By Crispin Hull
This is the fourth in my four-part January series on how politicians adapt poorly to changing circumstances or policies that don't work. This week, I look at the related topics of infrastructure, population and environment, and briefly at defence.
(By the way, I have not touched on some major questions, particularly Indigenous affairs, in this series, mainly because I'm not across those matters and others have greater insight – for example, my colleague Jack Waterford on Indigenous affairs, refugees and "homeland security".)
The biggest circumstantial change in Australia in the past few decades has been population. In 1945, Australia had a population policy. It was populate or perish. Here was a wide open country that would welcome as many Europeans who wanted to come.
In the 1980s, we still had a population policy of sorts. Guilt-ridden over the madness of our participation in the Vietnam War, the Fraser government gave almost open slather to people fleeing the communist regime. Even in the late 1980s, we had a population policy of sorts that said we would accept Chinese (particularly students) in jeopardy because of the events in Tiananmen Square.
Many migrants come from countries where their skills are more needed than in Australia.Credit: Erin Jonasson
Since then, there has been no coherent policy on why we take people, why we take them from where they are, why we take the numbers we take and, more importantly, what is the optimum size of Australia's population.
Logically, if Australia's population grows at the rate it has grown for the past 20 years, in, say, 1000 years, there will not be enough room on the Australian land mass for the people to stand in. So, logically, at some point, we must say enough. The land cannot take any more.
In fact, we've gone well past that point already.
The good things in Australia are under threat. Nearly all of our ills come down to overpopulation. We can't keep up with infrastructure demands: congestion, hospital queues, crowded classrooms, stressed infrastructure everywhere.
The federal government just signs off on a migrant intake that has no basis in economic reality and certainly doesn't reflect the states' capacity to provide infrastructure for them.
It is cruel and heartless to refugees for the sole purpose of ensuring that voters don't turn against the industry-supported high immigration begun in the Howard years, when the annual intake rose from about 70,000 to more than 200,000 every year. With natural increase added, this means Australia must build the equivalent of a city Canberra's size every year, and growing.
There is no sense of direction about it. It seems as though the people who make money from more people – the housing and retail industry – urge the government on, and the government obeys. It seems we have high immigration because we've always had immigration, without questioning its basis afresh. Few realise that if all immigration stopped tomorrow Australia's population would still grow through natural increase.
There is also a moral imperative to limit economic immigration. At present, a large number of our economic migrants come from countries where their skills are more desperately needed than in Australia. We are depriving source countries of skills.
Australia must build the equivalent of a city Canberra's size every year.
The people profoundly affected by high population growth – those in congested traffic or waiting for a hospital bed – don't get a say.
A population increase of 2 per cent a year seems small. But it is catastrophically large if you consider the real burden. Most infrastructure lasts an average of 50 years (a bridge, a road surface, a hospital, a school). So just to keep up, you need to replace 2 per cent of it every year.
But if you increase the population by 2 per cent, you need to provide 2 per cent more infrastructure for them. In effect, a 2 per cent population growth means you must double your infrastructure effort.
We are quite mad in Australia to allow such high population growth.
The answer to Australia's infrastructure shortfall is not to spend more on supplying infrastructure, but to lower the demand by reducing immigration.
Housing estates are gobbling agricultural land. Water resources are stressed. And, of course, electricity networks are stressed.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
We can now segue into the environment more generally. As I mentioned earlier in this series, the federal government has been, and continues to be, paralysed on the biggest issue of all: climate change. It threatens the security of us all.
So instead of running fear campaigns against Muslims, African gangs, drugs and crime in general, we should campaign against the one thing we should fear most: climate change wreaking economic, social and human damage across the globe.
Malcolm Turnbull should stop scratching in the sandbox looking over his shoulder at the coal conservatives and do what the states, local governments, most corporations and many individuals are doing on electricity: going for renewables. It makes economic sense, even if you don't care about the environment.
More importantly, unless Australia fulfills its international agreements on reducing carbon emissions, it will be hit with trade sanctions. It's in our interest to abandon coal. We may have among the world's largest coal reserves, but we also have among the world's largest solar reserves and the highest percentage of households with solar cells on the roof.
We once led the world on solar power. We should have maintained the lead. We should not have abandoned the car industry. We should have transformed it to produce electric cars. The world can't get enough of them.
Worse, having abandoned the car industry, the Coalition realised it needed a replacement to keep control of its South Australian electorates. So it went with a massive military ship-building program to keep jobs in SA. Military spending, however, trickles down much less than commercial spending. And worse still, we are spending billions of dollars on the old technologies of manned submarines, fighter jets and warships when others are developing cheap missiles and drones that will make our assets so vulnerable as to be obsolete.
Our politicians seem incapable of seeing the white elephant in the room. Even if they saw it, they are, ironically, too paralysed by fear of an electoral backlash to do anything.
Yet the electorate is desperate for them to get on with it. May 2018 see a change of direction and some action.