27 million ‘milestone’ no cause for celebration
Sustainable Population Australia Media Release
Australia’s passing the 27 million population milestone is a matter of deep concern and not a cause for celebration, according to Sustainable Population Australia (SPA).
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ population clock, the milestone was passed at 3.45pm on Wednesday 24 January. It was helped along by a record 624,100 population increase in the past year.
SPA national president Ms Jenny Goldie says the annual national growth was even more than the current population of Tasmania (572,800).
“Imagine having to add the infrastructure of Tasmania – housing, roads, hospitals, schools, energy supplies, farms – to the country every year,” says Ms Goldie. “It all costs: economically, socially and environmentally.
“Australia does not need a big population to be successful economically. Indeed, many Western European countries including Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Iceland, Austria and Sweden all have smaller populations than Australia but higher GDP per capita, or wealth per person.
“The critical issue, however, is not wealth but the health of the environment. The latest State of the Environment – Australia report in 2021 was quite specific about population growth being damaging to biodiversity, largely because of loss of habitat.
“When the human population grows, other species lose habitat to urban development or farms to feed the ever-growing number of people.
“So long as we continue to grow our population, our environment will remain in a permanent state of decline.
“But many people lose out as well. Housing supply has not kept up with demand, resulting in record housing unaffordability. Homelessness is on the rise with many reduced to sleeping in tents or their cars.
“Recent projections for immigration will ensure these challenges become more intractable, whatever effort is made to mitigate them.”
SPA believes Australia’s population must stop growing before it reaches 30 million.
“That’s only three million people away. If we maintain the same annual growth in numbers, we will reach that in under five years,” says Ms Goldie.
“Population growth, largely driven by immigration, is neither necessary nor desirable and is not supported by the majority of Australians.
“Indeed, Australians are fed up and are saying NO to a Big Australia.”
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19 comments
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Andrew Smith -
corvusboreus -
Canguro -
corvusboreus -
Andrew Smith -
corvusboreus -
corvusboreus -
andyfiftysix -
paul walter -
corvusboreus -
leefe -
Clakka -
Canguro -
Clakka -
andyfiftysix -
B Sullivan -
Canguro -
Clakka -
paul walter
Return to home pageSeveral questions, who at (presumably) SPA wrote this, lacks any data/analysis support and does not explain anything, just a dogwhistle?
Australia is not unique with generations of below replacement fertility, ageing and longer living permanent population base due to better health, yipee, and staying in the data longer esp. oldies and now boomer ‘bomb’; ‘solution’?
We have a 190k cap on permanent migration and many have been onshore and counted in via NOM net OS migration, modest vs. many more temporaries esp. students.
The latter are onshore and included due to LNP processing delays, Covid border closures and now a short term catch up or ‘data noise’; but latter are falsely described as ‘immigrants’ suggesting permanence, not true.
*all statistical correlation between documented growth in human population and attendant observed increase in habitat destruction and decline in biodiversity is purely coincidental (and based in racism).
Not that habitat destruction and devastation of native biodiversity are issues really worth mentioning anyway (statistically speaking).
Breed, baby, breed! Ah, the joys of sex always have this curly little problem, babies are often born as a result. The planet’s rise in human numbers is the direct result of this irresistible urge, coupled of course with the dramatic improvements in such fundamentals as health care, improvements in living standards, adequate nutrition and other ancillaries like housing, education, sustainable employment etc.
The question of environmental impact is rarely if ever addressed in the act of conjugation and its consequences.
SPA is to be applauded for their clear-eyed appraisal of the risks associated with an unopposed increase in this country’s population.
The damage done to the environment in the relatively short time of less than three hundred years is nothing short of appalling. It can only get worse if measures to restrict growth aren’t put in place. Why the federal and state governments continue to sweep the issue of environmental deterioration under the carpet or into the ‘too hard’ basket is a mystery that begs a solution.
One might also ask why anyone would wish to bring children into a world where climate change and global heating guarantee a significantly more difficult existence to those reaching adulthood within the next twenty to thirty years, and ongoingly.
Canguro,
The solution to your mystery lies in a brown paper bag.
Consider the ‘hidden migration’ of education visas offered for places in our increasingly corporatised universities.
Around 250,000 places per year to the highest bidder, usually from the affluent business classes of India and China.
Guests with education visas who obtain employment (connections help) can then indefinitely obtain bridging visas until places become available in the voluntary intake.
Such folk aren’t actually figured into NOM figures, but represent a significant increase in overall ecological burden nonetheless.
Meanwhile, popular media encourages us to rally and rage against a few thousand desperate souls per year who arrive seeking refuge of asylum from war, tyranny and poverty.
But nobody is breeding like the past, anywhere, we are observing what was predicted by Australia’s best demographer Jack Caldwell and Hans Rosling; the last of the high fertility generational outcomes.
On this ‘Such folk aren’t actually figured into NOM figures’, yes they are, as the NOM sweeps up all border movements and counts those resident for 12/16+ months; unrelated to visa, migration, PR or citizenship simply an arbitrary time test.
Same population and immigration data misrepresentation, confusion and agitprop is also shared with climate science deniers’ tactics.
Andrew,
You got me cold, I am a actually a climate science denier and nature hater cynically wearing the cloak of environmentalism to disguise my inherent racism against people of darker hue and different heritage.
I genuinely respect the well educated and informed environmental perspectives, concerns and information that you bring to this site.
ps, no offense taken.
Andrew,
Now that I have confessed my status as a paid-up shill for the corporate climate deniers, could you repost that link you offered up previously, the ‘green agenda’ site that detailed how the global environmental movement (including the very concept of ‘sustainability’) is actually a front for a sinister international conspiracy (run by Rockefeller’s, Attenborough et al) to eradicate the majority of the global human population and install a global dictatorship.
i find the whole arguement abhorent. It just sinks into the quagmire of misinformation, racism and selfishness..
lets start with the assertions.
the environment degradation is all due to current immigration levels.
I am pretty sure the early settlers created far more environmental damage than what we do now. Population density does not have to equate to environmental degradation Its a straw man arguement.
I rememeber when planning experts tried to limit suburban sprawl and look where they are now…shafted
We created the mess by voting in governments who didnt want to plan for anything. We are the problem, not immigrants. Just ask who gave us Fraudband….thats the level of planning that causes problems.
Canguro..” It can only get worse if measures to restrict growth aren’t put in place.” I hear this arguement all the time but its just a trumpian rant. . What growth are we talking about? Suburban sprawl or just numbers?
“Housing supply has not kept up with demand”. Another assertion that assumes that supply and demand is the only force at play. During the covid pandemic, nobody came or went but housing prices still rose. There was no shortage of buyers or sellers. Even if nobody comes in this year, we will still have a housing shortage and eye watering prices.
The truth is construction requires a big influx of unskilled exploitable labour. Immigration is not the main driver here, we are with our stupid hands off approach to anything thats sensible long term planning. Must’nt let home prices drop or …………you know what the response will be.
My arguement is thus, immigration is not the cause or panacea of environmental degradation, we are. We the people who vote and elect wilful malfeasance…..people who dont want to plan for anything.
We caused the problem therefore its up to immigrants to fix it. Good luck with that project
Sustainable Pop Oz has been around for a long time, is really an enviro crowd.
NOT “racist”, but some time ago forseeing the problems with “development” that we see today. Costs big bucks fixng old problems.
A56,
Noone is asserting that immigration is the only, or even a majorative driver of the escalating environmental decline that scientists and environmentalists are observing, just that it is an influencing factor.
I would also doubt your assertion that environmental degradation inflicted by pale pioneers matched current levels of habitat/biodiversity decline.
You’d have to look to localised examples of extra-zealous axe-struck deforestation (eg the government mandated clearance of the NNSW ‘big scrub’) to anything like match current dozer-driven levels of native vegetation clearance for mining, sawmilling, agribusiness and development sprawl.
There is no single simple solution, but we really do need to starting scaling this shit right the phuq down..
, .
I agree with their basic position, but I wish they didn’t include racist anti-immigration dogwhistles.
This land cannot support the population density of other continents; the environment is too fragile, water and arable land too limited. That doesn’t mean that we pull up the drawbridge and shut the gates. We can balance sensible immigration intakes, compassion for refugees and environmental sustainability. Well, we could if we had the political and social will to do so, but that seems to be in the “too hard” basket …
I’m with you leefe. Whilst Oz population is a minor direct factor in environmental degradation, coupled with (lack of) education and aspiration for riches drives the way it votes and who it votes for, and their policies and rhetoric.
Suffice it to say Oz has continued to operate an exploitative model of land occupation. And it continues to do so, pandering to local aspiration for riches, and the multinational exploitation machine. For example: in mining – excuse being it employs and brings export wealth – when it is a major user and contaminator of scarce fresh water. In forest logging – excuse it is needed by us and for export and can regrow, yet it doesn’t and causes loss of biodiversity, desertification, loss of above-ground reservoirs, and removal of CO2 sinks. In agriculture – using a euphemistic excuse that we are obliged to contribute massively to the world’s food bowl.
This sort of rationale is trotted out across the world – in the USA it has brought them very close to imminent ecological and economic collapse. Overall in Oz, the landscape is much more fragile and very different to that of Europe, Africa and USA and South America, yet in vain we seek to prop it up with agriculture that is far from sustainable. Not here, taking away from Oz excellent agri-scientists and mostly concerned local farmers.
Significantly, there is a scientific school of thought that has it that a world population of 8 billion would have been nowhere near attainable or able to be sustained without the use (misuse) of phosphorous (fertilizers). It has been overused resulting in contamination – toxification of waterways and coastal waters, increase in ultra-toxic algae and de-oxygenation and the devastation of those eco-systems. Oz is particularly vulnerable to that misuse as broadly speaking it has naturally low fertility soils.
Yet the world of bling-hypnotized people and ludicrous notions of endless bounties persists. Whilst it might be shitting itself about climatic effects, as we fecklessly hurtle towards 9+ billion, no-one much gives a second thought to the matter of phosphorous – it’s nearly all gone – that’s right, across the entire planet.
We have to stop pissing into the wind.
And of course the major cities of the world are planted on and tarmaced over the world’s most arable lands, and doing anything about that would apparently be beyond imagination.
Good comments, Clakka, and thank you for the link to Elizabeth Kolbert’s article – she being a significant contributor wrt this vexed question of just where humanity is heading, with her books The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Under a White Sky.
The history of our use of materials for the purpose of farming is both intricate and alarming, in the sense of the stepwise progression from natural sources of nutrients to the eventual high-end technological manufacture of nitrogen, (the Fritz-Haber process), along with extraction of potassium and phosphorus from ores. I had the opportunity in my one & only visit to North America to get a walk through of a potassium mine in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan (CA), where the guides told us that there was 500 years worth of potassium salts – chlorides & sulphates – in a stratum around 3,000 feet below the surface, based on current rates of extraction. All well & good, except that the questions of supply of the other two major nutrients vital for modern agriculture are less secure, and clearly phosphorus is the outlier in this equation.
In my years spent in China, I several times had the opportunity to visit rural areas, and it was observed that in farming villages the old traditions persisted – collection of all human and animal waste, aggregation, composting, then spreading these nutrient rich materials across the fields. As a person who received a tertiary education in modern agricultural practices but with a bias towards more natural farming systems, it’s often been my sense that we cannot continue to farm as we do in this ‘modern era’, that the ecological costs are far too great, but at the same time the imperative to provide food and fibre for a burgeoning planetary population negates the choice of returning to natural farming systems. I fear for the future, in this regard.
Thanks Canguro.
Of course there is yet another conundrum, and that is, in all our sophistication, the contents of human and agricultural animal waste is not what it used to be. Neither is the ‘natural’ runoff water we love to harvest.
I could go on and on about it, as I have been deeply involved in the building and functionality (or otherwise) assessment of numerous water and waste-water (sewage) treatment plants. Never mind industrial waste, dealing with the remains of what we put into ourselves, our animals and the atmosphere (falling as rain) is mind-boggling, and to a significant extent not possible, given the 78,000 odd significant chemical toxins we manufacture and use. Take just one group; pseudo-oestrogens, very handy, but very persistent, and in waterways they accumulate in fats – plant and animal. One part in a billion can genetically mutate the gonads of water-dwelling creatures. And as they eat one another, the accumulation intensifies.
Life is a closed-loop system here on Earth. Input = output. And what might have once been simple shit, is no longer just shit for sure.
Clakka, “…there is a scientific school of thought that has it that a world population of 8 billion ..”….
therefore is it not morally dangerous to pretent that australia cannot take its fair share. If we take more, doesnt that ease the strain elsewhere? After all we are not immune to problems elsewhere.
Corvusboreous. Who just about wiped out the whales a couple of hundred years ago? All the precious farm land we see around the place was deforested a long time ago. The yarra river in melbourne was a cesspit a long time ago.
I guess my thoughts are not open slather but well planned high immigration is not of itself a bad idea. Maybe how its been implemented has been sub standard.
Today commemorates the beginning of the end of the Stone Age in Australia, and the introduction of ten thousand years of advanced science and technology developed in response to population growth that stimulated the need for such technical and scientific innovations all around the world. The question we should be asking is why hadn’t such innovations also occurred in Australia, which was occupied by people no different in intelligence and ingenuity than anybody else on the planet.
The answer can only be that ever since Stone Age people arrived in Australia they never had the opportunity to reach a population density that was sufficient to support a surplus of people who could devote their time and energy to innovation and improvement. There are no fertile crescents in Australia. No river valleys to stimulate agriculture, growing populations that then need to develop the plough to break the soil to grow sufficient crops to feed everyone. No need to develop astronomy so that they can produce a calendar that will inform them when to sow and when to harvest or when the floods are due. Everything that is developed and learned creates new problems that need to be solved. Necessity drives innovation and technological and scientific advance, and population pressure was a driver of that advance. Unfortunately now population pressure is the very problem that threatens sustainability let alone further advance.
All the historical and archeological evidence point to the conclusion that prior to European colonisation Australia was very, very sparsely populated. If it wasn’t there would have been a thriving civilisation with a welcome committee to greet Captain Cook and tell him and Sir Joseph Bank’s scientific team where they went wrong in trying to work out the earth’s distance from the sun by measuring the transit of Venus when they were in Tahiti. They would have shown Cook their detailed maps of the coast of Australia, and amazed Banks with their illustrated encyclopaedias of the flora and fauna of Australia. They like the Māoris of New Zealand would have resisted annexation and diplomatically arrived at a treaty with the British or would have expelled them entirely.
Instead the people of Australia were no more technically advanced than when their ancestors first arrived forty, sixty or perhaps even a hundred and twenty thousand years ago. The land would only support a tiny, widely dispersed population, yet even so the land suffered from their presence as in their desperation the people burned the forests down just to facilitate the hunting they depended upon for survival. If you are familiar with ‘Odyssey Down Under’ this environmental degradation which brought about countless extinctions of animal and plant species is quaintly praised as ‘the forests gradually expanded into grasslands’. So despair not at the destruction of the Amazon and other dwindling rainforests of the world. The forests aren’t diminishing, they are simply expanding into grasslands.
Anyway, the conclusion of all the known evidence is that Australia is simply unsuitably for environmentally sustaining a large population of people. Agriculture is the greatest threat to sustainability, yet Australia insanely grows three time more crops than the local population even needs, draining the rivers, over clearing natural vegetation and depriving native animals and plants of their habitats. The excess agricultural produce is exported at great energy costs to markets thousands of miles away from the farms that produce it. Australia is after all at the end of the supply chain and it isn’t catering for overseas food shortages, it is catering for a privilege luxury market such as the live sheep export market. Only insane economic rationalism is presented to justify this environmental vandalism, defended fiercely by both Labor and Coalition governments who dare not offend the minority of people in the agricultural regions because of their massively disproportional representation in Parliament, which decisively determines which of them will form government.
B Sullivan, aside from your crowing about the ‘end of the Stone Age in Australia,’ I fail to see how you can paint the destruction of the Amazon and other rainforests as a neutral or positive thing, unless of course you’ve never seriously considered the consequences of such destruction. Complex ecosystems ravaged for profit by replacing them with monocultural agriculture; palm oil plantations and grasslands for cattle, along with the tragic consequences for indigenous communities who’ve lived in these regions for millennia is hardly an outcome to be lauded.
One might ask, and where did you garner the hare-brained notion that the Aborigines ‘burned the forests down’? It certainly isn’t implied in the Odyssey down under essay. The annihilation of Australian forests is entirely an artefact of white colonialism.
And with respect to that issue, the Wilderness Society succinctly sums it up.
andyfiftysix, it seems you are at it again.
If you can’t think of anything of your own to say to suit your agenda, please do not cite, ascribe and misuse, out of my context, any part of my comments as a premise to make such a non-sequitir ‘therefore’ proposition (that is almost unintelligible). In this case it is not only rude, but illogical. Accordingly, this will be my only reply to your nonsense comment / enquiry.
What some seem to be missing, is the epiphany that wanting certain preconditions involving the CONSTRUCTIVE use of the economy and resources in place prior, is somehow racist and immigration used to bust the union movement and change the mindset to neo liberalism from a more “mixed” economy. This also saw resources used for social and material infrastructures that were that necessary for a larger population to still retain some sort of democracy.
It wasn’t the likes of SPA that ruined it but the greedy neolibs like “Cronulla” Howard chasing after control, some thing that is obvious in todays comments from Ruston calling for a cashless (controlled) society and people. You cant have the likes of Morrison AND have a fairer immigration system, it won’t work under neo liberalism.