Treasury tacks a 'wellbeing' framework onto their endless-growth framework

Helps Treasury - via GDP growth. Doesn't necessarily help - wellbeing. Australia experiences per-capita GDP recessions. Under surging population, 2023 risks another.

Population growth isn't wellbeing

Peak-COVID polls found ordinary voters liked the COVID migration respite. Didn't want mass migration. Post-COVID polls go likewise. Unless you're a media triumphalist, cherry-picking surveys from Scanlon immigration lobby.

Treasury-brand "wellbeing" starts with continually growing population. As favoured by the graduate classes not the rest.

A wellbeing framework ought to knit stuff together. But Treasury dictates population policy. Dismissive of the weak Climate and Environment portfolio.

Following suit, "progressive" media punditry affects todelink climate "reform" from population. Though global emissions track global population.

Statement 4 ignores this climate-change basic. On which Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) has made a detailed report.

UN "net zero" emissions can't happen, they infer, under established global population trajectories. Over-population increases vulnerability to climate change.

Even for wealthy Australia, this imposes chronic problems:

• increasing water-security risks, both rural and urban
• population overload in cities, stymying infrastructure and congestion relief
• risky urban-fringe developments, increasingly facing fire and flood
• ongoing environmental degradation and species crashes
• extra 1.5m net migration by 2030, most magnifying their carbon footprints
• forget about an honest "43%" reduction in emissions by 2030

Outside Budget, State of the Environment warns of "human pressures" leading to "land clearing" and associated ills. Perversely, Budget magnifies those pressures.

"Climate action" and "protecting environment" band-aids can't offset the population loading. Nor does Budget tackle entrenched or illegal land clearing. Or modify Australia's notoriously timid regime of taxes/levies on fossil-fuel extraction.