KPMG’s Bernard Salt – the “unabashed supporter of a bigger Australia” – has been off his game lately.
After years of producing reams of articles pushing rapid population growth and warning that to not follow this path would lead to an economic and fiscal catastrophe, he seems to be changing his tune, making contradictory statements about the desirability of Australia’s world-beating population growth.
Back in April, Salt made the rare admission that a massive increase in population would cause major indigestion for Australia’s major cities, noting:
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?…
Later in the month, Salt lamented 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.
Then in May, Salt noted that Australians are wealthy precisely because its vast resource base is shared between a relatively small population, suggesting that pursuing a Big Australia would significantly dilute this wealth:
This is not to say that Australia has no capability in dealing with adversity… there is always the mollifying effects of the lucky country’s perennial equation: 24 million people sharing the resources of an entire continent delivers prosperity far beyond our effort and talent.
Later in the month, Salt warned that one of the main reasons behind Australia’s high immigration intake – so-called labour shortages arising from a reduction in the share of working-aged population – is not a problem after all, since technological change will mean there are likely to be too few jobs to go around:
What would be the impact on Australia, and the US, of a shift to knowledge work? Could the US leverage equal if not better economic output from a workforce of, say, 140 million instead of 164 million? And the same for Australia. What if by 2030 we don’t need 12 million workers; we needed only nine million? In such a world work retreats to knowledge enclaves such as Silicon Valley or to the privileged infrastructure-rich centres of Australia’s biggest cities.
How do we organise a society in which not everyone works yet where the number in the prime of their lives continues to expand?..
The question here and in the US will be the political ramifications from the development of a society where work and work-based remuneration may well be a scarce resource amid an expanding working-age population.
And yesterday, Salt noted once again that Australian are rich precisely because its vast resources are shared amongst a relatively small number of people:
I think the Australian nation and people will prosper for 100 years. Why? It comes down to one equation and a few simple facts. The equation is this: we are the only nation on earth to claim the resources of an entire continent and we share that claim with just 24 million people. Not even the Americans make such a claim…
Unlike other nations we are endowed with riches and resources from the land and the sea. We have wheat belts and gas basins and coal and iron-ore deposits. And for the most part we have a benign, if not a downright pleasant, climate…
All this is the bountiful legacy of our glorious continent and of the efforts of our hardworking forebears, as indeed is the sunk capital infrastructure that makes our cities and towns so irresistibly liveable. Our responsibility, our duty if you like, is to pass on the nation to the next generation in a better state, in an improved state.
So, tell me again, Bernard, why pursuing a “Big Australia” is in the interests of Australia? As you have highlighted in the articles above, all this extra immigration would do is:
- exacerbate infrastructure bottlenecks, leading to widespread congestion and reduced livability;
- dilute Australia’s mineral wealth across more people; and
- add to labour supply in a world of too few jobs.
Given your contradictory statements of late, are you still an “unabashed supporter of a bigger Australia”, or have you finally seen the light?
