FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT
Recent population change in Australia
Professor Graeme Hugo
Graeme Hugo is Federation Fellow, Professor of the Department of Geographical and Environmental Studies and Director of the National Centre for Social Applications of Geographic Information Systems at the University of Adelaide. His research interests are in population issues in Australia and South-East Asia, especially migration. He is the author of over 200 books, articles in scholarly journals and chapters in books, as well as a large number of conference papers and reports. In 2002 he secured an ARC Federation Fellowship over five years for his research project 'The new paradigm of international migration to and from Australia: dimensions, causes and implications'...
I feel particularly privileged to speak here because I have long had a great admiration for the work that Professor Fenner has done in bringing environmental and social sciences together. I think that this is a crucial issue in Australia over the coming decades as we face some of the challenges which we have just heard about.
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At the outset I want to state my position: I feel quite passionately that we do need a population policy in Australia, we do need a policy which is not stand-alone but is integrated with not only our goals for environmental sustainability but also our goals with respect to economic and social areas as well.
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Population, society, economy and environment are all related in a very complex way and there are no simple, ‘silver bullet’ solutions. There are going to be compromises, but in making these compromises we must be informed by the best research and we must consult with the community.
I believe quite strongly that we should be moving towards Australia having a population policy.
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It is crucial to realise that the global population is changing very dramatically. This diagram shows the speed with which each billion has been added to the global population. To add our first billion took until the early part of the 19th century. But, as you can see, right up to the 6 billion we kept increasing the speed with which each further billion was added, so that it only took about 12 years to get to our sixth billion.
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What happened in the 20th century was a massive increase in our global population, an unprecedented increase from less than 2 billion to over 6 billion by the end of the century.
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What is happening now, though, is that global population growth is slowing down very dramatically, much more so than was anticipated by virtually all of the commentators through the 1970s and 1980s, with a global population growth rate now of 1.2 per cent.
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There has been a shift in where the population is. In 1950 about a third of the globe’s population lived in the developed countries. That is now down to less than 20 per cent, and virtually all of the future net growth in global population will occur in less developed countries.
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There has been a massive change in where people are living. Within the next decade we are going to pass that magic figure where more than half the world’s population is living in urban areas.
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Virtually all of the world’s net population growth over the next four decades will be in the cities of less developed countries. We are moving towards a more urban future.
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The United Nations projections suggest that the global population by 2050 will be over 9 billion, and many suggest that it is likely to stabilise at around the 10 billion level.
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To look more closely at the OECD countries: it is interesting that the demographic factor has really moved into prominence. We get the Chief Economist of the OECD suggesting that demography is really the key issue in the economies of OECD regions over the coming years, and in Australia we have seen the Treasury, the Productivity Commission and so on really seriously looking now at some of the implications of demographic change, particularly ageing, for Australia’s future.
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Australia is growing quite rapidly, at 1.3 per cent per annum. I think it puts it into context to note that Australia’s population is now growing faster than Indonesia’s. It is growing faster than the whole of the ESCAP region, the Asia-Pacific region, and it is growing three times as fast as the average for OECD countries.
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This is different from many of the OECD countries, where Germany and Japan now are experiencing population decline, as is Russia; and the projections, given current trends, suggest that they will be suffering very significant population losses and, of course, an ageing in their populations as well.
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I will discuss Australia’s population around three areas which I think are of particular significance: the numbers of people, the ageing of the population and the spatial distribution. I think all of these issues are of significance when we begin to look at water and population.
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There is a lot of debate about Australia’s future population, but my colleague Peter McDonald and his colleagues at the Australian National University have suggested – I think correctly – that the numbers of people in Australia over the next two or three decades are going to fall within a very narrow range. There aren’t many variations within this range of probably something around 25 million in the 2020s. Any arguments for 50 million or for 8 million are really not sustainable in any way, and are not helpful in looking at our future.
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The Australian Bureau of Statistics scenarios, which I think are fairly reasonable given our current trends, would suggest that in 2021 we are likely to have a population of close to 24 million.
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The processes of population growth are natural increase and net migration. You can see in this slide that in the postwar period, natural increase has been pretty stable in terms of the numbers that are added, although it will start to decline fairly soon. Net migration, though, has been a very important part of population growth, and one which has fluctuated somewhat with economic and political cycles.
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If we look at the different demographic processes contributing to growth, mortality first of all, we see there has been a very dramatic change. In my lifetime we have added 12 years of life to the average Australian, which is a very significant change in a very short period of time.
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But the big change has been in the numbers of years which we have added to older Australians. In the period up to about 1970, we only added two or three years of extra life to people who made it through to age 50 in the previous 100 years. However, since then we have added seven years of extra life to the average Australian aged 50. When I mentioned this to my first-year class the other day, it got a big yawn, but for many of us I think it is really growing in significance. It is of crucial significance when we are looking at ageing. If we have got 2 million Australians aged over 65, we are looking at 14 million extra person years in those older age groups, and particularly in the age groups where we are intensive users of health services and so on. So changes in mortality have been a significant factor in ageing.
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Fertility, though, is really the crucial variable, looking into the future. Australia’s fertility has been relatively stable over recent times, at around 1.8 total fertility rate. Our demography into the future is going to be very much shaped by what happens to our fertility. Australia is pretty well placed, compared with other OECD countries, because of its current fertility level, which means that we are unlikely to experience the degree of ageing which is being experienced in countries like Japan, Italy and so on, where there are extremely low fertility levels. I was in China a couple of weeks ago and was told that in Shanghai at the moment the total fertility rate is 0.7, which must be one of the lowest ever recorded – a very, very low fertility level.
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Migration is crucial in the Australian context. Last year the excess of people moving into the country over those moving out was pretty close to 130,000, which is high by historic levels. But we have to add to that almost 50,000 people who were in Australia temporarily but who took out permanent residency – so an overall net gain of about 180,000, which is very high by historic standards.
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Age structure is crucial. The Australian age structure is dominated by the baby boomers, the people born through the late 1940s and ’50s. You can see that group in the age pyramid who are now poised to move into the older age groups, which is going to be a crucial issue which we have to deal with in a number of ways over the next 20 to 30 years.
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What I had intended to show here was a graph into which I had put single ages and projected forward the growth of those single ages over the next two decades. What this shows is that virtually all of Australia’s population growth over the next two decades will be in the older age groups, if we look at it in net growth terms. So, while we are anticipating population growth, the vast bulk of it is going to occur in those older age groups. And that does create a challenge.
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That challenge has to be met on a number of levels. We need demographic approaches, we need to look at the labour force – there is a whole range of areas where we need to make change, and make that change relatively quickly, if we are going to deal with that ageing of the population.
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Certainly productivity is crucial; stabilising fertility is going to be very important in that; migration plays a very minor role but at least in the short term it is going to be significant.
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I want to spend a little bit of time on population distribution, because I think when we look at population policy in Australia we tend to look at the overall number of people. Yet population distribution is going to be crucial, particularly when we start to look at the whole issue of population and water.
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We have got a very uneven distribution of population, with over 90 per cent living in urban areas; a very low density overall; and 82 per cent living within 50 km of the coastline.
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It is a pattern which you would all be very familiar with. Three-quarters of the population live on 0.3 per cent of the continental area, so we are dealing with a very concentrated population.
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Geographer Griffith Taylor suggested that Australia’s population distribution was worked out by 1860, by the time most of the desirable agricultural areas were settled. That structure of our population distribution was established in 1860.
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I have calculated the geographic centre of Australia, going back 150 years. I think Griffith Taylor was right, because the geographic centre of Australia has moved about 30 km over the last century. Of course, within that structure there has been significant change, such as the move towards coastal areas and the changing distribution of population within our cities.
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The key thing about the distribution of where the people are now, however, is the mismatch with where the water is. There is quite a significant mismatch between them which was pointed out 20 years ago by Henry Nix, showing that in the far north we have 2 per cent of the population and 52 per cent of the run-off.
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Henry, at that time, made a very important statement. He suggested that the vast bulk of the water in the south-eastern part of the continent was committed – the vast bulk of the run-off was committed in one way or another. At that time he suggested that there would be very significant consequences if for some reason this run-off were to be reduced, as we are now starting to see.
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I have a project within my group at the moment where we are attempting to look at what the population consequences of climate change could be in Australia, looking at what the impacts are likely to be on population distribution and on internal migration.
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The sorts of changes which we are attempting to model, to see what their population impacts relate to, are particularly sea level change and reduced rainfall, concentrating on the hotspots which have been identified as major areas of climate change impact.
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This work has only just begun but this map showing the rainfall last year should give you an indication of the sorts of things which we are doing. The yellow areas are those in which the rainfall was below average; the green areas are those where it was above average. From Graeme Pearman’s talk we see that there has been a longstanding pattern over the last couple of decades.
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When we look at that in population terms, though, we see that fully 89 per cent of the Australian population lives in that area which had below average rainfall last year and is in that area which is likely, in the longer term, to be experiencing reduced run-off.
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In fact, half the population lives in the area which recorded the lowest rainfall on record or rainfall which was very significantly below average. So the vast bulk of our population lives in those areas which are likely to be most influenced by reduced run-off associated with climate change.
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What are some of the impacts on population distribution likely to be? Very clearly, reductions in run-off will have some impacts on population distribution. Australia is one of the most mobile populations on Earth, with about 18 per cent of the population moving house every year. But, strangely enough, we don’t seem to shift our population distribution in a major way. A great deal of the migration is compensating types of movement. We are not seeing major changes, apart from the movement to south-eastern Queensland and, in recent times, some to south-western Western Australia.
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The impacts of climate change on population distribution, I believe, are unlikely to produce major movements of people, except in areas where irrigation land will be withdrawn from cultivation and areas of very, very significant rainfall decline.
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The crucial question, though, is: where will the future growth of the population be located? I think this is one of the things which we have to address very much as we move into the future. We are going to experience population growth and we need to look at the full range of factors which are influential in shaping where it needs to be.
Absolutely, though, we need to have a much more conservationary approach in the ways in which we use water. I guess the thing which is very important here is not to deal with population separately from environment. These things have to be looked at together, and the solutions which we come up with in Australia do need to be solutions which look across the whole range of areas to do with population, economy and the environment.
Of course, we also need significantly more infrastructure in the whole area of water.
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The final thing I want to mention is that I think that too often in the past the population scientists and other social scientists have talked past physical scientists. There hasn’t been a coming together.
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Everybody has thought that their area has primacy when it comes to looking at population: ‘We must stop population growth because of the environment,’ or, ‘We must have rapid population growth because of the economy.’
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To me, what we need to do is to have a dialogue, to have a situation where every relevant discipline brings their expertise and their research to the table, to come up with solutions which are to some extent going to be trade-offs but are going to take into account the whole range of issues.
We do need effective policies which relate to environmental issues and population issues together. It is necessarily going to be a compromise.
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In terms of objectives, we need to be working towards having a stable population. But it is important to have a stable population – one that is not growing – which has a balanced age structure, one in which there is a balance between the working- and the non-working-age population. That will need some population growth in the short term, as we work through the impact of the baby boom.
It seems to me that we need to accept that and we need to make sure that we have a set of social, economic and environmental policies which ensure that we have a sustainable future. I believe the spatial distribution issue is one which is going to be very important into the future.
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I guess I am an incurable optimist, but I believe that issues like ageing, like population and the environment, are manageable into the future. But they aren’t manageable if we accept a business as usual approach. There has to be change. There has to be a vision, one which takes into account all of these changes together and attempts to come to grips with the complexity which we have just heard something about.
I believe science has a major contribution to make here, but it is all of the sciences, contributing and cooperating in a careful way. We need better evidence, we need policy-relevant evidence, and we need greater community involvement in this discourse.
Discussion
Question: I appreciate what you are saying about the need for less confrontation and more collaboration, and that all the disciplines have to get together. I can only concur with that. But it does seem to me that we are facing huge environmental crises, not the least of which is climate change but there are other issues emerging as well, such as peak oil and whether we can continue our modern civilisation or industrialised economy as we lose the normal access to conventional oil. It would seem that in the debates up to now the environmentalists have been totally forgotten, and I am grateful that you want to include them at the discussion or dialogue table. But many commentators are saying that the world can only cope with 2 billion people overall. If that is the case, we really need to be moving not only to stabilisation but to some form of reduction of population. Can you comment on that?
Graeme Hugo: I don’t believe that the world can only support 2 billion people. And really it isn’t helpful to state that the world can only support 2 billion people. The fact is that we have already got 6½ billion here, and they are real people. What we have got to come up with is systems which combine sustainability with taking into account the wellbeing of people as well. And there will be compromises. We will do some things which are not going to be good for the environment, but we want to balance each of these issues.
I agree with you totally that in the past it has been a totally silo-ised type of debate. The range of issues which have tended to influence our migration policy and so on have very rarely looked at areas like the environment. I think they have to be included, but it doesn’t mean that they are included to the exclusion of other issues. It is a matter of getting them all together and looking at them, getting the best information that we can and having consultation with the community, and coming up with the best possible solution. Professor Fenner has been working in this direction for a long period of time but I think to some extent his has been a voice in the wilderness, because we really don’t have that integration in the policy-making process which I think is going to be so very important.
We need to look at realistic alternatives if we are going to try and influence policy. If we suggest Australia’s population should be halved, that’s not a realistic policy in any way. We have got to come up with policies which will work and which are going to end up with the best possible outcome for the environment and for the people.
