In reply to Paul L from http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7377#114171

Paul, I don’t understand why you have written this post. All I said in the post that you are responding to is that we should stabilise our population. You haven’t even addressed this point. Rather, you have talked a lot about population decline, which is certainly something that we don’t need to worry about in the slightest in Australia.

You seem to think that we need immigration to make up a shortfall that is due to a below-replacement birthrate. Firstly, this is not true and secondly, our immigration rate is far and away beyond the level needed to maintain a stable population if we had absolutely no births!

I’ve had to explain the following quite a few times on this forum; even though we have had a personal fertility rate that is quite a bit below replacement level for a long time, the national birthrate has always been above replacement level.

So, with a birthrate of about 1.76 children per woman, as it was before the terrible baby bonus caused it to rise somewhat, there was still a large excess of births over deaths nationally. This was and still is due to a considerable skew in the age structure of the population towards younger breeding people, compared to the age structure of a stable population, in which the personal fertility rate would be the same as that of the whole population. So the effective national fertility rate is something well over 2. Indeed, about half of our population growth was made of up births and half from immigration, back in the mid 90s. Since then, immigration has moved ahead.

Can I ask; what do you want to happen with Australia’s population? Do you want it to keep growing rapidly? Do you want to slow the growth in the face of the obvious resource stresses of oil, water and lots of others? Do you want us to reach a limit? Do you want the population to increase specifically because of the aging issue? If so, to what extent?