Opinion & Commentary
Population debate: we pretend growth is not inevitable
Listening to the sometimes facile public debate about population growth, it seems that all Australia needs to do to address our population issues is ditch “big Australia” in favour of “sustainable population”.
With a debate as shallow as this, it’s little wonder that we’ve made little headway in addressing our growing pains.
In 2009, when Kevin Rudd dug the first few feet of his political grave with his declaration in support of a ‘big Australia,’, population growth – led by higher birth rates and record migration – was at an all-time high. With Rudd safely out of The Lodge, Gillard and Abbott raced to the election trying to see who could distance themselves furthest from the former PM’s sentiments.
Fast forward to 2011, and it is now clear just how useless these populist pronouncements really are. We are no closer to fixing congestion issues or addressing any of the problems that precipitated the population debate in the first place.
Straw-man arguments about a ‘big Australia’ versus ‘sustainable popular’ have been nothing but a distraction from the real population issues.
New data released last week by the Immigration Department confirms that from its peak in 2008, population growth has slowed markedly. While net overseas migration – which accounts for just over half of population growth – peaked at 315,000 in 2008, by last year it had fallen to 185,000: a drop of 41 percent.
In the most recent data available, the year to September, Australia’s population grew by 1.52 per cent, a little above its long-term average but well down from the peak 2.2 percent growth rate recorded in the year to December 2008.
This fall in migration – and corresponding fall in population growth – has come about largely because of a precipitous drop in overseas student numbers.
At the peak of the migration boom in 2008-09, overseas students accounted for 41 per cent of net overseas migration.
By 2010 they were fewer than 20 per cent. The rising Australian dollar, increased competition from American universities, and a crackdown on dodgy education providers – rather than a conscious move away from a ‘big Australia’ – has led to the recent slow down in population growth.
Despite what the government and opposition would like us to think, politicians have little control over aggregate population growth, and population size.
In a prosperous Australia, growth is simply what happens when government takes its hands off the reins.
Rudd’s entry into the population debate might have kick-started his political demise, but the figures he quoted were nothing new.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics had already predicted months before that, under a business as usual scenario, Australia’s population would reach 36 million by 2050. If the trend towards higher birth rates continues, this could be even more.
It’s the ‘business as usual’ aspect of these projections that worries anti-growth campaigners such as Dick Smith, who would instead like to see migration cut to about 70,000 a year, less than a third of the current long-term average.
But while the government has adopted the ‘sustainable’ rhetoric, it has conspicuously shied away from adopting this migration target.
The government knows that cutting migration so radically could be political and economic suicide. After all, what government is going to tell universities that they can’t bring in overseas students, or tell businesses facing skill shortages that they cannot recruit overseas workers? Which government will explain the rapidly rising health care bill, as the working-age taxpaying population proportionally shrinks and the supply of overseas trained nurses dries up?
Even if migration were cut to 70,000, our relatively high birth rate and young demographic profile means our population would still reach 29 million by 2050.
Within our current political dynamic, no government would have the political will to abolish the baby bonus, let alone take the extreme step of restricting the number of children families can have.
Simply put: population growth is not a tap that can be easily turned off by a parliament house plumber.
A more constructive approach is to admit that, whether we like it or not, our population is growing. A ‘sustainable population’ means we need to be smarter about the way we prepare for it, but doesn’t mean we stop it altogether.
A growing population can bring many benefits, as anyone who has been drawn to the thriving metropolises of New York or Tokyo for better jobs, better shopping, or better arts, will attest. But it will bring challenges, too.
We also need to recognise that already congested roads and trains will probably come under even more pressure. We will need more suburbs, and denser suburbs. We will need more hospitals, schools, libraries, supermarkets. We will need new sources of energy and more efficient ways to use power and water. We will need more creative ways to protect our natural environment.
But the most important step is that we must urgently fix the disconnect between the federal, state and local governments.
Canberra, the beneficiary of the increased tax revenue that follows a larger population, gets all the benefits of growth. State and local governments, with their responsibility for planning, transport, hospitals and schools, bear all the costs. This disconnect cannot continue.
Until we can realign this relationship, state governments will always have an incentive to drag their heels in building new infrastructure. Local governments will have an incentive to cave into the demands of local residents to halt local development.
If we are to development an effective plan for Australia’s population growth, we must give state and federal governments a good reason to welcome local growth in their local area and this means giving them a bigger piece of the funding pie.
The longer we pretend we can stop population growth, or protest that we don’t want growth to happen, the more difficult the job will become.
Glib statements about ‘big Australia’ or a ‘sustainable population’ serve as a convenient shield for politicians who don’t want to face these tough issues. But they won’t help us make an inevitably bigger Australia better.
For that, real political courage – and real policy action – is required.
Jessica Brown is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and co-author of Populate and Perish? Modelling Australia’s Demographic Future, published by the CIS.
