We have nearly doubled the optimal population of 13 million, given that two thirds of Australia is uninhabitable and the overall ecosystem is fragile.

As late as 2017, academics were still saying that the population should be no higher than 15 million. The people who reported this said that Australia's 'well being' had peaked 40 years previously. Unnecessary and "ideologically-driven growth” had come at “an immense and unjustifiable cost to our natural and social capital”.

Since the Lima Conference in the late 1970s, things have gone from bad to worse. We have outsourced to foreigners most of our manufacturing and all of the great variety of skills it entails; all the small businesses it supports, and the richness it once brought to our culture. Most of our drugs and medical equipment are now made overseas. So it is with electrical goods and clothing, except in small and rare areas. We certainly do not need more people, particularly as there are three quarters of a million people permanently unemployed in Australia. Yet, we are the fastest growing country in the OECD. And the population growth is due to mass immigration, beloved of both major parties who are 'electing' a new population. The bloated building industry loves mass immigration; employers love it because they don't have to compete for labour (stagnant wages).

In 2013, before the above-mentioned report, " Productivity Commission wrote that, with the then current rate of population growth, public and private investment would have to grow by five times the amount over the next 50 years as it had in the previous 50 years. There has been investment in infrastructure recently but not at THAT level, and not at a level high enough to keep up with population growth.

The estimated the infrastructure costs of settling one new immigrant is
$100,000. In 2018-19 net overseas migration was 244,000, implying an infrastructure bill of $24.4 billion for that year alone.

The Jobs and Growth mantra that Morrison took over from Turnbull is absolute bull's wool, given that our comes mainly from digging things up and mass immigration.

Great post, ttbn. We are ruled by environmental vandals and traitors to their country.

Ttbn,

The inventiveness of capitalism is inexhaustible, even Marx thought so, Lenin too. We can't anticipate how technology will develop in Australia, but who knows how and when we will make the deserts bloom and re-populate the seas ?

Of course, we should manage our population and its education levels, but there's plenty of room for vastly more people over time.

Plus our humanitarian quota of refugees, currently nearly twenty thousand each year - as long as they are carefully and successfully integrated into Australian society, and not left alienated and marginalised on the outside, we'll all do okay. The more - and the more diverse - the better.

Joe

diver dan,

Thanks, I knew I would eventually get through to someone.

China's machinations in the wake of the WuFlu e.g. annexation of HK, provoking fighting along India-China border, cyber hacking Australian govt, etc. are giving weight to my constant warnings over the years about China's intentions.

One of the panel on The Insiders this morning said exactly what I have been telling my wife that we might be headed for a new Cold War with the world becoming divided between pro-USA and pro-China protagonists.

Wouldn't it be funny if the cyber hackings this week turn out to be a prelude to a Chinese invasion. It already has one foot in the door with all the Chinese migrants, its access to public utilities, and certain wealthy collaborators.

Loudmouth2,

There are plenty of past societies that overexploited their resources and then collapsed. See, for example, David R. Montgomery's book "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations". Betting on future technologies that may never come to pass is a fool's game. Just consider the sorts of things that were being seriously proposed in the 1950s and 60s. Where's my flying car? Whatever happened to our electrical power that was going to be too cheap to meter? Why haven't we won the "War on Cancer"? Why haven't we completely conquered infectious disease? Why don't we have bases, let alone colonies on the Moon or Mars? The list could go on. You want us to dive into a pool without checking how deep it is. How about we aim for the sorts of numbers that ttbn has mentioned for now? We can reconsider once those marvelous technologies have been fully proven. We can always increase the population later and at least avoid turning Australia into a place that is poor, populous, environmentally degraded, and conflict-ridden as the countries that people are risking their lives to escape.

Divergence,

First, distinguish between immigrants, usually skilled, with vjobs already lined up, contributing to the economy from Day One, and refugees, who are desperate to find safety but would probably rather stay in their home country.

Second, of course there are idiotic ideas about the future, you may have had your own ? I probably have. And of course, we can't predict where technology and economic and social imperatives might take us. I don't think electric cars will ever (pardon the pun) get off the ground, if only because, like cars on the ground now, their drivers will be needing to go off in all directions and how would flight heights be regulated in those circumstances across a city ?

I'm interested in incremental but significant changes in technology, the sorts of changes that we are already on the verge of, or that we know about but that haven't yet been operationalised. Small, safe, portable nuclear plants, for example, for every remote small town, and along the entire coast, desalinating sea-water and irrigating remote areas.

i.e. realistic innovations which may already be in the pipeline, and achievable in, say the next ten years, if investment can be secured.

Joe