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Water shortages: It's the population stupid!

By Tom Gosling - posted Wednesday, 15 February 2006


It is now a century since Dorothea Mackellar wrote of her love for the sunburnt country, that “land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of drought and flooding rains”.

Eighty-five years ago, P.J. Hartigan’s Around the Boree Log was published, including that magnificent poem about Australia’s variable climate, Said Hanrahan.

“We’ll all be rooned”, Hanrahan complained to his mates - in the first instance because of the drought, then because of the flood which followed it, then because of the bushfire threat from the long grass, which in spring was “knee deep on Casey’s place” as “happy lad and lass” went riding down to Mass.

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So what has changed? Not much, at least as far as Australia’s climate is concerned: it is still highly variable, thanks to the El Nino effect, with the land occasionally flooded and regularly suffering spells of several hot dry years in a row. Since 1900, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, both our average annual rainfall and our temperature have gone up (by around 100mm and 1C), with the strongest increases in rainfall being in tropical areas and in eastern New South Wales, and the strongest increases in temperature being in the west and at night.

Whether you believe these increases are the result of the Greenhouse Effect or not, well, that’s up to you - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the CSIRO are adamant the problem of human-induced climate change is real, but there are plenty of rogue scientists like Townsville’s Professor Bob Carter who believe Greenhouse is mainly hot air, and are cheerfully resigned to the climate changing because of sunspots, or just “because it is always changing”.

Even if Greenhouse is the culprit, its impact so far has been tiny compared to a huge, dramatic change that is as obvious and hard to argue with, as that good old elephant sitting in the middle of your loungeroom - the number of people.

As Bill Clinton might have said “It’s the population, stupid”. In 1900, when Dorothea Mackellar wrote her poem, Australia’s population was less than four million. In 1921, when P.J. Hartigan published Said Hanrahan, it was six million. Today our population is 20.4 million and still growing at another million every four years. That’s where the water problem lies. Not with lack of water, but with the huge growth in the number of people who are demanding it.

What should we be doing about it? We should immediately stop growing our population. The only reason Australia should ever grow its population is to make life better for the people who are here now. A growing population is terrific if you are a property developer worth $300 million and are intent on becoming a property developer worth $500 million. But for the average person, water “shortages” are just one of the many signs of life getting WORSE with population growth.

Those who stand to benefit from population growth are investment bankers, real estate agents, property developers, and construction companies. They profit from building ever higher-density apartment blocks and the schools, roads, bridges, hospitals, sewerage systems, shopping malls and office complexes - and, of course, water supplies - needed to cater for ever-sprawling suburbs of new "McMansions".

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They are the same people who give generously to support the re-election of the Howard Government and buy influence with the Opposition parties and the State Labor governments, in return for “nod-nod, wink-wink” agreement that Australia’s record high immigration intake will continue, and that pro-growth policies will prevail at state level.

Why immigration? Because, despite admonitions from the treasurer for Australians to patriotically have “one baby for your husband, one for your wife, and one for the country”, Australia’s natural increase is only adding 125,000 people a year to the population. While that is enough to keep the population growing for the next 15-20 years, it is not enough to sustain a really hot property market. So, population growth has to be turbo-charged for easy economic growth - developing properties is so much easier than coming up with clever new products, like Finland and its Nokia mobile phones.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 128,740 settlers arrived at our airports in 2005, 10 per cent more than in 2004 and the third year in a row of double-digit growth in arrivals. This number, however, greatly understates the true inflow. Under a dramatic change to immigration laws, foreign students at Australian universities can now settle here if they can organise a job after graduating. Figures for calendar 2005 are not yet available, but in the 12 months to June, 43,895 people living here were granted permanent residence. That number has been steadily rising, suggesting the number of new migrants last year was about 175,000, twice as many as in the early Howard years.

This blow-out has been one of the most successful two-card tricks ever played in Australian politics: because it talks tough and acts tough on boat people, the public is convinced that the Howard Government is tough on immigration, while in reality it has opened the floodgates to the highest continuous rates of immigration the country has ever seen.

The property development lobby strongly supports this high immigration, as do Australia’s wealthy and government-protected media companies, whose “rivers of gold” flow from the weekly advertising of real estate. Powerful lobby groups such as the Housing Industry Association, the Australian Institute of Urban Development, the Australian Population Institute and the Australian Property Council keep the pressure on politicians and remind them where their bread and butter is.

If you doubt for a moment that these contributions exist and are important, have a look at the website of the Australians Property Council, complaining about a proposal by the NSW Greens to ban them from making following political contributions. The Property Council gripes “the NSW Greens that wish to impose political apartheid on a single sector of the community. Not only did (their) bill aim to ban companies from making donations, the directors of major development companies would have been barred from contributing financially to political parties. Even attending fund raisers could result in a fine. Are the Greens seriously saying that those who take this multi-billion-dollar risk should have less access to the political process than a convicted murderer?”

The fact that the Property Council is reacting so strongly to a suggestion that it be stopped from making political contributions is fairly strong evidence that the political contributions are very important to its members - not for the good of the community, of course, but to enable them to continue to be able to make a dollar - well, lots of dollars.

So what’s in population growth for the average Australian? Nothing, except higher house prices and rents, more congested roads and transport, more pollution and waste, more apartment blocks, more crowds everywhere, more pressure on our parks and nature reserves - AND, of course, less water per capita.

If you don’t believe me, check out the Productivity Commission’s report of January 17, 2006, which showed Australians’ per capita income would be only 0.06 per cent higher if we had 50 per cent higher skilled immigration over the next 20 years.

Not only would there be negligible economic gain, but the Productivity Commission said there would obviously be environmental costs, but it could not take these into account because they are “externalities”, too difficult to count using conventional economic methods.

The costs mentioned, but not counted, by the Productivity Commission included air, river and ocean pollution, land degradation, increased use of natural resources, biodiversity loss, increased congestion of roads and public transport - and, of course, the increased water use that would result from higher immigration.

According to the Productivity Commission, there would be an average increase in income (more for the rich, less for the poor) of $6.44 a week, in 2003 dollars. Let’s be very generous and say the average worker would get $3 a week extra. How much out of that would he or she have to pay to compensate for the environmental costs of higher population - for instance, how much extra would their water cost?

As a sign of things to come The Courier-Mail in Brisbane reported late in January that local government water charges could rise by up to $185 a year per ratepayer under a $3 billion emergency water package announced by the Queensland Government.

SEQ Water has blamed an “unpredictable climate shift” on dams drying up, but The Courier-Mail observed, “the situation is made more critical by the fact that, by 2026, the population of southeast Queensland is expected to top 3.7 million, more than twice the population in 1985”.

Of course, the water shortage has everything to do with population growth, and very little to do with climate shift - what has happened there is lower-than-average rainfall over the past five years in the main catchment areas, but that is not unusual in Australia and communities can generally ride through it, unless their populations are going haywire.

Southeast Queensland is Australia’s fastest-growing region. In the 1950s the Gold Coast was a sleepy village of fibro holiday homes and there was all the water the population could ever need. Now, the State Government has announced it will fund about $2 billion in new water infrastructure, but insists that another $1 billion will have to come from water users.

Ultimately, said Queensland Natural Resources Minister Henry Palazcuzuk, higher water charges will occur. The Southeast Queensland branch of Sustainable Population Australia commented that the need for the community to contribute to the $3 billion package was a simple but clear sign that southeast Queensland’s growth was not paying for itself.

“Three billion dollars is a very significant amount of public funds to be diverted away from important infrastructure and services such as hospitals, transport infrastructure, police and protection of open space and bushland simply to accommodate more growth,” said the branch’s president, Mr Simon Baltais. “We call upon all levels of government to recognise that there are limits to growth, and to keep development within the carrying capacity of our region.”

Population pressures on Australia’s water resources are showing at a national level. The key findings of the Federal Government’s State of the Environment Report, published in 2001, and available on the Department of Environment and Heritage website are that “increasing pressures to extract surface and groundwater for human use are leading to continuing deterioration of the health of water bodies”.

Surface water quality has deteriorated further in many areas because of increasing salinity. Difficulties of managing water resources across state borders continue to hamper effective management, the report stated:

About 26 per cent of Australia's surface water management areas are close to, or have exceeded, sustainable extraction limits. Water use has increased from 1985 to 1996/7 by 65 per cent and water is overused in some regions. Water extracted for irrigation has increased by 76 per cent from 1985 to 1996/7.

The increase in salinity in the Murray-Darling Basin and other areas is causing water quality decline and land degradation. River water in several catchments is predicted to have salinity levels that will exceed drinking water guidelines within the next 20 years.

Although it is difficult to determine, the frequency, size and persistence of harmful algal blooms in inland waters seems to have increased over the past 50 years. Algal blooms in dams cost farmers more than $30 million per year, and in rivers, storage and irrigation channels about $15 million per year.

As former NSW Premier Bob Carr observed in a newspaper article “the Doomsday Millienium” on the first day of 2000, “Population growth, of course, is the factor that drives or multiplies or accelerates global warming. And deforestation and loss of groundwater and every other indicator of environmental damage”.

Or, as Jared Diamond warned in his essay The Lost Americans in 2004, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.

"Because peak population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production are accompanied by peak environmental impact, we can now understand why declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks."

To summarise: water “shortages” are but one of the many problems caused by population growth, and the best thing we can do about water is to stop growing our population, now.

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About the Author

Tom Gosling is a freelance science journalist with an interest in population and environment. He started in Sydney as a general reporter for ABC News in the early 1970s, and was Editor of The University of Sydney News from 1974-84. He then worked with CSIRO’s national media office in Canberra before moving to Melbourne in 1989 to report on science for the Herald and Herald-Sun. In 1995 he returned to Canberra to edit Australian Innovation Magazine, In 2002 he joined He was formerly CMC Power Systems where he was a Director. It was one of the companies that contributed to the aXcess project.

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