This is one of those chicken egg thing discussions?
Old folks would be able to live more active risk free lifestyles, if they but had clearer arteries!
However, even quite modest exercise is off the menu for many.
People might safely perform some modest hydro exercise routines, if the fees to access local pools, weren't quite so steep. And the bulk of the medical profession, in their quite abysmal ignorance, deny oldies the one cost effective remedy for clogged arteries and fragile easily fractured bones, still relatively affordable Chelation therapy!
And while some might not see a sixty-seventy, dollar fee for a season ticket to the local pool as dear, particularly over rewarded pollies!?
It is, when you're on a single pensioner's entitlement, and having to cough up considerably more than your entire fortnight's pension for the quarterly electricity bill or the council rates or for a bedsit!
And isn't always the case, that those living on merge pensions, eat the worst most fattening, salt and sugar laden food, because it is invariably the cheapest, or all they can actually afford.
We who have already grown old, need a little more than a lecture on healthy lifestyles from our so called health authorities or self confessed experts!
Many of who, would prohibit cost effective chelation therapy if only they could, all while studiously ignoring other cost effective therapies for the elderly, like entirely non invasive hypabaric oxygen therapy, or ozone hydro therapy, or liquid nitrogen therapy?
We with our rather peculiar attitude to these very safe and cost effective strategies, have the highest rate of diabetes related amputations in the western world?
And that's hardly just a coincidence; but, I believe, a product of quite disgraceful and culpable neglect, and or the lack of, systematically withheld, REAL preventative medicine!?
Rhrosty.

< Australia currently stands at a demographic crossroads. >

Really Peter??

We should be…. But we ain’t!

We’ve just had the most excellent opportunity to reach this crossroads, with Labor being turfed out and desperately wanting to reinvent itself… apparently.

Although it seems that the reinvention bit was a complete furphy and that they couldn’t drag themselves one iota away from the same old approach.

Damn pity, that is. With Gillard’s ‘Sustainable Australia, not a big Australia’, Carr’s long history of lobbying for lower population growth and sustainability and the same from Kelvin Thomson, Labor could have…. and damn well should have, embraced a low-population sustainability-first paradigm.

If they’d done that, then this country would have been at the crossroads on this whole subject.

But alas, our way forward is crystal clear – very high immigration and rapid population growth with no end in sight, regardless of any of the numerous enormous negative factors.

No crossroads here! Just a very straight road, along which we are boring at great speed..... totally in the wrong direction!

A most interesting article. Some time ago I wrote a news story on the role GIS plays in analysing health outcomes in Pittsburgh. It's fascinating stuff.

Likewise for the 50+ in Oz, there will certainly be some major fiscal gap happening in the health and aged care budget as the Boomers move through time. I am not confident that the Government (past or present) has got a handle on this. The IGR's seem to get a lot of doom and gloom coverage and then disappear.

Ludwig and his mates tend to be 'numbers minded' and this case, they are probably right, but not for the reasons they think. Many older folk will need to work in to their late 60s as they lost a packet in super during the GFC. Women never had much anyway - about $110K on av.

So if they are sick with diabetes, depression, muscle-skeletal problems, etc, then they can't work. That's not good for tax revenue. You get knock on problems.

It's true that Oz's immigration program is fairly high although exits, especially in amongst permanents is growing. A little bird told me that we might not see so many numbers applying in the future, which is to be expected if we look back over the last 60 years.

This article raises some interesting questions. I do think, though, the Professor is wrong about some key data. He says: “Critically, within 40 years there may well be as many Australians aged over 65 as there are working age adults”. The ABS demographic projections suggest that, by the 2050s, about 25% of the population will be aged 65+ and about 60% aged between 15 and 65. Even in Japan and Korea – countries with the worst problems of aging populations in the developed world - the OLD AGE dependency rate is not projected to reach 100% (i.e. 1 working age person for each person 65 and over).

http://archive.treasury.gov.au/documents/1239/HTML/docshell.asp?URL=03_Part_2.htm

(chart 2.8)

Australia’s old age dependency ratio is projected to be about 40%. Its TOTAL dependency ratio (including 0-14 year-olds as well as 65+s) is projected to be about 67% - nowhere near 100%.

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/3222.02006%20to%202101

Granted, these projections are often wrong (sometimes wildly so), but it would take a demographic revolution for them to be so far wrong.

Unless we take some steps to limit and control our out of control population growth nature will do it for us with a resultant BIG drop in our living standards.
Australia is a finite land and infinite growth in any way is a Ponzi scheme.
Destroy our environment as we are well on the way to and we destroy ourselves.
A one way road, the wrong way as a previous comment states, to extinction.
More people are not our future.
They are our extinction.

<< A little bird told me that we might not see so many numbers applying in the future >>

Really Paddy? Who might that little bird be, I wonder.

There sure as hell isn’t any sign of a significant reduction in numbers from Abbott….. is there?

"One road points towards increased immigration, higher fertility and moderately high population growth"

And that road will have its own crossroad.

The sign says "Civil War. 20 years."

That will put an end to Big Australia and its Multopian immigration base.

The article fails to tell the story of our upcoming death bust. Our actual deaths over the next few decades double and our natural growth may drop to zero or even negative.
It also fails to point out that 60% of our NOM are temp visa holders and our emigration is hitting record highs with over 92,000 people leaving permanently over the last 12 months.

<There is also little doubt that immigration has enriched Australia’s economy and enhanced its quality of life.>

This link includes a graph of Australia's growth in real GDP and GDP per capita since 1996. While there may have been real economic benefits from mass migration in the 1950s and 60s, it is obvious that most of the more recent "enrichment of the economy" has been simply due to greater numbers, while growth in GDP per person has been quite weak. Bangladesh has a bigger GDP than Denmark, but so what?

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2013/09/population-growth-juices-australian-gdp/

The Productivity Commission has said that evidence that immigration is an important driver of per capita economic growth is "poor or mixed" (p. 6)

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/113407/annual-report-2010-11.pdf

No doubt great new ethnic restaurants improve our quality of life, but all the problems with more crowding, infrastructure and public services that can't keep up, and more competition for jobs, housing (where average costs have more than doubled since the 1970s in terms of the median wage, and nearly tripled in some places), amenities, etc. are all too real, not due to "emotion ruling the roost". These problems are not simply due to "poor planning", as the problems exist in virtually all major Australian cities, regardless of the individuals or parties in power.

As for aging, young migrants grow old like everyone else, and they cannot be deported when they have outlived their value to the economy. What happens when they need pensions and healthcare? Take in still more migrants?

Divergence
The article you point to also stresses the strong growth of GNI per capita and Australia’s favourable record compared to other developed countries in growing per capita GDP after the GFC. You seem to select only the parts of the article that support an anti-population stance, and ignore the ones that don’t.

There is rather more to the contribution of migrants to Australia than ethnic restaurants. Talk to some of the resource related companies that helped us to avoid recession, in part by using 457 and other migrants.

Yes, aging migrants eventually move into retirement, but by that point their contributions to taxes, demand, superannuation and savings will more than offset the costs of their health care and pensions – and their children’s taxes will also help to pay these costs not only for retired migrants, but for other Australians too.

Rhian,

How can you be sure that the improvements you point to are due to immigration and not something else? If you look at that graph comparing the different countries, you will see that Japan (which actually has a declining population) showed an even sharper improvement coming out of the GFC, albeit from a lower base.

I am surprised that you have nothing to say about the crowding, extremely high housing costs, mostly due to the cost of residential land, etc. Why do you think that the migrants will pay for their declining years, but not the existing population? The fact is that there are a number of countries with essentially stable populations on the very high human development list of the UN Human Development Index. These countries already have stable age structures and haven't collapsed.

There is no question that some immigration is beneficial. There are educational and cultural benefits, as well as rare skills that don't exist in Australia. My objection is to the huge numbers we are having imposed on us to suit business interests that are able to privatise the profits from mass migration and socialise the costs. The labour market is already overstocked, with 10.4% real unemployment and 7.9% underemployment, according to Roy Morgan research. We are currently acquiring one new full time job for every 5 new people

http://www.smh.com.au/national/majority-of-new-jobs-go-to-migrants-20130614-2o9p4.html

http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/cpur/files/2013/02/Immigration_review__Feb-2013.pdf

As for "jobs Australians won't do", the US had essentially zero net immigration from 1921-1965. Fruit still got picked, toilets still got cleaned, etc. It is "jobs Australians won't do for the pittance that I want to pay".

Divergence

I am not arguing that Australia’s recent relatively strong population growth is the cause of its superior economic performance. I only point out that Australia has done comparatively well on some per capita measures, as the article you link to attests, but you selected only the negative ones to illustrate your point.

Likewise, I don’t think only migrants will pay for their declining years. Other things being equal, though, the burden of an aging population is easier to carry with a larger than a smaller working age population, and the demographic modelling I’ve seen suggests that the old age dependency ratio will be a little lower with current immigration levels than with radially reduced migration. It’s not a big difference though – my key point is that higher migration does NOT lead to a higher old age dependency burden; if anything, the opposite is true.

457 visa holders are not unskilled workers doing menial jobs Australians don’t want. They are mostly skilled workers doing jobs not enough Australians are able to do, or in places Australians don’t want to work.

I’m not sure about crowding. Australian cities have low population densities by international standards. Our houses are and getting larger, while average residents per household are falling. Affordability has certainly deteriorated, but I believe poor planning and temporary bottlenecks account for much of that.

I’m intrigued by your US net migration data – could you point to a source?

Rhian,

This backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies in the US contains a graph showing immigration numbers over American history and the rate of return (migrants who came for a few years and went home).

http://cis.org/1965ImmigrationAct-MassImmigration

The drastic reduction in immigration in the US as a result of the 1921 and 1924 bills was essentially part of the violent public reaction against the first era of globalization after World War I.

I never claimed that mass migration was making us poorer on average. Rich countries can get away with quite a lot for a long time. I am saying, contrary to Prof. Curson and others, that it is not making us significantly better off on average. The distributional effects, however, are making some people much better off at the expense of others (see my links to the Tim Colebatch and Bob Birrell articles in my previous post). This concentrates wealth and power in relatively few hands. My other objections relate to the hammering that our greater numbers are giving to the environment in the habitable parts of this country, the erosion of our safety margins in a world that is being affected by serious global environmental problems and resource shortages, the erosion of social cohesion from very high diversity, particularly from highly incompatible cultures, and the assaults on personal freedom due to greater crowding and more political correctness. Another relates to the reduction in quality of life due to clogged roads, unaffordable housing suitable for families, long waits in hospital emergency rooms, permanent water restrictions, etc.

You say conditions are more crowded elsewhere. True, but why should we copy them? This article gives some graphs showing the magnitude of the housing affordability issue. If unaffordable housing is due to "poor planning", how did all our politicians and urban planners in so many cities all get hit with the stupid stick?

http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/residential/how-150-years-of-australian-housing-prices-shows-that-the-bubble-will-likely-come-to-an-end-philip-soos/2013021759324/Page-1

If the CIS Center of Immigration Studies "researches" something it must be true.... just like Birrell's CPUR at Monash University a preferred source of Colebatch at The Age, Manauskas at News Corp and van Onselen at Macrobusiness, even though CPUR does not produce research but like CIS produces opinions presented as fact..... which journalists seem to prefer.

No coincidence both are linked to John Tanton and indirectly the Scaife Foundation (which is linked to the Tea Party movement); all with the aim of stopping or reducing rights of non European immigrants and residents (any objectives observer or researcher knows why, vs their screams of but we're not racist!).

Leads onto related article from The Economist http://tinyurl.com/l6ee7v7 on benefits of temp workers.

Firstly, when journalists, media, researchers, advocates, politicians, real estate industry etc. do not clarify their definition of "immigration" and "immigrant" i.e. making no distinction between permanents and temps caught up in the net overseas migration NOM, it's "dog whistling", whether intentional or not.

The Economist has introduced a much more descriptive term "churn" which reflects the fact that most in the NOM are not "(permanent) immigrants" but temporary residents such as international students, "EU immigrant" workers etc..

The advantage of such temps is that while they contribute financially through fees, work, taxes etc.. they are not eligible for benefits, and will not remain permanently to use them anyway.

Further, like in Australia where any similar debate is xenophobically or falsely framed by nativists around perceived high rates of immigration and populationg growth (which is correlated to sustainable environment, infrastructure etc.) by conflating permanent with temporary, the same benefits are ignored.

For the UK, the EU mobility allows 2 million+ UK citizens to reside in the EU for retirement, aged care, study, work, business, investment etc. (formally and informally, latter case not paying tax).

All quite logical and generally a win win for all, but UK politicians like in Australia feel the need for bigots, UKIP, BNP etc. to be placated by scare stories without any basis whatsoever.

Andras Smith, you're the one making wild claims.

I haven't heard anyone in this or any other thread who's proposed "stopping or reducing rights of non European immigrants and residents".

The question is whether more of those people should be granted those rights in the *future*.

"making no distinction between permanents and temps"

And temporary means what?
They don't drink water? Don't need housing? Bus seats?
Whether they're temporary or permanent makes no difference to resource consumption, crowding, job competition, etc.

When the temps leave, they're replaced by other temps, so the numbers never "go down" at any point. Why would you exclude them from the stats?

The EU's people movement has caused significant problems, with Eastern Europe losing much of its productive population, inhibiting their own development.

The UK has one of the highest rates of immigration and much of it goes to one city: London.
That means all the "stress" is focused in one place. Little wonder some people complain.

Temps contribute then leave without access to pensions, generally don't/can't buy property and qualitatively different resource use, vs the permanent resident population who do have access to benefits etc.

Central Europe like elsewhere has gone backwards due to reform fatigue, GFC and credit bingeing, politicians playing the race card against foreign direct investment, gypsies, impossibly high taxes for sole traders & SMEs who produce wealth, employ and and pay taxes, limiting unemployment benfefits (while maintaining pensions), encouraging cronyism i.e. corruption, media restrictions, collapse of tax base etc. while older generations if employed, "hold their chairs" precluding advancement for younger generations.

Re. UK, assume you are a 'nativist'? Significant part of nativist belief system like a cult is to ignore or divert attention from inconvenient facts e.g. high immigration or population growth is reached via distortion of data (and of course attacking and smearing observers).

London is now the 2nd biggest Hungarian city, similar for other CEE nations (+ Berlin), a great success story of the EU, labour can move where it is needed, and return home when not, it's called "turnstile migration".

These younger generations of workers (vs unemployed at home) will be be a huge asset for their nations and the EU, but as many find, they are not wanted because nationalistic nativist states prefer the status quo.....and new ideas, foreign languages etc. don't fit their authoritarian image of nirvana.

Other issue for younger generation in the EU if working, is supporting existing state funded pensioners, while trying to save for their own future, with little or no chance of a state pension in future.

Germany too has become very reliant upon workers from elsewhere in the EU, plus outside and like the UK, I don't think it's some Australian's business how they choose to run their nations.

Do you approve of a former nazi regime importing workers (Slav, Turk, Magyar, etc.) or too extreme? Anti pops brigade simply cannot hide their authoritarian leanings and obsession for a past most Europeans would prefer never happened..... many would tell the anglo world to 'f off we're full' (of bigots already).

Divergence,

The data in the report show that the USA has had significant positive net migration for most of the past 200 years with the exception of the early 1930s.

The UDIA attributes deteriorating affordability in Australia to a range of causes including:
- Restrictions in land supply in some markets;
- Increases in taxes and charges
- Substantial increases in infrastructure charges;
- Costs associated with the preparation of development applications;
- The trend toward the construction of larger houses or households with smaller household numbers;
- Policies that restrict land supply as a means to encourage higher density and consolidation of population;
- Costs of compliance with increased environmental requirements

http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Former_Committees/hsaf/submissions/~/media/wopapub/senate/committee/hsaf_ctte/submissions/sub44_pdf.ashx

Andras Smith "attacking and smearing", "authoritarian", "obsession".
You're referring to your own kind.

You are the authoritarians, imposing your schizophrenic "one-worldism/multiculturalism", demonising any critics or skeptics, and inventing "crimes" like "racial vilification" and "discriminating" against a job applicant who covers their face or carries a dagger 24/7.

"I don't think it's some Australian's business how they choose to run their nations"

My concern is Australia. *You* brought up the EU.
Are you Australian? You sound American.
If you're not Australian, then this article and its issues are not *your* business.

Temps leave, but they're simply replaced by others.
The faces change, the numbers don't.

They may not buy property, but they still need housing.
They take jobs, but probably pay no tax in Australia (declaring their income in their homeland, if they're honest).

They consume resources like any other person (water, electricity, food, roads, trains/buses) and produce waste (garbage, pollution).
You can't simply ignore their impact.

"Do you approve of a former nazi regime importing workers"

*Former* regimes don't do anything at all. As they don't exist.

The death bust (80 years after the baby boom) must be factored into any demographic arguments and our natural growth is downhill from here on in.

http://tinyurl.com/k3c6jsc

http://tinyurl.com/kv3wthx

http://tinyurl.com/lupr2sv

http://tinyurl.com/kl6dcj9

Rhian,

It is clear from the charts that I linked to that net migration to the US was far lower between 1921 and 1965 than it was earlier or later, even if it only actually went negative during the 1930s. Yes, there were positive numbers otherwise, but whether they were significant compared to the US population at the time is debatable.

If you look at your list on housing affordability, you have given the immediate, but not the ultimate causes, primarily population growth. For example, why would the government want to "restrict land supply as a means to encourage higher density and consolidation of population" if the population weren't growing rapidly?

<Increases in taxes and charges
- Substantial increases in infrastructure charges>

In her Economic Affairs paper, Jane O'Sullivan estimated that approximately $200,000 is required in infrastructure costs for each new resident.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0270.2011.02125.x/pdf

She has since said that $100,000 - $120,000 is for public infrastructure, but from the average person's point of view, it doesn't matter, for example, whether his electricity is supplied by the government or a private company. He will still have to pay higher charges for expansion of the network.

Most migrants will eventually contribute enough over perhaps 20 years to pay for what they use, but they need all of the infrastructure immediately and don't pay for it up front.

Household size hasn't decreased since 2006, in fact it has gone up a bit, but house prices are higher.

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2013/05/the-history-of-australian-property-values-part-2/

While houses are bigger than they used to be, the value of the land component in an average house-land package has gone from around 30% in the 1970s to around 70%. See

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2013/11/residential-land-values-reflate-across-australia/

Houses are so expensive primarily because of the cost of the land they sit on, even though block sizes are much smaller. Why would the cost of the land go up without population growth? Compare the situation in Germany and Japan (scroll down to the graphs)

http://www.oecd.org/finance/monetary/35756053.pdf

Dempografix,

If you are concerned with below replacement level fertility, you ought to be concerned with the trend towards cramming people in at high densities and other aspects of our economy. Desired family size is high enough to stabilise the population, even without net immigration.

http://www.aifs.gov.au/institute/pubs/resreport11/aspirations.html

Economic insecurity, overcrowding, and high housing costs are poison for fertility rates. See

http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/00806-city-leaders-are-love-density-most-city-dwellers-disagree

I suspect that if we cut back on mass migration, more people will be willing to have another child or two, once the labour market is tighter, housing is cheaper in real terms, and people have more room to spread out. So long as Australia remains a nice place to live, we would have no trouble attracting a modest rate of net immigration in any case.

divergence
agree 100%. I support a peak/decline in our population for the exact reasons you detail.