Have a look at this map of world poverty... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Basically the more red, the more poverty... But the surprise is that it is a map of FERTILITY - how many children are being born.

Too low population growth = initial wealth, but leads to a bust and long, painfull decline, like Japan.

Too high population growth = poverty.

You know how our government seems unable to fund hospitals, schools and roads, and this is with our population failing to produce enough children to replace ourselves... imagine the problems of fundiong these essential services if the population was not declining, but trippling every twenty years... no wonder they are poor. Worse than schools and hospitals, they somehow they also need to find more farmland too!

50 years ago, perhaps we could have ended poverty. But now there are so many more poor that the problem is so much bigger. For example, there are 60 million shanty-town dwellers in India alone, and only 20 million Australians... Let alone Indonesia, the Pacific Islands, New Guinea... What about Africa? Sth America? etc etc...

Why is China becomming so rich and powerfull? The one-child policy. It means they can finally afford to catch up with the infastructire and education that nations need to get ahead and build wealth.

I don't like the 'one child policy', but Thailand and surging Iran ) also have zero-population growth due to marketing, free contraception and free choice. It's not really the feminist idea that educating women reduces population growth (think Iran, they're not keen on educating women)...

What succeds is telling people that too many kids leads to poverty, and handing out long-lasting free contraceptive implants. Eventually compulsary education and urbanisation drive down birthrates, because they make kids expensive. This tends to come along at the same time as education for all, which creates the feminist myth that only educating women decreases birthrates...

On the other hand, why is the 'aging population' such a bad thing here in Australia? Surely it means we are living longer, and isn't that a good thing?

The problem is not an 'aging' population, it is that we are suiciding... failing to produce enough kids to replace ourselves.

Here we need to give tax reductions for kids so middle class parents can afford the kids we want. For example income splitting between the parents and kids.

Those on welfare are pumping out kids like there is no tomorrow because of the welfare bribes to have lots of kids. Meaning that single mums are pressured into having more kids than they can look after. And the payment incentives which ensure that few get married, as this reduces their welfare payments.

Australian men don't want to become fathers. Men don't celebrate buck=s nights anymore, and Kings Cross is full of hen's nights. We have the highest rate of vasectomy in the world.

Every man knows that marriage means long years of hard work, followed by divorce. And divorce means that his kids are fed to the lawyers. So men are simply saying 'No!' to marriage and fatherhood. Tragically, city offices are full of single 30-something professional women who can't get a husband.

So we need also to make divorce fairer, because Australian men don't want to become dads... because they are afraid of having their kids stolen by divorce lawyers.