This is a bit of a let down. I was genuinely hoping to see an article on OLO with a title like this so I could understand the relentless pursuit of population growth by all of our political parties.

The argument we here given in support of population growth boils down to: things have got better in the last 30 years and this must be caused by population growth. I guess the technological advances that have occurred in the same time frame had nothing to do with it then.

As for all those worries about water, oil running low and CO2 emissions we are assurances it will be OK, don't worry about it. The reason it will be OK? Because none of this has been proved, or so we are told. Ye gods, most of our major cities have desalination plants now. We have one of the most efficient water trading schemes on the planet, and it is improving rapidly - yet Victoria was for a short while a food importer.

Give us something on the subject that goes beyond platitudes, please!

Agree with Michael in Adelaide.

This writer is not in the real world the message should be 'Immigration brought real and tangible benefits'
Yes 1969 was better in many ways one could park anywhere and it did not take long to get to work, the air was clean and no water restrictions just to name a few.
And how stupid can you be to compare Sydney's 4 million people living on 174 sq ks and London with 7 million on 174 sq ks, no they do not love it either.
No point in continuing as writer do you research and do not listen to big business and politicians with their growth fetish/fantasy.
I think we already import 25% of our fruit and vegetables and seeing that phosphorus as well as oil is going to run out how are we going to feed ourselves

This is almost a generic pro-immigration article. Its all about name calling and trying to make you feel like you don’t love your fellow man if you are concerned about population impacts on the environment. Put the focus on Pauline Hanson and xenophobia in the first couple sentences and say there are environmental challenges to meet without providing any solutions at the end.

The important question to ask is: Will the life of the average Australian be better with increased immigration? The answer is no.

Jacob’s three claims are all wrong:

Immigration is less than usual. Wrong.
A) Those population increases occurred when the birthrate was higher. An accurate comparison would compare the immigration rates over 40 year periods. Immigration is higher now.
B) Our way of living hasn’t been sustainable in the past so continuing on the same way isn’t a solution it is a continuation of more unsustainable living. Only now there is less time to fix it.
C) Also JonJay’s points.

Growing population doesn’t threaten our way of life. Wrong.
A) The Productivity Commission reported that average person doesn’t benefit economically from increased immigration and that the environment becomes more degraded with higher immigration.
B) Jacob argues that life is better in 2009 with 22 million than in 1969 with 12.5 million. The Productivity commission argues that productivity was responsible for over 90% of the increases in quality of life and that increased population was neutral or negative depending on the weight given to environmental impacts.
C) Jacob seems to argue that since we now have the most liveable cities, we should endeavour to come back to the rest of world by adding more congestion and higher costs of living. No thanks.

Growing Population is no threat to the environment. Wrong.
A) Jacob comes close to admitting that immigrants do impact the environment but he argues that since they make an impact everywhere they might as well make it in Australia. I disagree. We can only clean up our own act and provide an example for the rest of the world

Of all of the articles I've read, this is definitely among the lamest.

Absolutely pathetic.

Crowding? "People love crowding! Magazines by people that might not actually live in Sydney and Melbourne say they're great!"
I live in Sydney and I say it's crowded. It's also much too wide. Both of which make a trip from one side of the city to the other up to three hours- the time it would take me to WALK from one side of a European city to another.

Water? "I don't believe we don't have enough"- no contradictory sources- just move on to the next point.

But it was your counter to Ross Gittin's Carbon argument of "That's just mean" that dropped the rest of your credibility

The only thing you vaguely kind of implied were it made life 'interesting' (that's multiculturalism- not high population growth), and it gave opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs- who make up a pittance of the population who will be affected.

Large population growth is fine so long as you could actually make suggestions of how we are going to accomodate the extra thirteen million people (which is approximately 4 extra Sydneys).
We have plenty of people actually trying to help and offer practical solutions to accommodate the increase- and you're not one of them Jacob- just another tosser who likes to use spin to get into the papers.

B) Can we lecture the Americans, Chinese and the Indians about reducing greenhouse if we are increasing ours? I would prefer to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.
C) Ross Gittens makes this point in the SMH and Jacob criticises him for it, but not for the logic of his argument. He says he is uncompassionate. This is the old politician trick of changing the argument when you can’t win. If someone argued that the Holocaust was reprehensible, Jacob would have changed the argument to focus on the efficiency of the Nazi Army.
D) Jacob says Gittens disregards people. Apparently he doesn’t think climate change or any other environmental degradation will impact people.
E) Jacob admits that there are challenges to increasing the population and he doesn’t offer any ideas about how to meet those challenges in the same way as Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, Penny Wong and Peter Garrett don’t offer any ideas. They just assume we will get it done. And if we don’t get it done, who cares. That means more coal fired power plants, nuclear power plants, desalinisation plants, less water in the rivers, less farmland with more food to grow and all the challenges listed in the previous posts.

If we were really compassionate about the rest of the world, we would do something in those countries and we certainly wouldn’t take away their best people. Over a billion people live on less than $2 a day, likely to increase over the next 40 years. Don’t imply that you are compassionate because you want to take in 10 million immigrants who are in most cases not part of those very poor. Most immigration is skilled immigrants (people with skills aren’t living in $2 a day) who will keep wages low, buy or rent housing and add to domestic consumption. The purpose of high immigration is not compassion. It is to make the rich richer.

Typical spineless and bearded gnome comments from people who want to cut Oz's population down to 7 million by 2050.

These are Facebook theorists who wouldn't know public policy if it reared up in the face and bit them.

The article should have gone in harder and weeded out the instrumentalist critics such as Michael-in Adelaide, et al, who think we're all rooned anyway. He's the thick edge of the sterilisation wedge, but no snip, snip, snip, for him as he waddles around the leafy Torrens.

So much of the anti-populationist critique is pure fear politics. Their mantra is 'I'm OK, stuff you, I made it here alive'. Now they want to turn back the economic clock to the 1600s when gentlemen called their wive's 'My Lady' and other such piffle.

They hate immigrants not because we can feed them for the next 1000 years, they hate them because they are black, or Muslim or 'not from around here.'

I have a pet theory that most of these people are from Adelaide where the chip on the shoulder sits where their brains should be.