Not only does our fearless leader want the Australian population to increase, he was also heard on TV a couple of days ago, also advocating that our standard of living also has to improve. It is about time the economists of the world got their heads around a different paradigm instead of the present one that says "Growth is good". Getting smart is better.

David

Unfortunately there is still a great deal of xenophobia tied up with this issue. If the government really wants to increase Australia's population to 30 million, all they have to do is invite in some bright young Chinese, Indians and Indonesians -- none of those countries would miss a few million citizens, and the people remaining behind would be better off as a result. But it's political suicide to suggest that non-white non-English speaking immigrants might make just as good and productive Australians as native-born babies; so we get the baby bonus and other daft schemes to bolster up a birth rate that would otherwise fall to a comfortable, economically viable level. Any debate on the issue is a good thing; but be prepared to run smack into entrenched prejudice.

That's a pretty good comment Jon J.

Why was population left off the agenda? It's because they read some of the tripe put out by the motley crew of nutters from the Undemocratic Unsustainable Unpopulate Australia lobby. Or maybe they realised that some of the IPCC white lab coat boffins royally screwed up the ice melting and sea rising data and that all bets were off.

One reason they didn't raise the spectre of depopulating the world is that they hope future generations of thinkers will tackle these issues without resorting to the forced sterilisation programs we saw in India and South America in the 1950s and 60s.

Or maybe they read some of the recent articles in OLO that simply shredded the anti-populationist thesis.

“Unfortunately there is still a great deal of xenophobia tied up with this issue.”

John J, you have hit the nail on the head: The cry of xenophobia has been the stock-in-trade of the long-successful campaign against efforts to discuss population in an informed and meaningful way.

And you raise it again. Against all the evidence from concerned and informed debate that has been choked-off for many decades.

We'll have a chance to vote for the '23 million party' and the next election. They believe, as many of us do, that 23m is as far as we should go.

Interesting to hear that Dick Smith, at the launch of a new book on the subject of Australia's population, reckoned that the cost of immigration is too great: that each doubling of a population halves the worth of a country's people.

Here's a multi-millionaire businessman telling us that the only people who gain from high immigration are the rich and governments (by way of taxation).

Cheryl,

Here is a link to Sustainable Population Australia's list of policies that they would like the federal government to adopt and the recommended policies of Britain's Optimum Population Trust (OPT).

http://www.population.org.au/index.php/population/the-issues/36-the-solutions/56-recommendations-for-action

http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.policies.html

Please point to where either organisation advocates forced sterilisation, either at home or in other countries. All that I can find is that OPT wants voluntary sterilisation to be made available to people who want it, but that they need to be informed that it often can't be reversed.

For other people who believe that the truth matters, here is a comprehensive guide to how humanity is running up against a number of environmental limits, Lester Brown's book "Plan B", which is available as a free download. It references the original government documents and other sources and is listed as recommended reading with his Scientific American article last May.

http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb4/pb4_table_of_contents

Cheryl's technological solutions need to come along pretty quick. World grain production per person peaked in 1984. Marc Purcell of the Australian Council for International Development said in a letter to the editor in today's Sydney Morning Herald: "Maize is 50% more expensive than its average price between 2003 and 2006, while rice prices are 100% higher. A 10% increase in the price of rice in Indonesia can put this basic food out of reach of 2 million people." Note that even if fertility rates dropped to replacement level tomorrow and stayed there, all around the world, there would still be massive population growth due to demographic momentum. In India, it would cause a doubling of the population.