Guy,
Excellent article, this is the most critical issue on earth now. The world, including Australia, is grossly overpopulated.
Australia should set an example and reduce population to six million people which is all that can be supported without profligate resource use. This could be easily done by eliminating immigration and discontinuing all incentives to reproduce.
The era of countries exporting their surplus population is over.

We should put out the welcome mat for economic migrants; namely, non voting, self funded retirees.
Self funded retirees, would pay some tax, and pay for their own healthcare, via decent health insurance.
They don't compete with young Australia, for jobs, but add to the level of service provision jobs.
Once they pass on to their greater rewards, there will be additional housing and infrastructure, their dollars would have essentially paid for.
They will add a level of discretionary spending, we wouldn't have to first fund, and provide sustainable economic stimulus, not paid for, via the national economy.
Their Rallies will swell the tourist ranks, as they visit their parents or grandparents.
The more agile and able, could be allowed to prop up their income levels as fruit pickers etc, given there is not enough Australians, vying for those jobs!
And as temporary Australians, they will not contribute to population explosions, but still add all the benefits of a larger, tax paying demographic!
But only if we use the brains we were born with, and completely reform our tax system, to eliminate all avoidance and parasitical unproductive practices! [Read my other posts to see how this could be done! No ifs buts or maybes!
We will need to completely reform the way we produce and reticulate power, or back in our own (public) hands, to quite dramatically downsize prices or current price gouging!?
The end of the ultra costly white elephant national grid and cheaper than coal thorium and or copious NG, providing more localized competitive power?
Gas companies could compete for greater market share, via individual household ceramic fuel cells, (hire purchase?) .
The world's lowest tax system, coupled to the worlds lowest energy charges, (All very doable), will have them queuing to relocate here!
Neither power provision system produces any or very much carbon! Gas powered ceramic cells, with an unbeatable 80% energy coefficient, also produce endlessly free hot water!
And more than one real service provider option, will act to force bare to the bone prices?
Rhrosty.

A very depressing article.
With numbers like that I can see no alternative for Australia to
confront those that arrive illegally with immediate return if they
came by air & if by boat be told turn back or you will be sunk.

Pretty grim isn't it but what would be the alternative.
However I can see a great complication to this whole scenario and that
is a big increase in fuel prices and its affect on food production that
will cause world wide starvation.
A side effect of the crash that will coincide with that will be massive
unenployment and a very large increase in subsidence farming and the
land shortage will cause many Rwanda situations to erupt.

Very grim indeed

To Divergence.

In the year 1000 AD, Britain had a population of 5 million which was facing mass starvation in the years ahead. You could say that Britain was overpopulated in 1000AD because people living at subsistence level need a lot of land. The problem was the lack of advanced farming methods that can extract much more from a small plot, not a lack of land.

Today, all of Africa knows about advanced farming methods, but they do not have the intelligence to use them. Their political and social systems are so backward that they can not emulate the advanced western societies that create wealth and can produce abundant food. In addition, they just keep on breeding. Western and advanced Asian societies would have negative population growths if it were not for immigration. Population growth today is almost entirely within those countries which can least afford to have high population growths. Don't tell me that these countries can not afford birth control. Shiploads of condoms have been shipped to Africa by WHO but African men will not use them. With AIDS out of control in most third world countries, this is just another glaring example that these people as races, are not real bright.

Simply transposing African, South American and Middle Eastern people into advanced societies will not only cause social and financial strife in those countries, it will eventually lead to their total destruction as advanced societies.

Take Rhodesia (nobody else wants it). Rhodesia under the whites was known as "the breadbasket of Africa." The blacks tossed the whites off the land, and the blacks are now starving to death. Most agriculture today in this country has reverted to subsistence level. One black politician was quoted in the media as saying it would be a "good thing" for a million or so "Zimbabweans" to starve to death because "Zimbabwe" was overpopulated. "Zimbabwe" was not "overpopulated" when the whites ran the place.

LEGO,

Overpopulation is always relative to the technology at the time. I am not a Cornucopian optimist, however, because unlike the situation in the 1960s, when the problem was really just low agricultural productivity, we are doing serious damage to our environmental life support systems on a number of fronts. See for example this paper from Nature, probably our top peer-reviewed science journal, which discusses many of them together

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html

open version:

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

From the quote in my previous post, however, even the best of modern agricultural technology wasn't enough to help Rwanda.

Why do you blame race rather than culture? American blacks have a total fertility rate (TFR) at about replacement level. Barbados, a black country, and the Seychelles, where blacks comprise the largest ethnic group, are both on the UN's Very High Human Development list.

There is really nothing that we can do about overpopulation and other forms of mismanagement elsewhere in the world. Foreigners live and want to live in independent countries. They don't have to pay any attention to what we think. The only dysfunctional culture that you have any hope of changing is your own. Intervening often makes a bad situation worse. Any parent can tell you that shielding people from the consequences of bad decisions is the best way to get more of them.