The ACT’s population is growing faster than that of NSW, according to ABS figures released this week. It is an illustration of the principle that the conditions for any future population changes are by and large already set and there is not a great deal that anyone can do to alter them.
The best policy-makers can do is prepare for them.
Some of the changes in the long term are quite dramatic, especially when you look at the world picture. And that will have a large effect on Australia.
A lot of people see population as inexorably growing along a trajectory and that some radical measures are necessary if we are not to end up with one square metre per human and the whole environment of the planet ravaged beyond redemption.
In fact we are well and truly off that trajectory already. The peak rate of population growth (at 2.2 per cent) was in 1962-63. It is now 1.2 per cent and falling. Australia’s is higher at 1.4 per cent.
At peak population growth, the world’s population was doubling every 30 years. Guess what? The world’s population is equally capable of halving in 30 years.
We talk about the ageing population. But when those old fogeys start dropping off the perch and death rates exceed birth rates, the population can fall dramatically.
The way things are going in some low fertility countries like Italy and Spain, in 100 years their population will be just 12 per cent of what it is today. That’s right just 12 per cent. Other European countries face large, but less drastic declines. Unless, of course, they welcome in the masses from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
These trends were elucidated in a paper given by University of Tasmania demographer Dr Natalie Jackson this week to a seminar on Sustainability held by the ACT Planning and Land Authority.
In 100 years, Australia’s population will be just 60 per cent of what it is today – about 16 to 17 million.
The period 1750 to 2100 is one of demographic transition – from practical zero population growth through very high population growth back to zero population growth, or even reduction.
Up to 1750 the world was in the Malthusian trap. Until 1750 people did not live any better or longer lives than pre-historic humans on the Savannah. World population growth until then largely – such as it was — comprised moving into new territory, rather than in higher densities.
Any extra wealth was spent almost immediately on more children, many of whom died. Average incomes, calorie intake or life expectancy hardly moved – except for a period in the 14th century after the Black Death cut life expectancy and allowed incomes and standards of living for those left to rise in Europe for the first time in 300 years.
Then the Industrial Revolution hit. Better sanitation and health care cut infant mortality dramatically. Population doubled in less than 100 years and incomes rose six-fold in 150 years. But it took until the mid-1960s before humans could start controlling fertility. Then the rate of population growth collapsed.
The exponential growth has ceased. Exponential decline is almost an inevitability as more women in the developing world gain control of their fertility. Experience in the west shows that the vast majority of women simply do not want lots of children. And as their economic and educational position improves no one can force them to do so.
In Australia the fertility rate is 1.8 babies per female – not enough in the long-term to replace the population without immigration. But if Europe is heading for the very large population falls projected by Dr Jackson, the major sources of Australia’s skilled migration program will dry up.
You do not have a skills shortage purely because of a lack of training. It comes because fewer people enter the workforce and more leave. The cross-over is already happening in half of Australia’s jurisdictions.
And the answer long-term is not to try to grab the skilled people from elsewhere because the rest of the developed world will also have skills shortages combined with population falls. That will result in higher incomes for workers, easier housing and less strain on resources. There would be no incentive to leave for a better life elsewhere.
Europe will not have seen anything like it for 600 years – people wallowing in wealth left behind by the excess population that is dying off.
Programs like the ACT’s “Come and Live in Canberra” campaign will be helpless in the face of it.
Of more import will be to keep older people in the workforce and to improve the productivity of younger people in the workforce. It would be better to accept the inevitability of the ageing and then declining population.
Indeed, we should celebrate it because the naturally declining population might just start before the existing population has done irreparable environmental damage. Planetary destruction through over-population is not inevitable. To the contrary. Pardon the inapposite metaphor, but the seeds of decline have already been sown. The only question is whether the present generation is smart enough to hold the planet together while they bear fruit.
More prosaically at the ACT level, Dr Jackson has done some projections that the ACT Government might consider.
The only way Tuggeranong will keep the epithet Nappy Valley is if the nappies are for the elderly incontinent.
The whole of the ACT, like elsewhere will have large increases in the over 60s. But in Tuggeranong the population will fall in all age groups except the over-60s over the next 20 years. Tuggeranong is a long way from many of the health and other facilities in Canberra. It is also spread out – designed for young families. Hitherto, Gungahlin has dominated the discussion on things like light rail, employment and infrastructure. Perhaps Tuggeranong deserved more attention.
The trick for governments is to accept the inevitable population changes and plan to buffer against any adverse affects from them. And then celebrate that the end to remorseless and damaging population growth is in sight – even if not in our lifetimes.