“Unabashed supporter of a bigger Australia”, KPMG’s Bernard Salt, continues to make contradictory statements about the desirability of Australia’s world-beating population growth.
For years, Salt has been leader-in-chief for a “Big Australia”, producing reams of articles pushing rapid population growth and warning that to not follow this path would lead to a fiscal catastrophe, a weaker economy, and most importantly higher taxes.
However, a few week’s back, Salt made a rare admission that a massive increase in population would cause major indigestion for Australia’s major cities, noting the following:
By 2050 some 84 per cent of the Australian nation’s 38 million residents will live in 20 cities…Do we plonk the new city on top of the existing city and tell everyone to dense-up?…
Are the new and largely idle desalination plants sufficient to deliver the water needs of an extra city entirely by 2050?…Should every capital city have two functional airports by 2050?…
If Sydney and Melbourne are gridlocked now on a Saturday morning how will they operate at seven million?…
A week later, Salt disregarded his new found concerns and reverted back to norm as chief Big Australia booster, arguing that immigration must be lifted further to ‘save’ the economy:
With population growth coming off a recent high base the housing industry must feel like the world is closing in…
It is only a matter of time before slack housing demand results in rising unemployment and into festering discontent in the nation’s outermost edges. Discontent flourishes wherever good times suddenly turn bad; it’s all someone else’s fault! It takes the punters and their political administrators quite some time to adjust to the new reality of a cold new world where commodities are less loved.
I think that given our current situation, which seems to be getting worse every day with falling commodity prices, we should ramp up immigration from about 200,000 annually today to about 240,000.
Today, Salt has taken his ‘good cop bad cop’ routine to another level, this time lamenting the population pressures afflicting Melbourne:
Melbourne now contains 4.4 million people; by 2050 it will have 7.7 million. In just over three decades three million Melburnians will be added with most growth being directed to the city’s western flank…
This might seem like an odd thing to say, but Melbourne is quite constricted by its scale and its geography…
However, as Melbourne approaches the limits of car commutability (say 60km to the east) and as it reaches scale (more than four million residents), inner-city congestion ensues. The job-rich and the culture-rich inner-city becomes paralysed with congestion.
…big, broad, flat Melbourne has now reached a point of critical mass where the fried-egg model of city development produces traffic gridlock within the central yolk. All that suburban white focuses on a single creamy hipster yolk. It was always only a matter of time before fluidity within the urban system is squeezed to a standstill in Melbourne.
To be fair to Salt, he does make some good arguments for decentralising Melbourne away from the CBD, which I wholeheartedly agree with.
However, I do find it striking that Salt never draws the direct link between the population-based ponzi scheme that he advocates – the so-called “Big Australia” – and the pressures on infrastructure, congestion and livability that he also laments.
Ten years of following Salt’s high immigration prescription has directly contributed to the infrastructure/congestion problems that Australia’s big cities face today, so what is the sense of continuing this approach, or ramping it up even further?
It makes even less sense given modelling by the Productivity Commission has shown consistently that immigration is neither beneficial for the economy or living standards, nor can it sustainably alleviate the impacts of an ageing population.
Any objective examination of the facts, therefore, suggests that the case for such a high level of immigration is anything but clear-cut and more consideration needs to be given to the downsides of such an economic model.
