In the unlikely case that one needs another reason to loathe the hare-brained premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie is now claiming that Australia should be aiming for a population of 50 million through "significant migration".

God help us if PM-in-waiting Kevin Rudd starts taking advice on such matters from this blockhead in Brisbane.

Australia is the most arid continent in the world, and with climate change it's only going to get worse. Environmentally, we are at carrying capacity.

Economically, immigration-driven population growth might enrich the big end of town, but it does nothing for productivity nor innovation. Nor is population growth rate positively related to higher income per capita (read the Productivity Commission’s report of January 17, 2006). Personally, I'd prefer to live in a knowledge-based, low population growth economy like Japan or Finland than an overpopulated quarry in the South Pacific. What has the last five years of unfettered immigration-driven population growth delivered so far? The most overpriced housing market in the developed world and an associated build-up of hundreds of billions in foreign debt. Hardly a sustainable economic model.

Socially, such large scale immigration-driven population growth would effectively be giving the populations of other countries the green light to colonise Australia. The eventual result will be that Australia's founding population would become a minority in the nation their forefathers created and built. Australia would be taking an existential risk in importing millions of people from nations vastly different from our own. Balkanisation beckons.

It's a sad day for democracy when both Liberals and Labor are advocating such reckless policies.

dresdener, democracy has nothing to do with it.

the reason oz is sliding into over-populated misery is the lack of democracy. a democracy has the following features:

1. citizen initiated referendum
2. direct election of officers
3. open government

of those features, oz has precisely none.

Dresdener, while I'm not necessarily in favour of the immigration Beattie is espousing some of your arguments there are a little flawed.

You cite Japan and Finland's low population growth policies, but neglect to mention they are very small landmasses with comparatively high populations which is what has created their current population policies. Japan has an incredibly high population for such a small country.

TurnRightThenLeft: You didn't read Dresdener's post properly.

Australia simply doesn't have the resources (no, I'm not talking about extractive industries here) to carry many more people. (think cows in a paddock here... not enough water to keep all the cattle alive!) We can't seem to support the current population, let alone double the current number. (Now, if we abandoned rice and cotton farming and repealed Cubby Station's water licence, things might be different in the Murray-Darling system.....)

This brings me to the knowledge-based, growth economy. I'm afraid successive governments have been missing that flotilla of boats since the 1950s. I remember the Dulmont Magnum (1970s), the ERA Computer (1980s) corporation and many other indigenous, ICT initiatives that these same blockhead federal pollies chose to ignore (i.e. not support). (BTW, that small Finish company, Nokia, was bankrolled by their federal government).

DEMOS:

I'm with you all the way. Our new federal anti-terrorist legislation (and now the especially enacted APEC laws) make the Nazi regime (or the Soviet Stazis) look like a Church Sunday school!

I would add a BIll of Rights to your list, just to make sure these B#st@rds in Canberra don't entrench themselves in power at the expense of our freedom.

Whoa there, lluvatar.

>>BTW, that small Finish company, Nokia, was bankrolled by their federal government<<

"Bankrolled" suggests that the company was run on government money, and that simply was not the case.

Yes, the Finnish government has a far more accessible R&D support system than we have - or, I'm afraid, will ever have; we just don't have the vision - but they most certainly didn't come close to "bankrolling" the company.

If anyone is really interested, the detail of TEKES funding for Nokia can be found at

http://tinyurl.com/yr8kmx

The gist of it is that throughout the seventies, the proportion of Nokia's R&D budget - not their operating budget, just R&D - that came from the government averaged 7% - hardly "bankrolling". The proportion is now, of course, much lower.

Unfortunately, the fate of every scheme intended to help Australian industry has been the same, ever since I came here in the early eighties. Half of it goes to employing more public servants, the other half is handed over to their mates.

Thanks Pericles.. knew all that.

What is not made clear is the subsequent financial support (via purchases of equipment) after all the R&D was commercialised.