Should Australia be keeping people out?

Economist Sinclair Davidson is among those in favour of Australia taking more refugees, in part on economic grounds.

"Rather than trying to keep people out, we should be looking to bring people in," writes Davidson in Crikey, the online political newsletter.

Davidson is professor in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT University and senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, a right-wing think-tank that might otherwise take an anti-migrant and anti-refugee stance.

Yet a population projected to grow to 35 million in 2050 would present Australia with its biggest challenge since Federation in 1901, says the country's most senior Treasury official.

"Where will these 13 million (extra) people live?" Treasury Secretary Dr Ken Henry posed the question at a business forum at Queensland University of Technology.

He fears Australia will not bear the load - on jobs, services and natural endowments, including water.

Grattan Institute analyst Saul Eslake is agnostic about the benefits of higher population growth. There are "gross" economic benefits in faster gross domestic product growth through retail sales, demand for housing, motor vehicles and the like, but Eslake is less convinced that faster population growth necessarily results in faster GDP growth per capita, "which is the more relevant measure of people's living standards".

"There are costs associated with higher population growth, including traffic congestion, higher housing costs, greater pressure on water supply, possibly greater environmental consequences - the kind of issues Henry was referring to," says Eslake, program director, productivity growth, at the independent think-tank. "And not all of these costs are included in GDP.

"Clearly, Australia needs immigrants, not least to deal with ongoing skills shortages. But fundamentally, I think our approach to refugees should be motivated by humanitarian considerations rather than economic ones." 

Edwards feels it is important to take a balanced and moderate point of view in examining Australia's response to the immigration debate. "It is easy to stoke up old rhetoric about xenophobia," she says. "But I do not think that is a balanced or fair response. 

"In the last 40 years, Australia has become one of the most multicultural societies in the world and has done so on the whole very peacefully and successfully.

"Serious problems have really only started to emerge in the post-9/11 world. The unfortunate shift in political rhetoric has gone hand in hand with very high levels of immigration.