16 September 2011

Australia’s day of population reckoning

Maybe there is a bit of selfishness on each side. Those for higher population like the markets and money and political donations that come from industries that profit from higher population. Those against ask like Carr: “What’s wrong with a bit of space? What’s wrong with the possibility of being able to get to a beach and get onto the beach . . . where the opportunity of going for a walk in a national park is less than an hour’s drive from the centre of the city?” I prefer the latter form of selfishness, though.

Current projections on present immigration levels suggest a population as high as 50 million by 2050, with its attendant inevitable further doubling in the ensuing 30 years.

Abbott said he would like to see as many people as possible be given the chance to live in Australia (provided you are not fleeing persecution by boat), as if we are doing the world a favour. His morality is the wrong way around. We want to selfishly import the well-educated and their families from societies where they are needed by the hundreds and thousands and give no succour to a few hundred boat refugees.

Rudd, too, has his moral emphasis askew. He says climate change is the great moral issue of our time, but fails to mention population in this.

Australians should ask why are we heading for such a huge population – most likely unsustainable with present living standards. Who are we helping here?

Smith suggested that Triguboff’s desire for a population of 100 million might lead to starvation for some people. That might be a tad alarmist (and he will get ridiculed for it) but it is not completely fanciful.

So we won’t be helping the Australians of 2050. You do not need a large population to have high average incomes and standard of living. You only need it for a few people to be disproportionately wealthy. As Australia’s population has increased mainly through immigration since the 1970s so has Australia’s income inequality.

But the main moral reason for keeping our population lower is Australia’s food production.

Australia’s food exports peaked at around $30 billion in 2001-2002 and have been falling ever since (after making allowances for prices). Most recent Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry figures (2008) put exports at $24 billion.

The fall in exports is because people in Australia are eating more of our foodstuffs and consuming more of the water and land used to grow it.

We produced about $37 billion worth of food in 2008 and imported about $5 billion worth. So we consume $18 billion worth of food. At this rate we will become a net importer of food before long. And who knows how we will replace the $24 billion worth of exports that allow us today to import lots of goodies. We will become poorer.

Of greater moral import, the food we used to export will no longer be available to the hungry people of the world. Smith might be wrong about starvation deaths in Australia, but it is certain that the withdrawal of Australian food will result in more starvation in the rest of the world.

Abbott suggests that we have handled great population increases in the past, so we can handle them in the future. Only the incompetence of state governments prevents it.

This suggests no understanding of the perils of percentage growth. In 1960 a two per cent growth of 10 million was 200,000 – manageable in a wide open land. In 2050 a two per cent growth of 50 million would be a million – the population of Adelaide. Madness. You cannot build Adelaide every year, no matter how competent the state governments or how aggressive the property developers.

And once the population growth is set in train it is very hard to turn it around. We cannot wake up on Australia Day 2050 and say stop.

The other moral question is the destruction of habit for native animals, often driving them to extinction.

Most Australians oppose large increases in population, but are ignored by the major parties.

What can be done? It would be good to ban large donations to political parties, so they don’t get driven by minority interests that benefit from higher population.

But the major parties have long showed themselves to be prisoners of what amounts to little better than bribery. Given that, if you can’t lick ‘em join ‘em, perhaps with an Obama-style aggregation of small donations. Maybe Australians for a Sustainable Population could set up a pledge website where people pledge money to the first of the two major parties which makes sustainable population (closely defined) its policy.

It is not a question of hoping the parties always to be populist and always bow to popular opinion. But when the national and international good lines up with popular opinion, we have to ask don’t the political parties line up with it? It is because there is more to be gained by pandering the wealthy elite because the voters have nowhere else to go – single-issue and minority parties rarely go far.

Also some politicians like power and self-aggrandisement, liking “the idea of a big Australia”, in the words of the Prime Minister.

But as the debate this week shows, people are noticing water shortages, land shortages, higher food and housing costs, stressed infrastructure in cities, large class sizes and degraded rivers, among other things, and are slowly beginning to link them to one obvious cause – over-population.

Very few people who oppose higher population and high immigration want a Hansonite revival. Indeed, many would happily see more refugees and much lower general immigration. But we do want to see some sense and some moral purpose in Australia’s population policy.#

 

 
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