Leigh,

I think that you are generally right, although zero net immigration is probably better than no immigration. From ABS figures, 61% (235,000 people) of our current annual 1.8% population growth rate comes from immigration, while 39% (153,400) comes from natural increase, a considerable amount of which must be from recent migrants. Our fertility rate (1.8 births per woman) is currently well below replacement level (2.1) and has been since 1976, so the natural increase is due to momentum from past high fertility. A population that has been growing rapidly has a pyramid-shaped age distribution, with the births in the large young adult generation and most of the deaths in the relatively tiny elderly generation. Unless there is a drastic increase in fertility, natural increase is temporary, and will end and then go negative when the baby boomers start to die in significant numbers. Fertility is likely to go even lower, however, with more and more people forced into "rack 'em, pack 'em, and stack 'em" housing styles. Nevertheless, the politicians could keep our population growing rapidly with immigration, even with no births at all.

Even so, there is no longer any reason why we should be forced to subsidise births via the baby bonus and the like. There is pretty good evidence from our government's own Measures of Australia's Progress reports (on Web) that our environment is being badly degraded to achieve population and economic growth. Furthermore, we have outgrown our water supplies everywhere except Tasmania and the tropical North. That is why the Murray Darling basin is in trouble, with more than 80% of the water allocated to human purposes as opposed to 15% in the 1920s, why we have permanent water restrictions in our cities with people encouraged to spy on their neighbours, and why the politicians are building expensive and energy hungry desalination plants instead of dams. In SE Queensland, according to a report in the Australian last week, water bills will go up by 20% next year and another 50% in the following two years, even though per capita consumption has been cut in half.

There's quite a few issues I have with this piece - I do agree that overpopulation is a very serious issue and needs to be tackled, but I never agree with exaggerations, distortions or oversimplifications.

Murray states that 3 billion is far too many people for the world.

I'd like to see some backing. Firstly, it all depends on standard of living, as well as wastefulness. Even if I did accept 3 billion as being excessive, does he mean 3 billion people living more circumscribed lives, or people wasting food and resources at an alarming rate?

He doesn't say. He just states it. Frankly, I think if we could get the population to stabilise at say, 5 billion, we'd probably be able to work things out. Maybe even higher, I dunno. What I'm worried about is population increases.

So I disagree with this point. Plus, we have no right to deny other people the chance to develop their economies - it's a necessity, one that needs to be implemented alongside population policies.

Also - this is a side point and it's not entirely relevant, but it deserves clarification. Murray states: "And fully 83 per cent desire to have both a son and a daughter, which together coincidentally translate into “good” in Chinese characters"

The characters are 'nu' and 'zi'. I'd put them here, but some won't have the character sets. Anyhow, compress them into a single character and you get 'hao.'

But, strictly speaking, Murray indicates as though nu means girl and zi means boy. That's not true.
Nu means female and zi means male. You need to add an extra character to indicate a boy or a girl.
The 'hao' character means good - it's male and female complementing each other. Whilst from one view it still ties into Murray's point, it's not literally any indication that having a boy and a girl is good - it's that male and female concepts complement each other - something that I think most cultures agree on.

We don’t need a one-child policy in Australia or other developed countries.

We’ve definitely got to gear our population growth towards no growth, if not a steady rate of negative growth, but we don’t need to implement a draconian policy to do this.

By reducing immigration to at least net zero, we’ll cut out nearly two thirds of our population growth in Australia, just that easily.

Then if we reverse policies like the despicable baby bonus and tax incentives, the fertility rate will very quickly drop considerably.

The population would still continue to grow a bit, as there is such a big discrepancy between the personal fertility rate and the national fertility rate (due to there being a large cohort of people in the reproducing years, due to a high immigration rate that is strongly geared towards younger people), but I reckon we can cop this bit of extra growth if we can be confident that it will relatively quickly decline and then move into the reduction phase.

This is in theory easy in Oz, US, UK, Canada, etc….and a whole lot more politically tenable than a one-child policy.

If the overall fertility rate is where we want it to be – taking our society towards a balance between people and environment / resource base, then we should be free to choose how many kids we have. It is the average that matters.

Of course we would still be stuck with the overwhelming third-world pop growth problem.

Loudmouth,

Your first paragraph stopped me dead from reading any more of your post. Your name-calling concerning people who are against immigration is just too stupid for words.

Divergence,

Yes. I’ll go along with zero net immigration, which is probably more practical. At the very least, we should not increase our population further. However, I would like to see a reduction ideally.

For all his sneering and overblown rhetoric the author presents not one scrap of evidence that the “demographic transition” theory is wrong. Perhaps this is because the balance of evidence overwhelmingly supports it. Fertility rates are falling in developing countries and have fallen below replacement rates in developed ones. We are moving from a world with high death rates and high birth rates, to one with low birth and death rates. Most demographers expect the world’s population to level off this century.

The author says “there is no proven correlation between economic standing and fertility” This is wrong. The correlation between prosperity and fertility is strong and negative in low-to-middle income countries, whether comparing different countries at a single point in time or trends over time in particular countries. Beyond a certain level of prosperity, the relationship flattens out, with fertility stabilising at low levels at per capita GDP levels of about US$15,000. This is exactly what demographic transition theory predicts. We can argue about the nature and direction of the cause of that correlation, but to deny the correlation itself is simply not tenable.

See this chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fertility_rate.jpg

Developing countries will not be “ruined” by economic growth. Their people have no less right to pursue a decent standard of living than we do. One of the least attractive features of the anti growth lobby is their effort to claim as a virtue their desire to keep poor people poor.

I thought the evidence points to fertility being linked to *Womens* wealth in society, not overall wealth. Where women cannot live outside the "traditional" family unit as child rearers they are completely dependent on children to give them a stable income (via the father as household ruler).
This implies that without equality for women, extra wealth will not necessarily do the trick. How much is economic and how much culture?
We definitely need to stabilise population, but to do that I believe we need a sustainable culture and economy. Won't happen in this climate of extremists and profiteers I'm afraid.