The Australian Democrats are preparing to dump their policy of zero net immigration. The draft new policy is being sent to member for consideration. It seeks a more flexible approach while maintaining environmental concerns. The development follows a recent call by the Business Council of Australia for substantially increased immigration to remedy a skills shortage, to boost the economy and to counteract the ageing of the population. Both developments are part of a long debate about population, immigration, the environment and the economy. And there needs to be much more debate and education about these matters.
Much of the debate fails to take account of the very long time it takes for policies to influence population levels and population make-up. It also fails to take account of the profound influence policy decisions today can have on population in the distant future. Further, most of the calls for change are directed at the Government, but in truth there is not a huge amount the Government can do in the short term and there are often other answers to problems posed than population objectives.
The existing Democrats policy of zero-net-immigration and the Business Council’s call for greatly increased immigration are instructive examples of poor thinking on population policy. Both would likely be bad for the country.
Australia has a very low birth rate. It is around 1.7. A rate of 2.1 is needed for replacement. If we do not have immigration, in the long term the population will decline and will have a large imbalance of old people — a high dependency ratio which can reduce living standards. The trouble with zero-net-immigration and zero-population-growth proponents is they do not deal with the latent trends they would put in the population. It would be far better to have modest immigration and modest population growth now so that Australia can reach a sustainable zero-growth population in the middle of next century, not an unsustainable zero-growth population in 10 years. The change in Democrat thinking is a good one.
Short-term thinking dogs the Business Council thinking, too. What happens after the high immigration flush. For a start, the back-lash against immigration now is a consequence of too-high immigration in the Hawke period. It is counter-productive to push society’s tolerance for immigration. But large immigration intakes now will leave an unexploded bomb in the population later which will make economic conditions worse, not better. As Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock pointed out, if numbers provided the solution, Bangladesh would be booming. Moreover, immigration helps the ageing problem only up to a point after which it merely postpones.
It is going to take several generations to iron out the structural age imbalance of the population caused by the post-World War II baby boom.
Mr Ruddock was quite right to point out the weakness in the business argument. Quality is more important than quantity and there are not huge numbers of skilled migrants waiting to come to Australia.
The real challenges to government and to business is to train and educate the population we have already got and to ensure that the existing migrant intake has a greater proportion of skilled migrants. The Government has taken some considerable steps with the latter.
And on the environment, there are more things to be done than assuming a solution lies in fewer people now.
The present immigration targets of around 70,000 to 80,000 are about right and can be fine tuned later. They will lead to a sustainable zero-growth population mid-century without straining community tolerance or creating intolerable age imbalances.
Radical shifts up or down are a recipe for instability.