Experts warn Australia's optimal population size is just 15 million amid high immigration rates

Australian Population Growth — Shoppers sit in seats inside a shopping mall in Sydney, Australia, February 19, 2016. Reuters/David Gray

Aussies continue to go backwards on several measures of well-being and income amid high immigration rates. Academics argue that the nation’s population must be far lower than the current figures as the optimal population size for Australia is only 15 million.

This was stated by environmental experts James Ward and Peter Martin from the University of South Australia and University of Denver’s Paul Sutton. They explained that genuine progress in Australia peaked 40 years ago, but the nation’s level of well-being has dropped despite population and economic growth seen in recent decades.

About 24.1 million people currently reside in Australia. At a rate of about 1.7 percent annually, it has the highest rate of population growth among all medium and large OECD countries. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth have seen over three quarters of the growth.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is usually used to measure economic health. However, they have decided to utilise an alternative measure called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which factors in several things GDP calculations does not include such as water pollution and carbon dioxide emissions as well as the quality of education, value of household work, parenting and occurrence of car crashes.

Martin, Ward and Sutton all agreed it was heading to a crunch point. They said it is often thought that the nation’s consumption pattern is what matters when dealing with environmental impact, rather than the size of the population.

“But common sense, not to mention the laws of physics, says that size and scale matter, especially on a finite planet,” they wrote in an article published in The Conversation. They also pointed that “unnecessary, ideologically-driven growth” has come at “an immense and unjustifiable cost to our natural and social capital.”

For Australian National University’s Liz Allen, the country needs a formal population policy. She said that natural increase no longer drives Australia’s population with low birth rate and increasing deaths.

Immigration is more relied on to counterbalance the ageing of the workforce. News.com.au notes that more than half of the nation’s population growth is from net overseas migration.

Planning expert Glen Searle called the country a “hostage to the growth machine” and noted that cities in Australia have less green open space. “In attempts to reduce the costs of new infrastructure to meet the needs of increasing populations, [the] average housing block size has been reduced,” news.com.au quotes him as saying.

Lack of regulation makes Australia an 'attractive target for money launderers': ANZ