"This is all about immigration."

Thanks for the clarification, Pericles... here was me thinking it was about failed states and their intervention in population AND fertility policies.

So closing Queensland (which I still think is justifiable) is off the agenda? That's not going to achieve a depopulation of the Cairns beaches...

or help the FNQing koalas!

Pericles,

It is not surprising that their is some benefit to per capita GDP from immigration. After all, the migrants, unlike Australian children, have been raised, educated, and trained at someone else's expense. Furthermore, they can be screened, so that people with criminal records or expensive disabilities can be weeded out. The idea that they are somehow superior people is nonsense. If they were, their home countries would be paradises on earth, and we would be the ones wanting to emigrate. What is noteworthy is that the net benefit is extremely small, something that you refuse to take on board, because you just know that the Productivity Commission and other economists who have looked at this issue have to be wrong. It is rather touching that you see our politicians as wise philosopher kings, rather than puppets of the business elite.

You also ignore the negative distributional effects and the (unmet because expensive) demand for extra infrastructure. Most people will be worse off, because the extra competition from more people drives down wages and worker bargaining power, and the growth enables the owners of capital to jack up prices for essential resources such as land for housing. There are also diseconomies of scale. Desalinated water is 4 to 6 times as expensive as dam water. The Productivity Commission didn't even factor in the extra pressure on the environment.

You keep bringing up the furphy that we want to stop people from having babies. Australia's fertility rate is slightly below replacement level and has been since 1976. It is not a problem, even if a few people want large families, although there is no reason why the rest of us should be forced to subsidise them.

Pericles,
Seems you have a fair crowd booting you in the ribs over this one. Could you do with a hand?

It is typical of many Australians to presume that a steady, well managed population growth in this country automatically equates to having to share what they have with an ever increasing number of non productive units.
The "diseconomies of scale" Divergence refers to are of course absolute rubbish. This makes the assumption that the population growth will or should occur in the already congested population centres. Why should we not work towards de-centralising our population. This would indeed have some effect on CREATING economies of scale.

It is distressing to see so many with a narrow minded view. An apparent lack of confidence that we as a nation are indeed able to create new industry, new wealth, broaden our economic base

A good article "Is Population Growth a Ponzi Scheme?"

http://churchandstate.org.uk/2012/11/is-population-growth-a-ponzi-scheme/

"The basic pitch of those promoting Ponzi demography is straightforward and intoxicating in its pro-population growth appeal: “more is better.” However, as somebody who has spent a lifelong career as a demographer, including 12 years of service as the director of the United Nations Population Division, I find that more is not necessarily better.

As has been noted by Nobel laureate economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen as well as many others, current economic yardsticks such as gross domestic product (GDP) focus on material consumption and do not include quality-of-life factors.

Standard measures of GDP do not reflect, for example, the degradation of the environment, the depreciation of natural resources or declines in individuals’ quality of life.

According to Ponzi demography, population growth — through natural increase and immigration — means more people leading to increased demands for goods and services, more material consumption, more borrowing, more on credit and of course more profits. Everything seems fantastic for a while — but like all Ponzi schemes, Ponzi demography is unsustainable.

When the bubble eventually bursts and the economy sours, the scheme spirals downward with higher unemployment, depressed wages, falling incomes, more people sinking into debt, more homeless families — and more men, women and children on public assistance."

How much of this is in evidence already? But in the end, there will always be those who simply won't entertain the possibility that population growth can be anything but good and the more of us there are, the more wonderful it is. The claims will continue that the issues we encounter are always because of incompetence etc failing to consider that the incompetence is only going to get worse as the issue get bigger.

ManOfTheLand,

I actually agree with you that the abandonment of decentralisation is part of the problem, and no doubt there are some country towns that really could benefit from more people. As it is, however, 82% of migrants end up in a capital city, as opposed to 66% of Australian born people. This report from the ABS gives some of the reasons

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/2071.0main+features902012-2013

You may not be that aware of the problems in the cities, but the infrastructure/diseconomies of scale issue is very real, with, for example, expensive and electricity-hungry desalination plants being built because the cities have outgrown their natural water supplies and cannot guarantee supply in a bad drought.

We are adding approximately a million people to the population every 3 years. I question the ability of the rural areas to absorb all or most of them on a continuing basis. Many areas don't have the water for a really big population. In many places, there aren't enough jobs for the children of the people who live there already, let alone outsiders. The Australian Academy of Sciences recommended an upper limit of 23 million to Australia's population back in 1994, and a lot of their concerns were reiterated in the 2010 Long-Term Physical Implications of Immigration report. Wishful boosterism can't trump knowledge.

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

http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/physical-implications-migration-fullreport.pdf

It is worth noting that if Australia were to have a referendum tomorrow, the overwhelming majority would reject a big Australia - both of the major parties have acknowledged this - remember Julia Gillard "let's take a breath..." and Tony Abbott recently offering to reduce population growth targets to the Coalition's historically low levels of 1.4% (i.e. the same as it was in 2011).

And that is why we'll never have a referendum.

But as 1.5 million voters are unhappy with the big two and 13% of Australians want a new party, perhaps we'll see a swing towards parties like The Stable Population Party who at least can put the Big Australia arguments as the key to for resolving ageing population, skills shortages, economic stagnation in their place as the nonsense they are.

Either way, we're in for a tough time. The real question is, how much more damage will the big two do before they find it practically impossible to govern and Kelvin Thomson's "Witches Hat's theory of government" becomes a reality?