an Australia of 22 million today, instead of less than half of that had we had no immigration in the past 60 years. Does anyone think that a nation of 10 or 11 million people, with a Western orientation would be taken seriously by anyone in the region, least of all China or Indonesia?

The other issue with the reductionists is that they never like to explain exactly whose rights are to be curtailed in order to reduce or limit the population. Is it the right of people to have as many children as they choose? The right of people to bring their relatives to Australia? Or is it the right of employers to hire appropriate skilled workers to enable them to contribute fully to the Australian economy?

Pulling up the drawbridge once all of one’s own family and dependents have been allowed to settle here (however many generations might have occurred in the short period of European history in Australia), is a selfish and defeatist mentality that will not reflect well on our standing in the world. Arguments about a fragile environment will cut no ice when there are more people living in the deserts of Saudi Arabia than in all of Australia. It is about managing the environment and building the necessary infrastructure to ensure sustainable growth.

Finally, it will actually be a surprise if growth can be limited to only 35 million by 2050 as that would imply an annual growth rate of 1.2% – below the average for the last few decades and not much more than half of the current rate.

Jane Alcorn writes: Not only would I support the opinion that the environment is fragile and unable to support a large population,  but there is an attitude to development that is not viable. In my area, the growth boundary to the north of Adelaide, there is the expectation that population will increase greatly in the next few years.

There are preparations for housing and freeways, but no intention to provide any public transport infrastructure until AFTER the population is in situ! One particular development has an add on condition that the developer provide a bus service! While this sounds interesting, developers are notorious for their lack of concern for the community after they have taken their money and run. This will likely be no exception.

The lack of employment in the area (aside from seasonal agricultural work and service industries that merely move the income from one person to another) means that the housing will presumably become low income, rental and investment properties rather than the up-market trendy neighbourhoods shown in the marketing brochures.

Without significant infrastructure in place BEFORE the housing, these communities turn into outer suburban ghettos…one would have thought that we had learned our lesson, but the new generation of entrepreneurs don’t seem very interested in these issues.

The fact that we are nearing (or past) peak oil and need to use much less of the stuff from now on seems to have eluded these developers and politicians.