Towards a population tipping point

As Australia’s overcrowded cities thrum with a quiet fury, in Canberra, no one wants to claim the elephant in the room.

‘People feel that Melbourne is jam-packed,’ says Victorian MP Margaret Fitzherbert.

In Australia’s largest cities, population growth is not a modelling exercise. It’s demountable classrooms stacked three high on what used to be a playground. It’s a peak-hour train that stops at a suburban station too full to pick up passengers. It’s the quiet, Falling Down fury of idling on a 100km/h freeway. It is something that ­jostles and frustrates. It is real and visceral.

In Australia’s federal government, population policy is not something you can see or touch. It doesn’t exist in name. It has no portfolio attached, no minister responsible. It’s a locked room filled with largely ignored reports all recommending the same thing, a room haunted by the ghosts of parliamentarians who grew old waiting for Australia to take complete charge of its future.

It’s a room Dean Smith unlocked this week. The Liberal senator whose understated advocacy and private member’s bill forced the government to finally resolve the question of same-sex marriage wrote to Malcolm Turnbull calling for a Senate inquiry into Australia’s population growth.

A population inquiry is politically unwelcome in what may be an election year. A national conversation about population and all that entails — who should come here, where they should settle, what jobs they should do, what we want our nation to look like in 10, 20 and 30 years’ time and what we need to build to accommodate that future — will not easily reach agreement. It won’t deliver votes. It will divide the Liberal partyroom.

Yet, in the absence of a population policy, a policy Australia has not had since the Whitlam government dumped a longstanding 2 per cent growth target set at the end of World War II, we are “walking in the dark”, says Smith. We can argue about immigration levels, we can bemoan the failure to deliver infrastructure apace with population growth, we can lay blame at the feet of the hapless city planner. While we pick at these pieces, who is looking at the whole? “You don’t go out and buy furniture if you haven’t worked out what the plan of your house is,’’ says Steve Vizard.

Vizard tried to make the case for a national population policy 15 years ago. Back then, he was an influential figure in Melbourne with a seat on the board of some of the city’s most important cultural, business and civic institutions. He enlisted a couple of former prime ministers in Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser, a premier in Steve Bracks, business titans such as like Richard Pratt, and union and community leaders. They held a summit. They found common ground. They declared population the most important unaddressed issue facing the nation.

“If there was a takeaway ­message it was really simple,’’ Vizard tells The Weekend Australian. “The absence of policy doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it means you are doing it badly. Take control of it. Get a population policy. Don’t put your head in the sand.’’

This has been the refrain since Barry Jones was a minister in the Hawke government. Late last century, back when political horizons extended beyond the next Newspoll, Jones chaired the long-term strategies committee of the House of Representatives.

One of the policy areas it examined was population. This is what it concluded in a 1994 report: “In the committee’s opinion it is essential that governments of whatever political persuasion understand that establishing a population policy is a primary goal and that setting immigration levels is a secondary consequence of the population goal. The cart must not be placed before the horse, making population merely an undefined, inexplicit consequence of immigration policy.’’

The report called for establishing a cabinet committee on population that would include the treasurer and the ministers for foreign affairs, finance, trade, immigration, ethnic affairs and the environment. “The Australian government should adopt a population policy which explicitly sets out options for long-term population change, in preference to the existing situation where a de facto population emerges as a consequence of year-by-year decisions on immigration.’’

If you skim through the findings of a productivity report published 22 years later, it is remarkable how little has changed. The 2016 report, titled Migrant Intake into Australia, found immigration policy was our de facto population policy. It recommended that the Australian government should “develop and articulate a population policy”.

Barry Jones and Productivity Commissioner Paul Lindwall, one of the co-authors of the 2016 report, contacted Dean Smith this week. “I wish him well,’’ says Jones, a driving intellect within the Hawke and Keating governments who laments the lack of long-term thinking in contemporary politics.

The default setting in Australia politics when confronted with questions about population is to talk about immigration. This was on display this week from the Prime Minister, from Bill Shorten, and from Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. Within hours of Smith putting population on the national agenda, each reverted to narrow arguments about the skilled-migrant intake, border protection and work being done by a large and largely unregulated temporary migrant population.

This isn’t surprising. Net overseas migration last year accounted for 62 per cent of Australia’s annual population growth. That’s an additional 240,400 people who all need somewhere to live, a seat on the train, a car on the road and ­access to schools for their children and hospitals when family members get ill. This isn’t the full story, however.

Although overseas arrivals are by far the single biggest driver of population growth in greater Melbourne and Sydney, nearly two-thirds of Brisbane’s additional population last year came from births and people arriving from other states. In Cranbourne East, Australia’s fastest-growing local area at the end of Melbourne’s sandbelt sprawl, 85 per cent of new arrivals were people who’d shifted from other parts of Melbourne and Australia. Across town in Tarneit, another growth hotspot, 903 babies were born. If those families all stay put, that’s enough to fill two new primary schools.

These statistics tell us about population growth that has already happened. University of NSW professor Bill Randolph, the director of the City Futures Research Centre, says we are missing something more critical.

“It’s not that we don’t have a migration policy or a population-growth policy at a general level, it’s that we simply don’t have a policy to deal with it on the ground. Without doubt, immigration pressure is going to continue in Australia for all sorts of reasons, not the least because it is a great place to work and bring up your kids. We don’t have a national strategy to deal with how we allocate migrants on the ground and fund the infrastructure that needs to go along with population growth.

“There is a real issue that our cities are becoming unaffordable and not liveable places for ordinary families. Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are great places but they are starting to choke on their own success.’’

The simplest solution, one proposed by Tony Abbott and supported by an unlikely and very loose coalition — Bob Carr, demographer Bob Birrell, environmentalist Tim Flannery and entrepreneur Dick Smith — is to dramatically cut immigration until we figure things out.

This would be popular, at least in the short term. This week’s Newspoll showed nearly three-quarters of respondents supported a reduced intake. It would be fiercely opposed by businesses that rely on imported skills, our tertiary and vocational sectors, which survive on international students, and political leaders and business lobbies in South Australia and Tasmania and regional centres, where more people are desperately needed.

It would also be fraught. “You can’t turn the tap off,’’ says Randolph. “This stuff is interrelated and complex. Any drastic movement either way is going to have implications down the track which are going to be difficult to understand.’’

In the absence of a national population policy, it is left to state and local governments to best guess what their part of Australia is going to look like a generation from now. Across this fragmented planning, Infrastructure Australia is tasked with identifying the things that most need to be built and prioritising them for government. It is no coincidence that IA has lobbied Canberra, albeit without success, to fill in the gaps by developing a population policy.

The Victorian opposition, which hopes to regain government in Australia’s fastest-growing state in November, has spent the past year developing a stand-alone population policy. The Liberal MP responsible, Margaret Fitzherbert, says Victoria can’t ­afford to wait for Canberra and the other states to act. “People feel that Melbourne is jampacked,’’ she says. “You see this in schools, you see it in hospitals, you see it on trams and on trains. Everyone bumps up against this in their everyday life in ways that affect them in very practical ways. It’s not a hypothetical or theoretical discussion.’’

The Planning Institute of Australia, an organisation that represents professional planners, will next month issue a formal call for the federal government to develop a national settlement strategy — a population policy by another name. PIA principal policy officer John Brockhoff says this is an essential starting point if Australia is to best shape our ­future population, preserve the liveability of our biggest cities and encourage regional growth.

“We are very aware that no one across the country has a bird’s-eye view of how growth is affecting cities and regions across Australia looking out 20 years and beyond,’’ he says. “As planners we are seeing there is some sort of tipping point that we are approaching in terms of declining liveability in our major cities.’’

Vizard says the great frustration of the population debate is the surfeit of data and absence of political will. He says the Intergenerational Report, a detailed, long-term forecast produced every five years at the initiative of former Liberal federal treasurer Peter Costello, is like a diet we never go on.

“Humanity has a way of addressing the issues,’’ he says. “They either address it in a farsighted way and avoid problems or, alternatively, they will address it in a crisis, when there is a breach, a rupture, when things go wrong, when infrastructure is pushed to the limit, when the standard of living drops, when the healthcare system breaks.

“That might not be tomorrow but there will be a point.’’

If the highest population projections from the Australian Bureau of Statistics are realised, our size will double to almost 50 million over the next 30 years. The devil is not this number but where new arrivals are forecast to live. According to the ABS, three out of four will settle in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. If so, Melbourne and Sydney will become megacities of 10 million people. Brockhoff says this is being driven by an economic transformation beyond anyone’s control.

“The trajectory of our workforce is that more people are going to be employed in the service economy. The characteristics of that economy are going to encourage agglomeration: people clustering together. We all agree that it is a positive to have regional growth and balanced growth outside two or three megacities. At the same time, we don’t want goldplating of regional growth schemes that won’t be able to push against the tide. That’s why a ­national settlement strategy that understands those nuances is ­important.’’

Don’t imagine these nuances are beyond the grasp of the Prime Minister. Turnbull is a cities-­policy wonk. He has written about population issues. He was water minister at the height of the drought, when water was a key constraint on Australia’s population capacity. He lives in one of Australia’s highest-density postcodes. Anything he doesn’t know about population he can find out without leaving his kitchen table. Lucy Turnbull, the chief commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission, was a member of the expert advisory panel that assisted a COAG cities review in 2012. It’s finding: “Australia is at a watershed point for its capital cities and their strategic planning.’’

A national population policy falls squarely into what Turnbull promised back in 2015 when he talked about “a style of leadership that respects the people’s intelligence, that explains these complex issues and then sets a course of ­action”.

For now, Smith’s best hope is more modest: for the Senate to be left to do important and overdue work, unmolested by the next election.