Big Australia? Big deal

It’s a good thing the Bureau of Statistics didn’t release its latest population growth estimates before the September 7 election. Had they done so, we’d have been treated to a load of Chicken Little malarkey about over-populated Australia being ‘swamped’ with migrants.

As a political meme, ‘overpopulation’ works. As the sound basis for policy making, it’s utterly insubstantial. 

Australian cities are fast becoming overcrowded and dysfunctional – true – but that is a result of lousy policy making, not too many Australians overall. More on that below. 

The ABS figures released yesterday provide three scenarios for population growth – low fertility rates and low immigration, medium levels for both, and high levels for both. The ‘medium’ forecast is the one they think is most likely to transpire, and would result in 42 million Australians by 2061 or 54 million by 2101. 

The ABS doesn’t muddy the waters with, say, low migration and high birth rates, though given the nationalism swirling about in political circles at present it’s not too hard to imagine a politician in the mould of Pauline Hanson or the UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage rising up and exhorting the need to breed and keep Johnny Foreigner away from our shores. 

But as reports from both the Productivity Commission and Grattan Institute in the past week have highlighted, Australia desperately needs new, young, Aussies in order to sustain current levels of prosperity (or levels even close to them). 

Without a bit of in-filling lower down on our demographic profile, the top-heavy bit will soon be asking for more healthcare and benefits than the budget can afford, and there will be too few working-age Australians to pay more taxes to shore things up (Budgeting was easier when life was brutish and short, 25 November).

The problem is that in contemporary politics, two problems are conflated. Our cities are becoming too crowded and dysfunctional, and yet we need more people. 

The easy political sell is to tell those in the crowded bits of the country – Western Sydney got an extraordinary amount of attention at the last federal election – that you won’t let any more foreigners in. And first or second generation voters seem quite happy to keep the next wave out. 

It’s akin to the problem colonial clubs faced during the British Raj – when they decided to allow local Indian members to join, the first new member would ‘black ball’ all future local applicants. Hrmph! It’s just not cricket!

But let migrants in, we must. And we always do – John Howard handed out more visas to migrants than anyone, at the same time as creating a xenophobic fear campaign over boat arrivals. 

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that Labor sources have told me several times that it was Kim Beazley who, by failing to tackle Howard’s ‘boats’ rhetoric head-on, that got us into the current heighted state of fear. Other countries, who have far greater numbers of unauthorised arrivals (France, Italy, Thailand, Malaysia to name just a few) must wonder why we’re so scared. 

The Abbott government will be no different in terms of actual migration patterns, which means it needs to get serious very quickly about addressing the other side of the coin. The ABS projections reinforce the fact that new arrivals flock, primarily, to Melbourne and Sydney, with Perth coming third. 

While Perth has room to grow, our two biggest cities are groaning under the weight of bad planning and increasingly inadequate infrastructure – most notably public transport, with the Abbott government winning power promising only to fund roads, not trains as Labor did. 

Australia needs to learn to build real cities, not just regions of suburbs. That means more medium and high-density living, congestion charging, better public transport and so on. 

The other alternative is more cities. Abbott promised to build the headquarters of the National Disability Insurance Scheme in Geelong, which is served by Avalon airport – public service mandarins can easily fly in, drive up and down the Princes freeway, and be back in Canberra in time for cocktails and canapés. 

More relocation of other public service offices would be a good idea. Salaried public servants help build local economies but creating demand for the businesses that can offer jobs at a range of skill levels. 

While such attempts to bolster regional economies are often decried as ‘social engineering’, they will become increasingly important. Jobs and a decent standard of living is what migrants want – not the western suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney. 

Building our regional centres, through social engineering or otherwise, must be made a priority – and must be disentangled from the misguided notion that Australia is full.