What would low population growth mean for Australia?

In the meantime, where does this leave us? Do we still need "a big Australia?" and is high growth essential to our prosperity? Personally, I have always believed we need a larger population to give us a critical economic mass across a range of measures and for many different reasons. Equally though, it seems odd in a country so large as Australia to concentrate nearly all growth in mostly two cities and ask them to bear the infrastructure burden to cope with that growth while other regions perfectly capable of absorbing growth with less stress are overlooked.

It's going to be an interesting and ongoing debate and opinions will not be in short supply. Pro-growth and anti-growth proponents will dig their trenches and wage their wars. The evidence (also known as truth) is - as the saying goes - the first casualty in war and this will probably be no different. But hopefully a quick look at the evidence might leave some of us better informed. Balanced arguments, while possibly overlooked in the short term, may just find an eventual foothold in public policy debate about a very important topic.

Now here's that list of countries growing faster than Australia, in descending order: