A Greater Australia: Population, policies and governance - CEDA

Section 2.3IntroductionThe Australian population debate has been dominated by the numbers issue: Howmany Australians? A big Australia vs a small Australia? What is Australia’s carryingcapacity? What is Australia’s optimal population? This dichotomisation and simplificationis unfortunate because the challenges and opportunities presented by populationchange in Australia over the next few decades are as much to do with populationcomposition and spatial distribution as they are about numbers. This chapter focuseson the spatial, and argues that an important part of any sustainable population strategyfor Australia must involve consideration of where the future population will live and theconfiguration of the settlement system and policies which work toward achieving abetter balance between the distribution of resources and population.The present preoccupation with gross numbers has not always characterised the populationdebate in Australia. Concerns about population distribution go back a centuryand indeed were often front and centre in the debate. Accordingly after summarisingthe main features of the contemporary Australian population distribution, a briefhistorical review of policy and public concern with the spatial dimension of Australia’spopulation is presented. The attention then turns to factors that have shaped the past,and will influence population distribution into the future. Policy issues relating to futurepopulation distribution are then presented.A distinctive population distributionIn discussing Australia’s population distribution, one is confronted with a strikingparadox of mobility and stability. On the one hand Australians are the most mobilesociety in the contemporary world. The 2006 census indicated that 16.8 per cent ofAustralians had moved their permanent place of residence in the last year and 45.5per cent in the last five years. Moreover, 23.9 per cent of the Australian population wasborn in another country, the highest proportion for any middle-sized or large country.In addition, at any one time there are almost one million foreigners in Australia on someform of temporary visa; and about one million Australians reside abroad. Hence theAustralian population is one of the most residentially mobile in the world.On the other hand, there has been a great degree of stability in the overall spatial structureof the national population distribution. About a century ago the geographer GriffithTaylor argued that the structure of Australian population distribution had been fixed bythe 1870s and his argument is still substantially sound. Figure 1 shows the centre ofgravity of the Australian population since 1861 and indicates that it has moved very littleover the subsequent 150 years. Despite massive population growth the basic structureof the spatial distribution of the population has remained fairly stable. This is in contrastto the United States where there has been significant westward and southward shift inthe centre of gravity of the population distribution over the same period. 1Moreover, despite a popular narrative of massive internal migration from non-metropolitanto metropolitan areas, there is also a high degree of stability in the proportionsof the national population living in metropolitan, other urban and rural areas. Figure2 indicates that there has been relatively little change over the last few decades inthe proportions of the national population living in the three main sections of statecategories identified by the ABS.A Greater Australia: Population, Policies and Governance73