Bigger or Better?: Australia's Population Debate

Professor Ian Lowe AO is president of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University in Brisbane, as well as being an adjunct professor at Sunshine Coast University and Flinders University. His previous books include A Big Fix, Living in the Hothouse and A Voice of Reason (UQP 2010). Professor Lowe has been a referee for the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program and the Millennium Assessment. He attended the Geneva, Kyoto and Copenhagen conferences of parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. He was a member of the Australian delegation to the 1999 UNESCO World Conference on Science and has served on many advisory bodies to all levels of government.

Contents

Introduction

1 A brief history of Australia’s population numbers

2 What a larger population will do to our resources and environment

3 How the numbers affect our society and the economy

4 The benefits of stabilising the population

5 Who’s who in the population debate, and what are their agendas

6 The politics of population growth

Summary and conclusion

Acknowledgements

Further reading

Index

Introduction

In 2010, at the end of an interview on the 7.30 Report, Kerry O’Brien asked Kevin Rudd, who was prime minister at the time, an unexpected question on a completely different subject to what they had been discussing. Rudd was asked to respond to a forecast in a government document that the Australian population could reach 36 million by 2050. He replied that he believed in ‘a big Australia’. There was a strong public reaction, mostly hostile. One insider said that ‘the focus groups went ballistic’.

Later in the 2010 election campaign, Julia Gillard renamed the relevant minister’s portfolio ‘sustainable population’, and implicitly criticised the pro-growth policies of previous governments. Opposition leader Tony Abbott weighed into the debate with his claim that he would ‘stop the boats’ if elected (thus limiting immigration), and has maintained this line ever since despite generally supporting a population growth agenda and clearly having no way of stopping the boats. The Murdoch press attacked both major parties, accusing them of pandering to base prejudice by discussing the social impacts of immigration or suggesting that population growth had negative environmental impacts. It urged politicians to champion what it claimed were the self-evident economic benefits of rapid population growth. The issue is clearly a political hot potato.

There is widespread concern in our cities that population growth is eroding traditional lifestyles and stretching infrastructure. The debate, however, has been confused by serious misconceptions. In this book I have tried to clarify the subject. I begin by summarising the historical context of our population growth last century, and I follow this with an analysis of the many components of population change. I look at alternative future patterns of growth to demonstrate the complex implications of changing population – economically, socially and environmentally – showing that in all areas there are strong disagreements about the effects, good and bad, of growth. Chapter 5 of the book analyses the variety of interest groups involved in either promoting population growth or arguing against it, showing that on each side of the debate there are incompatible motivations.

Our birthrate has fallen steadily since the 1960s, when women often had four or five children, to the present day when one or two is much more common. Despite this dramatic reduction in the number of children per adult woman, there has been a consistent ‘natural’ increase in recent times of more than 120,000 a year. This number has become greater in the last few years, coinciding with a government decision to introduce financial incentives to have children, though there is still a debate about whether the increased birthrate has been caused by the offer of money. We are also living longer, on average, so there are more generations alive now than ever before. This has consequences both for the size and age profile of the population.

The levels of migration have also been increasing, with heated political debates about the relatively small group of would-be migrants who arrive as refugees by boat. The largest groups of migrants to Australia, though, have historically been from the United Kingdom, Ireland and New Zealand, but lately there has been an increasing influx from Asian and African countries. Some of the controversy is perhaps because these migrants are recognised more easily on the streets, in shops and on public transport, whereas the larger groups of British, Irish and New Zealand migrants tend to merge invisibly with the local population. It is a sensitive issue because discussing immigration can invoke charges of racism. My analysis demonstrates that there are racist elements involved, on both sides of the debate, as well as larger numbers of people whose motives are completely different.

I am a patron of Sustainable Population Australia, a group that believes we should stabilise our numbers at a level that can be sustainably supported. I was also (at the time of writing) President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, which believes decisions about population levels should take into account the impacts of human demands on natural systems. Those viewpoints inform my approach to the complex questions of population growth. I should add that there is also a direct causal relation between my views and those appointments. I have been asked to assume those positions because of my well-known opinions.

Some of the arguments in this book were canvassed in a preliminary form in a 1996 report for the Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research, published by the Australian Government Publishing Service as Understanding Australia’s Population Debate. Here I have taken the complex and controversial issues around population and made them accessible. My aim is to stimulate public debate about this important topic and contribute constructively to that process. The decisions we make now on this topic are literally shaping our future. They should be considered and informed decisions as the future stability of our nation is at stake.

1

A Brief History of Australia’s Population Numbers

The first Australians reached this continent some time between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago. Their numbers gradually increased and they spread around the continent, which at that time was joined by land bridges to Tasmania and Papua. Naturally, the settlements were concentrated in the parts of the country where food supplies were most plentiful, principally along the coastline. When the first 859 British subjects (or invaders) came to the country and established their base at Sydney Cove, the total Indigenous population was almost certainly less than 1 million.

By 1900, when the colonies agreed to federate and form the Commonwealth, the total population had grown to about 4 million, so the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had become greatly outnumbered by the immigrants. By 1950 the entire population had more than doubled to 9 million. By 2000 it had again more than doubled to about 20 million. The growth in the last hundred years has been truly dramatic. While it increased by around 3 million between 1788 and 1900, another 5 million were added in the first half of the twentieth century and 11 million in the second half. The Indigenous people are now a small minority, although there are about as many Aborigines living in Australia today as there were in 1788.

There was nothing inevitable about the population growth in my lifetime. It was the result of conscious political decisions. In 1945, Australia and Sweden both had populations of about 7 million. Today the Australian population is about 22 million, while that of Sweden is about 9 million. Between 1980 and 2000, the population was growing at about 200,000 a year. That is an extra Australian every two minutes!

The growth has traditionally had two components. Each year the number of babies born is much greater than the number of deaths. This so-called ‘natural increase’ averaged about 120,000 a year between 1960 and 2000, with only small variations from year to year. The second main contributor to our increasing population is migration. Every year some Australians and temporary visitors leave the country to live somewhere else. At the same time, people are arriving in this country from overseas, some to study or to have working holidays, others with the intention of moving permanently to Australia. These factors are not totally independent and their interaction compounds the numbers. As the most obvious example, migrants often come to Australia when they are young enough to have children of their own and those children grow up in this country and raise families of their own.

Migration rates have changed dramatically during the 50 years I have been studying this question. The significant figure here is called the ‘net migration’, the difference between the number who arrive and the number who leave. Between 1960 and 2000, the net migration varied from year to year between about 20,000 and about 150,000. The average over that 40-year period was about 100,000 a year, about the same as the natural increase. In other words, between 1960 and 2000 these two components of population increase were roughly equal. But the constant flow of migrants has changed Australia significantly. In fact, more than a quarter of the Australian population at the time of writing was born overseas, while an astounding 44 per cent – not much less than half the total population – were either born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas. Very few countries have such a high fraction of relatively recent arrivals.

There is also now a third factor causing our population to increase: we are living longer. In my lifetime, the average life span for Australians has increased by about ten years. Over the twentieth century as a whole, life expectancy of men increased by 20 years. So there are quite a lot of people like me, still around to be counted in the census at an age when my father and both my grandfathers were already dead.

Since the Europeans settled here, most people have believed the country needed a bigger population. When I was young, the prevailing mood was to populate areas of the country where relatively few people lived, particularly in the north and inland – the national anthem adopted 40 years ago refers to our having ‘boundless plains to share’. Governments have gone to considerable trouble and expense to encourage migration to this country. In 1948 the minister for immigration, Arthur Calwell, echoed the mood of the time by saying ‘for security in wartime, for full development and prosperity in peacetime, our vital need is for more Australians’. We need only look at the prime minister at the time of writing for the result of such policy. She was one of the famous ‘ten-pound Poms’, migrants who were encouraged to come to Australia by being offered the inducement of a fare of ten British pounds, the equivalent of a few hundred dollars in today’s money. The leader of the opposition is also, like Gillard, the child of migrants from the United Kingdom.

The enthusiasm for growth has gradually abated over the years, in some cases because of reflection on the logic. The argument that we need a larger population to defend Australia from possible invaders made sense in the first half of last century, when wars were fought between serried ranks of soldiers facing each other. But since World War II, technology has been more important for defence than military numbers. So there is now no simple link between population and capacity to defend territory. Wealth may influence our capacity to buy military hardware to defend our borders, but the number of Australians prepared to don uniform and stand on the shoreline is hardly a factor.

The argument that we had to ‘populate our empty north’ raised the spectre of mass migration from the crowded Asian countries to our north, suggesting the Northern Territory would be overrun by teeming hordes of Indonesians if we didn’t fill it up with ‘Australians’. But, as the late Cyril Pearl pointed out 50 years ago, Java was crowded and Arnhem Land lightly populated for thousands of years before Europeans set foot in this part of the world for good geographical reasons: Java has rich, deep volcanic soils that support a large population, while the north of Australia has old, thin and nutrient-poor soils. Pearl argued that fearing an invasion of northern Australia was like Algerians being worried about the Sahara being overrun. While those furphies have been exposed, there remains an enduring belief that we need population growth, and hence high levels of migration, for economic reasons.

Around 1970, a new mood of concern about population growth emerged, linked to discussion overseas about the increasing impacts of human consumption on the natural world. A group of senior European business leaders, academics and politicians formed a think-tank called the Club of Rome. The first report to the group was prepared by systems modellers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. It was the first simple attempt to construct a global model and examine alternative futures. The report, Limits to Growth, was widely attacked by economists who don’t believe in the idea of limits, but it sparked some questioning of the simplistic view that growth can continue forever at a constant or increasing rate. An unrelated local event was the decision by the Australian Government to set up a National Population Inquiry in 1970. Its report largely dismissed concerns about ecological constraints on the human population, but it did acknowledge the vulnerability of the natural systems of Australia by suggesting we adopt such measures as making family planning information more widely available. It was, at the time, a brave recommendation since sex was rarely discussed in either polite or public company. It is true that since the availability of reliable contraception the average number of children per adult woman has declined dramatically. But there are also other factors that contribute to the lower birthrate, such as women’s greater access to education and subsequent higher levels of participation in the workforce – women with professional careers are noticeably more likely to postpone or avoid motherhood.

Much later, the National Population Council was established. It reported in 1992 on the links between population, economic development and the environment. It said that the government should seek to influence population change ‘so as to advance economic progress, ecological integrity, social justice and responsible international involvement’. Perhaps mystified about how those four factors might be brought together, the government of the day did not accept the recommendation. Australia still does not have a formal population policy. There is no official government target for what the population should be at any future time. A submission to the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994, said ‘there is no clear formula for a workable population policy in a developed country with low fertility’. The clear implication was that Australia is ‘a developed country with low fertility’ even though a ‘natural increase’ of about 120,000 a year is a high rate of growth for a developed country. In fact, it is one of the highest of all the nations that are usually grouped in that category.

In that same year, the House of Representatives Standing Committee for Long-Term Issues, chaired by former Science Minister Barry Jones, held a public inquiry into population. It attracted nearly 300 submissions from a wide range of viewpoints. This reflected the increasing level of public concern about the impact of our growing population. While it had been almost universally accepted in the 1950s and 1960s that growth was good for the economy and made the country stronger, by the 1990s it was becoming apparent that the issue is more complicated.

More people means proportionately greater demand for housing, clothes, food, transport and other services. In the short term that undoubtedly contributes to a larger economy. On the other hand, more people looking for work can either increase unemployment levels or drive down wages. Some economists think that rapid population growth makes it difficult or even impossible to keep pace with the increasing demand for such services as water and transport systems. As discussed in later sections, the question of the economic benefits and costs of an increasing population is widely recognised as much more complex than previously assumed. This realisation is, however, far from universal; as an extreme example, the Murdoch press still espouses the old simplistic view that population growth is self-evidently good for the economy and therefore we will all benefit from an increasing number of people.

There are also broader issues at play, such as the concern about the growing human impact on natural systems. Four national reports on the state of the environment have documented serious problems in this area that are getting worse every year. In our cities, the failure of infrastructure to keep pace with the growing population has led to a widespread perception that the quality of urban life is deteriorating. The presence in our cities of clearly identifiable groups of recent migrants has led also to tension and even violence, like the recent and infamous ‘Cronulla riots’. The causes of that event are complex and hotly disputed, but there can be no doubt that a contributing factor was the perception that some recent migrants do not hold the same cultural and social values as many who have grown up in this country.

The Jones Report set out the issues that should be considered when discussing the implications of population growth, but it did not make a clear recommendation for a population policy. CSIRO scientist Dr Doug Cocks, who worked on the Jones inquiry, was so disappointed that he subsequently wrote a book setting out the case for a definite policy, People Policy, Australia’s Population Choices, which was published in 1996. More recently, other voices have stimulated the debate, notably poet Mark O’Connor who has argued passionately for a policy of stabilising the population in two books, This Tired Brown Land and (with William Lines) Overloading Australia. The second book has been so popular that it has been reprinted. In 2011, entrepreneur Dick Smith made a television documentary and published a book, unusually called Dick Smith’s Population Crisis, as if he had personally created the problem. Population Crisis is a trenchant polemic, arguing strongly for a policy of stabilising our population. It has undoubtedly stimulated debate about the issue. The lobby group Sustainable Population Australia, formerly Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population, has worked tirelessly to keep the topic in the public eye.

As I noted in the introduction, Rudd’s statement of support for ‘a big Australia’ sparked vigorous debate and a re-examination of the assumptions that have underpinned the implicit policy of continuing rapid growth. The background leading up to this debate was an unprecedented increase in immigration levels during the final years of the Howard Government, driven partly by calls from the commercial sector for more workers and partly by educational institutions recruiting overseas students, often with an implied promise of permanent residency as a prize for completing formal qualifications. So the net inward migration level, which had varied between about 20,000 and about 150,000 a year, surged to over 300,000.

At the same time, the government decided to encourage women to have children by offering a baby bonus of $3000 per child. This enticement was famously announced by then Treasurer Peter Costello, who said women should consider having three children rather than two: