Why do people say Australia has reached its population quota.
It's a vast land, and largely unpopulated.

Do you know anything about this land?
Have you seen the land just 40 klm inland.
The dry creeks and dams, rivers and streams.
Just a year ago no grass dead horses once family pets.
Have you memory's of crops dead not long after the seed sprouted.
Or seen the massive bush fores sweeping over a thousand acres.
Our country is not like New Zealand, not always green, the soil is not always capable of growing very much at all.
We cluster close to the coast, fail often to understand good reasons for that exist.
Land is not always a measure of population potential, some of ours is desert some never will be home to many.

The human history of this continent says it all:

40 000+ years of occupation by indigenous peoples, who would have either developed agriculture thousands of years ago if the land had been suitable for it or been displaced by Asian agricultural peoples.

The fact that Australia remained in the hands of the Aborigines up until the end of the eighteenth century, and much of it well beyond that time, indicates that it just wasn’t worth colonising by Asian peoples living just to the north that had known about it for thousands of years, or by Europeans later on.

If the Top End or the Kimberleys had been anything remotely as fertile and well watered as Java, they would have been exploited many centuries ago.

Europeans struggled to become established. The population built up slowly. Compare this to the European history of the USA. Soil fertility and rainfall are vastly better in the US. These are the factors that allowed their population to reach a level some fifteen times greater than ours, such is the enormity of the difference. Recent glaciation in North America compared to extremely old undisturbed soils in Australia has a great deal to do with the relative fertilities.

So we are now in a position where there is little doubt that a doubling of our population would be completely disastrous in terms of our ability to support ourselves from what the land can provide. And yet this would still only be a tiny fraction of that of the US, or of Indonesia or China.

Even with the country being run by manic growth-at-all-costs merchants, who are pumping people in as fast as they can, and with our ability to build huge dams, pipelines, etc, the population is still tiny compared to other similar sized land masses….and will always be…..because Australia is mostly desert and semi-desert, for goodness sake!

Jacksonn, can you tell us what you would like to see in regards to population in Australia, with some justification. Thanks.

European-cum-multicultural Australia exists directly because of the same fundamental reasons that lead us to have a small population compared to the size of the land mass!

If Australia was wet and fertile, Aboriginal peoples would have been displaced thousands of years ago by more aggressive agrarian Asian peoples or the Aborigines would have developed agriculture.

If Australia had been occupied by peoples practicing agriculture at the time of European contact, the place would not have been subjected to the lie of Terra Nullius and the European invasion wouldn’t have happened.

All the water we need is in the air and it is easy to get at.
Google "Water from the air machine".
I got 24,000,000 hits.
One firm manufacturing such a machine is in Queensland.
We can do it.

To fertilize the land just put a water bowl on top of a tall pole.
Birds will drink and do their droppings onto the ground.
Taller the pole ,great the the poo distribution or spread it manualy.
Free fertilization of the desert for your plants to grow.
The machine is electical so get a wind generator.You need electricity anyway.

100 hectares of desert for $10,000.
Machine plus generator ,$5000.
Or live in the city and pay $10,000 for a garage for your car?.

Why do people say Australia has reached its population quota?

Dogma, selfishness and propaganda as illustrated by the above answers.

runner
"Dogma, selfishness and propaganda as illustrated by the above answers"
One time in my life I gree with you! I wanted to find something to agree with you and I found it! YOU HAVE RIGHT!
Antonios Symeonakis
Adelaide

The people already here have done massive and quite probably permanent damage to the Australian environment and more will just accelerate the loss of topsoil, rivers, farmland, clean air and water, wildlife and amenity for all of us who inhabit this arid and infertile land

mikk
Do you say the same story with the others?
Do not you know that we 22 millions live on a whole continent?
Do not you see that 43% of our land belong to CROWN and it is not used good enouph and is leased for pinuts?Give this land to australians and we will multiplay our agricultural products!
Do you see how much flood water we lost last year in East Coast because we do not have enouph water dams, because we do not have a good water managment system?
Do you know that we can build desalination plants and cover our needs in water and convert our deserts in forests? Oceans have plenty water let's use it for australians and for the whole planet!
mikk
Do you afraid from migrants and refugees? as the climate change, as the Ocean waters race, as 100nds of thousands of migrants will start moving around on the globe we, with our whole continent, should support them! If you are not ready for some million more people how you can be ready to host 100nds of millions of migrants?
I thought you are internationalists but you scare me, you seem as nationalists!
Instead of less migrants or refugees let's use our land with a smarter, more productive way.
Antonios Symeonakis
Adelaide

,

Ludwig,
I don't want to discourage you and your statements are true and accurate.

You have much patience!

Some people just get silly notions. There are none so blind etc.

Belly, there are times I seriously question our compulsory voting and what is more, they get to breed.

I largely agree with Ludwig...

although,in previous centuries, asian population pressures might not have been sufficient to encourage wide scale colonisation anyway.

Additionally, we should remember it was western European medicine which has eradicated many of the limiting, disease based, population-regulators.

Jacksonn,
I see this is only your second post.

Your topic was discussed only recently. Below is the link and you might care to read the comments made there.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2939

Jacksonn,
Belly is right the land is unable to sustainable current practices and is rapidly facing the law of diminishing returns.
Ludwig is also correct when he states that there are too many people in Australia. BUT I would add the caveat as I have said many times the land isn't the current major stumbling block but what we DO with it HOW and WHY.
Building houses over our best soils, inappropriate farming practices wastage, wrong products, rubbish disposal, building in in appropriate areas et sec.

I agree with Ludwig.

Now of course, if we had some central planning bureau ( stacked full of actuaries & futurists & economists) it might determine that Aust. could safely accommodate many millions more …if, we’d just let them micro-manage peoples lives .

But, there are two issues that trouble me:
What does it do to the human psyche to be so tightly supervised, that, what you eat, drink & otherwise do is measured & policed to the nth degree?
And, sometimes, experts have a way of getting things wrong:their planning & predictions can run very very wide of the mark. What would happen if we had a natural disaster on the scale of the current world financial crisis ?

No thanks, we better err on the side of caution .

Sorry I upset you Antonios but the facts remain that we have already done massive damage to our country and increasing the population will only make it worse. I have no "nationalist" or "racist" agenda I would think the same whether any increases came from an improved birthrate or from immigration. I love this country and want to see it protected not exploited and degraded.

You are very wrong in your assesment of the possibility of increasing agriculture in Australia. Have you not heard all the farmers constantly crying out for assistance, seen all the farmers who have walked off their land? Have you never seen eroded or salinated land. Have you not seen the reports of duststorms and bushfires? Havent you heard the Murray river is all but dead? All thanks to our overuse and destructive farming of the australian land.

This is the oldest continent on earth and after all these millenia it has been ground down flat and leached of all its nutrients. There is very little that could be considered more than marginally fertile. That is the reason it can only support sparse grazing (compared to other countries) and the reason there is very limited cropping let alone intensive food production. We are lucky to get decent grain crops to grow.

Our rainfall is very variable and droughts are more than common. How come you dont see this? With our clearing and the results of climate change rainfall has been decreasing in many parts of the country over the last century or so. You talk about massive flood events and the waste of that water but even the floods are very variable. One year its the Hunter valley the next year far north queensland that gets flooded. A year later it might be tasmania or south east qld and the nth rivers. How could you possibly get that water to where you need it.

Your advocacy of new dams, irrigation systems etc is just ridiculous and shows you have done no research whatsoever. The community will not support massive new dams the like of the snowy scheme. Turning rivers inland or flooding lake eyre have all been shown to be unviable and the information is out there if you look for it.

Desalination is an extremely expensive system for making drinking water let alone for irrigation. The carbon costs from desalination plants will in the future make most of the current ones white elephants. There is no possible way desalination could contribute to increased farming. Please do some research.

43% of our land may be crown land but it is also desert or national park and totally unsuitable for habitation let alone agriculture.

This is not the green and fertile land of Europe or the Americas this is the sunburnt country. A land of droughts and flooding rains. Read that poem and continue to learn about this country and one day you will understand. This is the best country in the world and we have a duty to future generations to keep it that way.

I don't advocate more agriculture. However I would be in favour of it being more focused to our NEEDS.
I can't see why we have untold industries that focus on producing products primarily for the overseas profligate market.This is most often done at the expense of local needs and our environment.
Wheat, cattle, cotton etc are prime examples....I ask why?
I am aware of the 'global' market but
a. is it a level playing field?
b. do we have a net benefit?
The answer to both is a clear no so why do it.....profit. But for who and when is it enough? The first is clear and we've been conditioned to accept the absurd that there is no viable alternatives. To emphasize this we get the 'reds under the bed' extremist scare tactics instead of reasoned discourse.
As was observed elsewhere we're big on grand displays...save Koalas, Butterflies, wombats old growth forest but not if we have to do do something. Conservation isn't just the above it's asking do we really need that 2mtr resource hungry plasma TV and a million other sensible decisions.
It is on that basis I believe that is we stopped growing wheat for o'seas markets we would have more than enough agricultural land to grow all the other things we have to import which cause us to grow more wheat to pay for it. the eternal self destructive cycle of over exploitation.

mikk,
Slowly sir take a breath! I am not upset!
Do you mean if we water our land it will not be good for agricultural use?
Do you mean it is good for grass but if we water it will not be good for crops?
I am sure we can improve our water managment system, even we can sent plenty water in the deserts if we want it. The question is if we can give life to dry land and deserts by watering them.
There are countries which use sea water more than 60% of their total needs, including of cause the irrigation.
The oceans have so much water arount australia!
I found you are going hand by hand with extrem nationalists about our population.
You know I desagree with you and I prefer a better use of our land to be good enouph for hundrend twenty milion population!
LET'S CONVERT OUR DESERTS TO FORESTS, LET'S CONVERT AUSTRALIA TO A STRONG COUNTRY, LET'S SUPPORT OTHER COUNTRIES WITH FOOD AND OXYGEN!
Antonios Symeonakis
Adelaid

"Do you mean if we water our land it will not be good for agricultural use?
Do you mean it is good for grass but if we water it will not be good for crops?"

That is exactly what I am saying Antonios. The vast majority of our soils have been leached of any nutrients from millions of years of weathering and erosion. We used to put tons of superphosphate on them and plow them to within an inch of their lives but that just resulted in dead, lifeless soils that blew/washed away at the first opportunity. Also super became expensive as did fuel. We do better now with reduced tillage and sensible stocking policies but there still remains much damage unrepaired.

There has been no recent glaciacion to grind up the bedrock and produce fertile soils in this country as there was in Europe and Nth america. There are no widespread volcanic soils with their inherant fertility like there are in parts of the tropics. There is bugger all rainfall and what there is is usually flood rains which cannot physically protected from let alone captured and then transported over the vast distances of this continent. The whole climate is the most variable on earth with the only certainty being its unpredictability.

Your ideas are admirable Antonios but far better minds than you and I have investigated these schemes for the best part of two hundred years and all the sensible ones have realised it cant be done. There is not enough fertile land, not enough water and the distances are too vast to introduce more intensive agriculture and irrigation. We would be better off trying to save the rivers, forests and agricultural lands we have than opening more or subjecting existing land to increased pressure.

Why is it that people think we have this "duty" to just hand over whatever we have to anyone who wants it? Why is it that people believe we should populate simply because we can? Why do people think keeping our population small in order to make less of an impact on the environment is "selfish"? Why do people think we owe the rest of the world a living?

Let's face it, plenty of countries make mistakes, but it's not our job to clean up their mess. We live in a magnificent country, let's take care of it. Let's look after our own less fortunate and marginalised people. Let's engage the rest of the world without feeling we need to do everything for countries that simply will not get their act together. Bad governance, corruption, tribalism and oppression must go, but it's not our "duty" to handle the fallout from them. At some time, people have to take responsibility for their own situation. We've seen it before - South Africa, the Philippines, Chile - so don't say it can't be done.

Study the population movements in the last 20 years. Note the growth and decline areas and ask the reasons Why?

Hey Jacksonn, are you going to partake in the discussion that you instigated? Are you even reading this thread? Where are you buddy?

What about my question to you of 1 August:

Can you tell us what you would like to see in regards to population in Australia, with some justification?

I'm always a little alarmed when I hear calls to 'turn our deserts into forests'. I know that desertification is a big issue - that human activities have resulted in the infertility of land and the gradual spread of deserts. But the fact remains that our 'red centre' was desert long before white man came along. A desert is an ecosystem, just as a rainforest is. Why should we destroy that ecosystem? What effect will its destruction have on its surrounding systems?

Assuming that investors came forth to pour the huge amounts of money into damming rivers, capturing rainfall, turning the sea into potable water and so on, we would have two options:
1) Turn what is left of our natural environment into the 'breadbasket of the world' and feed the starving, with little regard for our natural heritage.
2) Turn their offers down, leave the land as it is, work to repair the damage we have done and maintain a sustainable population without destroying the natural integrity of our country.

I'm all for Option 2. Much of the 'wasted' land AS speaks of is too wild to use for sustainable, large-scale, dense farmland. Look at North Queensland earlier this year: dry and inhospitable scrubland turns into giant lake and back into scrubland in the course of a couple of months. The people of the region are hard-pressed sustaining agriculture as it is - until we can control the climate, we won't have much luck turning that land into a 'breadbasket'. And even if we did, what right do we have to destroy our land to suit our own purposes?