Any government or private organisation calling for immigration or guest workers to fill skills ‘shortages’ is up to no good.

In Australia, there are 400,000 or more people on the dole or on varying types of disability pensions. These people should be looked at very carefully. While there are some people who are genuinely unable to work or learn new skills, it is unbelievable that there are nearly half a million people in this category.

Australian governments talk about training, and that’s about all they do. Most of the ‘training’ is Mickey Mouse stuff with no relevance to overcoming the claimed skill shortages.

There are limits to growth, and they should be recognised. The greed of developers, in the housing industry in particular, and other industries already bulging with wealth needs to be recognised also. It is big business that is always trying to con governments into increasing the population.

Australia does not need any more people! We already have twice the population our mostly arid country can carry. Apart from environmental reasons limiting population, we simply don’t have the infrastructure to cater for more people, and it is quite clear that governments will not spend money on providing infrastructure. They don’t do anything about public transport. They don’t do anything about roads until traffic comes to a halt.

Australia should be seriously working towards reducing population, not increasing it

In Australia, Hudson and Julia Ross have successfully campaigned to increased skilled migrant visas for IT workers because there are many advertised positions that are not filled. True! Take an example, Telstra needs 135 programmers so it puts the tender out to 5 agencies who all place online advertisements, so now there are 675 advertisements for 135 positions. Then of course there are "fishing" advertisements placed for which there are no current vacancies to see if there are any candidates out there.

The Australian Computer Society started a jobs filled index in 2007 that surveyed employment agencies and counted the numbers of jobs filled. The jobs could be full time, part time, contract or only last a week. The survey covered about a quarter of the market. Extrapolating out the figures there was probably 25000 jobs filled and there are 6000 to 12000 IT graduates per year.

It has been very easy to manipulate the Australian IT figures so that we import Indians on skilled migrant visas while Australian graduates are not able to find work.

Unless you work in IT, please don't post about the Indians having better qualifications because I have listened to their chatter and they don't and they often have the impediment of poor language skills.

Mr Right,

You don't know what you are talking about. Australia's fertility rate is currently 1.76 births per woman. Replacement rate to keep your population stable is 2.1 at a minimum. That is, no population growth, just maintaining what you have. What this means for us is that increasingly we are going to be a nation of old people. And once the baby boomers are gone our population will halve every forty to fifty years. Favourite programs of the soft left like universal health care, gov't funding for the arts and unemployment benefits will have to go. Their just won't be enough workers to pay for them.

To suggest that Australia can't handle 20 million people or 50 million people for that matter is just enviro-lunacy and societal vandalism.

Paul.L
By the time you find out that it is you who are wrong, it will be too late.

With your arrogant attitude you will be in a fine old mess – so sure that other people are ‘enviro-lunatics’ and ‘societal vandals’, you will not have a clue how to survive when everything you are used to having handed out to you is gone.

The Australian population is replacing itself, and this old chestnut about an ‘ageing population’ comes from an aberration concerning ONE generation only – immediate post-WW11 young adults who had it tough and were tough. There is no evidence that future generations will be long-lived.

So, there will be young people to carry on, and the old people will live and die the same way they always have.

In your great wisdom, haven’t you checked the countries with half the population of Australia who have always done very well?

As for your “soft left”, my alias Mr. Right, has nothing to with right or wrong; it is to with my politics.

You need to get out of your bubble.

Spain is a better place to look to see the consequences of an economy based on population growth industry. With its population now stabilising and set to decline, there is no longer the need for construction and infrastructure. As there has been no consideration of economic alternatives after a fourteen year construction boom, Spain now faces bleak times.

Australia could avoid this by cutting immigration now. The resultant surplus of construction workers could satisfy the huge demands for mining and the construction of mining infrastructure. The measure could make housing more affordable, greatly ease the infrastructure crisis, improve the current account deficit, and reduce inflation and interest rates.

Unfortunately, the idea that high immigration is economically beneficial is not questioned by politicians. All options need to be explored if the most beneficial option is to be found.

When environmentalists say we are running out of clean water, cheap fossil fuels, good farmland, natural ecosystems and biodiversity and in 40 years it will be much worse, the don’t-worry-it-will-all-be-okay bunch say “It’s impossible to predict the future 40 years away,” but when it comes to population growth (which is 130,000 per year without any immigrants), the don’t-worry-it-will-all-be-okay bunch say “Oh my God. In 40 years we could have a population that isn’t increasing anymore. Catastrophe. Armageddon. Societal vandalism. We must do everything we can to insure that population continues to grow forever.”

We’ve had an increasingly ageing population for the past 60 years. During that time our standard of living has increased substantially. That will probably continue if we can learn to live sustainably. Living sustainably is easier with a stable population than with a rising population. Population growth can’t go on forever. Some generation has to face that fact. How ‘bout if it was this generation, so we can give our kids a chance to live sustainably.

The ideas in the article are well put. Nobody would even consider saying “There is a shortage of Microsoft computer software. Let’s lobby congress to get them to lower the price, so we can afford more.” It’s easier to take the best people from developing countries and pay them half the market price.