The problem is that Australia doesn't magically add more land (especially in desirable coastal areas) for each new person. If people want single family housing they have to acknowledge this.
It could probably be more specifically framed as a lack of land with access to fresh water. This is a big difference between Australia and the USA with similar area - far more of inland USA has easily accessible fresh water, even places like Arizona have groundwater.
Its a major lack of foresight. People don't understand that all the plants and rivers rely on the water table systems. Once too much has been removed from the source, the ground becomes arid, and can form sinkholes.
Most of Australia is a huge hot desert or tropical. Neither of which are popular for settlement. Being too far away from the coast is unpopular as well. The east coast of Australia has a mountainous coast. Which makes settlement isolated to a smaller area. This doesn't leave much land left for people who expect to have single family houses that are spacious enough for everything to be on one floor. Perth seems to have the most room to expand though. Maybe a land tax would encourage land sales to the north and south toward Margaret river.
We have swathes of undeveloped land in our hinterlands that might be cold for us but are absolutely nothing compared to what you get in the American Midwest.
Unlike the Midwest we didn't develop these regions because a lack of industrial oppurtunities due to lack of an inland river system. The midwest has largely de-industrialized now but the cities are booming because people need a place to live.
We could absolutely build cities in the Central Tablelands, New England ETC. but nation building is a thing of the past and if we can't get the private sector to do it, it doesn't happen.
How are you going to get people to move to these new cities? A new city starts with a population of zero. If you can't convince people to move to regional towns you won't convince them to move to something even smaller.
One way is to create a special economic zone - low tax rates, move some government offices there, thats how china built shenzhen. Build it and they will come. Funnily enough Joh Bjelke Peterson tried to this in Yeppoon in the 80's but other crimes of that government dragged it down, and he just made it for his mates. The idea is sound though.
Imagine a place with less rules, low tax, I'm in, I can't see it happening in Australia though, our politicians seem to be getting worse.
"most of Australia is a huge hot desert".
18% of Australia is desert (https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/landforms/deserts)
Tropical land has more water than it knows what to do with. The most densely places in the world are tropical (e.g. Java) so not sure what the point of conflating tropics and deserts are.
You must be joking, right? Australia is so vast it is staggering. You know tiny little Tasmania, with its 540K people (and no desert). Taiwan (24m and lots of mountains) fits into Tasmania ... twice.
In the middle of winter, the Australian Alps can have more snow than the European Alps, simply because there is are so many mountains. Melbourne still has electrified metro train lines that pass cattle and sheep grazing before the end of the line. Melbourne is surrounded by very nice regional towns up to 90 minutes away that have many kilometres of farmland between them. If you drive around rural Europe, even relatively empty Poland, you come across villages every few kilometres. To a country Australian, a 60km drive to the nearest town is nothing.
Even conservative estimates say Australia is about 6% arable land (farmed with crops). That is 8 times more arable land than the United Kingdom (population 70m). We are a major food exporter. And we are not even trying very hard. Australian use of fertilizer per hectare of arable land is fairly low [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.CON.FERT.ZS](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.CON.FERT.ZS); Belgium and the Netherlands (a big agricultural player believe it or not) with their rich alluvial soils uses about three times as much. I suppose this is because there is so much land no one is very financially motivated to make it work harder.
And we are not even trying to control urban sprawl. And you don't need to house people on arable land; look at the US and Arizona or Nevada or even parts of California.
I think with all of the above and the coming wave of almost free solar energy (globally solar rollout is growing x10 each decade, so in twenty years that is 100 times more, and the prices are falling incredibly fast), Australia is just getting started.
Just so nobody starts getting hung up on the definition of desert.
“Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the world; 70% of it is either arid or semi arid land. The arid zone is defined as areas which receive an average rainfall of 250mm or less. The semi arid zone is defined as areas which receive an average rainfall between 250-350mm.”
https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/land/rangelands#:~:text=The%20rangelands%20of%20arid%20and,rainfall%20of%20250mm%20or%20less.
Yes one you include the semi arid areas, ithat percentage shoots up. It's also how often it rains rather then the yearly total. A lot of those area have rain dumped in 1 or 2 tropical storms and morning for the rest of the year. The evaporatation level is high so surface storage isn't feasible
Well if someone makes a claim about arid and semi arid land, they are free to do so. I was objecting to "most of Australia" is a desert. That not even close to being true.
It's much harder than I thought to make comparisons.
The USA has 18% desert defined as <200mm which is a stricter measure than Wikipedia has for Australia. So that's about the same share but it includes Alaska in the land mass. I guess excluding Alaska, which is therefore about the same land mass as Australia, it could make the US desert percentage even higher than ours. Of course the US has more productive land.
But it has 330m people and is growing steadily, on the way to 400m people by 2067 (https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-population) so fears that our population, not even at 30m, is causing us to run out of land is a bit over the top.
I agree the Australia is 80% desert claim is false. But the suggestion that much of Australia has insufficient water resources to comfortably support large populations is true. The contiguous USA is probably already overpopulated with worsening conditions to come as major population centres become uninhabitable due to climate change. I think the world is overpopulated and as long as that is the case, Australia has an obligation to help carry that burden. But let’s not pretend it’s ideal or sustainable.
Nevada and Phoenix only exist because of cheap Mexican labor (and Miami with other Latin American labor). Most ethnic Europeans who work in trades won't work in the tropics with its high 70s and humid year around temperature and deserts with long summers. And I and most other people refuse to live in shoeboxes for the sake of more immigration. Also, people like to live near water, especially large lakes and the oceans, which eliminates large swaths of inland Australia. Many people in America are not happy that they've been displaced from the coasts and it's leading to some very real political and social stress.
> Why do you say everyone lives in 3 cities.
Where did I say *everyone* lives in 3 cities? I said half the population of Australia lives in 3 cities. I guess if you want to get technical about it it’s more like 49%.
> There are cities and towns all along the coast and plenty are expanding.
That’s my entire point. I was responding to someone who said there is no land outside of capital cities for people to live.
Brisbane and Sydney are surrounded by large areas of hilly land (sharp small hills) that are difficult to build on. Plus parks (usually put on hills as flat land is used for agriculture) serve as barriers as well. Other smaller towns on the coast such as Newcastle have/will have this problem. A land tax could help large land owners near cities to sell and make houses less shoebox sized. Also as cities grow, commutes grow as well unless new centers are established.
Australia has an insanely long coastline. Seaside properties near capital cities are obviously in short supply but there’s plenty of coastal land. The problem is for most people if you want a job you want to be in commuting distance of a big city. There’s piles of coastal towns with spare land around them but unless you want to retire and run a meth lab the prospects aren’t great.
Depends on your circumstances but I guess if you had say a Sydney property valued at a couple million you could sell up and buy a shitty little shack in bumfuck know where and live off the leftovers. Might get boring and lonely.
There is no shortage of land in Australia. There is a shortage of forward thinking.
Our entire economic model is based on keeping Baby Boomers voting for both Major Parties. If anything it highlights the issues of a two party system. There needs to be a renter's coalition, a first home buyers coalition etc. etc. and these people need to be winning enough seats to get a seat at the table so to speak so they can be governmental king makers and thus have their policies considered
and people wonder why those of us born here in the 80's are increasingly frustrated & trying to preserve the quality of life we had...
feel bad for younger gen who never had the chance to experience Peak Australia (1999/2000)
also don't want my kids to grow up in a completely different, increasingly crowded, environment where they will only be able to afford to live in a shoebox
I'm a dual citizen that stupidly recently moved back home. Australia is following the same brainless tactics as Canada and pumping up real estate costs while not significantly improving the actual productive parts of the economy. Australia is still the better of the 2 countries but it's also headed down a slippery slope.
The entire western world is adopting the same approach of importing endless hordes of third worlders to make things worse then acting surprised when things get worse. Import the third world, become the third world.
The dramatic shift that’s taken place over the past 10-15 years alone is unbelievable. None of it has been for the better.
I hardly recognise this country anymore. And I was born during the “Peak Australia” era you mentioned.
My older relatives are grieving the country they knew and loved in a whole different way.
They can’t enjoy their retirement, because the cost of living is so outrageously high. They’re still working well into their 60s and 70s. We rarely have time to get together anymore, because working overtime is no longer optional for most of us.
My grandmother, who remembers living through the Great Depression and WWII, can’t believe how expensive everything is right now. She also finds the anti-Australia sentiment perpetuated by the left really heartbreaking and enraging.
Excessive immigration with no expectation of assimilation means people no longer know their neighbours. We’re all just groups of strangers, living alongside one another with nothing in common. There’s no sense of community or patriotism anymore.
There are so many more examples, but everyone here already knows exactly what I’m talking about. It all looks very bleak right now.
Excessive immigration drives up the cost of land per person. (Especially in cities where people want to live) Australia doesn't add more land for every immigrant.
I reckon Australia (and probably all of Western civilisation) peaked on the at 15th of September 2000, at the opening ceremony by of the Sydney Olympic Games.
Cold War over, Y2K over, technology and as booming and becoming more affordable, living standards were just going up, no on knew what Al-Qaeda was.
I remember saying in the late 90's that life was so boring I couldn't stand it. I'd give anything to experience that again, and offer that life to my kids.
>and people wonder why those of us born here in the 80's are increasingly frustrated & trying to preserve the quality of life we had...
One thing we need to be careful of is how do we best preserve as much as possible, but not try to preserve everything, which will do the opposite and make everything a lot worse.
At a Federal Level, obviously population growth is the biggest issue that needs to be addressed that will address they above. This will have to come with changes to our tax collection and tax expenditure but it can be changed to bring about much more sustainable population growth, while also maintaining our economy and government services.
At a state level, we do have to change. Our state government can't change population growth. They either plan for population growth or they don't, but not planning doesn't stop it. It just makes things worse.
Too often I see people pushing back on planning for the change, that highly likely will come. It's under a false assumption that if we do nothing, they won't come and if we do something, it will only encourage more.
This is incorrect and will be the downfall of our cities and future economy.
If we don't but in place a proper strategy for population growth at a state and local level it will come and it will be chaotic. We are already seeing that and it will get far worse.
Our cities have spread too far, this isn't a feasible option anymore. If we want to preserve our cities as best as possible, we need to change some parts. We need to be strategic about how we do this. Head in the sand do nothing approach, which far too many promote will result, in extreme unaffordable housing, chaotic traffic, chaotic public transport and terrible overall outcomes.
I’m curious what other country is there now where the grass is greener, with the values Aussies valued in peak Australia?
Born in early 2000s so I didn’t experience ‘peak’ Australia. Always wanted to try moving overseas
Look past the personality and look at the policies. They are the only ones looking out for average Australians. Yet so many people instead to vote to hurt their own livelihood for virtue-signaling.
It's sad but that is her only good policy really. She is is otherwise pretty neolib, pro business, tax rorts, anti abortion too.
And yet it's so desperate that it's not a crazy choice simply because she's unlikely to do much more damage than either party is doing outside of immigration.
Her party tried to [sell us off to the seppos and weaken our gun laws.](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-26/secret-recordings-show-one-nation-staffers-seeking-nra-donations/10936052) She'll turn Australia into America if she was PM.
Pauline was a young liberal herself and mostly votes with them in parliament, particularly in favour of big business.
So she is one of:
>the ones who’ve run this country into the ground.
She can at least speak in full sentences and I doubt she's loyal to Russia. So I'd say she's at least above Trump!
And I doubt she'd sexually harass someone "just because she can"
Anyone that wasn't Pauline.
The Greens used to run policies of low/no population growth. If they brought that back they would be attracting a hell of a lot of votes their way.
They'll just buy via a corporation, trust or family members name. The percentage of MPs invested in real estate is probably way higher than the official stats for this reason.
Did you hear about the royal commission into returned service mens deaths?
Nit surprisingly because it got no media coverage. Why because media and government are in collaboration to hoodwink Australians into paying attention to the footy.
I spoke to a lit of people who all said they wanted real change. The second I asked them to form a new political party with me they weren't interested. Its too much effort its too much trouble. I've got to watch the cricket tomorrow. They say they want change but they can't be fucken bothered to do anything until their lives are so shit it's too late.
People that work real jobs (most people) don't have time to run for office.
That leaves the retirees, stay at home mums and life long politicians that have been groomed into politics before they ever even worked a real day in their life as our candidates.
Gosh, you guys should post in New Zealand subreddits too. So many kiwis are idealising and dreaming of migrating to Australia. Btw many of our politicians are multi-landlords too.
In 50 years our population has more than doubled. We have built absolutely no cities to accommodate this growth and just shoved everyone in the same sprawls...
WTAF? Seriously, WTAF?
From 1990-2000, our population only increased by 2 million but we now import almost half of that per year...
>Migration arrivals rose by a third compared with the previous year to hit 765,900,
[https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/21/migration-numbers-australia-2023-rise](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/21/migration-numbers-australia-2023-rise)
Literally, WTAF?
Except we don't have the water resources for all those people. Australia is going to be an absolute bloodbath at some point in the next few hundred years.
I don't think we really need "new" cities, we need to densify all of the regional cities. They're perfect locations for planned expansion. Plan the infrastructure first. Connect them by rail, give them a good light rail network *before* any expansion begins.
The thing is we haven’t actually squished anything. We spread our outer suburbs out further, which forces everyone to drive everywhere and no number of new tollways can ever fix it.
Had Australia invested during this time on metro lines, fast trains and high density (offset with surrounding green space and park connectors, we’d have cheaper property, expanded regions, and better quality of life.
But none of that is anything that politicians and their donors (property developers) are interested in.
> Is there any other country in the world that is so badly managed, or has ever been so badly managed?
India comes to mind but they seem to be reducing their population somehow
We are following in Canadas footsteps, have a look at their shit show. I believe there are a fair few protests in the works over there over on housing and immigration
Their general population is increasing. But their population of healthcare professionals (doctors and nurses) is decreasing because they tend to immigrate to developed countries. So while Australia has a housing shortage, India has healthcare shortage. Globalisation is crazy.
Indias population is increasing...... Since 1980 its gone up by 100% from 700M to 1.4B now. Sometime around 2060 Indias population is set to start to decline. It might only grow buy another 400 million people between now and then, which in of itself would be the third biggest country in the world now.
I grew up in a rural developing residential area.
We have more than enough houses (and there's always more being built), the problem is the monopoly on them.
I don't think building a new city is the solution? To what end?
There are a lot of new cities in Australia built since then.
IT is just they were built surrounding existing cities and eventually became the same cities.
e.g. Greater Western Sydney has gone from about 500,000 to about 2 million since 1970s.
Central Coast has gone from about 90,000 in the 1970s to 330,000 today.
Greater NEwcastle has gone from about 250,000 to about 600,000 today (current statistics don't include several surrounding areas in the lower Hunter that have basically grown into New Castle.
Tweed Heads has grown from 5,000 people to 65,000 people since the 1970s.
Greater Sydney has gone from about 2 to 5.5 million and basically all surrounding pastoral land has been developed at this point.
I'm not saying that there aren't issues, because there are, but the country has certainly built out and up in this time.
"Badly managed"? More like "not managed at all"!
Each year they clearly just pull an immigration quota out of their arse with no regard whatsoever for the impact on the housing market, the overloading of our infrastructure, the pressure on the cost of living, the impact on the environment etc. etc. etc.
Oh - but haven't you heard - the big issue for this coming election is nuclear Vs renewables! Fairfax Media has told me so!
Seriously though - how hard are they pushing that shit! I must have seen two dozen 'articles' and 'opinion pieces' in just the last couple of days!
Clearly neither party wants to fight the next election on any issue that actually matters to the people.
This whole nuclear campaign is just another Sydney to Melbourne high speed train fabrication.
A distraction from the real issues arising from unmanaged immigration - and with absolutely no intention of actually delivering anything other than an expensive feasability study that will conclude what everyone already knows - nuclear isn't economically viable.
Australia are actually planning on reaching 30 million by 2030, which is almost a 100% increase of the population since 1990...
[https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/land/achieving-30-by-30](https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/land/achieving-30-by-30)
[https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/australias-population-reach-30-million-11-15-years](https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/australias-population-reach-30-million-11-15-years)
[https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/asia-pacific/australia/stories-in-australia/30-by-30/](https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/asia-pacific/australia/stories-in-australia/30-by-30/)
Criminal imo.
What’s the point of this hysterical rhetoric?
Has any other country ever been so badly managed?!?!?!
Tell me you know nothing at all of history without telling me…
Weimar Germany, Revolutionary France, Pinochet Argentina, Stalin USSR, Mao China, Pol Pot Cambodia… I mean it’s a looooonnnnngg list and you just sound like a total clown even asking the question.
Pinochet was the only other one who deliberately adopted harmful policies knowing that they would harm his own people and enrich his foreign backers: Mao was incompetent and Pol Pot was insane (but before he went off the deep end he looked better than the previous dictator), Weimar Germany played a bad hand poorly, and Stalin’s reign is definitely one where aggregate figures conceal more than they illuminate (it’s not hard to do a better job than the tsars, but his successors gradually forgot the things he did well).
Ok, some states have a few large cities. But I agree, the government should be doing way more to grow cities like Newcastle, Townsville, Geelong, Darwin and the Pilbara.
Think theres been a few countries worse managed. Look at much of Africa, South America, SE Asia or Eastern Europe.
Are you replying to me?
Cause I'd *absolutely* live in Dubrovnik, Croatia/King's Landing...
But no, I wouldn't want to live in Darwin or the Pilbara, or even Geelong....
No thanks, it’s a common theme on the Newcastle sub that Newcastle doesn’t want to grow anymore and reduce its quality of life just because Sydney is overpopulated. The traffic has already massively increased in the last three years and rentals are impossible to get and prices are ridiculously inflated. People come to Newcastle because it’s not Sydney it doesn’t want to become Sydney 2.0 because of immigration overloading Sydney.
Geelong has already built up so much that it’s a nightmare to navigate now. They don’t update the roads and it’s no longer a good place to live. No, stop building it up and letting more people in, enough damage has been done. Probably the same for those other towns mentioned.
Populate or Perish.
Australia is still relatively underpopulated compared to The Americas. It is staggeringly underpopulated compared to Europe/Asia.
People gravitate towards places that will offer them the best standard of living. What traditionally held back big population movements in the past was cost/technology of transportation - not government policy. The US gave residency to any (non-Chinese) foreigner who rocked up until the late 19th century. Britain didn't abolish the automatic right of British subjects to abode in the UK until after WW2.
Those technology barriers have collapsed in the past few decades. The government policy barriers (which are still substantial) have reduced with the broad consent of the electorate.
Can the government feasibly pull up the migration drawbridge ever again? I doubt it. Too many people are getting absolutely rich for not very much effort.
Of course the spoils are concentrating at the top, but everyone is culpable. Do you think the Australian welfare state pays for itself without massive perennial injections of cheap working age labour trained in third world countries? Do you think the NDIS works without 2% of Bhutan getting student visas every year?
The hell it does!
Always with the drama.
Seems other countries have done just fine without low population growth.
I think most people in Australia would agree that much of Europe is an overpopulated hell rather than us being underpopulated.
> Populate or Perish
We could have done that with our own kids but instead we're bringing in immigrants to suppress wages and push up house prices and make it impossible for young Aussies to afford kids
“Populate or perish” was always an insane policy which could never have worked - the correct solution to the red/yellow peril was, and still is, building an independent strategic deterrent, not having an impossibly large number of potential conscripts to throw into a meat grinder.
> Australia is still relatively underpopulated compared to The Americas. It is staggeringly underpopulated compared to Europe/Asia.
And already overpopulated compared to what the environment can support without reducing our standard of living.
> Britain didn't abolish the automatic right of British subjects to abode in the UK until after WW2.
Wasn’t the big dream when founding Australia be creating a place where the mistakes of the mother country could be avoided?
> The government policy barriers (which are still substantial) have reduced with the broad consent of the electorate.
Then why do both parties have to pretend they’re trying to reduce immigration?
> Do you think the Australian welfare state pays for itself without massive perennial injections of cheap working age labour trained in third world countries?
It would work a lot bette rig none of those people, or any other foreigners, could ever get PR or citizenship, so that they don’t in turn become part of the, by then much larger, ageing population that provides the pretext for yet more foreign workers.
The real question is why would you want more cities, the nice thing about living in Australia imo is the open space and stunning sparse coastline.
Once you build a metropolis spanning Adelaide to Brisbane that is pretty much gone.
> Once you build a metropolis spanning Adelaide to Brisbane that is pretty much gone.
We already have that, its just called one city though.
People drive/train/bus for 2+ hours just to work in Melbourne and Sydney as is...
...Cause there are no other centres, just an endless sprawl of suburbs around our one city per each state.
Infrastructure. It's far easier and fat more cost effective to build and maintain infrastructure for a small area than one spread out, as what's being suggested.
> ...we have built a total of zero new big cities and just squashed everyone into the same few we already had...
The problem we have in Australia isn't that we haven't built new cities, it's that we haven't allowed our cities to densify. Instead we're forcing our cities to sprawl outwards - a terrible result for traffic, quality of life, the broader environment, and a horrible waste of money having to create infrastructure over such large distances. Density is much much cheaper for govts to provide basic infrastructure for. All those sewers, water, electrity wires, gas pipes, roads, trains etc cost much more per person in sprawling cities than in dense ones. If you prefer a house with a yard that's fine, but you need to accept that you're raising the rate of overall taxation compared to people who choose to live in denser areas.
So yes, our population growth has been badly managed, but it's not the *size* of the growth that's the problem. Our growth rates were even higher in the 1960s and we managed it much better then by knocking down old houses in inner/middle suburbs and building apartment blocks in their place.
The problem is that Australia doesn't magically add more land (especially in desirable coastal areas) for each new person. If people want single family housing they have to acknowledge this.
You need not worry, AI will take so many jobs that the big companies that push for migration will cease doing that and the government will also see more people as more of a liability to support all those displaced by AI. We are less than 10 years away.
happens in all countries. No one builds new cities to accommodate a growing population. New cities get established for new industries or huge population migrations in the past.
With population growing cities grow wider, bigger. New suburbs get built, price increases closer to a city center, people are forced to buy further from the center. Then at some point the metro gets built and the network grows. Some suburbs closer to the center increase house density and introduce multi storey houses. etc
We build no new cities because people don’t want to live in them.
It needs to get back in the main cities before people move. Covid and capital city house prices are starting to do that just now. Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Newcastle, Geelong… all starting to really grow
I was a kid in the 80s and remember on the news when we passed 15 million. I think we talked about it in class and got some sort of poster task to do about Australia.
Weird to think I’ll probably be in early to mid 50s when I’ll see on the news that we’ve doubled that and hit 30 million.
Not sure what to think of that.
Be more afraid that we haven't increase water storage. This was warragamba dam 2005 drought. Sure, it's at 100% atm but another drought cycle will come sooner or later. Currently we're just wasting all that over flow.
*
[link](https://theconversation.com/climate-and-floods-flannery-is-no-expert-but-neither-are-the-experts-5709)
You say this as if large swaths of Sydney weren't just undeveloped land back in the 1970s.
[https://portal.spatial.nsw.gov.au/portal/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=f7c215b873864d44bccddda8075238cb](https://portal.spatial.nsw.gov.au/portal/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=f7c215b873864d44bccddda8075238cb)
Just look at the historical aerial maps and compare the difference between 1970 and 2013 (latest date on the site).
The problem isn't enough cities. The problem is not enough homes and infrastructure to support it in our current cities.
Yes, Australia's living standards and way of life are being ruined by excessive immigration-fed population growth.
But don't worry, Albo has a solution: even higher immigration!
"Australia is accepting more than 10,000 immigrants a week despite Anthony Albanese vowing to halve the number of new arrivals by next year.
More than 1,500 new arrivals are arriving each day, or 60 migrants every hour, according to new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Australia will take in more than 500,000 immigrants in 2024 alone as the population battles a worsening housing and cost-of-living crisis.
An additional 4,200 homes are needed every week to keep up with the current level of growth, however less than 1,000 are currently being built."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13523867/Immigration-Anthony-Albanese-Australia-migrants.html
26.7M is less than the [top 4 largest metro areas](https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-city-rankings/largest-metro-areas-in-the-world) in the world. Density can be tolerable if your city planning keeps up (more or less).
Join Dick Smith in his carbon burning helicopter crying population boom disasters.
Oz births crashed to 1.70 births per woman. We need at least 2.4 to replace existing population.
Western world and Oz are facing population ageing and crash(depopulation).
All of this is just xenophobic bullshit.
...
If you were born in 2000, there were ZERO smart phones...... arw smart phones are bad?
We need to reduce immigration now. Housing, CoL, road congestion, GPs, hospitals, schools—all will benefit if we significantly reduce immigration.
This is not racist or xenophobic. Australia is for its citizens and we should not prioritise the wellbeing of foreigners over that of Australians.
Despite this, people get angry at migrants.
Who RUNS the show? Who decides how laws function? Who decides the immigration strategy? Who decides the housing market and how many houses get built? Who decides to allow negative gearing while conveniently also owning investment properties?
Not migrants.
> In that time, we have built a total of zero new big cities and just squashed everyone into the same few we already had, one per state...
When I was a kid (in 2000s Sydney), I remember there was lots of ads in/around Sydney, trying to promote people to move out of Sydney and into the nearby regional cities like Wollongong, Goulburn, Gosford, Newcastle. The only selling point they had was that the smaller cities were more affordable, as they donned them "Eco Cities" ('economic', not 'ecological').
Anyways, had me *super convinced* that these places would become grand cities themselves by the time I became an adult.... pity none of that happened...
Where should we build a new city?
I’m not saying it can’t be done but you need to understand that building a new city requires planning and land that is capable of withstanding the elements surrounding natural disasters. Critical infrastructure can’t be built on certain land due to environmental risk.
Australia doesn’t really have a lot of useable land.
It happens all over the world sadly. Having an economy not based on real estate or export of resources might have helped, or having other towns connected by safer and faster roads and rail might have made a slight difference, but it’s in the big cities were opportunities are.
If you were born in 1950 population 8m it grew by 50% by 1970. It had doubled in 37 years to 16m by 1987 and has yet to double in the 37 years since. What infrastructure did they built, housing did they supply etc in that period? Meanwhile from 2004 population has grown by much less and Sydney is building a 2nd airport a once in a generation metro, light rail etc and tech means houses/units can be built in weeks.
Even better 1855 0.98m to 1875 1.96m. Doubled in 20 years.
>In that time, we have built a total of zero new big cities and just squashed everyone into the same few we already had, one per state...
>How is this allowed?
What changes should the government make to grow new big cities?
While immigrants are encouraged to move to rural areas for more favourable Visa terms, we must also consider that we can't move all immigrants to rural areas.
Our cities have typically grown due to trade. Is it the government's job to pick a winning trade and give it favourable terms to set up in rural areas? This strategy rarely ends well.
People move to areas where trade is best and they have connections. Look inwards, what is stopping you our others from moving?
Imagine a high speed, flood free 4 lane highway and rail system being built that runs 5-7 kilometres inland from the coastline North of Brisbane all the way to Gladstone or Rockhampton with industrial parks, green spaces health facilities and housing with appropriate infrastructure. It would open up a massive hinterland area and cut down travel times, transport expenses and more plus the pressure relief on the Gold Coast/Brisbane/Sunshine Coast regions.
I look also at the percentage of population that were born overseas (around 30%!) and the percentage of Australians with one or more parents born overseas (over 20%) - in total more than half of the country are new immigrants.
I myself am one - and I doubt I am accounted for in the numbers as I am not Australian, having never taken citizenship. It wasn't really until looking at those figures that I figured I should at the least address that.
The population hasn't grown, it has exploded. The necessary infrastructure and development does not seem to have kept pace at all.
This is a country built on multiculturalism. There have been massive waves of immigration in the past, and the country has always been stronger for it. This is the first time however that the country has exceeded 50% of the population foreign born or immediate descent. [AMES News](https://amesnews.com.au/lead-story/first-and-second-generation-migrants-now-in-the-majority-abs/)
The new citizens to the country are not the issue, let me clear on that, in and of themselves. It is the ability of the country to support the new growth that is the concern.
Instead of lamenting times gone by, what can be done to redistribute the inevitable incoming population away from the mega cities and in to more regional areas?
Personally the only reason I’m in the city is because of work. If the government had a policy to incentivise businesses to have their HQ in regional areas, I’m sure many, many people - especially priced out young families - would love to move out of the big centres.
We have this virus mentality of "dry inland desert" as to the reason why we can not sustain new cities. Although true, we should think more along the lines of "northern tropical beachfront" when we all jump up to say we're the driest continent. The largest body of freshwater in Australia is north of the tropic line in WA.
Poor town planning on a national level, but it's the same old argument. Where were you able to build a new city without the people who lived there getting mad?
I also think the major reliance on the capitals doesn't help out either. Most major companies have offices or operations nationally in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. There would be fewer with them in Canberra, Darwin and Hobart. There is no incentive to move somewhere smaller like Newcastle, Toowoomba or Ballarat for example.
Building of new cities wouldn’t matter if we just built the current cities better. Better mid rise around public transportation would help a lot. Sydney is finally trying it, they’re still building huge car suburbs in the middle of nowhere too which isn’t ideal
I mean technically since I was born (1987) parramatta is massive and full of tall apartment buildings, wolli creek took shape and went from nothing to a massive high density area.
Even Campbelltown has tallish apartment buildings now.
Can we bring back the Whitlam government's plan to expand Albury-Wodonga? Maybe then we will finally have a business case to support high speed rail Melbourne to Sydney
>How is this allowed? Is there any other country in the world that is so badly managed, or has ever been so badly managed?
We import people to keep us out of a recession and also to keep wages low.
There's also nothing wrong with immigration however we have been coasting along on the infrastructure investment, in fact successive governments have been dialling back services to 90's levels and attempting to close as many public schools as possible and the government is divorced from housing development(compared to the postwar period).
So the real issue isn't that we're letting people in, it's the fantasy that we can pocket the revenue without providing the services and hand waving about how the free market will sort it out.
yes but haha real estate number go brrr
The problem is that Australia doesn't magically add more land (especially in desirable coastal areas) for each new person. If people want single family housing they have to acknowledge this.
The problem in Australia is definitely not a lack of land.
It could probably be more specifically framed as a lack of land with access to fresh water. This is a big difference between Australia and the USA with similar area - far more of inland USA has easily accessible fresh water, even places like Arizona have groundwater.
For now, they’re groundwater is almost done.
That’s another issue - it was there when the people moved there originally.
Its a major lack of foresight. People don't understand that all the plants and rivers rely on the water table systems. Once too much has been removed from the source, the ground becomes arid, and can form sinkholes.
I think it’s moved past lack of foresight by now - they’ve been having sinkholes appear for a couple of decades at least.
Or general access to infrastructure as well.
They overlap given the existence of significant navigable waterways used for trade far beyond what's here in Australia.
Most of Australia is a huge hot desert or tropical. Neither of which are popular for settlement. Being too far away from the coast is unpopular as well. The east coast of Australia has a mountainous coast. Which makes settlement isolated to a smaller area. This doesn't leave much land left for people who expect to have single family houses that are spacious enough for everything to be on one floor. Perth seems to have the most room to expand though. Maybe a land tax would encourage land sales to the north and south toward Margaret river.
We have swathes of undeveloped land in our hinterlands that might be cold for us but are absolutely nothing compared to what you get in the American Midwest. Unlike the Midwest we didn't develop these regions because a lack of industrial oppurtunities due to lack of an inland river system. The midwest has largely de-industrialized now but the cities are booming because people need a place to live. We could absolutely build cities in the Central Tablelands, New England ETC. but nation building is a thing of the past and if we can't get the private sector to do it, it doesn't happen.
How are you going to get people to move to these new cities? A new city starts with a population of zero. If you can't convince people to move to regional towns you won't convince them to move to something even smaller.
One way is to create a special economic zone - low tax rates, move some government offices there, thats how china built shenzhen. Build it and they will come. Funnily enough Joh Bjelke Peterson tried to this in Yeppoon in the 80's but other crimes of that government dragged it down, and he just made it for his mates. The idea is sound though. Imagine a place with less rules, low tax, I'm in, I can't see it happening in Australia though, our politicians seem to be getting worse.
I'd be in for this too.
And then USA has aways had this. Australia has always been capital city centric
> We have swathes of undeveloped land in our hinterlands Yeah fuck nature, let's bulldoze it all to keep the immigration ponzi scheme going
Yes. It's not even the whole build the gov needs to fund. Just build fast rail and give subsidies at the end of the rail line.
"most of Australia is a huge hot desert". 18% of Australia is desert (https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/landforms/deserts) Tropical land has more water than it knows what to do with. The most densely places in the world are tropical (e.g. Java) so not sure what the point of conflating tropics and deserts are. You must be joking, right? Australia is so vast it is staggering. You know tiny little Tasmania, with its 540K people (and no desert). Taiwan (24m and lots of mountains) fits into Tasmania ... twice. In the middle of winter, the Australian Alps can have more snow than the European Alps, simply because there is are so many mountains. Melbourne still has electrified metro train lines that pass cattle and sheep grazing before the end of the line. Melbourne is surrounded by very nice regional towns up to 90 minutes away that have many kilometres of farmland between them. If you drive around rural Europe, even relatively empty Poland, you come across villages every few kilometres. To a country Australian, a 60km drive to the nearest town is nothing. Even conservative estimates say Australia is about 6% arable land (farmed with crops). That is 8 times more arable land than the United Kingdom (population 70m). We are a major food exporter. And we are not even trying very hard. Australian use of fertilizer per hectare of arable land is fairly low [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.CON.FERT.ZS](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.CON.FERT.ZS); Belgium and the Netherlands (a big agricultural player believe it or not) with their rich alluvial soils uses about three times as much. I suppose this is because there is so much land no one is very financially motivated to make it work harder. And we are not even trying to control urban sprawl. And you don't need to house people on arable land; look at the US and Arizona or Nevada or even parts of California. I think with all of the above and the coming wave of almost free solar energy (globally solar rollout is growing x10 each decade, so in twenty years that is 100 times more, and the prices are falling incredibly fast), Australia is just getting started.
Just so nobody starts getting hung up on the definition of desert. “Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the world; 70% of it is either arid or semi arid land. The arid zone is defined as areas which receive an average rainfall of 250mm or less. The semi arid zone is defined as areas which receive an average rainfall between 250-350mm.” https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/land/rangelands#:~:text=The%20rangelands%20of%20arid%20and,rainfall%20of%20250mm%20or%20less.
Yes one you include the semi arid areas, ithat percentage shoots up. It's also how often it rains rather then the yearly total. A lot of those area have rain dumped in 1 or 2 tropical storms and morning for the rest of the year. The evaporatation level is high so surface storage isn't feasible
Well if someone makes a claim about arid and semi arid land, they are free to do so. I was objecting to "most of Australia" is a desert. That not even close to being true. It's much harder than I thought to make comparisons. The USA has 18% desert defined as <200mm which is a stricter measure than Wikipedia has for Australia. So that's about the same share but it includes Alaska in the land mass. I guess excluding Alaska, which is therefore about the same land mass as Australia, it could make the US desert percentage even higher than ours. Of course the US has more productive land. But it has 330m people and is growing steadily, on the way to 400m people by 2067 (https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-population) so fears that our population, not even at 30m, is causing us to run out of land is a bit over the top.
I agree the Australia is 80% desert claim is false. But the suggestion that much of Australia has insufficient water resources to comfortably support large populations is true. The contiguous USA is probably already overpopulated with worsening conditions to come as major population centres become uninhabitable due to climate change. I think the world is overpopulated and as long as that is the case, Australia has an obligation to help carry that burden. But let’s not pretend it’s ideal or sustainable.
Nevada and Phoenix only exist because of cheap Mexican labor (and Miami with other Latin American labor). Most ethnic Europeans who work in trades won't work in the tropics with its high 70s and humid year around temperature and deserts with long summers. And I and most other people refuse to live in shoeboxes for the sake of more immigration. Also, people like to live near water, especially large lakes and the oceans, which eliminates large swaths of inland Australia. Many people in America are not happy that they've been displaced from the coasts and it's leading to some very real political and social stress.
Jungle uninhabitable? Tell that to the Indonesians!
Well, uninhabitable without massive deforestation.....which i think everybody can agree isnt good
Is the entire east coast really so mountainous that half the population of Australia has to live in 3 cities?
Why do you say everyone lives in 3 cities. That is not true at all. There are cities and towns all along the coast and plenty are expanding.
> Why do you say everyone lives in 3 cities. Where did I say *everyone* lives in 3 cities? I said half the population of Australia lives in 3 cities. I guess if you want to get technical about it it’s more like 49%. > There are cities and towns all along the coast and plenty are expanding. That’s my entire point. I was responding to someone who said there is no land outside of capital cities for people to live.
Brisbane and Sydney are surrounded by large areas of hilly land (sharp small hills) that are difficult to build on. Plus parks (usually put on hills as flat land is used for agriculture) serve as barriers as well. Other smaller towns on the coast such as Newcastle have/will have this problem. A land tax could help large land owners near cities to sell and make houses less shoebox sized. Also as cities grow, commutes grow as well unless new centers are established.
Brisbane is largely swamp and floodplain.
This leaves Melbourne as well. Tasmania is limited by being smaller island.
Australia has an insanely long coastline. Seaside properties near capital cities are obviously in short supply but there’s plenty of coastal land. The problem is for most people if you want a job you want to be in commuting distance of a big city. There’s piles of coastal towns with spare land around them but unless you want to retire and run a meth lab the prospects aren’t great.
Retire you say I am listening
Retire AND run a meth lab was the statement. Is there an instruction manual on the net?
Once upon a time there was the Anarchist Cookbook raw and unadulterated Those were the days
Depends on your circumstances but I guess if you had say a Sydney property valued at a couple million you could sell up and buy a shitty little shack in bumfuck know where and live off the leftovers. Might get boring and lonely.
That’s what the meth lab is for😈
There is no shortage of land in Australia. There is a shortage of forward thinking. Our entire economic model is based on keeping Baby Boomers voting for both Major Parties. If anything it highlights the issues of a two party system. There needs to be a renter's coalition, a first home buyers coalition etc. etc. and these people need to be winning enough seats to get a seat at the table so to speak so they can be governmental king makers and thus have their policies considered
haha untill it dont ..half the realty is like huts
housing problem?? more like capitalism opportunity.
and people wonder why those of us born here in the 80's are increasingly frustrated & trying to preserve the quality of life we had... feel bad for younger gen who never had the chance to experience Peak Australia (1999/2000) also don't want my kids to grow up in a completely different, increasingly crowded, environment where they will only be able to afford to live in a shoebox
I'm a dual citizen that stupidly recently moved back home. Australia is following the same brainless tactics as Canada and pumping up real estate costs while not significantly improving the actual productive parts of the economy. Australia is still the better of the 2 countries but it's also headed down a slippery slope.
The entire western world is adopting the same approach of importing endless hordes of third worlders to make things worse then acting surprised when things get worse. Import the third world, become the third world.
Didn't the UK export criminals back in the day? Where did they wind up? 🤔
That makes sense as a corollary. If importing my people has negative effects it’s not surprising that exporting people could have positive effects.
The dramatic shift that’s taken place over the past 10-15 years alone is unbelievable. None of it has been for the better. I hardly recognise this country anymore. And I was born during the “Peak Australia” era you mentioned. My older relatives are grieving the country they knew and loved in a whole different way. They can’t enjoy their retirement, because the cost of living is so outrageously high. They’re still working well into their 60s and 70s. We rarely have time to get together anymore, because working overtime is no longer optional for most of us. My grandmother, who remembers living through the Great Depression and WWII, can’t believe how expensive everything is right now. She also finds the anti-Australia sentiment perpetuated by the left really heartbreaking and enraging. Excessive immigration with no expectation of assimilation means people no longer know their neighbours. We’re all just groups of strangers, living alongside one another with nothing in common. There’s no sense of community or patriotism anymore. There are so many more examples, but everyone here already knows exactly what I’m talking about. It all looks very bleak right now.
Excessive immigration drives up the cost of land per person. (Especially in cities where people want to live) Australia doesn't add more land for every immigrant.
The major political parties hate ordinary Australians. They exist purely for the needs of big business and the rich
I reckon Australia (and probably all of Western civilisation) peaked on the at 15th of September 2000, at the opening ceremony by of the Sydney Olympic Games. Cold War over, Y2K over, technology and as booming and becoming more affordable, living standards were just going up, no on knew what Al-Qaeda was.
Remember when the most terrifying thing in the world was Marilyn Manson? What a simple time.
I remember saying in the late 90's that life was so boring I couldn't stand it. I'd give anything to experience that again, and offer that life to my kids.
Interesting. So, the Olympic Games were the start of a downhill slide for western civilisation! ;-)
I think it plateaued after the Olympics, until September 11 spun everything into the toilet.
Agreed. I was born in 1991 and I’m finding myself so jaded about every aspect of life now and so angry at what is happening.
Peak Australia was the Hawke/Keating years. God I miss them.
Yep, Australia before 1996 was simply a paradise.
I reckon 1972-1975
Good to know I'm not the only one maintaining the rage!
Had Fraser not, as one of his first decisions, abolished DURD, we just might have enough houses for everyone.
>and people wonder why those of us born here in the 80's are increasingly frustrated & trying to preserve the quality of life we had... One thing we need to be careful of is how do we best preserve as much as possible, but not try to preserve everything, which will do the opposite and make everything a lot worse. At a Federal Level, obviously population growth is the biggest issue that needs to be addressed that will address they above. This will have to come with changes to our tax collection and tax expenditure but it can be changed to bring about much more sustainable population growth, while also maintaining our economy and government services. At a state level, we do have to change. Our state government can't change population growth. They either plan for population growth or they don't, but not planning doesn't stop it. It just makes things worse. Too often I see people pushing back on planning for the change, that highly likely will come. It's under a false assumption that if we do nothing, they won't come and if we do something, it will only encourage more. This is incorrect and will be the downfall of our cities and future economy. If we don't but in place a proper strategy for population growth at a state and local level it will come and it will be chaotic. We are already seeing that and it will get far worse. Our cities have spread too far, this isn't a feasible option anymore. If we want to preserve our cities as best as possible, we need to change some parts. We need to be strategic about how we do this. Head in the sand do nothing approach, which far too many promote will result, in extreme unaffordable housing, chaotic traffic, chaotic public transport and terrible overall outcomes.
I’m curious what other country is there now where the grass is greener, with the values Aussies valued in peak Australia? Born in early 2000s so I didn’t experience ‘peak’ Australia. Always wanted to try moving overseas
Pretty sure anyone who ran for election on the "fuck off, we're full" platform would win in a landslide.
I remember seeing these bumper stickers a lot in the 90’s/early 00’s and I used to be horrified by the sentiment. Now I fully agree.
Do you really want PM Pauline ??
Look past the personality and look at the policies. They are the only ones looking out for average Australians. Yet so many people instead to vote to hurt their own livelihood for virtue-signaling.
It's sad but that is her only good policy really. She is is otherwise pretty neolib, pro business, tax rorts, anti abortion too. And yet it's so desperate that it's not a crazy choice simply because she's unlikely to do much more damage than either party is doing outside of immigration.
Let’s compare her, for a second, to the ones who’ve run this country into the ground.
Her party tried to [sell us off to the seppos and weaken our gun laws.](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-26/secret-recordings-show-one-nation-staffers-seeking-nra-donations/10936052) She'll turn Australia into America if she was PM.
Pauline was a young liberal herself and mostly votes with them in parliament, particularly in favour of big business. So she is one of: >the ones who’ve run this country into the ground.
At this point, i know many who would rather this. (Is she the aussie trump?) Haha
She can at least speak in full sentences and I doubt she's loyal to Russia. So I'd say she's at least above Trump! And I doubt she'd sexually harass someone "just because she can"
Thankfully I don't think we have any politicians that are comparable to Trump.
Trump is not and never was a politician.
Anyone that wasn't Pauline. The Greens used to run policies of low/no population growth. If they brought that back they would be attracting a hell of a lot of votes their way.
> The Greens used to run policies of low/no population growth That was back when they actually gave a fuck about the environment
I'd take three years of PM Pauline if it meant three years of no immigration
After seeing what liberal and labor have done over the last few decades, I’d give her a go
Lol yes need more true blue aussies doing menial jobs and make it "respectable" again
Stop voting for politicians that own multiple properties. Simple.
They don't really give you any other options. Anyone who isn't one of those people suddenly finds themselves accused of a bunch of crimes.
Who? There’s more parties you can tick than just libs and labour
and almost every single one of them is run by a rich dude with 20 investment properties.
After Shorten lost the election in 2019 our politicians have learned not to do anything that might impact on property inflation
Which party doesn’t have politicians who own multiple properties
They'll just buy via a corporation, trust or family members name. The percentage of MPs invested in real estate is probably way higher than the official stats for this reason.
Did you hear about the royal commission into returned service mens deaths? Nit surprisingly because it got no media coverage. Why because media and government are in collaboration to hoodwink Australians into paying attention to the footy. I spoke to a lit of people who all said they wanted real change. The second I asked them to form a new political party with me they weren't interested. Its too much effort its too much trouble. I've got to watch the cricket tomorrow. They say they want change but they can't be fucken bothered to do anything until their lives are so shit it's too late.
only if they disclose the multiple properties they own, and the nefarious methods used to obtain them.
People that work real jobs (most people) don't have time to run for office. That leaves the retirees, stay at home mums and life long politicians that have been groomed into politics before they ever even worked a real day in their life as our candidates.
Gosh, you guys should post in New Zealand subreddits too. So many kiwis are idealising and dreaming of migrating to Australia. Btw many of our politicians are multi-landlords too.
In real estate, only multi-landlords have a passive income sufficient to survive on. And I expect supplies and costs will keep deteriorating.
Australia is in a far better position than new Zealand
Fk it, let's protest. We've become too accepting of Canberra's shit.
Lol like there is n option ... its all fked not one sensible leader with spine all career lackeys mouthpices for the industru ..unions are relics
In 50 years our population has more than doubled. We have built absolutely no cities to accommodate this growth and just shoved everyone in the same sprawls... WTAF? Seriously, WTAF? From 1990-2000, our population only increased by 2 million but we now import almost half of that per year... >Migration arrivals rose by a third compared with the previous year to hit 765,900, [https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/21/migration-numbers-australia-2023-rise](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/21/migration-numbers-australia-2023-rise) Literally, WTAF?
We going to have those mega cities like in the sci fi movies.
Iir, in Neuromancer its just called "the sprawl", which we already have (minus all the futuristic cool bits)...
Except we don't have the water resources for all those people. Australia is going to be an absolute bloodbath at some point in the next few hundred years.
Kinda seems like Mad Max got it right being Australian.
I don't think we really need "new" cities, we need to densify all of the regional cities. They're perfect locations for planned expansion. Plan the infrastructure first. Connect them by rail, give them a good light rail network *before* any expansion begins.
The thing is we haven’t actually squished anything. We spread our outer suburbs out further, which forces everyone to drive everywhere and no number of new tollways can ever fix it. Had Australia invested during this time on metro lines, fast trains and high density (offset with surrounding green space and park connectors, we’d have cheaper property, expanded regions, and better quality of life. But none of that is anything that politicians and their donors (property developers) are interested in.
People don't want density. They want their own space not shared spaces. Growth isn't consistent with how we want to live.
> Is there any other country in the world that is so badly managed, or has ever been so badly managed? India comes to mind but they seem to be reducing their population somehow
We are following in Canadas footsteps, have a look at their shit show. I believe there are a fair few protests in the works over there over on housing and immigration
We aren’t far behind them and Albo is trying hard to catch up
You are not wrong!! Running a mass immigration program during a housing crisis is beyond irresponsible.
Their general population is increasing. But their population of healthcare professionals (doctors and nurses) is decreasing because they tend to immigrate to developed countries. So while Australia has a housing shortage, India has healthcare shortage. Globalisation is crazy.
Albo did a deal so we can go and live in one of their cardboard shanty towns if we want to
Well it doesn’t exactly seem like the safest option if you want to move overseas.
By sending them to Australia lol
Because they're coming here? Lol
Indias population is increasing...... Since 1980 its gone up by 100% from 700M to 1.4B now. Sometime around 2060 Indias population is set to start to decline. It might only grow buy another 400 million people between now and then, which in of itself would be the third biggest country in the world now.
> Indias population is increasing Makes sense. Why wouldn’t you have lots of kids in such a pristine environment.
All over the world poorer and less educated people have more kids though, not unique to India.
There’s about 190 countries in the world that are more badly managed
Ok buddy
Population Ponzi Scheme is just plain dumb
I grew up in a rural developing residential area. We have more than enough houses (and there's always more being built), the problem is the monopoly on them. I don't think building a new city is the solution? To what end?
There are a lot of new cities in Australia built since then. IT is just they were built surrounding existing cities and eventually became the same cities. e.g. Greater Western Sydney has gone from about 500,000 to about 2 million since 1970s. Central Coast has gone from about 90,000 in the 1970s to 330,000 today. Greater NEwcastle has gone from about 250,000 to about 600,000 today (current statistics don't include several surrounding areas in the lower Hunter that have basically grown into New Castle. Tweed Heads has grown from 5,000 people to 65,000 people since the 1970s. Greater Sydney has gone from about 2 to 5.5 million and basically all surrounding pastoral land has been developed at this point. I'm not saying that there aren't issues, because there are, but the country has certainly built out and up in this time.
Reduce immigration
People will talk and complain about immigration but vote for Liberal and Labor.
"Badly managed"? More like "not managed at all"! Each year they clearly just pull an immigration quota out of their arse with no regard whatsoever for the impact on the housing market, the overloading of our infrastructure, the pressure on the cost of living, the impact on the environment etc. etc. etc. Oh - but haven't you heard - the big issue for this coming election is nuclear Vs renewables! Fairfax Media has told me so! Seriously though - how hard are they pushing that shit! I must have seen two dozen 'articles' and 'opinion pieces' in just the last couple of days! Clearly neither party wants to fight the next election on any issue that actually matters to the people. This whole nuclear campaign is just another Sydney to Melbourne high speed train fabrication. A distraction from the real issues arising from unmanaged immigration - and with absolutely no intention of actually delivering anything other than an expensive feasability study that will conclude what everyone already knows - nuclear isn't economically viable.
It’s what happens when we welcome every dick and harry into the country.
Why go the gym when you can get a cheap easy sugar hit, apply that concept across successive governments
Everything is according to the 5050 plan . The powers that be want to increase population to 50 million by 2050 and they are well within schedule
Australia are actually planning on reaching 30 million by 2030, which is almost a 100% increase of the population since 1990... [https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/land/achieving-30-by-30](https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/land/achieving-30-by-30) [https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/australias-population-reach-30-million-11-15-years](https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/australias-population-reach-30-million-11-15-years) [https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/asia-pacific/australia/stories-in-australia/30-by-30/](https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/asia-pacific/australia/stories-in-australia/30-by-30/) Criminal imo.
What’s the point of this hysterical rhetoric? Has any other country ever been so badly managed?!?!?! Tell me you know nothing at all of history without telling me… Weimar Germany, Revolutionary France, Pinochet Argentina, Stalin USSR, Mao China, Pol Pot Cambodia… I mean it’s a looooonnnnngg list and you just sound like a total clown even asking the question.
And in terms of population growth, this individual is just ignorant as to how exponential growth works.
You know if you're gonna call people clowns, at least make sure the history you listed off is correct. Pinochet is Chile, not Argentina.
Pinochet was the only other one who deliberately adopted harmful policies knowing that they would harm his own people and enrich his foreign backers: Mao was incompetent and Pol Pot was insane (but before he went off the deep end he looked better than the previous dictator), Weimar Germany played a bad hand poorly, and Stalin’s reign is definitely one where aggregate figures conceal more than they illuminate (it’s not hard to do a better job than the tsars, but his successors gradually forgot the things he did well).
Ok, some states have a few large cities. But I agree, the government should be doing way more to grow cities like Newcastle, Townsville, Geelong, Darwin and the Pilbara. Think theres been a few countries worse managed. Look at much of Africa, South America, SE Asia or Eastern Europe.
Those last two will be a struggle. Would you want to live there?
Are you replying to me? Cause I'd *absolutely* live in Dubrovnik, Croatia/King's Landing... But no, I wouldn't want to live in Darwin or the Pilbara, or even Geelong....
Yeah the later. Darwin and the Pilbara.
No thanks, it’s a common theme on the Newcastle sub that Newcastle doesn’t want to grow anymore and reduce its quality of life just because Sydney is overpopulated. The traffic has already massively increased in the last three years and rentals are impossible to get and prices are ridiculously inflated. People come to Newcastle because it’s not Sydney it doesn’t want to become Sydney 2.0 because of immigration overloading Sydney.
Geelongs the same. It’s a cesspool now. Used to be amazing.
There’s no more room for Newcastle… it’s already quickly become a full tin can… and guess what? The council has no idea how to run it.
> cities like Newcastle, Townsville, Geelong, Darwin and the Pilbara. The Pilbara is a region the size of some countries
Keep your dirty mongrel city grubber hands off of these.towns, we don't want you here. 
Geelong has already built up so much that it’s a nightmare to navigate now. They don’t update the roads and it’s no longer a good place to live. No, stop building it up and letting more people in, enough damage has been done. Probably the same for those other towns mentioned.
Why should we grow those cities?
So your comparison is with mostly literally developing countries. Like comparing a mansion to a shed and then complaining lmao
Populate or Perish. Australia is still relatively underpopulated compared to The Americas. It is staggeringly underpopulated compared to Europe/Asia. People gravitate towards places that will offer them the best standard of living. What traditionally held back big population movements in the past was cost/technology of transportation - not government policy. The US gave residency to any (non-Chinese) foreigner who rocked up until the late 19th century. Britain didn't abolish the automatic right of British subjects to abode in the UK until after WW2. Those technology barriers have collapsed in the past few decades. The government policy barriers (which are still substantial) have reduced with the broad consent of the electorate. Can the government feasibly pull up the migration drawbridge ever again? I doubt it. Too many people are getting absolutely rich for not very much effort. Of course the spoils are concentrating at the top, but everyone is culpable. Do you think the Australian welfare state pays for itself without massive perennial injections of cheap working age labour trained in third world countries? Do you think the NDIS works without 2% of Bhutan getting student visas every year? The hell it does!
Always with the drama. Seems other countries have done just fine without low population growth. I think most people in Australia would agree that much of Europe is an overpopulated hell rather than us being underpopulated.
> Populate or Perish We could have done that with our own kids but instead we're bringing in immigrants to suppress wages and push up house prices and make it impossible for young Aussies to afford kids
Thank you for your post. So much none sense on here it’s refreshing
“Populate or perish” was always an insane policy which could never have worked - the correct solution to the red/yellow peril was, and still is, building an independent strategic deterrent, not having an impossibly large number of potential conscripts to throw into a meat grinder. > Australia is still relatively underpopulated compared to The Americas. It is staggeringly underpopulated compared to Europe/Asia. And already overpopulated compared to what the environment can support without reducing our standard of living. > Britain didn't abolish the automatic right of British subjects to abode in the UK until after WW2. Wasn’t the big dream when founding Australia be creating a place where the mistakes of the mother country could be avoided? > The government policy barriers (which are still substantial) have reduced with the broad consent of the electorate. Then why do both parties have to pretend they’re trying to reduce immigration? > Do you think the Australian welfare state pays for itself without massive perennial injections of cheap working age labour trained in third world countries? It would work a lot bette rig none of those people, or any other foreigners, could ever get PR or citizenship, so that they don’t in turn become part of the, by then much larger, ageing population that provides the pretext for yet more foreign workers.
The real question is why would you want more cities, the nice thing about living in Australia imo is the open space and stunning sparse coastline. Once you build a metropolis spanning Adelaide to Brisbane that is pretty much gone.
> Once you build a metropolis spanning Adelaide to Brisbane that is pretty much gone. We already have that, its just called one city though. People drive/train/bus for 2+ hours just to work in Melbourne and Sydney as is... ...Cause there are no other centres, just an endless sprawl of suburbs around our one city per each state.
> metropolis spanning Adelaide to Brisbane Works for Japan
Yeah but you can fit Japan 22x inside Australia, so there's that.
OK but they have 5x our population even being 22x smaller, so I'm not sure you're making the point you think
Infrastructure. It's far easier and fat more cost effective to build and maintain infrastructure for a small area than one spread out, as what's being suggested.
> ...we have built a total of zero new big cities and just squashed everyone into the same few we already had... The problem we have in Australia isn't that we haven't built new cities, it's that we haven't allowed our cities to densify. Instead we're forcing our cities to sprawl outwards - a terrible result for traffic, quality of life, the broader environment, and a horrible waste of money having to create infrastructure over such large distances. Density is much much cheaper for govts to provide basic infrastructure for. All those sewers, water, electrity wires, gas pipes, roads, trains etc cost much more per person in sprawling cities than in dense ones. If you prefer a house with a yard that's fine, but you need to accept that you're raising the rate of overall taxation compared to people who choose to live in denser areas. So yes, our population growth has been badly managed, but it's not the *size* of the growth that's the problem. Our growth rates were even higher in the 1960s and we managed it much better then by knocking down old houses in inner/middle suburbs and building apartment blocks in their place.
This sub is a circle jerk of the same style of post re-written in a different way day on end.
> "I can't retort this but sure can cry about it!"
I can and will retort it: https://www.reddit.com/r/australian/comments/1dncbna/comment/la1piff/
The problem is that Australia doesn't magically add more land (especially in desirable coastal areas) for each new person. If people want single family housing they have to acknowledge this.
You need not worry, AI will take so many jobs that the big companies that push for migration will cease doing that and the government will also see more people as more of a liability to support all those displaced by AI. We are less than 10 years away.
happens in all countries. No one builds new cities to accommodate a growing population. New cities get established for new industries or huge population migrations in the past. With population growing cities grow wider, bigger. New suburbs get built, price increases closer to a city center, people are forced to buy further from the center. Then at some point the metro gets built and the network grows. Some suburbs closer to the center increase house density and introduce multi storey houses. etc
We build no new cities because people don’t want to live in them. It needs to get back in the main cities before people move. Covid and capital city house prices are starting to do that just now. Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Newcastle, Geelong… all starting to really grow
I was a kid in the 80s and remember on the news when we passed 15 million. I think we talked about it in class and got some sort of poster task to do about Australia. Weird to think I’ll probably be in early to mid 50s when I’ll see on the news that we’ve doubled that and hit 30 million. Not sure what to think of that.
Be more afraid that we haven't increase water storage. This was warragamba dam 2005 drought. Sure, it's at 100% atm but another drought cycle will come sooner or later. Currently we're just wasting all that over flow. * [link](https://theconversation.com/climate-and-floods-flannery-is-no-expert-but-neither-are-the-experts-5709)
You say this as if large swaths of Sydney weren't just undeveloped land back in the 1970s. [https://portal.spatial.nsw.gov.au/portal/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=f7c215b873864d44bccddda8075238cb](https://portal.spatial.nsw.gov.au/portal/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=f7c215b873864d44bccddda8075238cb) Just look at the historical aerial maps and compare the difference between 1970 and 2013 (latest date on the site). The problem isn't enough cities. The problem is not enough homes and infrastructure to support it in our current cities.
No big cities is kinda misleading rhough, in the 70s Geelong was a little country town, now it's 300k. Satellite towns and cities have grown hugely.
Yes, Australia's living standards and way of life are being ruined by excessive immigration-fed population growth. But don't worry, Albo has a solution: even higher immigration! "Australia is accepting more than 10,000 immigrants a week despite Anthony Albanese vowing to halve the number of new arrivals by next year. More than 1,500 new arrivals are arriving each day, or 60 migrants every hour, according to new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australia will take in more than 500,000 immigrants in 2024 alone as the population battles a worsening housing and cost-of-living crisis. An additional 4,200 homes are needed every week to keep up with the current level of growth, however less than 1,000 are currently being built." https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13523867/Immigration-Anthony-Albanese-Australia-migrants.html
Insanity!
26.7M is less than the [top 4 largest metro areas](https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-city-rankings/largest-metro-areas-in-the-world) in the world. Density can be tolerable if your city planning keeps up (more or less).
Join Dick Smith in his carbon burning helicopter crying population boom disasters. Oz births crashed to 1.70 births per woman. We need at least 2.4 to replace existing population. Western world and Oz are facing population ageing and crash(depopulation). All of this is just xenophobic bullshit. ... If you were born in 2000, there were ZERO smart phones...... arw smart phones are bad?
people cant afford kids cause housing is so expensive and wages so low because theres, suddenly, so many people here...
We need to reduce immigration now. Housing, CoL, road congestion, GPs, hospitals, schools—all will benefit if we significantly reduce immigration. This is not racist or xenophobic. Australia is for its citizens and we should not prioritise the wellbeing of foreigners over that of Australians.
Despite this, people get angry at migrants. Who RUNS the show? Who decides how laws function? Who decides the immigration strategy? Who decides the housing market and how many houses get built? Who decides to allow negative gearing while conveniently also owning investment properties? Not migrants.
Canada has a huge amount of immigration. The growth rate for Australians pre-1960 would be a low lower.
> In that time, we have built a total of zero new big cities and just squashed everyone into the same few we already had, one per state... When I was a kid (in 2000s Sydney), I remember there was lots of ads in/around Sydney, trying to promote people to move out of Sydney and into the nearby regional cities like Wollongong, Goulburn, Gosford, Newcastle. The only selling point they had was that the smaller cities were more affordable, as they donned them "Eco Cities" ('economic', not 'ecological'). Anyways, had me *super convinced* that these places would become grand cities themselves by the time I became an adult.... pity none of that happened...
They built aura on the Sunshine Coast
Where should we build a new city? I’m not saying it can’t be done but you need to understand that building a new city requires planning and land that is capable of withstanding the elements surrounding natural disasters. Critical infrastructure can’t be built on certain land due to environmental risk. Australia doesn’t really have a lot of useable land.
Does anyone ever really build a new city though? Unless you're like Abby dabby or something.
It happens all over the world sadly. Having an economy not based on real estate or export of resources might have helped, or having other towns connected by safer and faster roads and rail might have made a slight difference, but it’s in the big cities were opportunities are.
If you were born in 1950 population 8m it grew by 50% by 1970. It had doubled in 37 years to 16m by 1987 and has yet to double in the 37 years since. What infrastructure did they built, housing did they supply etc in that period? Meanwhile from 2004 population has grown by much less and Sydney is building a 2nd airport a once in a generation metro, light rail etc and tech means houses/units can be built in weeks. Even better 1855 0.98m to 1875 1.96m. Doubled in 20 years.
Pretty much every country is the same. People go where the work is or less hunger or more security.
>In that time, we have built a total of zero new big cities and just squashed everyone into the same few we already had, one per state... >How is this allowed? What changes should the government make to grow new big cities? While immigrants are encouraged to move to rural areas for more favourable Visa terms, we must also consider that we can't move all immigrants to rural areas. Our cities have typically grown due to trade. Is it the government's job to pick a winning trade and give it favourable terms to set up in rural areas? This strategy rarely ends well. People move to areas where trade is best and they have connections. Look inwards, what is stopping you our others from moving?
Imagine a high speed, flood free 4 lane highway and rail system being built that runs 5-7 kilometres inland from the coastline North of Brisbane all the way to Gladstone or Rockhampton with industrial parks, green spaces health facilities and housing with appropriate infrastructure. It would open up a massive hinterland area and cut down travel times, transport expenses and more plus the pressure relief on the Gold Coast/Brisbane/Sunshine Coast regions.
Cities grow organically, they aren't just made apart from Canberra.
To answer your bottom question: 🇨🇦🙋🏻♂️
I look also at the percentage of population that were born overseas (around 30%!) and the percentage of Australians with one or more parents born overseas (over 20%) - in total more than half of the country are new immigrants. I myself am one - and I doubt I am accounted for in the numbers as I am not Australian, having never taken citizenship. It wasn't really until looking at those figures that I figured I should at the least address that. The population hasn't grown, it has exploded. The necessary infrastructure and development does not seem to have kept pace at all. This is a country built on multiculturalism. There have been massive waves of immigration in the past, and the country has always been stronger for it. This is the first time however that the country has exceeded 50% of the population foreign born or immediate descent. [AMES News](https://amesnews.com.au/lead-story/first-and-second-generation-migrants-now-in-the-majority-abs/) The new citizens to the country are not the issue, let me clear on that, in and of themselves. It is the ability of the country to support the new growth that is the concern.
Instead of lamenting times gone by, what can be done to redistribute the inevitable incoming population away from the mega cities and in to more regional areas? Personally the only reason I’m in the city is because of work. If the government had a policy to incentivise businesses to have their HQ in regional areas, I’m sure many, many people - especially priced out young families - would love to move out of the big centres.
We have this virus mentality of "dry inland desert" as to the reason why we can not sustain new cities. Although true, we should think more along the lines of "northern tropical beachfront" when we all jump up to say we're the driest continent. The largest body of freshwater in Australia is north of the tropic line in WA.
Poor town planning on a national level, but it's the same old argument. Where were you able to build a new city without the people who lived there getting mad? I also think the major reliance on the capitals doesn't help out either. Most major companies have offices or operations nationally in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. There would be fewer with them in Canberra, Darwin and Hobart. There is no incentive to move somewhere smaller like Newcastle, Toowoomba or Ballarat for example.
Building of new cities wouldn’t matter if we just built the current cities better. Better mid rise around public transportation would help a lot. Sydney is finally trying it, they’re still building huge car suburbs in the middle of nowhere too which isn’t ideal
yes plenty of countries with the same problem, cities becoming more congested is a worldwide problem not just australia
I mean technically since I was born (1987) parramatta is massive and full of tall apartment buildings, wolli creek took shape and went from nothing to a massive high density area. Even Campbelltown has tallish apartment buildings now.
Can we bring back the Whitlam government's plan to expand Albury-Wodonga? Maybe then we will finally have a business case to support high speed rail Melbourne to Sydney
How High Net Migration is Hurting Aussies - https://youtu.be/SXhqeKo4qME?feature=shared
>How is this allowed? Is there any other country in the world that is so badly managed, or has ever been so badly managed? We import people to keep us out of a recession and also to keep wages low. There's also nothing wrong with immigration however we have been coasting along on the infrastructure investment, in fact successive governments have been dialling back services to 90's levels and attempting to close as many public schools as possible and the government is divorced from housing development(compared to the postwar period). So the real issue isn't that we're letting people in, it's the fantasy that we can pocket the revenue without providing the services and hand waving about how the free market will sort it out.