Big Australia needs rethink on World Population Day 2023 Another UN World Population Day passed with the UN focussing on anything but population growth. Australia’s population is growing faster than most, with sustainability not on the government’s radar, as Stephen Williams laments. By Stephen Williams, July 19, 2023
I don’t pay much attention to awareness days, but I make an exception for World Population Day, first observed on 11 July 1987 when the global population reached approximately 5 billion.
We are now at about 8 billion and still increasing by some 80 million every year – roughly the population of Germany. While the global rate of growth has decreased markedly in recent decades, the increase in absolute numbers has not reduced significantly due to the high total population. For instance, it took 12 years to add 1 billion people between 1999 and 2011 (giving us 7 billion), but still only 11-12 years to add the next billion (even while the rate of growth decreased).
Humans have never added 1 billion people more quickly.
World leaders have failed to address the problem of global carrying capacity due to various malign ideologies, ineptitudes, and laziness, despite the scientific evidence that population numbers are a key driver of climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental harms.
It will surprise many to learn that Martin Luther King Jr spoke out about the evils of world overpopulation as early as 1966.
The core problem is we have too many people consuming too much too quickly, and that story cannot end well on a finite planet. Potential ecological collapse is now reported as a staple of the news cycle, famously heralded in 1972’s Limits to Growth and confirmed here. Even the august British Medical Journal is willing to publish opinion that ecological and societal collapse is now a serious concern.
A long-term maximum sustainable human population may well only be between 1 and 4 billion – if people are to live in reasonable security and comfort in harmony with the natural world – but for all we know closer to the former than the latter, especially with global heating and other environmental disasters making Earth less habitable.
Humans are now constantly consuming natural capital faster than it can be replaced, meaning that fewer people can be supported as time goes on. The laws of nature are totally amoral and insensitive to human suffering.
It follows that all nations need to stabilise their populations as quickly and ethically as possible, and most will then need to reduce their populations, as some are already doing. That’s because every person has an ecological footprint that is considerably larger than their so-called ‘carbon’ footprint. Put another way, even if we could magically solve the climate crisis, we would still be facing existential threats due to other environmental ‘overshoot’ concerns (since there are at least eight planetary boundaries and we have transgressed most of them).
Australia is no exception to the cumulative effects of human numbers. A question that is rarely asked is this: what would be the symptoms of overpopulation in Australia given our current production-consumption patterns?
Answer: biodiversity loss; a failure to reduce greenhouse pollution; housing developments in areas prone to fire and flood; congestion in cities; a housing crisis; water scarcity and poor river health; high energy and food prices; and a general erosion of quality of life and wellbeing. These symptoms will sound familiar to many readers around the world.
Australia’s modern era of high population growth began with the Hawke administration in the 1980s when demographic ageing first became a concern and a net benefit of high migration was perceived, if not proven. All governments since the Howard era (say from 2000) have adopted a ‘Big Australia’ program of high immigration, no doubt egged on by a Treasury and Productivity Commission that is not focused on sustainability because they don’t understand it.
The Albanese government is just the latest administration to say little about population policy prior to being elected, only to embrace population growth and the questionable economics underpinning it once secure in office. Yet surveys over the past decade, especially by The Australian Population Research Institute, have consistently shown the ambivalence, or even hostility, to further population growth by ordinary Australians, and that includes recent migrants.
We now have record permanent migration quotas and most temporary visa categories are uncapped. After the pandemic hiatus, unprecedented numbers of new migrants are competing for housing and jobs. The latest figures from the ABS show population growth was 1.9% in 2022 (496,800) giving a population doubling time of about 37 years if that was to continue.
Absolute numbers are one thing, but the rate of increase is also cause for concern. Population-driven housing shortages have made Australian housing among the least affordable in the world, and the infrastructure needed is beyond any government’s resources. It may be time for an independent commission to look again at the cost-benefit analysis of this ideology-tethered growth.
Some feel that a large immigration program is an important contribution to helping the world’s disadvantaged people. If the Australian government wanted to help overseas nations, it would increase our woeful foreign aid budget and help end the exploitation of poorer nations that are suffering under unconscionable debt burdens, ‘structural adjustment’ programs, and other neoliberal straitjackets.
The world knows how to reduce unwanted fertility in an ethical way – we need to wisely choose the UN and other analysts’ low fertility projection rather than its medium or high one.
Stephen Williams is a journalist and author. He is a co-editor of the book Sustainability and the New Economics (Springer, 2022). He has produced a regular newsletter on population issues for the past 10 years.