More people in an ailing infrastructure won't make a big country

 Straight from the Source

THE key to quality of life for Australian families and communities during the coming four decades is not a population of 36 million, as Kevin Rudd advocates, but carefully managed sustainable growth. A random declaration of bigness is no substitute for a planned vision of a sustainable Australia.

This country's future is about productivity and sustainability, not population.

The starting point for any discussion of population, growth and sustainability rests on three principles: first, there has been a long-term consensus that Australia could sustain a population of 29 million by 2050.

That consensus,  was shattered when the Prime Minister unilaterally decided that he believed in a Big Australia with a population of 36 million.

In reality, 29 million as a starting point for 2050, knowing that we will increase further by the end of the century, is already a Big Australia. Rudd's imposed vision of 36 million is in fact a Bloody Big Australia. The debate should not be about growth but about the sustainable rate of growth.

Let us therefore regain national consensus on sustainable growth by beginning with 29 million as a starting point for discussion of our rates of growth.

Of course evidence that we have properly planned for our water and transport needs could lift this figure significantly, but the starting point must be the question that Singapore has asked itself: What is sustainable and desirable for quality of life?

If Rudd wants to move beyond that figure he should explain why he has unilaterally abandoned the long-term consensus.

Second, the key to growth in gross domestic product per capita - or our individual and collective wellbeing - is productivity and infrastructure, not raw numbers.

The central reason behind the huge growth in migration, at a time of slowed economic growth, is that Rudd is using population in place of productivity and infrastructure to maintain our national economic advancement.

The imposition of barriers to teenagers delivering newspapers or working after school in milk bars is the most obvious example of new laws that destroy workplace incentives and productivity. At the deeper level, the destruction of incentives for individual performance and the re-regulation of the labour market limit our long-term productivity in mining, manufacturing and the service sector.

People want incentives to create a better life for themselves but with no disadvantages. They don't want a restricted economy that destroys the hope for advancement and therefore means falling back on population rather than productivity.

It is this erosion of national productivity that has driven the shift to population growth. Make no mistake, the trade-off for the government's decision to dumb down our incentives for work and productivity was to balance it by ramping up migration numbers from average net migration of 126,000 a year under the Coalition to 300,000 a year.

The rapid increase in population leads immediately to the need for sustainable infrastructure.

The heart of sustainable water infrastructure is a national vision to ensure that we have sufficient water for our cities, our food security and our environment. This means investment in a once-in-a-century modernisation of our food production so as to save more than 600 billion litres of water a year at present lost through inefficient water use. However, instead of the grand vision of re-plumbing rural Australia and modernising our water use to improve our water efficiency, food security and food production, the government is closing down food production. Taking away food security is odd behaviour when you want to increase the number of people you intend to feed.

There also has to be a recycling revolution that will see the 1800 billion litres of urban waste water dumped off our coasts every year cleaned up and re-used for industry and agriculture.

Investment in water efficiency for a thirsty country should be the starting point for considering population, not an afterthought.

In that context, the economic tragedy of the government's pink batts and school halls waste is the lost opportunity for water, transport and urban infrastructure that could have helped Australians have better productivity and better quality of life.

The waste under those programs represents a fundamental loss of resources for productive purposes. Even if the programs had been fully effective, they still represented a fundamental misallocation of resources that could have been better deployed on water and transport projects.

In any event, the sheer scope and scale of debt incurred will be a financial drag on our children and grandchildren, who will have to pay back the debt at some stage, thereby limiting future productivity. In short, the government not only wasted the stimulus but lost the opportunity to help create a productivity revolution.

Beyond productivity and sustainable infrastructure, the third principle for quality of life in 2050 is creating a sustainable society. The key to a sustainable society is support for a balanced migration program that is colour blind and skills based. This is a shared personal passion. National consensus on migration therefore requires confidence in the numbers and the processes through which our migration intake is drawn.

That confidence is collapsing and must be rebuilt.

The key to quality of life during the coming four decades is a high productivity country, built on continued macro and micro-economic reform.

By contrast, Rudd's decision to choose raw population numbers over real productivity and water infrastructure is the biggest decision of his prime ministership. It is time, though, to give the Australian people a say and to consider whether we can achieve a higher quality of life through productivity and infrastructure as the key to a genuinely sustainable Australia.