Angst Swells as Australian Population Nears 25M
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Even towns in the 'habitable' area get in the upper 40C [115F] regularly during summer. The last three years have been relatively cool, but in between 2008-2012 there were days where Melbourne and Sydney basically had to shut down because the heat made infrastructure unusable without damaging it.
There is hardly any water and the cities were designed around cars far more than any city outside Los Angeles. Add a population that's three times what the neighborhoods were planned for and you see why Mad Max was thought up here.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/it...
What is the population of California, and what is the population of Australia?
California = 39 million in 163,696 square miles of total land.
California has twice as many people in an area half the size (not including inhabitable parts of California since half of it is a desert).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outback
and particularly, about a third of the way down, the aerial photography and the arid interior, and consider that that arid desert extends from the equivalent of Oregon to Tennessee, South Dakota to Oklahoma.
Maybe better to compare available water or other resources. Cities in the desert are viable if you have water.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.PRCP.MM?end=2014...
As a past/present resident of both LA and Melbourne, I would modify that to say that Syd/Mel are as dependent on cars as much as Los Angeles, but without the planning commitment to cars that LA has exhibited. Bring up maps of LA and Sydney/Melbourne on the same scale. LA has a grid of freeways with a cell-size of 10-15 km. Not so for Sydney and Melbourne, and their surface streets are much worse. Roads designed as two lanes each way made into 3 narrow lanes each way by turning the shoulder into a new lane. Nowhere to go when someone breaks down. Without a commitment to either a comprehensive transit system, or a decent freeway network, Syd/Mel have half-arsed implementations of both.
In LA I was comfortable cycling along PCH, Santa Monica Blvd, Sepulveda Bvd etc, but I would never consider cycling on their Melbourne equivalents.
Funny you say that - when I visited Sydney I thought the regional rail network was better than anywhere in the US outside the eastern seaboard.
Melbourne is similar to SF. They love their above ground trams for inner city transport but those trams do nothing to get people into the city in the first place. The love is pure historical admiration and not rooted in reality. Being above ground is a flaw in terms of adding to congestion and different track gauges and thus train changes is a hassle we could all do without.
I'm curious about how "uninhabitable" is defined in this context.
There are American cities of millions of people (Phoenix, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, etc...) where summer high temperatures never get below 100-110° for months on end.
They, too, are in the desert, but not classified as "uninhabitable." (OK, maybe Vegas is uninhabitable... ;) )
Down the road from Las Vegas is a town called Baker, California where the hottest temperature on earth was recorded. 134°, IIRC. Thousands of people still live there.
There are places in Australia that have set records - including this "160 consecutive days above 100F" - note that this isn't talking 'highs', it was above 100 the entire time.
even deep under the ground?
We’d probably have to build heaps of desalination plants around the coast and pipe it in to put more people further out.
That's a fun bit of trivia. But I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion. The sources of New York and Los Angeles water are up to a thousand miles away from the Mississippi River watershed. Neither gets its water from there.
What I mean is that the problem is not the distance, but that sufficient water just isn't available anywhere in the continent.
Australians tend to overstate the nature of their desert. It is true that a large part is very hot but then they can have few more cities long the coastline with desalination plants.
But all those sort of things are possible only when you have adventurous people trying to implement radical ideas which the USA gets in disproportionate numbers thanks to its immigration programs.
Australian immigration is only about high skilled immigrants and they do not attract the likes of Steve Jobs to Elon Musk.
Los Angeles and some other American cities get water from hundreds of miles away, even crossing mountain ranges to do so.
These days that kind of ambitious engineering would be largely unthinkable. Some bean counter somewhere would say it’s not worth the expense and the politicians would go along with it.
Recently I learned that until 2005 Navajo Indians were transporting coal 300 miles via a slurry pipeline to Nevada power plants. Again, something that would be inconceivable in these small thinking days.
I’m glad that a few crazy adventurers like Musk and Bezos and a few others have popped up. It’s been a long time since America had that kind of pioneering spirit.
If people in the 1930’s had today’s mindset, Los Angeles would be just another desert gas stop on the coast road between San Diego and San Francisco.
Every time I visit Las Vegas I am reminded that the American prosperity is built on the sweat and blood of those badass pioneers who crossed the desert in unbearable heat, overcame all odds and built a fabulous city.
Read this story for example of a Sicilian man turning hard pen land into an underground orange farm in the middle of Fresno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpBL_at8FAY&t=3s
Giants are gone and we are living in the times of pigmies.
Yes Australia could easily have 100m people living there, but they wouldn't be as comfortable as when there were 15m.
Its a bit like California. LA & SF in the 60s and 70s sounds dreamy - and we'll never get back to there.
It’s full of homeless camps, traffic is a gridlock. Rents are insane. Salaries are low.
A bit pricey perhaps, but I did manage to cover an awful lot of ground without a car while I was there.
California's population is 39M.
Australian planologists should talk to Dutch planologists, and it'll be fine. I am culturally biased but I think it will become a problem once they reach about 200 to 250 million. The Netherlands as well: it can still grow a huge bit before it will hit a ceiling. Yes, it'll get more crammed, it just means you have to organize yourself better as a nation. But my point: if the Dutch can live in a crammed space, so can the Australians.
By the way, in English planologie is called "city planning" or "urban planning" and a planoloog is an "urban planner" or "city planner". We don't really have the terms planology and planologist (although they sound pretty awesome!).
Words mean what people use them to mean. Dictionaries are only, and can only be, historical records.
The only issue is that this conversation keeps getting derailed by racists so I just stay away completely :(
We're getting so stuffed in the USA that national parks are starting to limit visitors and close gates at capacity - that for me alone is signal that a) we should take a serious look at our population b) we should do more to preserve and open more public lands for this growing population.
has grown much faster than population, due to heavy advertising by national parks and a general increased awareness of visiting national parks as a "thing to do" on vacation rather than e.g. going to Disney Land.
Of course, good to point out. I would call this a scientific discussion. Not that we necessarily only need to have this conversation on scientific conferences and the like but keeping it scientific as much as possible is the extent to which such a discussion is useful, in my opinion.
Aus population has grown much more quickly than The Netherlands, even if it isn't full yet.
250 million. There's more to how many people a country can support than what you can see on a map. That's as ignorant as looking at Antarctica and saying "Yes, they can support 200 million people there, just look at the Netherlands."
https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/miserly-newstart-keeps-unempl...
I think the real issue with sustained high levels of immigration is that most immigrants end up living in one of two major cities, Sydney or Melbourne. Melbourne is on track to have a London-sized population by mid-century - but that’s of course based on estimates. Which as the article points out, were completely wrong by three decades in 2005.
Nearly all nations tanked similarly, but only when priced in US dollars. It was caused by a record USD bull run. The USD gained a lot of ground vs the AUD in just two years.
Germany went from $3.88t to $3.36t one year later.
France went from $2.85t to $2.43t one year later.
Canada went from $1.84t to $1.55t in two years.
Japan went from $6.2t in 2012, to $4.4t in 2015. I assure you, their economy didn't actually contract by 29% in three years. That's solely due to the dollar / yen exchange. They didn't shutter a third of their stores or factories. A year later their USD GDP value jumped by ~11%, solely due to the exchange rate, their economic production did not expand by 11%.
The US dollar dropping by a considerable amount during the Bush years, was similarly responsible for artificially inflating the GDP of Australia (and all nations) in USD terms.
> Nearly all nations tanked similarly
Is this true though?
As an Australian, my conclusion is that Australia has failed to diversify its economy. Money comes in through mining, agriculture, property sales and to a lesser extent tertiary education. The rest is a services economy, and I think the joke about Australia being a country where we all serve each other lattes captures the idea in as few words possible.
I've just left the US, and instead of going home I went to Europe to start my company. Denmark is amazingly progressive with how it spends its public purse setting up an environment for innovation. Australia on the other hand seems to have abandoned any idea of establishing a sovereign wealth fund (mining tax) and instead blown millions courting US dollars which hasn't succeeded in turning Australia into a foreign branch of SV.
For a longer read, this is obviously one person's analysis, but I fail to find a flaw in his conclusions. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/australias-economy-house-card...
Where does Australia rank on the global scale?
Worse than Mauritius, Macedonia, Oman, Moldova, Vietnam, Egypt and Botswana.
Worse than Georgia, Kuwait, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and El Salvador.
Sitting embarrassingly and awkwardly between Kazakhstan and Jamaica, and worse than the Dominican Republic at 74 and Guatemala at 75,
Australia ranks off the deep end of the scale at 77th place.
77th and falling. After Tajikistan, Australia had the fourth highest loss in Economic Complexity over the last decade, falling 18 places.
Not the behavior of a modern, mixed economy that many Australians pretend that we have. We are an anomaly. A third world economy with a first world standard of living. Will is last?
The basic problem is that if infrastructure last 50 years, you have to replace 2% of it every year. Now, for every 1% of population growth, you also have to (on average) also build 1% more infrastructure, so you need to build 3% in total, or 50% more than if you had no population growth. But you only have 1% more revenue to build it with, so inevitably only a fraction of what you need gets built, hence the problems. And the higher the population growth, the worse the problems.
You argue 0 immigration -> 2% infra costs You argue 1% immigration -> 3% infra costs but also 1% more revenue to use for infra costs
I fail to see your issue
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL76483D7434812A0D
At some point there's a (not entirely) rethorical question about what's a "good" growth rate for a town, and a politician indicate 5% is good. 1.05^15 ~ 2. So that's a doubling in the period between someone enters kindergarten and leaves high school.
But as someone who grew up in Sydney, I got to observe first-hand how the rail system / other critical infrastructure development projects...did not develop.
When I first came to Asia and compared Australia to, say, trains in HK, or Japan. I knew the problem.
To some extent, yes, I think we have to control immigration but blaming stressors on immigration is political expedience typical of the change-ineffective democracy we have there. A more useful culprit I see is the refusal / inability to choose to take responsibility to make the changes to critical infrastructure that could have created improvements with alleviating these stressors.
We had a mining boom (thanks, China!) and could have reinvested that free money back into growing out critical infrastructure, with decades-long future planning to exceed capacity.
But we didn't. Credit loosened the banking sector gobbled up the profits in a (mostly residential) property boom, while the population twiddled their political thumbs and battled viciously (assisted by a complicit media) over small-stakes issues, seemingly benumbed by the spectacle of 66 leadership changes in 13 years[0].
But blaming politicians is "public expediency". The people didn't do anything about it, and in the face of some challenges, are they showing much more than learned helplessness and useless blaming of politicians, without creating some changes?
I want to finish by saying that Sydney was fine, back in the late 90s. Before there was any type of pressure. But to think that situation would last forever is the height of naivety, when you have such an attractive resource. We didn't plan ahead, and we wasted the mining piggy bank I think we could have used to extend capacity to meet future projected needs. It's really very sad I find, because you have a great city, beautiful in every way, with decreasing value / utility because the quality of forward looking planning / action was so poor. Maybe the worst part of it is, Sydneysiders / Australians think quite highly of themselves, and are quite aspirational / ambitious, but they didn't enact that attitude into reality.
[0]: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-10/australia-political-le...
This is the main ingredient of any pyramid scheme.
Our economies are built on the assumption of endless growth. Those immigrants better have children above the replacement rate.
So, I don't know how immigration works on your planet, but here in the real world immigrants do not get free "feeding, housing" or free anything-else. In fact a key condition in even the most open/lenient countries is that you must show proof that you can provide for yourself. Any other way would simply not make any sense, and I am always in awe at the level of confabulation needed to believe these nativist fairy tales.
Or maybe you're one of these people who mistake immigrants for refugees?
It's an honest question. I can't think of any. But for all I know, immigration to some Andorra/Albania/whatever has been significantly higher than emigration every year for the past ten. I can't recall reading anything with data and I'd like to know.
The better solution is to allow your population to contract and seek to boost the per capita output over time through augmentation with higher automation - robotics, AI, et al. The overall net economy size may stagnate or contract... so what, that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is the quality of life of each person.
Less pressure on the environment, less pressure on housing, higher standard of living per capita.
The primary argument I see in the developed world for needing endless overall population expansion, is that a lot of entitlement programs are shaky ponzi schemes that require ever larger numbers of new workers to pay for the last generation's benefits or the entire thing collapses in a shattered social contract. Sweden for example is dealing with that debate:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-26/now-even-...
A country where your actions are judged on whether they improve improve GDP or GDP/capita would be a terrible place to live.
Lots of people spending lots of money may boost GDP in the short term, but if it isn't sustainable, then there will be a corresponding fall in GDP in future.
GDP is actually a pretty damn good measure, and if it is slowing, then it matters to us all.
Doing things yourself is not free: these tasks take time, which is then not available for other jobs.
Pretty good indicator given its simplicity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
Is there a metric as simple as that that correlates as well with quality of living for a majority of the population?
People don't drink land and we get decade long droughts that make California's look tame by comparison. The majority of Australia has the same hospitality to human habitation as does the Sahara.
Many places average 4" of rain a year.
Water supply is a ... challenge.
That 10% is generally really nice though! (Not that there aren't also cool places to visit in the desert/outback too).
WRT to the article Australia seems to be paradoxically "big" and small at the same time (it's the biggest country after Brazil), with the big desert areas making its habitable area much smaller than one could suppose (Japan has a similar problem, even though it's bigger than Germany)
Not that I am keen on ridiculous population growth, but just interesting to think about.
Edit: an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)
Quote: "The water of the Snowy River and some of its tributaries, much of which formerly flowed southeast onto the river flats of East Gippsland, and into Bass Strait of the Tasman sea, is captured at high elevations and diverted inland ".
Sorry, what? Australia is 6th largest, after Russia, Canada, China, the US, and Brazil.
There are official migration statistics, so you can look that up and check for yourself - here is a good start:
https://www.destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/SocietyState/Populat...
If you're going to get all in a tizzy about crowded cities and beaches, move somewhere else!
Theres tonnes of places in Australia where you can have beautiful beaches and no-one else around for 100's of km.
Same goes for the land, the 'topsoil' that is left also comes with added salt.
The place is living on borrowed time, an environmental catastrophe unfolds in the news headlines and before our eyes. Only the ingenuity of man can prevent the place going back to the default 'Aboriginal' carrying capacity. The government can't magically buy feed for the farmers to give to their 'livestock' forever.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2018-07-29/the-big-dry-see-...
That’s a well thought out position.
Adelaide/Hobart +10 Melbourne/Sydney -10 etc.
This might mean companies that need immigrants have to set up offices in Adelaide and Hobart. Fair enough.
* I'm assuming you read the article re: points scheme
Australia has all the resources and land in the world to support much, much more people.
As a result, everyone crowds to the same places and the housing supply (and associated infrastructure) is strained.
From what I've seen it's a repeating pattern in the developed world. I've seen New Zealanders, of all people, complaining about NZ being overcrowded (it has one of the lowest population densities in the world, especially considering its climate and abundant natural resources).
TL;DR: Rich property owners block/delay construction to get high rents or sell their properties at a very high prices. Average people suffer. Rich people point average people to immigrants and "overcrowding".
Driving down the eastern seaboard of Australia one is struck by the hundreds of kilometres of perfectly habitable empty space. You could put two or three Hong Kongs on the coast between Sydney and Melbourne and no-one would even notice. We just need the damn infrastructure!
Given its land mass, Australia at 25m is a joke. We can support ten times that. That "uninhabitable desert" is no worse than Arizona really. All that's needed is a little bit of long-term thinking and investment.
Anyone familiar with my comments knows I'm no fan of "high-functioning autocracies" like China or Singapore but bloody hell - it would be good to get them in charge for just a few years and build stuff.
Then just build 3 Hong Kongs. What's the problem? Immigrants will be happy to build their new cities. Hong Kong didn't just suddenly show up. It grew over time on an island that had basically nothing on it. It's neighbour Shenzhen was a 10,000 people fishing village and is now a 10 Million metropolis.
But not the water, and a large part of what makes living in Australia appealing is that it is comparatively uncrowded, even in the cities. It leads to a relaxed feeling when compared to large US, Asian or European cities.
Should citizens be asked to give up one of the major positives of living in Australia in the name of 'growth' ?
No.
The people who are the most negative here about population growth are Australians.
It's getting to the point where at a Bunnings sausage sizzle you can't tell if you're talking to someone from One Nation or the Greens when you ask what they think about immigration.