Population: perpetual growth is not the answer
Martin Rasini gets a little tutorial help on the population issue from one of Queensland's sharpest academic and research minds
Dr Jane O'sullivan
Growing crops in a more sustainable way is easier than growing the human population in a sustainable way.
In fact, the latter is nigh on impossible – and a sentiment embraced by Dr Jane O’Sullivan, an agricultural research scientist at the University of Queensland.
She is firmly convinced that arguments advanced by government that we must grow our numbers to meet the costs of an expanding aged population are fallacious.
As a speaker at the Brisbane and Sunshine Coast population forums organised by Queensland Conservation, the Sunshine Coast Environment Council and other green groups, Dr O’Sullivan will argue that the cost of growing a younger population is higher than the cost of maintaining a stable population and that government policy therefore makes little sense.
“The population debate implies a trade-off between economic benefits of growth and its social and environmental costs, but it seems to be that the touted benefits of growth are poorly based,” she said.
“In addressing the growth debate, we need to separate the impact of the size of the population and its demographic structure from the impacts of rate of growth.
“Rate of growth has immediate impact on facilities and resources and in Australia in the past decade it has doubled.
“There are two major areas of public expenditure associated with nation-building. These are skills-training and the development of infrastructure.
“In general terms, a stable population needs to replace about 2 per cent of community infrastructure each year. However, the current growth rate of Australia’s population requires the provision of a further 2 per cent.
“This not only doubles the capacity requirement but may more than double the cost, as it must be generated from a diminishing physical resource base. Increasingly, we have to substitute environmental services, such as for water supply, with more resource-intensive alternatives.
“Even small changes in growth rate result in large changes to infrastructure needs and if necessary additional resources are not provided, as has been the case in the past decade in Australia, access to services and service quality declines and society goes backwards.”
She points out that the same effect happens in the supply of skills. To grow the supply of, for example, doctors or electricians by 2 per cent per year, we need to recruit around 50 per cent more than would be needed to maintain a constant workforce, either by graduations or immigration.
If we import them, they add to the need for every other skills area. Far from curing the skills shortage, our expanded immigration program is fuelling it.
While the costs of supporting more aged people are overstated, so is the ability of immigration to solve the problem. Dr O’Sullivan says that for Australia to maintain its current ratio of over-65s to working-aged people would require a much higher rate of immigration than we have now – a rate that could not be sustained and would greatly expand the future ageing problem, let alone the problem of food security.
“The current proportion of aged is an historical anomaly. It must rise, but will stabilise at quite a manageable level. We can plan for this, but we can’t plan for perpetual growth,” she said.
“Expanding our population is effectively living off the future and putting generations yet to come in a precarious position.”
Dr O’Sullivan says an oft-overlooked factor associated with population growth is that construction – the creation of new infrastructure – is the most energy-intensive form of economic activity.
“So, by accelerating growth, our energy intensity rises and our carbon emissions per person increase. Stabilising population therefore means a drop in per capita emissions without any impact on lifestyle,” she said.
Dr O’Sullivan says the focus on aged dependents ignores the even greater cost of young dependents, and completely fails to recognise the cost burden imposed on the community by the not-yet-arrived. By this she means those who will be additional, requiring expanded capacity, not those who will replace the current population.
“They provide nothing, yet we have to spend massively to accommodate them.
“The worry that per capita Gross Domestic Product will be smaller with a larger aged population is outweighed by the fact that, under a growth scenario, capital and resources are being expended on people who are not yet with us.
“I am confident that, without growth, Australia will be more than able to service the needs of its aged citizens and that the community will be better off economically and environmentally.
“If we stop the ridiculous scare campaign about below-replacement birth rates, and let our fertility drop again to around 1.7 where it was before the baby bonus was introduced, we would also be able to receive many more refugees than we currently do.
“Every time anyone talks about limiting immigration, it is reported that they want to turn away refugees. I don’t think many people realise that refugees now constitute less than 5 per cent of our immigrants.”
Dr O’Sullivan is concerned that the population debate is being dominated by vested interests, which stand to benefit by growth in property and consumer demand and the oversupply of labour.
“The economic benefit is for them, not us.
“We must insist that politicians do not put the wants of the powerful above the needs of the wider community.”
Related articles:
- Paul Summers: population distribution, size and sustainability
- Population: looking at the numbers with Bob Abbot
- Plea to halt absurd growth in Queensland
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