Upton Sinclair is purported to have said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Ludwig
No one ever said the population growth was required, or necessary. All Ross' articles does is use a few, simple examples to show that Aus can still sustain a vast increase in population, which it can. And we will get those extra numbers, whether we like it or not, so we should start planning now.

michael_in_adelaide
Again I am cast in the role of bursting your green resources-are-limited bubble. Standards of living are at best only weakly related to local resource constraints, population density or environment. Consider Finland, for example, the Fins are snowed-in and in darkness almost all day for six months a year but their standard of living is the highest in europe. Now contrast that with the economic issues in resource-rich African countries. Leave it with you. If I exasparate you with reality that cannot be helped.

Brian of Buderim
Waste treatment and drinking water would certainly be an issue, so that means we need to plan and perhaps we would have a need for those now unnecessary desalinsation plants which misleading forecasts pushed most states into building. Its not enough to complain the task will be difficult. Its going to happen, so that means we have to plan to avoid would could be unpleasent consequences. Incidentally, where did you get the idea that a lot of waste water is piped out to the ocean? Aren't you confusing bathroom waste with storm water which is just dumped in the ocean.

colinsett/geoff-of-perth - sorry, can't get to you guys, but most of your complaints are answered above..

There have been some good comments on the environment and resource issues. It is worth pointing out that in 1994, the Australian Academy of Sciences recommended a population of 23 million as the safe upper limit, and they haven't revised this since.

http://www.science.org.au/events/sats/sats1994/Population2040-section8.pdf

If population growth is so essential for our economy, Ross Elliott needs to explain why countries with much smaller populations than ours and countries with miniscule population growth or even declining populations can outperform us in terms of economic competitiveness, as well as ranking high on the UN Human Development Index (a measure of living standards and quality of life).

Germany (population growth -0.2%) and Japan (-0.077%) are in the top 10 on the World Economic Forum Competitiveness Index. This list also includes other low population growth countries: Switzerland (number 1, 0.20%), Sweden (0.17%), Finland (0.065%), and Denmark (0.24%). All of these countries also rank high on the UN Human Development Index, where Germany and Sweden are 9 and 10, Switzerland is 11, and Japan is 12. Norway (population growth 0.33%) is number 1.

These countries would also already have stable age structures and are somehow managing to cope. As others have pointed out, trying to use immigration to deal with population aging is a Ponzi scheme. Migrants grow old too, just like everyone else, and they cannot be deported when they have outlived their value to the economy. The only solution when they also need pensions and health care would be more and more migrants, world without end.

Curmudgeon,

You are trying to paint this vast increase in numbers as inevitable, but it would be quite possible to stabilise the population with perhaps one to two additional million people (from demographic momentum, as the fertility rate is slighly below replacement level and has been since 1976). Big increases would be entirely due to government imposed mass migration. Last I heard, we can vote out politicians in Australia.

While we could certainly support more people at a lower standard of living, at least in the medium term, there is no upside to population growth for ordinary people and therefore no reason to refrain from opposing it. This excerpt is from p. 154 of the 2006 Productivity Commission Report, where they modelled the effects of doubling skilled migration. This would be the best possible case for population growth, as the migrants have already been raised, educated, and trained at someone else's expense.

"Most of the economic benefits associated with an increase in skilled migration accrues to the immigrants themselves. For existing residents, capital owners receive additional income, with owners of capital in those sectors experiencing the largest output gains enjoying the largest gains in capital income. On the other hand, the real average annual incomes of existing resident workers grows more slowly than in the base-case, as additional immigrants place downward pressure on real wages."

This is consistent with the findings of other reports around the world, such as the 1997 Academy of Sciences report in the US and the 2008 House of Lords report in the UK. Prof Robert Rowthorn (Economics, Cambridge) writes in the (London) Telegraph 5/7/06:

"As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration. There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative."

This is a good discussion to have, and given the inevitability of future growth it is important to identify limiting factors/consequences.

However one of my pet peeves is the "finite planet/resources" argument. The reason this gives me the sh/ts is that people that argue this must be totally ignorant that almost all the resources we use are derived from outside the earth (the sun), as well as seem unaware of our ability to travel outside of earth. Please just get over it!

If you want to worry about sun running out of fuel the go ahead. Let see how much fear mongering you can cause with that one! You would then need to prove that the number of suns is limited. Good luck.

Lack of food production is a complete furphy. Just the old Beaudesert shire has enough unused high value farmland to feed South East Queensland, if it was seriously exploited, in the way Asian framing would use it.

For all of you, including me, who want the boat people, & other so called refugees, stopped, you'd better hang on tight. The ride is about to get wild. We may be damned sorry we let John Howard take our guns off us.

The stuff is about to hit the fan in Europe, big time. The flood of refugees coming out of Mediterranean Europe is going to make anything we've seen recently, or post WW11 look tame. This time, with so many of them being kin to the "new Australians" we got in the 40s to 60s, there will be massive pressure to take these in.

Can we afford it, of course not, unless we go back to the inexpensive model of the 50/60s. Public funded housing for all will be impossible, as it really is now. Those migrant hostels will have to be used as they were then. It will have to be, come on in folks, but you'll have to make your own way.

Will we do it, of course we will. When we do, we had better get a few hundred thousand agrarian Asians, to make our land as productive as only they, & their hard work can.

That old curse, "may you live in interesting times", is about to be the motto of the 21St century.