Should Australia sextuple its population ASAP?

Why the Big Australia dreams of business journalists will never die

Photo by Steven Wei on Unsplash

Even I’m beginning to get sick of discussing mass migration, so I promise I’ll leave the subject alone for a while after this. But two intriguing articles published today have forced my hand.

One billion Americans, 150 million Australians 
There was an article calling for a ‘Big Australia’, in today’s AFR (27/7/23). This is hardly newsworthy; there’s an article in the AFR calling for a Big Australia most days. Just as I imagine there are regularly articles calling for a ‘Bigger UK’ in the Financial Times and ones calling for an ‘Enormous America’ in the Wall Street Journal.

What made this article stand out was the author’s suggestion that Australia should aim to sextuple its population to 150 million. Though he doesn’t reference it in his article, I suspect AFR Senior Correspondent Jacob Greber was, shall we say, inspired by a recent Matthew Yglesias book titled One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.

You can find the book here, but the tl;dr version is that the US should triple its population because (a) it’s currently not that densely populated compared to many Asian and European nations and (b) it will help shore up the US’s geopolitical heft, ensuring it doesn’t get its lunch eaten by China.

(It should be noted that Yglesias isn’t a corporate shill and recognises that turbocharged immigration would necessitate huge investments in housing and infrastructure, as well as increased social spending on things such as childcare.)  

Anyway, where Yglesias settles for a softcock 3Xing of his nation’s population, the bolder Greber demands a 6Xing of his. Perhaps recognising this is a minority opinion, Greber devotes the first part of his article to plucky “Malaysian-born entrepreneur Maha Sinnathamby”, who has built “Australia’s first privately constructed city” in some godforsaken part of Queensland.

The inference seems to be that Australians, who are increasingly struggling to meet their mortgage and rent payments, shouldn’t worry about migrants because, more likely than not, they will build thousands of residences for every one they occupy.

Unless Australia only allows property developers to immigrate from now on (a genuinely horrifying prospect), I’m not sure the Sinnathamby case study will reassure too many Australians that they have nothing to fear from throwing open the floodgates.

The case for immigration
To be fair to Greber and his fellow immigration enthusiasts, there are some respectable arguments for a big country with a small, ageing population and worryingly uncomplex economy to bulk up.   

I’ll share Gerber’s arguments below, with my snarky commentary underneath.

Greber: Official numbers show there were about seven workers supporting each pensioner in 1975. Today, the number has shrunk to four, and there are predictions that will halve again by 2060.

Me: Ah, the old Ponzi scheme ‘young migrants will look after the ageing natives’ argument. This is undoubtedly true in the short term, but – as I assume even open-border aficionados acknowledge – new Australians are as subject to the ageing process as long-established ones. What do we do when the 125 million youthful migrants we’ve imported start to get old? Bring in 1.25 billion new migrants to support them? Also, a lot of work is likely to be automated away in the coming years. So, the idea you need to bring in tens of millions of ‘factory fodder’ migrants to keep the aged care homes, hospitals, shops and restaurants staffed is very much open to debate.

Greber: Imagine for a moment the population was more than five times larger than today, at 150 million…  Australia’s economy would have transformed from a remote global supplier of dirt and energy into a diversified powerhouse.

Alongside a vast consumer base, the country would have broadened local manufacturing, seen its enormous superannuation savings form the core of a deep and liquid global capital market, and confirmed its geostrategic heft as one of the primary defenders of western democracy in the Indo-Pacific. Nobody invades countries with militaries backed by a tax base of more than 100 million people.

“With population comes scale, and scale is a tremendously positive economic force,” says economist Steven Hamilton. “The reason Australia does not have a car industry is not because there’s something about Australia that is unusual or that cars are cheaper to build in China. It’s that Australia does not have the scale to support a car industry.”

Me: I’ll concede Greber is right about Australia having a lot more “geostrategic heft” with a larger population. The idea that Australia will magically transform into a combination of Japan, Germany and Switzerland if it has a larger population is more questionable.

Isn’t it just possible that Australia still won’t be able to have a car industry if its population is 150 million, or even 300 million? (Possibly for the very reasons the AFR is constantly working itself into a lather over, such as a Soviet-style industrial relations regime that putatively crushes the dreams of any would-be or extant businessperson?) And with all due respect to Professor Hamilton, is it possible that there is something about Australia besides its relatively small population that makes creating a viable car industry difficult? After all, there are only 10 million Swedes and they don’t seem to be having much trouble churning out the Volvos and Saabs.  

Greber: Do you want to be a part of some pissant country nobody respects or is much interested in? Or would you like to be a citizen of a serious nation?

Actually, that’s my paraphrasing. Here’s how Greber, quoting the ever-ambitious Kevin Rudd, rather more diplomatically puts it: 

Kevin Rudd triggered the last true “big Australia” debate in 2009, when he suggested it was “good news that our population is growing”… Rudd’s remarks set off a fierce backlash in the suburbs and big cities, where decades of under-investment in infrastructure have hampered growth; worsening amenity, living standards and equality…

“I do not believe we can safely guarantee the nation’s future in this deeply uncertain world unless we become much bigger than we are,” Rudd wrote in his 2021 book The Case for Courage. “Precisely how much bigger will be a matter for detailed research on what we will need for our future national capacity, although a figure of 50 million people should be within our reach for the second half of the century. That would begin to place Australia in the same league as France, the United Kingdom and, in time, Germany.”

Me: Can I offer a modest proposal? How about governments – with the full-throated support of organs such as the AFR, of course – sort out the “decades of under-investment in infrastructure” before importing 125 million people? At a bare minimum, could we please have some 1:1 arrangement with housing? That is, if governments bring in, say, 500,000 migrants a year, they are compelled to guarantee that housing sufficient to accommodate half-a-million new Australians is built annually.  

And if we’re really going to push the boat out, maybe governments could look into the “worsening amenity, living standards and equality” side of things too? (I’m just brainstorming here, but is it remotely possible that issues such as housing unaffordability and the pauperisation of the middle class aren’t solely down to a failure to bring in enough migrants?)

Look, I’m not even arguing that those cosmopolitan, globalist Australians who feel ashamed that Australia isn’t as big, powerful or interesting as other nations have to continue to suffer in silence. After all, they always have the option to go live in the US, as Kevin Rudd did shortly after leaving politics. Migration goes both ways!  

The case against migration
To be fair to Greber, he does concede most Australians feel aggrieved about another 1.5 million migrants turning up over the next five years and are in no mood to countenance 125 million people arriving in the coming decades. And he even acknowledges that there might be reasons other than xenophobia and racism that Australians are far less enthused about migration than university vice-chancellors, property developers, employers and AFR journalists. If you’ve got a subscription, his article is well worth a read.

But I want to conclude by examining another article published on the same day as Greber’s. In The Australian, Peta Credlin asserted ‘It’s not racist to debate immigration levels’. Once again, I’ll provide some money quotes and accompanying commentary.

Credlin: “For the record, my view is that current levels of immigration (tipped to be 750,000 over two years) are much too high. Even the levels of the decade before the pandemic (averaging 240,000 a year) were too high, not because those migrants wouldn’t turn out to be good Australians but because bringing in a city the size of Canberra every two years puts downward pressure on wage rates, upward pressure on housing costs and massive pressure on infrastructure. And none of this is being done according to any cogent plan.”

Me: Preach, sister!  

Credlin: Like just about every Australian, I’m pro-immigration. How could we not be, given nearly all of us are migrants or the descendants of relatively recent migrants? Yet being pro-immigrant and appreciating all the ways immigration has created modern Australia doesn’t imply that immigration levels should always be going up.

Me: Yep.

Credlin: Meanwhile, as economic reform stalled, Treasury economists pushed ever higher migration as a way for reform-shy governments to keep delivering economic growth. I will never forget sitting in a discussion with senior ministers hearing Treasury officials explain that the best way to get economic growth over 3 per cent was to boost immigration because each extra worker added to the size of the economy…

In early 2018, when the former prime minister Tony Abbott called for immigration to be halved back to the average of the Howard years, treasurer Scott Morrison claimed this would cost the budget $5bn due to reduced tax revenue…

For the federal government, at least, higher migration and its boost to overall GDP provides an apparent vindication of its economic management while its costs in extra demand for schools, hospitals, housing and transport infrastructure fall disproportionately on the states.

But what does that matter for a federal government desperate to avoid slow growth on its watch or, god forbid, a recession – officially two consecutive quarters of negative GDP – even if growth per capita is heading south?

Me: There’s the rub. Politicians are overwhelmingly judged on the state of the economy. Given the incentive structure voters have given them, you can hardly blame them for loosening the migration spigot to ensure the GDP growth figures continue to look healthy.

Throughout the Anglosphere and Western Europe, ordinary people have had high levels of immigration imposed on them from above by business, political and, more recently, cultural elites. But they are not entirely blameless, given they have continued to reward politicians who appear to be delivering economic growth while not paying much attention to how that “growth” is achieved and whether it ultimately improves their lives.  

Playing the racism card
Credlin ends her article by quoting a survey of 3000 Australians conducted by demographer Dr Katharine Betts of the Australian Population Research Institute. (Not, I imagine, a hotbed of white supremacists.)

The survey found “70 per cent of those surveyed believed Australia should have ‘somewhat lower’, ‘much lower’ or ‘nil’ levels of net migration… [but] this strong majority is rarely heard in public debate and has almost no impact on public policy”.

Most survey respondents believed raising “questions about immigration being too high” was inviting allegations of racism. A minority – about one in five – of survey respondents, who Betts termed “guardians against racism”, did view raising questions about immigration as racist. What characteristics did these anti-racism crusaders share? According to Betts, they “felt disproportionately more free to talk about their views,” and tended to be “younger, better educated and more financially secure than other voters”.

If you didn’t know any better, you might conclude that those most in favour of high immigration are those most likely to enjoy most of its benefits and be able to dodge most of its costs.