In the unlikely case that one needs another reason to loathe the hare-brained premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie is now claiming that Australia should be aiming for a population of 50 million through "significant migration".

God help us if PM-in-waiting Kevin Rudd starts taking advice on such matters from this blockhead in Brisbane.

Australia is the most arid continent in the world, and with climate change it's only going to get worse. Environmentally, we are at carrying capacity.

Economically, immigration-driven population growth might enrich the big end of town, but it does nothing for productivity nor innovation. Nor is population growth rate positively related to higher income per capita (read the Productivity Commission’s report of January 17, 2006). Personally, I'd prefer to live in a knowledge-based, low population growth economy like Japan or Finland than an overpopulated quarry in the South Pacific. What has the last five years of unfettered immigration-driven population growth delivered so far? The most overpriced housing market in the developed world and an associated build-up of hundreds of billions in foreign debt. Hardly a sustainable economic model.

Socially, such large scale immigration-driven population growth would effectively be giving the populations of other countries the green light to colonise Australia. The eventual result will be that Australia's founding population would become a minority in the nation their forefathers created and built. Australia would be taking an existential risk in importing millions of people from nations vastly different from our own. Balkanisation beckons.

It's a sad day for democracy when both Liberals and Labor are advocating such reckless policies.

dresdener, democracy has nothing to do with it.

the reason oz is sliding into over-populated misery is the lack of democracy. a democracy has the following features:

1. citizen initiated referendum
2. direct election of officers
3. open government

of those features, oz has precisely none.

Dresdener, while I'm not necessarily in favour of the immigration Beattie is espousing some of your arguments there are a little flawed.

You cite Japan and Finland's low population growth policies, but neglect to mention they are very small landmasses with comparatively high populations which is what has created their current population policies. Japan has an incredibly high population for such a small country.

TurnRightThenLeft: You didn't read Dresdener's post properly.

Australia simply doesn't have the resources (no, I'm not talking about extractive industries here) to carry many more people. (think cows in a paddock here... not enough water to keep all the cattle alive!) We can't seem to support the current population, let alone double the current number. (Now, if we abandoned rice and cotton farming and repealed Cubby Station's water licence, things might be different in the Murray-Darling system.....)

This brings me to the knowledge-based, growth economy. I'm afraid successive governments have been missing that flotilla of boats since the 1950s. I remember the Dulmont Magnum (1970s), the ERA Computer (1980s) corporation and many other indigenous, ICT initiatives that these same blockhead federal pollies chose to ignore (i.e. not support). (BTW, that small Finish company, Nokia, was bankrolled by their federal government).

DEMOS:

I'm with you all the way. Our new federal anti-terrorist legislation (and now the especially enacted APEC laws) make the Nazi regime (or the Soviet Stazis) look like a Church Sunday school!

I would add a BIll of Rights to your list, just to make sure these B#st@rds in Canberra don't entrench themselves in power at the expense of our freedom.

Whoa there, lluvatar.

>>BTW, that small Finish company, Nokia, was bankrolled by their federal government<<

"Bankrolled" suggests that the company was run on government money, and that simply was not the case.

Yes, the Finnish government has a far more accessible R&D support system than we have - or, I'm afraid, will ever have; we just don't have the vision - but they most certainly didn't come close to "bankrolling" the company.

If anyone is really interested, the detail of TEKES funding for Nokia can be found at

http://tinyurl.com/yr8kmx

The gist of it is that throughout the seventies, the proportion of Nokia's R&D budget - not their operating budget, just R&D - that came from the government averaged 7% - hardly "bankrolling". The proportion is now, of course, much lower.

Unfortunately, the fate of every scheme intended to help Australian industry has been the same, ever since I came here in the early eighties. Half of it goes to employing more public servants, the other half is handed over to their mates.

Thanks Pericles.. knew all that.

What is not made clear is the subsequent financial support (via purchases of equipment) after all the R&D was commercialised.

iiuvator,
I think Beatties a dropkick and so is Fraser, who advocated the same population some time back.

Even if we stopped agricultural use of water in the whole Murray/Darling basin we would still have a slight problem in getting the water where it is needed. We would need massive secondary industry to support that many people and that is not going to happen.

Don't even need to think about all the other infastructure that new cities would require. Clearly the man is mad.

Hello everybody
Well I am shocked Peter Beattie would be so stupid to be honest. I thought he was the best man to lead the party before this!
It was labour who started all this imagration and its clear its put up the prices of houses amoung other things.
I am just wondering if he has any plans to employ more police considering they police under labour cant respond now to urgent calls.
I opended a thread tagged- Labour can not supply police if anybody is interested.
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=987

By the way I think it was James who told me the Government and labour have a MOU Not to discuss imagration at election time from the Keating days?
I think the Australian public are being insulted here.
Its our country and we pay them to represent usnot block us from being represented.
Time for an Government made up of ordinary Aussies.
No wonder why we can not get laws of a hundred years old regarding Animal Welfare brought into the 2007 era.

illuvatar - I'm well aware of Australia's low carrying capacity in most parts of the country.

However, in terms of an agricultural base and overall carrying capacity per head of population, we are indeed well below places such as Japan and Finland. Japan's population for a country of its size, even if it is a fertile location, means that it has to have low population growth policies.

It's disingenous to compare the two without acknowledging that - I agree to an extent with limiting population growth in Aust - but my point about that comparison remains valid.

For once I agree with Dresdener. Why is Australia suddenly trying to increase it's population when every other country has realised that lower populations are the key to higher standards of living?

http://www.ozpolitic.com/articles/population-sustainability.html

TurnRightThenLeft, Australia is not an empty land waiting to be populated. Its geographic size is highly deceptive. Only about 6% of Australia is arable land. Climate change-induced desertification will further reduce Australia's carrying capacity in the decades to come. That's why immigration-driven population growth confounds common sense.

"...carrying capacity per head of population, we are indeed well below places such as Japan and Finland."

The population of Australia is very unevenly distributed, with most of our population crammed into densely-populated coastal strips. Population growth will mean that more of the limited amount of arable land suitable for agriculture will be consumed by the urban sprawl of the swelling population centres. A rapidly growing population combined with a reduction in land available for agriculture is a recipe for calamity.

Besides, you seem to have missed the point. Knowledge-based, export-oriented economies such as Finland and Japan didn't transform themselves into internationally competitive wunderkinds through population growth. Australia, in contrast, has experienced significant population growth in recent decades, but has become less uncompetitive according to most indictators. For example, Australia produced 2.8% of the world's total exports in 1950 when the population was only 10 million. Australia now only supplies less than 1%, despite the fact our population has more than doubled to 21 million.

How is importing people en masse going to improve our woeful current account balance or reduce foreign debt levels? Considering most of our exports are primary goods, population growth simply means we are going to suck in more manufactured imports, and consume more domestic produce otherwise destined for foreign markets.

By the way, I meant "less competitive" rather than "less uncompetitive" in my previous post.

In response to PALEIF, I believe Bob Hawke admitted in the early 1990s that "the major parties had reached an implicit pact to keep immigration off the political agenda".

Respected historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote a well-argued book back in 1984, entitled "All For Australia", about the shambolic and undemocratic immigration policies of the Hawke-Keating Government. He wrote:

"Immigration is everyone's business: it is one of the most important national issues. The idea that it is too dangerous to be debated is a mockery of democracy. It is too important not to debate."

You can find a brief synopsis of Blainey's major points here:

http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=1667

Sadly, Australia's immigration policy continues to be formulated behind closed doors for the good of big business and ethnic lobbies and for the electoral benefit of a number of federal politicians. The wishes of the Australian people aren't really a consideration.

Dresdener - I'll say again, I'm aware of Australia's low carrying capacity and I've not said it's some empty land waiting to be filled up.

I think six per cent is a little on the low side, but I'd agree overall it is very low. Even if the arable percentage is just six per cent, that still is a very large amount of land compared to what's available in Japan. I just don't think it's a fair comparison, especially when you factor in the notion that our agricultural exports are far higher than either of those countries.
Besides - Japan has hundreds of millions of people.

I'm not arguing in favour of increased immigration - but I think that comparison distorts the picture.

The funny thing is that the technological change required to counter climate change will also allow Australia to support a larger population sustainably. Funny because all the major seem to want mass immigration (against the democratic wish of Australians), yet none of them want to do a thing about global warming, other than to generously fund the crazy plans of their buddies.

TurnRightTurnLeft, we still seem to be on different pages. Let's forget the issue of environmental carrying capacity for a moment and look at this in purely economic terms. The comparison between high-population growth Australia and low-population growth Finland and Japan was meant to highlight differing economic models.

We are told in Australia that population growth is essential for the economy. My response is that other economies have performed far better than Australia without high population growth. Finland and Japan are examples of nations which have embarked down the export-orientated, knowledge-based path to economic prosperity. In Australia, by comparison, the big business elite and their Lib/Lab sycophants have determined that population growth has to be turbo-charged for easy economic growth. After all, fecklessly binging on foreign credit and developing properties is so much easier than becoming more internationally competitive and developing new export products, like Finland and its Nokia phones.

If there is a better economic model, then why are we taking such serious environmental, social and economic risks by importing millions of people en masse?

You seem to think Australia can take more people. I disagree, but not only because of our limited carrying capacity.

Oh, by the way, I am somewhat flummoxed by your repeated references to Australia's agricultural output. Are you suggesting we should import more people simply because we have the ability to feed them? If we continue consuming more and more of our domestic agricultural output, how will Australia be able to earn an export income? After all, we haven't got much else to export these days now that manufacturing is on its death bed. Have you seen Australia's trade balance recently?

Dresdener

"In Australia, by comparison, the big business elite and their Lib/Lab sycophants have determined that population growth has to be turbo-charged for easy economic growth."

Surely you aren't sucked in by this nonsense? Yes, some profit greatly, but if the per capita benefit remains the same or is negative, then the economic model is parasitism, not capitalism. It is this obscene implication which leaves me with total contempt for the major parties. I believe that Australia can support a larger population, but only after substantial technical advance. The actions of the major parties in increasing Australia's population before solving the technical challenges, coupled with a scientific Philistinism, only intensifies my contempt.

"Surely you aren't sucked in by this nonsense? Yes, some profit greatly, but if the per capita benefit remains the same or is negative, then the economic model is parasitism, not capitalism."

I concur. My point was that it's an easy way for the parasitic big end of town to make money. Never said it was a sustainable or equitable model for the rest of Australia. In fact, most Australians are worse off as a result of immigration-driven population growth.

It is also electoral suicide for the idiotic Liberals:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=913

Thanks for reminding me Dresdner. I've been waiting a while for all the pro-immigrationists to come up with evidence for their position. As yet I am unsatisfied, but I have salvaged a bit of fun contrasting governments treatment of climate change ("We need more evidence.") with immigration (no evidence needed.). Sadly both Labor and Liberal are the same re immigration, so the degradation is likely to continue regardless of who is in power.