Not to mention that the value of life also depends on the value of living, and the idea that their own lives are worth more to reduce their standard of living on a philosophy they not only don't believe in themselves, but is followed only by people who treat them with disdain.
Or, valuing the more healthy lifestyle of a low-density area over the substantually draining, aggressive, miserable and unhealthy one of urbanized areas.

The problem with claiming that Australia could feed 70 to 100 million people is that it ignores the balance of trade. Along the same line of reasoning, the author might have also mentioned that Australia produces enough iron or and coal for many hundreds of millions of people, yet I dont think he would think his readers silly enough to believe this evidence that Australia could support a population of hundreds of millions. Yet he seems to think agricultural production as a measure of population capacity. In reality, agricultural produce is a commodity which supports living standards. With 50 million Australians, agricultural production would need to more than double to provide the same per capita trade benefit.

And if infrastructure costs are not big deal, then why are state governments going so deeply into the red? In Queensland, for example, annual infrastructure expenditure is about 18 billion dollars of a budget of just over 40 billion.

http://www.budget.qld.gov.au/budget-papers/budget-highlights.shtml

http://www.investqueensland.qld.gov.au/dsdweb/v4/apps/web/content.cfm?id=12268

This is only the public sector cost of rapid population growth, and the infrastructure is not even keeping up with demand. Supplying the infrastructure to support the high living standard of a developed country is expensive.

Perhaps Cheryl and Curmudgeon should become converts to Pol Pot's agrarian utopia. It would be much cheaper and would Allow Australia to support a much higher rate of population growth. I would like to see Australia support more people as much as Curmudgeon or Cheryl, but not at the expense of living standards, and I am concerned the the current rate of growth is far in excess of what can be supported.

Curmy, I gave you a straight answer to your first question. I didn’t answer your second question because you are right when you said:

<<How can you quantify this cost? In fact you can't. No-one can, realistically. >>

Even if one was to go to great lengths to research the expenditure on various infrastructure and services over the years, they’d need to be able to relate it to real improvements or lack thereof.

A hard task indeed.

However, when you look at it in an overall sense it is patently obvious that we have very serious problems with various services and forms of infrastructure that have not improved and have actually worsened as the population has burgeoned.

Are our national health system or education system or water supplies and provision or road congestion in our cities better or worse than they were a decade or so ago?

Most are clearly worse and those that are perhaps a little bit better are only slightly so compared to the immense expenditure that they have received.

<< If immigrants stopped coming tomorrow your tax burden would not drop one cent and services would not improve at all. >>

Our tax burden wouldn’t drop and neither should it. Services wouldn’t improve straight away. It would take a considerable period of time to see real improvements. And these would be most unlikely if our taxes were to be reduced and hence the expenditure on the things that need improvement reduced.

<< Can you point to any direct costs of immigration that are not trivial? >>

Curmy, I don’t understand why you need to ask this. The direct costs are enormous – immigration, in combination with our domestic birthrate, has led to all the classic downsides of population growth – overcrowding, congestion, environmental degradation, stressed resources, dog-chasing-tail economics, etc, etc.

1. Why have a larger population? Who benefits?

2. Sustainability doesn’t just mean can we grow enough food today to feed a larger population. It means providing the needs of this generation without compromising the needs of future generations.

Farming depends heavily on fossil fuels to run the tractors, harvesters and other equipment that makes farming so efficient and profitable in Australia. Farming also depends on nitrogen fertilisers made from natural gas and in some cases Phosphate fertilisers that are non-renewable. Future generations are unlikely to have cheap fossil fuels, natural gas and phosphates. That means that future generations are being compromised. That is unsustainable.

3. The article implies that there is no problem with water usage in the agricultural sector. The Sustainable Rivers Audit published in 2008 by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission found that 87% of the river valleys in the Murray Darling were in poor or very poor health. Every farming group wants access to more water for irrigation with little concern for the ecosystems that the water supports. That is unsustainable.

4. All the major cities have been on water restrictions during the period that we have used less water. I suppose if we have a lot of blackouts we would also use less electricity. In order to have 40 million people and use the same amount of water, Water restrictions would have to be expanded and strictly enforced. What are the benefits of a larger population that make water restrictions and more desalinisation plants so desirable? Higher population means a poorer standard of living.

5. Erosion in some rivers, especially around agricultural land is 50 times worse than natural erosion. Salinity may impact 17 million hectares by 2050 according to the national Land and Water Resources Audit. 19,000 tonnes of total phosphorus and 141,000 tonnes of total nitrogen runs down the rivers to the ocean every year from agricultural lands according to the Australian Agricultural Assessment 2001. That is unsustainable.

Australia is currently on a path that will leave future generations worse off.

Is sustainability, or rather the apparent threat to sustainability, a symptom or a cause?

There has been an ongoing debate about levels of investment in infrastructure. Roads are one of those. Just how much investment is needed in new and improved roads compared to the level of utilisation of roads?

Amongst Ministers responsible for roads it is clear that traffic builds to utilise the roads provided. It does not matter how much is spent on roads the same outcome occurs.

One proposition to reduce traffic is to close roads. London introduced congestion taxes as well as closed roads to reduce traffic; the M25, which circumnavigates London, as well as the circular périphérique, the inner ring road in Paris, become very expensive parking lots during certain peak periods.

Why does this situation arise? Is it the failure of the government to provide or is it to do with what people expect? There is a lack of wisdom in looking at governments as being THE ones to be virtuous and resolve such absurdities – governments always end up reflecting the people governed (read Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for an extreme example of such a relationship).

What are the drivers for the expectations and how can they be addressed? I suspect that whilst ever life is seen as being merely the allotted 3 score and 10 years then there is a limit on acting to benefit contempories or future generations – if this is all there is then why not grab what I may while I may?

Mike Keogh demands a factual basis for the population debate, but proceeds to offer not a single fact, just a scenario based on ideological assertion. There is no mechanism for government to shift population to regional centres in significant numbers, as the failure of the Albury-Wodonga experiment demonstrated. Providing additional infrastructure and services in regional areas is even more expensive than providing them in the suburbs, and governments are failing to provide them because they can't afford it, not because they've omitted to plan for it. Why would they opt for an even more expensive option, when sustainable jobs are not in the regions? Why would we charge regional people less tax, when it takes more tax dollars per capita to service them? Why does he think that national population growth is needed, in order to push people into regions? And why would this be a desirabe option, when the proportion of Australians against population growth is even higher in regional towns than in capital cities? On last report, 85% of them don't want more people.