The numbers are being bandied around now, and have been for quite some time, perhaps since Pauline Hanson popularised the topic, about how many migrants we should allow in, about boat people and in fact, what the population of Australia should be.  However, the question is rarely asked and one must question if the powers that be ever actually consider it, what is the ability of this country to support any level of population, let alone decide on how much to increase it by!

Credit must be given to Dick Smith, famous Australian businessman and noted adventurer, for his self-funded documentary on the sustainable level of the Australian population.  However, even he didn’t ask the important questions and I have tried to address them all on this website.

One of the most critical issues is that our rural population has been and continues to drift to the cities, on the coast. 

We have to ask WHY?

It’s not hard to find a multitude of answers:

1. Services in the country for families, such as hospitals and schools of equivalent quality.
2. Employment. Centralism has robbed the country regions of major employers and is causing the death of rural and regional towns and centres.
3. Profitability of farming enterprises is hugely affected by seasonal influences and the growing scourge of “green” influences such as Native Vegetation Laws and the Wild Rivers Legislation.
4. Infrastructure falling apart, failing to be maintained or withdrawn from use, such as country roads and railway lines to regional centres.

What can be done to reverse these problems?

They have been addressed in part on other pages of this website, including:

1. Free medical training of our own high school graduate students, for their first medical degree into a medical field, to reduce and eventually eliminate the need to rob third world countries of their doctors and nurses.
2. Infrastructure rethink, to take the pressure off capital cities and to reinvigorate regional areas, as described under the heading of “Infrastructure” on this website.
3. Adopt genuine policies to protect the profitability of Australian agriculture, as described in “Business and Entrepreneurship” and “Taxation”.
4. Remove or greatly revise Native Vegetation Laws and Wild Rivers Legislation as they stand, and replace them with local authorities that have the expertise to advise on appropriate vegetative strategies that are relevant to the local areas, rather than blanket the whole country with its diverse landscapes, with one blanket vegetation law.
5. Encourage, by a variety of means, business and industry to relocate to regional areas.  Start by moving government departments such as Agriculture, Water Resources etc, to those areas.
6. Take high speed broadband internet capacity via Fibre Optic Cable to all regional centres and make it available from there via local providers to customers.  As a prerequisite, all regional hospitals would need the capability to provide the Medinet facility, whether via Fibro Optic Cable or High Speed Copper, and all industrial estates in major regional centres would have access to Fibre Optic Cable.
7. Divert a small proportion of the excess flood flows of the Northern and Eastern rivers over the range into the Murray Darling System, to provide water to South Eastern Australia and maintain the health of the inland river system.
8. Investigate the broadening of the Northern Territory/Kimberly water harvesting capacity, as demonstrated by the Ord River, to open up agriculture, industry, commerce and greater settlement in North Western Australia.

Once initiatives such as these are undertaken, our capital cities will have lessened pressures on their infrastructure, population density and all the areas of problems those issues create.

How much growth of population can Australia manage?  What is our capacity?

The question becomes irrelevant, because unlike the situation we have now, with a shrinking economic base other than mining and export of primary production raw materials, we would have a fast growing national economy, with increasing wealth, infrastructure and decentralisation.

Currently, we have a shrinking pie and a growing number of sparrows to feed off the ever smaller pile of crumbs.

Providing these incentives to get people back into the rural and regional areas, creating jobs from business and industry outside the capital cities again, reversing the rural labour and brain drain and putting lives and careers into the empty ghost towns we now have will create a huge capacity for a greater population, without further straining our currently overstressed infrastructure.

Rather than relying on migration for a population increase, I would rather see young families so optimistic about our future as a nation and their place in it that they want to increase the size of their families once more, and raise our birth-rate, naturally.

If we provide the incentives for people to want to populate regional Australian, to raise families there, to make lives and careers right throughout Australia, then the population issues are no longer an issue.  We will have too many Australians doing great work with other Australians and enjoying the abundance that provides, to be concerned about petty issues such as how big Australia is.  We know the opportunities are big, and we want Australians to fill them!