THE Infrastructure Australia Audit issued a week ago would be laughable if it were not so depressing.
So here is the laughable bit – a script I have crafted for John Clarke and Brian Dawe.
Dawe: Prime Minister, Infrastructure Australia says Australia is lagging and must do more. Why?
Clarke (as PM): Because we have to keep up with population growth and economic growth, Brian.
Dawe: And what does IA say we must do to keep up?
Clarke: Spend more money, Brian. Lots more money.
Dawe: And where will that money come from?
Clarke: From you and me, Brian. From the taxpayers. And from road user charges. That’s in the report.
Dawe: So taxpayers will have to pay more for roads that are now free. And pay more for railways and airports?
Clarke: Of course, Brian. How else can we catch up with population growth? We are going to have 30 million people in Australia in 15 years’ time.
Dawe: Wouldn’t it be easier and better not to have the population growth, or at least slow it?
Clarke: You can’t do that Brian.
Dawe: Why not?
Clarke: Because the economy benefits. Big companies benefit.
Dawe: So?
Clarke: Well, Brian. If the big companies did not make bigger profits they would not donate to political parties who support high immigration and more population growth. These are the political parties that form the governments to raise the taxes to build all the new infrastructure. Simple really.
Dawe: Prime Minister, thank you for your time.
Clarke: Pleasure, Brian.
Ends
That’s the fiction. The truth is worse.
The chair of Infrastructure Australia Mark Birrell said, “It is time for this nation to treat population growth as fact; a fact our nation should accept and gear up for.”
It is highly self-serving stuff. It does not help the broad mass of the Australian population to set ourselves the task of building infrastructure for more than 200,000 extra people a year – and even more than that in some years.
Some of the audit’s findings show how silly this is and put the lie to the argument that we must fill up the empty spaces in Australia or the masses to the north will do it for us.
The audit says that 72 per cent of the 8.2 million population increase to 2031 will go to the four largest cities. Those four cities comprise just 54 per cent of the population today (12,600,000 people).
So this extra population is not filling up the vast empty spaces it is pouring into the cities and clogging them up, making living conditions worse for the people who already live there.
Figures in the audit reveal that our major cities have now hit a point where they are already too big and that adding to them will result in disproportionate extra congestion – congestion which decreases living standards. The audit says the cost of traffic congestion in the capital cities will go from $13.7 billion in 2011 to $53.3 billion in 2031 – up 290 per cent.
The population of the four biggest cities will go up by 46 per cent and the population of the other capitals (now about two million) by 27 per cent – an overall increase of 42 per cent.
So on the Audit’s own figures this increase of just 42 per cent in population results in a 290 per cent increase in congestion. For every 1 per cent increase in population we are getting a seven per cent increase in the cost of congestion.
Surely, this indicates we have gone well beyond the optimum point in population growth. It may well have been that up to, say, some time in the 1960s or 1970s there was some advantage to extra population. But this infrastructure audit shows the downside is now laden with disproportionate, nasty, costly frustration as commute times get ever longer.
The audit says that growth in demand for non-urban transport is expected to be lower than the growth in GDP. So do not expect much improvement in rural and regional roads.
This audit shows that just to keep up and prevent greater congestion in the major cities will result in a huge diversion in Australia’s infrastructure effort away from things that make life better, like telecommunications, water, energy, schools, hospitals, national parks, public spaces, arts, culture and sport.
Transport makes up 70 per cent of the infrastructure spending required if we are to accept a 36.5 per cent increase in the population by 2031 “as fact”. Nearly, all of that will have to be spent on just ensuring commutes do not get any worse.
It does not sound like a great deal of progress to me. The figures more resemble the desperate efforts of Third World countries trying to cope with huge population growth. And incidentally the audit uses the words “huge population growth” to describe the projected 36.5 per cent growth by 2031. Moreover, that growth rate is described as being in the middle of the range.
If we hit the high end, the damage to our cities will worse than imagined, because such a high portion of the growth goes to the major cities and just a 1 per cent increase results in a seven per cent increase in congestion costs.
It is a myth we need these high population growth rates to maintain higher standards of living. Sweden has done pretty well economically and in overall living standards since 1960. If we had had the same population growth rate as Sweden since 1960, Australia’s population would now be 13 million. Sweden grew 30 per cent. We grew 130 per cent.
Denmark has also done pretty well with a population increase of less than 25 per cent since 1960.
The lesson from this audit is not that we need to “gear up” to spending billions just to stand still on the transport front, but to seriously question our immigration and population policies.
The audit should make us ask why are we blindly adding to our population and pouring so much infrastructure effort into transport at such a large and obvious cost to other things.
CRISPIN HULL
The article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Fairfax media on 30 May 2015.
Thank you to raise the issue. It would have been nice to compare some countries population and their land sizes (rich and poor) and also comment on religious lobbies etc…. When I look at population growths in countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, it seems that nothing worry them in term of sustainability… Just a reminder that Australia is mostly desert land and population should not increase but stabilise if we want to feed ourselves and export too. But how much food can we provide to feed the world in growing populations countries in the future.
Well argued, Crispin.
Crispin and Phillip: you cannot have a rational population policy without including the refugee issue. Do we, for example, say the numbers of boat people in recent years is acceptable and set an annual quota at that level? Or perhaps more rationally set a quota related to the overall immigration reduction target? Either way you must have an argument to counter those who, from a comfortable distance, allow emotion to override commonsense and claim that any people on a boat in the Indian Ocean who express a wish to emigrate to Australia have a “right” to do so. The number of asylum seekers in our region is in the millions. Not that I think the approach of the current and previous government, effective as it seems to be currently, is sustainable, morally or economically. We need to transfer a significant amount of our accumulated wealth and excessive income into development aid and adopt foreign policies aimed at settling conflicts rather than taking sides. A collateral benefit would be a gradual reduction in Australian living standards to a level commensurate with our environmental resources and thus a less attractive destination for “economic refugees”. Whether such a solution would be acceptable to comfortably well-off “refugee advocates” is a moot point!
With an ultra-orthodox Treasury that strictly regards population growth as a magical exogenous variable, and all three parties determined to ignore the issue, we may be stuck with our I’m-with-stupid Arthur Calwell Memorial Population Policy for yet another generation. It means little that it is measurably not what the electorate wants.
It’s worth recalling what happened with the Rudd-Gillard population ‘strstegy’. The responsible minister, Burke, had made up his mind from day one, and his published ‘strategy’ of 2011 is laughably obtuse, little more than a regional roads program. Shorten having expended his small stores of political courage on gay marriage, he won’t pick up the issue again.
Bit of a laugh, but fact free?
The definition of population changed re. the NOM including long term temps such as international students who impact the data (in the UK there are plans to remove students from the NOM).
Question is, what has been the impact on increasing estimated resident population or ‘population growth’ not by ‘immigrants’, ‘fetrtility’ etc., but Australians and prosperity, i.e. oldies living longer?
How much of the perceived visual issue e.g. congestion etc. are due mostly to domestic imputs, not ‘foreign’?
It’s no coincidence that the ‘zero population growth’ movement and meme was seeded by those cuddly neo con liberals, the Rockefellers.
Thank you – an excellent article. The evidence screamings that globally we already exceeding limits to growth: climate change, but also species extinction, potable water shortages and loss and degradation of our soils. While immigration has helped establish a generally successful multicultural society, our per capita immigration rate is much larger than other first world countries. Our high immigration rates strip developing countries of their best and brightest, yet we are now slashing our development aid budget. Population policy and moving to a steady-state economy must be placed on the national agenda.
Yes, the elephant in the room AND the driver of a lot of the conundrums that the world finds itself facing ….
Couldn’t agree more with your population article. Can I suggest you consider the policy solution at http://www.wewilldecide.info. Let local people decide through the census how much growth they want in their residential area. Limit future residential development accordingly. Total up the local limits and that gives you the number of migrants we should bring in for national interest reasons. The Government can still decide on the international obligations component; i.e., refugees etc. Hope you find time to look at it.