• Jo Coghlan

Image: Marxchivist / flickr

10 June 2011writes Jo Coghlan.

The 2011 federal budget announcement increasing skilled migration intakes has again focused public and political attention on the question of just how big Australia's population should be. Are we to be a sustainable 'Green' Australia or should we revert to 'White' Australia? As the CSIRO acknowledge, the population debate in Australia is really two debates: one about the sustainable and infrastructure requirements needed to support labour-needed annual immigration numbers and the other about total population levels.

According to the World Bank, in the fifty years from 1960 to 2010 Australia's population has doubled. Australia's population is currently growing at a faster rate than the U.S., Britain, and many developing countries. The population grows by about 443 000 per year, double the 220 000 it used to be. In the next four decades, Brisbane and Perth will double in size. Sydney and Melbourne will become sprawling mega-cities of seven million people each.

The 2007 Second Intergenerational Report, for example, predicted Australia's population would reach 28.5 million by 2047. Yet, Treasury modeling released in 2010 forecast the population would increase to 35 million in 2050. Using demographic modeling, the University of Queensland Centre for Population Research (QCRP) projects that Australia's population may be significantly higher, reaching 43 million in half that time (2025).

The central question in the immigration debate concerns the number of people to be granted permanent resident visas each year. The central question in the population debate is whether Australia should set itself a target population level and target rate of population change to be achieved by some future date and, if so, what should that date, rate and size be? It is the latter debate that is being lost in confining the debate to the Tim Flannery view that Australia's population is already too high to be environmentally sustainable. He argues that Australia can only sustain a population of about 16 million. The other view is that of Andrew Jakubowicz that concerns about a lack of infrastructure and sustainability are "proxies for racist prejudices and social marginalisation" of migrants and refugees.

The population debate is unfocused and confusing, in part, because of the environment-migration focus and, in part, because government debates about population are departmental rather than whole of government. It is debates about Australia's role and responsibilities for receiving immigrants, a debate about how many people can achieve fulfilling lifestyles in Australia in relation to the nation's natural resource base, a debate about the perceived relationships between population growth, immigration and economic growth, and a debate about what constitutes progress in relation to overall wellbeing of Australians. According to Stephen Cork, it is the confusion between these different debates and the lack of an overarching government approach that obscures key issues.

Past and current Australian governments have argued that an explicit population policy is not needed or desirable. Unless there is some process to develop a well-reasoned intent, however, Australia will continue to have a de facto population policy driven by public opinion. Without a clear and long-term approach to population policy, it is likely that resource consumption and a lack of housing will lead to a quality of life decline. A population program driven by short-term labour needs is also problematic in relation to infrastructure needs and sustainability pressures. Population debates without a clear focus also mean that when population growth is seen as a negative, the public will often demand reductions in immigration resulting in a policy not dissimilar to that of the White Australia policy.

Recent opinion polls (People and Place 2008 and 2010) consistently show the Australian public in favour of low immigration, hence likely to support the status quo when it comes to population size. The Australian government does not have an explicit position on how many immigrants will be admitted beyond the current budgetary framework, nor does it have any formal process for setting immigration targets for the coming decades. Similarly, the government has no position on size and rate of change of population in the longer term. As such, Australia does not have an explicit population policy.

The 2011 'Sustainable Australia - Sustainable Communities' report at best suggests: "Australia is a nation of sustainable communities which have the right mix of services, job and education opportunities, affordable housing, amenity and natural environment that make them places where people want to live, work and build a future". This sentiment is fine however it fails to address core question of Australia's population increases and what is driving them.

Without a realistic population debate and without a set of policies to sustainably support a 30 million plus population, many Australians will start to resist and resent immigration and it won't be able to sustain anything close to a 'green' environment.

Dr Jo Coghlan is a lecturer in Politics at the School of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is a regular writer on national and international human rights issues and is the coeditor of Seeking Refuge: Asylum Seekers and Politics in a Globalising World (Halstead Press, Sydney, 2005). Dr Coghlan regularly contributes on Online Opinion.

Image: Marxchivist / flickr