This was published 14 years ago
Meeting the environmental, economic and social challenges of a Big Australia
By Leon Gettler
THE Big Australia will dominate debate over the next decade. It kicked off in September when Treasurer Wayne Swan announced that the long-term projection for Australia's population was 35 million people in 2049. Population dynamics are a critical issue for society and business. Where will these extra people live? How will this reshape business, company management and cities? And can we afford it?
The projections are actually at the bottom end. In the 1990s, Australia was growing by 200,000 each year. Over the past 12 months, it grew by 443,000. If Australia continues on that trajectory, the population will hit 40 million by 2050.
With a 60 per cent increase in population, Sydney and Melbourne are likely to reach 7 million each and Brisbane will more than double in size to 4 million. Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth will have as many people as there are in Australia today.
What will a bigger Australia look like? Certain sectors of the economy will boom. It will be a good time to have a job in health care, medicine, education, financial planning, town planning and managing infrastructure such as water.
A bigger population will reshape Australian cities, turning them into clusters of regional centres much like Los Angeles. Just as no one in their right mind would drive from Riverside to downtown Los Angeles, people will live and work within discrete parts of the city, like Penrith, Parramatta, Cranbourne and Box Hill.
Already the Victorian Government has flagged this in their planning document Melbourne@5 million (bit.ly/8nfUqu). It talks about creating Central Activities Districts at Box Hill, Broadmeadows, Dandenong, Footscray, Frankston and Ringwood. Combined with economic forces, like petrol prices, it will turn capital cities into a series of regional hubs. While people can still drive from Cranbourne into town, they are unlikely to do so when petrol is at $3 a litre (Deutsche Bank predicts a barrel price of $US175 by 2016). By 2050, the only reason people will go into the city will be to see a medical specialist or dentist, or go to the football, theatre or opera.
In his address at a business leaders' forum at Queensland University of Technology in October, Treasury secretary Ken Henry said the population boom raised problems about planning, jobs and the environment. And the kicker? ''We don't know the answers to these questions, even though all of us would have opinions,'' Henry said, noting that his own opinion was pessimistic. ''With a population of 22 million people, we haven't managed to find accommodation with our environment. Our record has been poor and in my view we are not well placed to deal effectively with the environmental challenges posed by a population of 35 million.''
The population projection is creating serious divisions, particularly around environmental issues. Whereas at the beginning of the century, questions of population were being framed by White Australia, now it's Green Australia.
It's a schism we are seeing around the world. Environmental scientist Tim Flannery says the push for population comes from governments wanting more taxpayers and businesses wanting customers. But with the global population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, there are now calls to rein in the growth to save the planet. Canada's national finance newspaper, the Financial Post, argues that the world should adopt China's one-child policy. We can expect more to join that debate.
It's not just the environment. Australian society was shaped by xenophobia. This comes from being an island with no connections to any other borders and white Australians seem to forget that they were the first boat people. It gave rise to one of the first acts of the Australian Parliament, the White Australia policy. Certainly the recent bashings of Indian students suggest that the groundswell that led to that piece of legislation is still there. Those tensions might grow as the population expands.
Internationally, the increased population could also shift Australia's alliances. About 10 per cent of Australia's population already has some Asian parentage. That figure is likely to increase as the population grows. When China eclipses Japan as Australia's No. 1 trading partner, Australia might well change alliances. Impossible? Australia has been quite shameless in the way it has done this throughout its history, starting with the British and then switching across to the Americans in the 1940s. The population boom might exacerbate that pattern and align us with China. Australians are nothing if not pragmatic. That's another part of the debate around the Big Australia.