Populate for lower living standards

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.