What a half-baked lot of critics you lot are !

FACT 1 - Australia is the DRIEST CONTINENT ON THE PLANET. Forget about per capita rainfall. A substantial proportion of the water falls north of the "Brisbane Line". The population would have to start moving to Darwin and spread out from there.

FACT 2 - Australia has been losing it's intellectual capital since the late 1960's. We were at the FOREFRONT of computer technology in the late 1950's. (Sydney University built one of the first few mainframe computers in the world - SILLIAC: built 1955, dismantled 1968). In the early 1980's we built designed and built a laptop computer - the DULMONT. The main peripheral chips were designed at UNSW and were fabricated at AWA Microelectronics chip fabriaction plant in Sydney (Yes we did have one!)

It was Bob (Pig Iron) Menzies who urge us to dig it, shear it or grow it. Now that's all we can do!

GDP growth should be based on intellectual capital, not MacJobs to build MacMansions.

In case anyone is interested.... Here's a link to see the DULMON Magnum

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=764

Read and weep :-(

Facts in a knot again, Ludwig. You have the timing out badly on China. The chinese economy was not developed, the population continues to grow, the economic take-off was a result of free market reforms, not the partial population restrictions, and the jury is still out as to what will happen to their economy when the excess of single males impacts on demand for family goods.

So lets get back to comparing like with like, shall we. Australia has a developed economy. Two advanced countries with stagnating population growth are Japan and Germany and both have stagnating economies and high unemployment. So I will ignore your repeated boorish sneers and repeat the earlier request for you to provide an example, with realistic implications for Australia, of a successful policy of population decline.

Good article Tom. However I don’t like some of the comments, this country in the main is different in what it produces per given drop to most other places regardless of the technology. If the ACT and its region is the test then the answer is not much. We have only recently discovered we need to strap our rivers together to overcome variations in flows and storage to maintain what we had in reasonable community expectations and that’s without significant agriculture.

Economies of scale are so important. Installing hundreds of tanks is not the answer.

If we must look at other developed areas for a comparison, a few can grow by using other people’s resources. The US for instance must be way out front on this score.

Close to home, we can build a five star home but half the young couples can’t afford one.
Let’s look at some issues around this ‘sustainable’ home concept with extra rainwater tanks, a grey water recycling plant, some solar panels, and perhaps a swimming pool for good measure. I have learned to think though, just by watching our supermarkets and chain stores grow that big is best, i.e. what’s wrong with regional water and energy services growing too other than general consumerism is much harder to check.

The fact is growth continues to drive us and we can’t expect many to suddenly go back to basics or living hand to mouth literally. Stop using credit, stay at home and develop the garden into producing some nutrition season by season. It’s hardly likely to become the norm, so get used to a rough transition to the next equilibrium.

Tom, that was a really good article.

Perseus, take a look at Finland in the CIA World Factbook. This country was rated number one on the World Economic Forum Competitiveness Index and number two on their good environmental management index. It only has 5.2 million people, who don't even have English as their first language, and a population growth rate of only 0.16%. The net migration rate per thousand people is 0.89 as opposed to 3.91 for Australia. The fertility rate is 1.73, as opposed to 1.76 for Australia. Their median age is 41 as opposed to 37 for us. GDP per capita in US dollars (in terms of purchasing power parity) is $US30,300 as opposed to $32,000 in Australia. Australia looks slightly better here, but one of the things that all of our population growth does do is increase social inequality. If you take the ratio of the share of total household income going to the top 10% over the share going to the bottom 10%, it is 5 in Finland compared to 12.7 in Australia. Much better to be in the bottom 10% in Finland.

Your local problems are really due to government policy. Lack of training opportunities = later lack of skilled workers. Unemployed city people who move to the country lose their benefits. There are confiscatory effective marginal rates on low income workers, so that it often doesn't pay to work. There is no shortage of workers per se. 16% of the working age population gets all or most of their income from the welfare system, as opposed to 3% in the early 1960s when there really was full employment. As has been described in the Guardian, the British government has been able to greatly reduce the number of disability pensioners by reducing taxes and claw back of benefits when they got jobs and by allowing them to go straight back on benefits if the job did not work out or turned out to be too much for them.

Well lo and behold… Perseus makes absolutely no attempt to address my sustainability ‘challenge’.

My reply was not good enough for him! Well, now how could it ever be?

Now if he really wants to entertain any sort of debate with me, it is going to have to be a two-way street. When he answers my challenge and shows even the slightest bit of knowledge let alone interest in sustainability, then he can put forward another challenge and expect me to answer it.

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“The fact is growth continues to drive us and we can’t expect many to suddenly go back to basics or living hand to mouth literally. Stop using credit, stay at home and develop the garden into producing some nutrition season by season. It’s hardly likely to become the norm, so get used to a rough transition to the next equilibrium.”

Yes Taz, growth continues to drive us towards this rough transition. But stopping or lowering growth doesn’t mean that people will have to go back to basics and become self-sufficient, nor anything like it. Just the opposite – as growth pushes us over the edge of societal coherence, people will have to go and make their own living, independent of supermarkets and cars.

We are just so profoundly hooked into continuous growth that I don’t think we have any chance of voluntarily weaning ourselves off it. We just need to look at China, which has made the most concerted effort of any country to deal with continuous population growth. For all its advantages, it has led to a forthcoming major issue with a highly discrepant sex ratio, and it has contributed to a different sort of growth – massive fossil-fuel-based economic growth, which has its own enormous set of problems.

I think it is just beyond us. The rough transition is inevitable. And it will be upon us very soon, triggered by ever-rising fuel prices