The " Population " Question !

We have just ticked over twenty-five million people who call Australia home.  In today's world that is a very small population to be the sole occupier of a vast continent.  A huge proportion of those numbers reside in five major cities and the population numbers are becoming greater on the eastern shore of this Australian landmass.

A lot of the things we hope to achieve are directly geared to population numbers.  We only recently achieved a divided carriageway dual lane road linking Sydney and Melbourne and those capitals are only a little over a thousand kilometres apart.  Much of the other centres within Victoria and New South Wales are served by virtual horse and buggy era roads - a single lane each way - and many are even yet to get a blacktop seal.

It all comes down to the tax base that funds these types of improvements and we are just spread too thinly for those tax dollars to deliver the world of our dreams.  We are also questioning the inward flow of migrants and there is strong pressure from some residents for that flow to be curbed.   We live in a world where millions of people have been displaced by war and tribal friction and many live in refugee camps.  Australia is high on the hope of becoming their future home.

If we seriously reduce our migrant intake, this country will stagnate.  Migrants arrive here with virtually the clothes on their back and they need to innovate to survive.  We have only to look to America in the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds when they opened the doors to the poor of Europe to see a country that quickly became the world leader in innovation, but that surge of progress also comes with change.  New arrivals bring a change of tempo and we absorb new customs, it is inevitable that they bring a surge in criminal activity and there is the usual problems of language and housing to be overcome.

Australia was most prosperous during the gold rush days of the eighteen hundreds, and then the Brit/European surge after the end of the second world war.   This migrant surge changed to the arrival of the " boat people " after the end of the Vietnam war and it is remarkable how our new Asian arrivals have settled peacefully and profitably into our economy.

A long time ago we adopted that " populate or perish " mantra because we were threatened with invasion.  We live in a troubled world and it is doubtful if our small population can defend this country from the pressures that will build in the future.   We are heading into an overcrowded world and the movement of people may become unstoppable.

We need to decide what sort of population numbers we need to turn Australia into a defensible and prosperous country, and decide how we will manage that situation.  We live in an ever changing nation and that change has been beneficial.  The worst decision we could make would be to close down immigration and decide to freeze Australia in its present time frame.

The past is something we remember with fondness.   The present is a contradiction because the decisions we make now will dictate the future.   The future has immense promise or the threat of disaster, depending on the wisdom we show today !