Water shortages: It's the population stupid!

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.