Dispelling some myths about Australia’s population

The reaper is only grim for some.

In 1348 the Black Death hit England and grimly reaped 70 per cent of the population, which fell from seven million to two million by 1400.

Wages, which had halved in the century to 1348, then quadrupled in the next 100 years. After that they fell away as population increased and did not rise again till the grim reaping Black Death revisited in 1660.

Maybe climate change will not be as calamitous as the Black Death, but there may be parallels. Historian Barbara Tuchman called the 14th century “a distant mirror”.

Population, wealth and calamity are fitting topics in a week in which the Australian Bureau of Statistics told us that Australia’s population growth rate has risen to 1.7 per cent – one of the highest among developed countries – and in which the Australian Government used that high population growth as an excuse for its pitifully weak greenhouse gas targets.

We seemed trapped by misconceptions (pardon the pun) about population.

The Black Death experience should put paid to one: that wealth rises with population. The misconception arises because correlation has been confused with causation.

Since about 1750 the world’s population has increased dramatically and so has its wealth and standard of living. But the unevenness of the population growth and the unevenness of the increase in wealth disguises the truth of the 14th century’s lesson: declining populations in fact bring increasing wealth.

And the lessons of the Third World, particularly Africa and Latin America, are that increasing population brings decreasing wealth.

The brutal and sad fact is that a large portion of the African population – perhaps a third – is no better off than in Neolithic times. Indeed, many are worse off – living lives of unremitting toil for mere subsistence. Tragically, the wonders of medical science and new technology have only caused populations in Africa and much of Latin America increase dramatically without any increase in standards of living. Their lives are not much longer and perhaps more miserable than those who wandered the Savannah 10,000 years ago. The archaeological records of human stature and longevity certainly indicate that.

Australia’s population growth of 1.7 does not sound much, but it means a doubling of the population every 40 years.

It means Australia – whose soils and water are already stretched beyond reasonable limits – will have 43 million people in 40 years’ time.

We are adding the equivalent of one Canberra a year to Australia’s population.

What, if anything, is being done about it? What should be done about it?

The Western world had rising standards of living at the same time as rising population from about 1750 on as medicine cut infant mortality and technology provided sanitation and clean water and increased wealth to the masses.

World birth rates peaked at the beginning of the 1960s. And in Europe and Japan the population has peaked and is now falling – but living standards are still rising.

In the short and medium term, however, the world and Australian populations are projected to rise.

As affluence spreads and infant mortality falls women have fewer children. But it takes a long time – it took almost 200 years in the West. The massive world population rises since 1750 are like a python eating a goat. It will take a while to digest and level out.

It is cause for great optimism in the very long term – provided we do not choke on the goat. In the short and medium term, though, the world has to be careful that this population spike does not make the planet uninhabitable. And Australia has to be careful that we do not blindly or deliberately allow our population to increase in a way that will threaten our overall well-being.

The key words are blindly and deliberately.

Much government policy in the past 30 years has been made without regard to population, particularly immigration which can be controlled. On one hand, governments bleat about water shortages, salinity, soil depletion, housing shortages, housing affordability, climate change, public transport woes, university and pre-school places, pollution and so on. And on the other hand, keep increasing immigration as if the things are not related – when the relationship should be obvious to anyone with Year 10 education and an IQ above 95, let alone policy makers with PhDs and IQs of 140.

More of this anon. First to some other misconceptions.

We have the misconception of longitudinal growth. Many people imagine that populations and standards of living have risen steadily (barring the odd glitch) since the Dark Ages – the past 1000 years of so.

It is not so. World population rose a bit and wealth did not rise very much at all until a big spike after 1750. Lifestyle, leisure, calories eaten, life expectancy and so on were better in Britain in 1200 than they were in 1800 – except for the very few at the top like Henry VIII and the wealthy in Jane Austen novels. The vast bulk of people labouring in unremitting drudgery in early Industrial Revolution Britain would have been better off in pre-Roman Britain where their lives would have been longer, healthier and wealthier.

Wages in Britain in 1400, estimated by the economic historian Gregory Clark, were double what they were in 1800.

Before 1750 in Britain and a bit later elsewhere in the West, any technological gain (and there were not very many) got instantly eaten up with rises in population. It is only after the Industrial Revolution that the masses start sharing in the wealth because the technological improvements are so great that they do not get totally eaten by population increases. But it is only into the 20th century that the rate of population increases starts to decline and populations themselves decline.

So we have not had steady growth since the Dark Ages, but centuries of very slight growth followed by a very steep rise.

The next misconception is that the world population is destined to continue to increase indefinitely until we hit planetary catastrophe. No. Rather, as infant mortality falls and wealth increases, women have fewer children. Ultimately, the rate of increase slows and then goes backward. Just as the world’s population rose dramatically after 1750, it will fall just as dramatically after 2100 – that has been postponed a bit by the baby boomers who are now hitting retirement. They are like another goat being eaten by a python.

Just as the world population doubled in 30 years to 2000, so it can halve in the 30 years to 2150. One these ageing baby boomers and the mini-boom of their children die, the world’s population will plummet as quickly as it rose. In Italy and Spain, for example, the population in 100 years is expected to be just 12 per cent of what it is today. But that is then; this is now.

However, the mere fact that the world population is most likely to halve in the 30 years to 2150 gives us even more grounds for working on population policy, the environment and the direction of economic growth. It indicates that if we are sensible earthly salvation is at hand.

If we are not, the world’s population might halve or fall even more THIS century in circumstances too horrible to contemplate – planetary disaster.

Some more misconceptions: the ageing population will put unbearable strain on economies like that of Australia so we must strive for a younger population through immigration and boosting births.

First to the cost of the ageing population. It is just too simple to argue that an ageing population will chew up vastly more health-care costs. Health-care costs are usually high in the first couple of years of life and in the last couple of years of life, irrespective of the age of the dying person. Further, costs will almost certainly be contained in the future with medical advances. The period between morbidity and death will decrease.

To use a crude example, a 55-year-old in the 1960s might have hobbled out of the workforce with a bad knee which would be tinkered with by the health system for 20 years. In 2008, a hi-tech new knee would keep him in work out of the health system. As time goes on, treatments for disease and injury have become more cost effective, keeping people fitter and out of health care for longer. People spend less time in hospital.

Every detailed international and Australian study shows the health costs of the ageing population are manageable. Sweden and Japan are among a dozen or so countries which spend a lower portion of GDP on health than Australia but have older populations and equal or better health outcomes.

This has been known for some time. Epidemiologist Dr Michael Coory pointed it out in an excellent article in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2004.

But the scare-mongers with their own agendas are out there using this as an excuse to push measures to put more youth into the population. More of them anon.

One thing is for sure: the ageing are here whether we like it or not and their health will have to be attended to. If we add more births and more immigrants, the total health bill can only be higher.

Next misconception: Getting a younger population through immigration. When the baby boom started, it was as if our friendly python has swallowed a goat. The aging goat is slowly passing through the system. While it does that it will always be a hump. It is an idiotic mistake to imagine that as the goat’s lump passes through the python that the way to bring the python back to standard shape is to attempt to fill out the rest of it with more goats from mouth to tail.

The high birth rates of 1945 to 1960 coupled with low infant mortality was an aberration the world has never seen and most likely will never see again. We should accept that aberration. The baby boomers will die off and the shape of population graph will return to normal.

Incidentally, “normal” is not the age distribution of 1950-1980 with a big bulge of young people.

Can we afford to look after the old people without more immigration? Yes, because more immigration compounds the problem. We have a dependency ration of 75 – 75 dependants for every 100. That is projected to get to 115 in 2050. Ouch, that’s a lot of people to support, you might say. Quick, let’s have some immigrants to fix it. Well, to keep a 75 ratio through to 2050 you would need an immigration program that would result in a population of 160 million. Taken through to 2100 we would have a population of 900 million. It would be far easier to support the existing old fogeys than all those immigrants, who themselves would get old.

We should just accept the baby boomer aberration and let it work through the system.

Next misconception. We need population to stop jealous over-populated countries from invading our empty spaces. Well, the space has been empty for decades while the north has teemed. Australia has had a low population per land mass for 200 years without invasion.

Next misconception. We need population to be an important force in the world. Well, does Nigeria, Brazil or Indonesia (each with between five to 10 times Australia’s) get major-player status on population alone, over countries like Austria and Holland (each with less than two-thirds Australia’s). No.

With those myths debunked, we should now question successive governments’ policy decisions.

Governments are far too influenced by pressure groups. A good case in point is the Housing Industry Association. In another hat I wear I have read virtually every press statement it has put out in the past four years. Many of them mention affordability. Nearly every one that does calls for more land releases, cuts in taxes, and cuts in planning “red tape” (so people are less fettered with environmental requirements). I have not seen one that has mentioned the main and obvious cause of the housing affordability crisis – high demand created by high immigration.

But the HIA serves its members who build houses, not the nation as a whole or the environment. It does its job well, but it is not the job the Australian Government should be listening to.

The Real Estate Institute is similar. And a host of other industry groups fall in. Each with its own interests that are so often contrary to the national interest – as pointed out by Mark O’Connor and William Lines in “Overloading Australia” to be launched by Envirobook next month.

Governments continue to listen to them because they are wealthy, powerful and represent a lot of people. Change threatens that. But change is what we need if we are to optimise the nation’s and planet’s resources – without over-exploiting them.

The Rudd Labor Government did not have a mandate to increase immigration. We have had a year of committees, targets and inquiries about its various election promises, but about the only thing it has actually done is increase immigration – something it did not mention in the campaign. In June it announced the intake would rise by 37,500 to 300,000.

As Australia’s leading demographer Bob Birrell, of Monash University, points out, there has been no discussion about this and its consequences for state governments struggling to deliver water, energy, transport, health and education to the existing population.

Rudd’s pitiful excuse for his weak greenhouse gas reduction program was that Australia’s population would grow by 45 per cent from 1990 to 2020. Well, it is an excuse of his own making.

He should be honest about the cost of the immigration policy and tell us that emission restrictions will have to be that much higher to keep out per-capita emissions in control.

Iit does not make sense to be trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time be bringing hundreds of thousands of people from lower emitting countries (UK in particular) to Australia where they will become higher emitting individuals.

Yes, we had a confluence of events this week: the ABS population figures and the greenhouse excuse. Unfortunately, it is not especially unusual. Most weeks in Australian politics in the past 30 years some policy has been announced without any reference to population, even though it is often a critical ingredient in the policy’s fate.