The population debate we have to have

The biggest driver of our growth isn’t migrants or people having babies. It’s people coming here temporarily and not going home.

Sustainable Australia president William Bourke: ‘We are seeing that volcano start to erupt again’. Picture: Hollie Adams

On Tuesday, shortly after 11pm, Australia’s population will reach 25 million. Once, a milestone such as this would have been marked by a new arrival in a maternity ward, a grinning politician on hand to celebrate a joyous, auspicious birth. Instead, our 25 millionth person most likely will arrive at one of our big city airports, on a student visa, without fanfare, and not a parliamentarian in sight.

Whether our population in fact reaches 25 million at the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ appointed time is a moot point.

The one constant of population projections is they underestimate the speed at which Australia is growing. We will reach 25 million people a generation before anyone thought we would, uncertain about how we will manage a population of this size and increasingly unconvinced it is a good thing.

In 2002, immigration minister Philip Ruddock announced a dramatic expansion of our migration program. For the next four years, skilled places would be boosted to more than 60,000 and the total annual migration intake increased to more than 100,000. Ruddock said the program would be a “central contributor” to Australia’s economic and social development and would put the nation on a trajectory to reach a population of 25 million by 2040.

The reason we are 22 years ahead of schedule was made clear by ABS data released a week ago. Every one minute and 42 seconds, a baby is born in Australia. Every three minutes and 16 seconds, someone dies. Every minute and one second, someone comes to Australia to live. Every one minute and 51 seconds, someone leaves.

In the 2016-17 financial year, our population grew two ways: by 152,600 naturally and by 262,488 from net overseas migration. The biggest group is people coming here on temporary visas to study, work and travel.

In the year when more than 150,000 foreign students came to Australia, fewer than 50,000 left. Of 72,000 people who came to “visit”, only 18,000 people went home. The biggest driver of population growth isn’t people having babies and it isn’t our permanent migrant intake, which includes refugees. It’s people coming here temporarily and not going home.

The impact of population growth is felt by everyone who lives in Sydney, Melbourne and, increasingly, Brisbane and Perth. Unaffordable housing; overcrowded trains; gridlocked roads; waiting lists for childcare places and elective surgery; finding a park; queuing at the supermarket checkout: the cumulative effect is a feeling of being pressed for time and cramped for space, a collective tightness of breath.

National Australia Bank chairman Ken Henry, who a decade ago made clear his concerns about our population, says a sensible conversation is due.

“It’s time for a well-informed dialogue about the current challenges and future opportunities of population growth,” Henry tells Inquirer. “While there is strong support amongst business for population growth, a driver of economic growth, the broader community is, rightly, concerned about job security, housing affordability, congestion in our cities, worsening environmental pressures, as well as access to quality transport services, water, energy, healthcare and education.

“Policymakers have been aware of Australia having a relatively high rate of population growth for many years. And it has been even faster than projected.

“Infrastructure planning is better than it was a decade ago, but it is going to have to lift to a much higher level if we are to make a success of the next few decades of growth. It is sobering to realise that we will have to build the equivalent of a whole new city of Melbourne once in the next decade, and then do that twice again by mid-century. I’m cautiously optimistic about Australia’s future, but it can’t be taken for granted.”

Such a conversation will not be easy. For 20 years, since Pauline Hanson was elected to parliament and spoke against Asian immigration, the population debate has been banished to the fringes of Australia’s political discourse.

On the extreme Right, those obsessed with the racial make-up of our new arrivals, those fearful of Islam and the “f..k off we’re full” crowd have openly prosecuted an anti-immigration agenda. On the hard Left, small Australia conservationists have sparred with open-border activists fixated on Australia’s refugee intake.

Infrastructure Australia founding chairman Rod Eddington says the debate needs to shift into the political centre.

He says: “The immigration question has always been a difficult one to have a rational debate around. At one extreme, there are people who would say build fences on the borders and don’t let anyone in. At the other end is the ­humanitarian view that says we should be open to anyone who wants to come.

“The problems in the big cities, the shortfall in infrastructure, aren’t just a function of immigration policy (but) a function of substantive changes in Australian lifestyles; the move from the country into the city and the move from the outer to the inner suburbs.

“If we are going to have a debate about the nature of our cities, where most of us live, we need to have a whole of issues ­debate.

“We need an honest national conversation about what being part of Asia means in economic terms, and about our national economy, and what people movements in and out mean to the economy. It needs to be a conversation that is evidence-based, a conversation not driven by prejudice, one way or the other. We need to understand the economic benefits of being open and the challenges that come with it, including the pressure it places on infrastructure. We are probably closer to being able to have that conversation today.”

Sustainable Australia president William Bourke has been trying to get this conversation started for 10 years. The vagaries of the population debate are illustrated by two speeches delivered five days apart in October 2009. The first was by Henry, then secretary to the Treasury. The second was by prime minister Kevin Rudd. They were informed by the same economic and demographic information, delivered to similar audiences and by the smartest men in the room. Their conclusions on population couldn’t have been more different.

Henry said Australia’s rapid population growth raised several profound issues for economic policy. Where would the extra people live, he asked. What jobs will they do? How will our big cities cope? Did we have enough water to sustain a big Australia? What would it mean for our environment? On the last question, Henry was pessimistic. “Our record has been poor and in my view we are not well placed to deal effectively with the environmental challenges posed by a population of 35 million.” We will know soon enough.

Rudd had no such qualms. While he conceded that managing population growth would be challenging, he restated his belief in a big Australia. “This is good for our national security. Good for our long-term prosperity. Good in enhancing our role in the region and the world. The time to prepare for this big Australia is now.”

Bourke tells Inquirer Rudd’s speech prompted him to form Sustainable Australia, or Sustainable Population Party, as it was called. The aim of the party, he says, is to tackle population growth from the centre.

A business graduate who grew up in Mount Waverley, a Melbourne suburb once home to big, sloping blocks and open spaces, Bourke describes himself as a practical conservationist.

“We have stuck to our guns over the best part of a decade to try to get this issue front of mind,’’ he says. “It bubbles along, a bit like a volcano, and then all of a sudden, activity increases. We are seeing that volcano start to erupt again around this critical milestone of 25 million. You have got to tell people why it matters and that has been a big problem in the political sense because we have had Pauline Hanson talking about immigration in relation to ethnicity, race and religion, and the Liberal Party doing similar things on a milder basis. It has poisoned the well for people like us to talk about population from an economic and environmental point of view.”

Sustainable Australia is preparing to field candidates for the first time in state elections, this year in Victoria and next year in NSW. The focus of its campaign will be the densification of suburbs such as Crows Nest in Sydney, where residents fear losing their low-rise neighbourhood to developers intent on replicating the high-rise skyline of neighbouring St Leonards. In Victoria, two of the party’s prospective candidates are former mayors of well-to-do shires, Bayside and Mornington Peninsula, each motivated by concerns over suburban development.

Clifford Hayes, a 66-year-old film and television script writer, never planned on entering politics. That changed about 12 years ago when he saw the plans for a four-storey development over the back fence of his mum’s place in North Brighton. When he went to council to investigate, he discovered the entire suburb had been designated as one of 25 “activity centres” slated for higher-density development under the state govern­ment’s planning blueprint, Mel­bourne 2030. He lost the battle against the developers but took a bigger fight to Bayside council, where he later served as mayor.

“I started to tune in to how fast the population is increasing all the time,” he says. “Melbourne is growing at 2000 people a week. The development industry very much supports the growth. So do the big banks and the retailers. But it presents such a huge problem for planning and infrastructure.

“We are starting to pay the price. People are starting to realise what it is doing to the city. (People are) starting to connect the dots now; that the problem really is population growth driven by very high immigration numbers.”

Australia’s population imperative is neatly illustrated in our terms of trade. Last year, our five top export earners were iron ore, coal, education, natural gas and tourism. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says education and tourism exports last year were worth a combined $51.5 billion. When we talk about education and tourism as exports, it means bringing people here.

As far as our biggest exports go, Australia does just two things: we ship non-renewable resources overseas and we bring overseas people here. Population growth, meanwhile, underpins the property market and the stamp duty revenue of state governments.

The federal government has not willingly put population on the national agenda. Neither has Bill Shorten’s Labor opposition, which remains committed to a large immigration program. The Greens, a party that abandoned its previous policy of zero net migration for fear of being lumped with Hansonism, is hopelessly conflicted. Within this leadership vacuum it was Dean Smith, the Liberals’ ­patron MP for inconvenient causes, who wrote to Malcolm Turnbull requesting an inquiry into Australia’s population growth.

Smith was conveying the concerns of his West Australian constituency but, if recent Newspolls are a reliable guide, those concerns are held nationally. In April, 56 per cent of respondents agreed immigration was too high. Last month, 72 per cent backed the government’s tightening of the permanent migrant intake. Bob Birrell, president of the Australian Population Research Institute and an advocate for reduced immigration, says the poll results are a “fundamental breakthrough” in the population debate.

“This is a tipping point but it can have a significant policy outcome only if it becomes part of political bargaining,” Birrell says.

“Hitherto, we have had bipartisan agreement on high migration. The only significant breakthrough, apart from One Nation, has been Dutton’s solo effort.”

Peter Dutton’s solo effort, as Birrell describes it, are the changes to the old 457 visas announced last April by the Home Affairs Minister. Those changes came into effect in March. The government scrapped the temporary 457 visa previously granted to migrant workers to fill skill shortages.

A new temporary skill visa, known as a TSS, allows a migrant worker to stay in Australia for between two and four years. To be granted one, applicants need to show they have worked for two years’ in the occupation for which they are being sponsored. TSS visa holders filling short-term skill shortages can no longer apply for permanent residency. That pathway is limited to migrants sponsored for jobs on the “medium and long-term strategic skills list”, a more select list of ­occupations.

Birrell says the twin change — requiring two years’ work experience and severing the link between short-term skill shortages and permanent residency — is ­already having a significant impact on the flow of temporary migrants to Australia.

He says it has blocked a citizenship avenue previously used by foreign students who would arrive in Australia on a student visa, switch to a 457 visa, then apply for permanent residency.

“Those changes that the ­Coalition introduced are going to have a continuing and deepening impact without any further legislative change,” he says.

Bourke says despite these changes, the overseas student market is still in need of reform.

“In the 90s, my parents had many foreign students from Asia come and stay with us,” he says. “They all had a great three, six or 12-month experience in Australia and went home. When John Howard deregulated (the student intake), it turned into a commodity for much poorer foreign students to come and work here and get permanent residency.

“Do we want an education system that educates and is topped up by quality international students or do we want an education system that is prostituted towards selling permanent residency to people who are looking for a better life?”

Population isn’t a problem that will wait for people to solve it. In 2016-17, 539,000 people came to Australia, 276,000 people left and 377,000 people shifted interstate. That’s 1.2 million people, a city the size of greater Adelaide, on the move in a single year.

The proposed solutions are largely unchanged from a decade ago: economic development in country towns, and fast, intercity rail links to ease the pressure on our biggest cities and create new ones; better transport infrastructure in our big cities to ease the movement of people and goods; smarter use of energy and water; in-fill developments instead of sprawl. Henry says: “With proper planning and investment in infrastructure, this growth can be a positive for our economy and for our communities.

“There needs to be a greater focus on the opportunities for rural and regional Australia, and how we will develop well-connected, affordable cities that offer access to quality jobs, lifestyle amenities, education and essential services.”