Populate for lower living standards

You should question the sanity of anyone who welcomes rapid growth of Australia’s population from the present 21.5 million to an estimated 35 million by 2050. Our population is already growing faster than at any time since the post-war baby boom of the 1950’s but, this time it is largely due to immigration, with an intake of 97,000 in the September quarter of 2009 alone.

Several economists and many businesses enthusiastically support Australia having a population of 35 million. They claim this is necessary for our future prosperity and security. Continuous population increase would produce growth in demand for goods and services, providing on-going stimulus to the economy. A higher population is needed to generate public revenues needed to provide social services, particularly for an ageing population and to improve national productivity.

These claims are made without evidence that these outcomes would be achieved or that population growth would be of net benefit to Australia or for that matter the rest of the world. These assertions are made in the absence of a well thought out population model addressing social, economic and environmental considerations.

They are made in the absence of a coherent population policy and without providing the public with the facts needed for informed public debate. They are made without considering other ways of enhancing productivity. The need for sustainability and maintaining present living standards are given little if any consideration.

Less sanguine about rapid population growth are those who doubt the ability of Australia to cope with it or avoid adverse socio-economic outcomes. A projected growth rate of 65 per cent over the next 40 years is very high when compared with projected global growth of 38 per cent, widely regarded as unsustainable because of declining supplies of food, water and other resources.

We should be concerned by the liaises faire attitude taken by those who see only benefits or commercial gain while ignoring problems associated with a rapid influx of migrants. This prompts a call for government immigration policy to be based on a coherent population plan addressing the following considerations, among others.

Social factors:

• Avoid population pressure on our major cities where migrants tend to settle, where housing and infrastructure is limited.
• Discourage development of enclaves of language and religious communities that remain insular and tend to resist integration.
• Ensure that immigrants are composed of social and cultural groups that are largely compatible with Australian norms or can be easily adopted by them.
• Establish bona-fides and background of all immigrants to eliminate those with criminal background or extreme views which may pose a threat to law and order.
• Adhere to targets which ensure that net migration plus net resident population increase results in economic and environmental sustainability.
• Maintain balance in the present composition of the Australian population.

In summary, it is necessary for government to implement a more measured immigration program, particularly in terms of numbers. An important consideration is ability and willingness of those granted residency to “integrate” and adopt values regarded by the majority in the Australian community as acceptable norms.

Economic considerations:

Achieving a population of 35 million by 2050 means that on average the population will increase by a net 330,000 a year for the next 40 years. The implications of such an increase are clear, the more obvious being that each year it will be necessary to:

• Build 65,000 - 70,000 new dwellings for rental or sale.
• Construct roads, water, drainage and electricity mains with connections to each of these dwellings.
• Increase electricity generation, treatment of sewage, water storage and associated reticulation.
• Provide public transport to the areas where those dwellings are built.
• Build and staff additional hospitals, schools, and other services.
• The multiplier effects of all of the above, requiring establishment of new and expansion of existing businesses.
• Ensure that employment opportunities are available in appropriate areas.
• Increase national production and supply of food by 1.7 per cent every year for 40 years.
• Supply other goods and services such as training, retail outlets, increased policing, community facilities etc.

Anyone giving assurances that Federal, State and local governments have planned for this expansion is not to be believed. Failure to plan to deal with the effects of rapid population increase are already being experienced, particularly in our capital cities.

The result is a shortfall of more than 100,000 dwellings and inflated housing prices, health services which can no longer cope, traffic congestion, unreliable, overcrowded public transport, higher prices for food and other household goods, an increase in pockets of unemployment and poverty - and the list goes on.

To sustain rapid population growth, public expenditure must be increasingly devoted to funding provision of essential services, diverting it away from aged care, health, education and research and development needed to increase efficiency and environmental protection. Yet these are the very areas where increased investment is needed to cope with the effects of sustainable population increase for the next 40 years.

Capacity to produce the food needed to sustain a large population is limited by three factors. First, only 6 per cent of the continent is arable; second, climate change is already reducing rainfall in the southern half of the continent, where most of the population lives, and; third, arable land is being used for building on, further limiting food production.

Despite these limitations, sufficient fresh fruit, vegetables and grains can be grown to sustain a population of 35 million most of the time - but only by increasing our dependence on imports and becoming a net importer of food. However, as global population grows, imports will become increasingly expensive or unavailable as a world with 10 billion faces chronic and deteriorating shortages of food and water.

Environment factors:

During the decades when Australia should be striving to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to at least 25 per cent below 1990 levels, growing population will place demands for it to increase its emissions due to:

• Increased burning of coal and gas to generate the electricity needed to supply 65,000 additional houses each year - more than 2.5 million new dwellings over the next 40 years.
• Increased electricity generation to provide the energy required for associated services such as street lighting, sewage and water treatment works, additional trains and trams, new and expanding enterprises, growth of the public sector to provide additional health, education, policing, defence and other services.
• Increase in the number of private and public vehicles burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gasses - including nitrous oxides producing deadly ozone when exposed to the ultra-violet in sunlight. This may be short term as electric vehicles replace those propelled by fossil fuels. However, this is unlikely to overcome the increased emissions of an additional 50,000 - 70,000 vehicles on our roads each year for the next decade.
• Increased electricity generation to fuel an ever growing number of vehicles using it for propulsion - until 2030 when electricity is likely to be largely generated from non-polluting sources.

Both sides of politics are committed to massively subsidising production and burning of fossil fuels, particularly coal, both here and overseas. Protection of exports, jobs and revenues are deemed far more important than the effects of greenhouse gas driven global warming or rapid population growth. Those effects are becoming more evident, are unavoidable, and will have a profound impact on our ability to cope with the need to curb global warming and sustain a population of 35 million.

They include continued increase in temperature and the incidence of severe climate events such as prolonged heat-waves and drought - particularly in Western and South Australia - facilitating an increase in bush fires. Paradoxically, severe climate events are likely to include increased rainfall in the north of Australia and an increase in the severity of wind events such as cyclones.

These and other effects of global warming are not going to stop in 2050 or 2100 or for that matter 2200. They will be on-going, more severe, increasingly threaten low-lying coastal towns, further reducing land used for food production.

Conclusion:

Knowing this, no responsible government can advocate and actively implement an immigration program which seeks to increase the population by over 13 million over the next 40 years. How can Federal and State governments cope with the demands of a massive population increase and the effects of global warming?

Were the population better informed of the effects of global warming on the future which awaits most of their children, they would rightly demand much lower, slower population increase or stabilisation and faster, more effective action to limit global warming.

A belief held by the business sector is that without a massive population increase to 35 million, the Australian economy can not grow and diversify. That is nonsense. The economy grows and diversifies by becoming more efficient, more competitive and more productive, selling goods and services on both domestic and overseas markets. The business sector is of course primarily motivated by opportunities for increased profits and expansion, not sustainability.

If immigration were limited to essential skills now, that would not affect the ability of the economy to develop. The population of Australia would continue to grow, albeit at a slower, more sustainable and manageable rate. Overseas markets for our products will continue to grow, particularly in countries such as India where the population is expected to grow from its present 1 billion to an unsustainable 1.5 billion by 2060.

We should not emulate such uncontrolled folly. Government population policy and the expectations of business need to be tempered and based on what best enables the entire population to improve or at the very least maintain its living standards.