“You have to ask yourself what’s so good about rapid population growth. And it’s not good enough to say it makes the economy grow faster. From a narrow materialistic point of view, immigration-fed growth in the economy is good only if it raises the real average incomes of the pre-existing population”

Syndey Morning Herald

Let’s think twice about growth by immigration

SO YOU think Australia has escaped a ”technical” recession? Actually, if you look at what’s happened to real gross domestic product per person, you’ll see it has fallen in three of the past five quarters. Over the past 15 months, it has contracted by 1.5 per cent.

In other words, remarkably rapid growth in Australia’s population has been a little acknowledged factor helping to hold up the economy, along with interest rate and budgetary stimulus and growth in the volume of exports.

We learnt last week that, in the year to March, our population grew by 2.1 per cent, its fastest in almost 40 years.

Although our low birth rate is up a little, almost two-thirds of that growth came from net immigration. This net inflow of almost 280,000 people is 20 per cent higher than the previous record year and several times the level that has been typical until relatively recently.

It puts Australia among the fastest growing developed countries. And when Treasury plugged a much higher level of immigration into its projections for 2050, it foresaw a population of 35 million, 6.5 million more than it was expecting just three years ago…

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