Please excuse my above comment - it was meant for another thread, on 'Greens' Discrimination'.

My apologies.

Divergence
There is not the remotest possibility that Australians will be forced to become vegetarian because we can neither produce nor import meat. And buying land isn’t “grabbing” it.

Food exports certainly help the balance of payments, but food is a small and diminishing share of Australia’s total exports, swamped by resources. Food, wool and cotton combined accounted for just 8.6% of Australia’s exports in 2011, down from more than a quarter in the late 1980s

Fester
Food and food self-sufficiency is an obsession of the anti-population lobby. So is the pol pot agrarianism you speak of.

Rhian

All I do is question the sense of government pursuing high population growth policies. That is not an anti-people stance as far as I can tell. But which is the more humanitarian stance:To have as many people as possible and have no prospect of providing all the resources to develop, or to provide people with free access to family planning and consequently have fewer people, but with more resources to develop?

The idea that high rates of population growth leads to accelerated development, while once popular, is no longer so as it tends to be contradicted by reality.

Fester
I agree that access to free family planning can help to alleviate poverty in poor countries, as can improving education (especially of women) and, if affordable, better health services.

Australia is a rich country with plenty of land and resources and a very low population density, and can easily accommodate more people if it chooses. Arguments that may hold true for developing countries are not relevant here.

Here in Australia there is a strong positive relationship between per capita economic growth and population growth. States like WA which have comparatively strong economies have the fastest population growth, and vice versa. One can argue the direction of causation, but “the reality” as we experience is the opposite of your hypothesis.

Rhian,

Australia does indeed have a low population density - because it is mostly desert. Agricultural exports may be small now in relation to minerals, but the minerals are a nonrenewable resource.

<Here in Australia there is a strong positive relationship between per capita economic growth and population growth.>

The Productivity Commission disagrees with you. From their 2006 report, p. 154:

"Most of the economic benefits associated with an increase in skilled migration accrue 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. The economic impact of skilled migration is small when compared with other drivers of productivity and income per capita."

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/9438/migrationandpopulation.pdf

From their 2010-2011 annual report:

"Two benefits that are sometimes attributed to immigration, despite
mixed or poor evidence to support them, are that:
• immigration is an important driver of per capita economic growth
• immigration could alleviate the problem of population ageing."

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."

So for no economic benefit, population growth gives the average person a deteriorating environment, deteriorating infrastructure, and more competition for jobs, housing, public services, and amenities.

It was interesting to see the author mention Maths... perhaps he might like to view this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e_VpyoAXpA8