‘Population Ponzi’ is no path to prosperity
THE next big battle for rational policy that adds value to Australia and individual Australians and not just dollars to the bottom lines and bank balances of developers, construction companies and assorted billionaires has to be over population.
Two years of the virus put Australia’s ‘Population Ponzi’ on hold – the idea that you could build a healthy and strongly growing economy on simply bringing more and more people into Melbourne and Sydney, every year, forever.
Yes, we got bigger aggregate growth in the economy, but we most certainly didn’t get quality growth, that actually improves the lives of ordinary Australians.
Quality growth is growth per head and so rising real after-tax incomes and living standards; and that only comes with productivity increases. That’s producing more out of the same amount of resources of labour used.
This ‘Population Ponzi’ built on property and people – plus the resources sector – has been lazy growth. It had also been making life in Melbourne and Sydney increasingly unpleasant before the pandemic.
The biggest negative is the pressure on infrastructure – on roads and public transport, on hospitals and schools, and so on.
It’s bad enough that you have to build more and more infrastructure just to essentially stand still. But you are also always trying to catch up – at any point in time, there’s less infrastructure relative to servicing not just the existing population but the new arrivals as well.
Ask yourself this question: Transurban’s toll roads and the few freeways that are left in Melbourne and Sydney might have more lanes than 10 or 20 years ago, but is driving on them any better?
Do you really think if we get to a future where Citylink in Melbourne had 20 lanes and the M4 and M5 in Sydney had, say, 16 lanes each, the cities would be wonderfully more liveable?
It was bad enough, prepandemic when we had allowed our immigration numbers to explode to the levels that we were bringing in ‘an Adelaide’ every five or six years. And then, having to build ‘an Adelaide’ every five or six years just to stand still. Now there’s pressure to hike the numbers to bringing in ‘a Brisbane’ every five years or so – to lift the intake from 250,0000 to 400,000 a year – to “catch up” for the pandemic hiatus. The latest push apparently comes from the top echelons of the NSW public service, trying to lockin the new premier Perrottet as he moved into the office. Ironically, just as Perrottet was showing a personal preference for what’s called “natural population growth”.
Just how a huge sustained surge in population would be at all compatible with trying to cut emissions to net zero is not explained. “Experts” tend not to do rationality, far less common sense.
The pandemic-driven immigration time-out should have provided the opportunity to do two things.
That’s to think about the quantity of people in and coming into Australia; and secondly, the quality of new arrivals. Yes, we need a significant immigration program. But 250k was too much and 400k would be insanity. I would suggest as a discussion starter a core of somewhere in the 50k to 100k range, with flexibility at the top end for skills needed and family reunions.
The issues around our permanent immigration program blur and blend into both temporary arrivals – broadly, back-backers – and education, mostly tertiary, which had been increasingly a backdoor to permanency.
Our universities and vocational (TAFEs) institutes had also become microcosms of the broader infrastructure degradation – overcrowding and plunging standards. But, true to both political and elite dynamics and interests, there’s been precious little to zero discussions about immigration numbers and make-up. We must demand the tap doesn’t get turned back on until there is.