Ross Elliott, have you used steroids to bulk-out this Nation Building article? It doesn’t look at all healthy.

To bring it back to a more healthy condition, might I recommend a visit to www.environment.gov.au/sustasinablepopulation and click on “submissions now available on line”.

While there take in the offering by the Australian Water Association. It’s measured and factual dissertation could provide a stabilizing platform for thought.
After digesting the Australian Water Association’s submission, it would be appropriate to visit the submission by the Johnstone Ecological Society as a second progressive step. However, take a bex and a good lie down as a precaution against its robustly perceptive comments. The many accurate comments made there could cause quite a fizz in your singularly limited bubble of thought.

After 50 years of mass migration to Australia and a more than doubling of our population in this time when does the author think population growth will start to fix the problems of an ageing society?

Before I looked at Ross Elliotts CV, I felt sure that he would be in the property market and I was pleased to find that I was right on target.
He starts off with the usual attack on Malthus and Ehrlich that all pro populationists use, even though they did not possess 20/20 foresight and the benefit of the Net for research.

Then we move on to Dick Smith who does not have a market or political axe to grind and so can call it as it is.
He then quotes from Bloomberg “'Shrinking Societies: the other Population Crisis”.
The real crisis is that we are not reducing world population quickly enough and not that we are reducing population too much.
“Europe, Korea, and Japan have gone into panic mode” He quotes. Who is panicking there? More property developers? And he then trots out the old chestnut “we not going to be able to support all the old people.”
Using that argument, the problem is never ending because obviously the increased population that he craves will get old them selves and then we will have to find even more to support them.
The rest is the usual hotch potch of “ growth is good” and “bigger is better” that any Real Estate agent worth his commission would trot out. With not a mention of infra structure, food, water, peakoil and so on

Sarnian beat me to it;
Of course Ross Eliot, a person whose (personal) prosperity is based in the property market (selling properties to more people), NEEDS more people here or HE will panic- and whatever is good for Ross and his delightful friends must be good for us- oh wait- he never explained that part, even though he kept repeatedly insisting he 'could explain it' to us if we were only 'willing to listen'.

Even the debunked "what do we do about our aging population" nugget:
Let's see, we have a few choices:
-Introduce more people who, at present, are not old, requiring that an even larger intake will be required to pay for their retirements when they DO become old, and so on.
-Nurture a culture where old people (read, older than 30) are not seen as useless and actually given equal consideration by employers, so they may continue to work.
Wait a minute- these were both already covered by Dick Smith's doco- I shouldn't even have to repeat these, minus the fact Ross Elliot- who was part of the audience watching it- simply avoided answering this entire time and clearly, is pretending still hasn't even heard.

Let's face it- another self-serving lobbyist trying to fling dirt on someone who calls out his money-spinner as unsustainable and undesirable to everyone but him- while carefully avoiding to tell us too much about what he actually wants himself because chances are we might not like it; including explicitly that the alternative to highrise is to lay out a few broad acres of suburbia around existing cities and over former agricultural and parkland (denying the people of the city these resources and burdening them with further congestion, and division of finite resources like water and forcing up the cost of living to fund desal plants to alleviate)- or putting these acres in a remote desert area- which of course is no good for Ross because these simply aren't as sellable.

Ross - I see a few posters have trotted out the scare stores with Peter A claiming - in the teeth of all evidence - that we cannot feed ourselves. (Last DFAT/ABS stats put our food exports at double our imports) and citing peak oil, which is now dead as a scare story. (Goggle fracking and shale).

Population projections are a waste of time, but then efforts to draw a line in the sand and say that Australia can only handle a certain amount of population are easily refuted by pointing to the population densities of the likes of Singapore and parts of Europe. Why can they have those much higher population densities and we can't?

One quibble I will make is that one of the writers you cite, Ross, blames Japan's economic ills on an aging population. Nope. As far as I know, no-one supports that one. Japan's problems stem from its failure to let the market correct problems from the bust of the early 1990s. the Japanese government did not want to let the economy go into what would have been a very painful recession, and the Japanese people have been paying for that decision ever since (albeit not so much in the decade just gone).

Australia needs more people like a PONZI scheme needs more investors.

Canberra has been running an immigrant PONZI scheme on both sides of the house since Hawke said " Labor will never lose another election"

As for Australia needing more workers to cope with an ageing population, i can tell you this:

Nature takes care of ageing populations, always has and always will. And in a way disinterested foreign slaves never will.

Replacement skills and labour are supposed to be taken care of by a free and dedicated (not undercapitalised) education/apprentice system. A system that since Hawk, successive governments have outsourced and privatised into a 'non-func'. The main reason for this is to give their respective corporate backers a reason to import skills at way below true cost while externalising all the social costs to already stressed out Aussy communities and onto our VERY fragile and dying Environment - from red-centre to shores.

Australia needs to revolt and hang up those minority ponzi-spruikers and GST Mandarins who dare to DICTATE the way average Australians must serve THEIR purpose while being forced into piggy backing thousands of unknown basket cases from around the world. A world where it is the RIGHT of 5 billion people to come here and screw up our desert environment if it is the right on any ONE person, investor or morally imperious PM.