Population gold

Gillard has made the right noises on increasing participation in higher education, which is one path to a middle class life, but the progress thus far has been incremental. Moreover, a scorecard for secondary schools was all well and good but it just confirmed what everybody knew anyway. My parents, and those of my classmates, didn’t need a scorecard to tell them that sending their children to elite private schools was a good idea. Better pay and conditions for public school teachers might have helped. Though, I’m sure that the builders enjoyed the recent funding blowout in the Education Revolution.

Changing Tony Burke’s job title to the Minister for Sustainable Population is just window dressing. If Australia’s population will rise anyway from 22 million to 36 million by 2050 then we may as well face up to that fact and think about how best to deal with it. This would mean looking sensibly at infrastructure and at expanding cities or at developing regional cities.

We might need to start thinking about distribution rather than concentration, and about making better use of urban spaces. Protecting the environment and increasing the population are not automatically in conflict. It’s the way in which the environment is treated that matters. It would make sense to invest in environmentally friendly technology. Funnily enough, all of that requires a taxpayer base and since the mining companies seem reluctant to pay a fair share that just leaves us ordinary citizens.

This brings us back to that uncomfortable evening in 2004 when Julia Gillard and Mark Latham announced the Medicare Gold policy. In the shocked silence that followed those of us with about 40 working years left, started to calculate the weight of the increased tax burden. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that free health care for the over-75s would be subsidised by those of us who were working. It also doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the environment, infrastructure and an ageing population, requires somebody to pay for it. We need to think hard about that and not close the door on hardworking migrants. If not, we might as well re-title Wayne Swan as the Minister for a Sustainable Taxpayer Base.