Opinion & Commentary
A bigger country is inevitable
There has been a lack of honesty in what is shaping up to be the main area of debate in the campaign: population. Under every realistic scenario, population growth is going to happen. This is a certainty. Australia’s history has been one of growth and this growth looks set to continue for the foreseeable future.
Another certainty is population ageing. While ageing has been conspicuously left out of the population debate, in many ways it will provide a greater challenge for policymakers than population growth.
While the median age of our population is now 37, it will probably rise to about 40 through the next four decades, or even as high as 45 if our fertility levels drop.
Because of this, Treasury believes that by 2050 health care, aged care and the aged pension will cost us an extra $60 billion a year in today’s terms. However, there will be proportionally fewer taxpayers to meet these costs. Taxes will have to rise dramatically to keep the budget afloat.
Depending on what happens with migration and our birth rate, we will have to deal with the pressures of population growth and ageing to a greater or lesser extent. But we will have to deal with them both.
And despite what the government and the opposition are telling us, they have remarkably little control over either of these things.
Governments can set migration targets. But they can’t control net migration completely.
Governments can’t control the number of Australians and New Zealanders who leave or return each year.
Nor would they say no to businesses looking to import workers in the face of skill shortages.
The best way to cut migration is to cut economic growth and no government wants to do that.
Short of introducing a China–style one–child policy, governments can’t do much to control how many babies we have, either.
While former treasurer Peter Costello famously asked us all to have ‘one for the country’, the Productivity Commission found that payments such as the baby bonus have been remarkably ineffective in raising the birth rate.
Instead, the recent baby boom can be attributed to a strong jobs market and women in their 30s ‘catching up’ on babies they didn’t have in their 20s.
Finally, governments can’t –– and wouldn’t want to –– control the medical breakthroughs that allow us to live longer.
So when you hear politicians from across the political spectrum saying they will limit growth, or set a growth target, or a growth–band target, don’t listen to them. In fact, run a mile.
Not only is this sort of talk deceptive, it is it potentially very dangerous.
The danger is governments and politicians will succeed in using all this talk of population targets and a sustainable population to deflect attention away from the real areas of policy reform and service provision in which their governments are failing, things that will be affected by population growth, whether we like it or not.
The populist nature of the debate allows politicians to say: ‘House prices out of control? Blame it on population growth. Stuck in traffic every day? Population growth. Water shortages? Guess what? Population growth again.’
The politicians get off scot–free every time and never have to do the hard work of actually fixing these problems.
An honest politician would say: ‘Population growth and population ageing are happening whether we like it or not. So, we’d better get ready.’
But no one is saying this.
And because we have set up a false public debate, about something we can barely control anyway, all of the very real challenges of population growth and ageing are not being addressed.
So next time you hear a politician say they believe in a small Australia or a sustainable population, or that they want to set a population or migration target, challenge them. Ask them, ‘Is this something you can really control? Or does all this bluster mean you’ve actually got no idea about how to fix the real challenges brought about by population growth and ageing that we are already dealing with now?
‘Do you really understand population, or are you just a populist?’
Because this is where the real debate about population should be; it should be about housing, hospitals, roads, pensions, our natural environment: all the things we urgently need to do to plan for a growing and ageing Australia.
The debate should not be about whether we should have a Big Australia or a Small Australia, but about how we can make a growing Australia work, and how we can make it a prosperous and liveable place for us all.
Jessica Brown is a policy analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies.
