Imre Salusinszky is magnificent.
Can’t get the job you want? Can’t win the girl you desire? Can’t own the car of your dreams? Have you noticed the common link? That’s right: there’s always some other bastard who already has these things. Too many Australians!
(HT: Stephen Kirchner)
That does not make the going any less tortuous for Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, as they try to make overcrowding an issue in a country that ranks sixth in the world for size and 54th for population.
Sorry Imre but what a tortuously dumb comment. Two-thirds of the country is desert. It’s the dryest continent on earth. Maybe he think we could build a couple of Las Vegases out Birdsville way.
C.L.
28 Jul 10 at 11:52 am
Driest!
C.L.
28 Jul 10 at 11:53 am
I’m miffed people invoke Pauline Hanson in this debate. She never opposed people in general (she had four children of her own), just the cultural effects of immigration.
Call this what it is – Gillardism.
Dale
28 Jul 10 at 12:01 pm
If you’re looking for proper analysis from a column entitled “The Wry Side” then you’re barking up the wrong bush C.L.
Love the ‘gotcha’ attitude though. We need more of that in Australian politics.
JackP
28 Jul 10 at 12:01 pm
C.L. true. But it’s still pretty sparse in the habitable areas.
Australian cities are just not crowded, compared to make i have visited or lived in.
By the way, do you know the most heavily populated country, excluding city states of Singapore and Hong Kong?
It’s Netherlands. And Britain is more heavily populated than China.
A colleague and I used to fly over China – the coastal strip mostly – and would go for a long way without seeing a town or city. We reckoned (semi seriously) that the billion people was a booking keeping error. We could only get up to about 200 million.
But Nanjing Road in Shanghai is crowded.
Ken Nielsen
28 Jul 10 at 12:02 pm
More of this madness from Bob Birrel. He doesn’t care about humanitarian migration but again is worried about the skilled component and overseas students.
Again
1) these people actually pay to come in and support a growing export industry
2) they are a source of cheap labour
3) they don’t get to vote!
And Bob is actually concerned because they create more jobs (by increased demand) before filling them.
What’s not to like? This is a truly bizarro debate.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-election/does-the-lucky-country-need-migrants-20100727-10uf5.html
jtfsoon
28 Jul 10 at 12:08 pm
Bob has always been that way.
Butterfield, Bloomfeld % Bishop
28 Jul 10 at 12:10 pm
A colleague and I used to fly over China – the coastal strip mostly – and would go for a long way without seeing a town or city. We reckoned (semi seriously) that the billion people was a booking keeping error.
Now you’ve got me wondering!
daddy dave
28 Jul 10 at 12:16 pm
dd – around the same time another bloke and I used to joke that the Japan book was also sleight of hand book-keeping and that one day the books would be opened and we’d see Japan was not the economic miracle after all. Oh, how we laughed.
Ken Nielsen
28 Jul 10 at 12:19 pm
Singapore used to buy all its water supplies from Malaysia with which it has a potted history. This is probably what induced them to invest in water recycling.
I don’t see why the desert should be an issue to further settlement.
jtfsoon
28 Jul 10 at 12:20 pm
“boom” not “book” in line 1 of my last.
Ken Nielsen
28 Jul 10 at 12:20 pm
Jack, Imre’s column on “green Hansonism” is not meant to be “wry”, ironic or cheeky. He has an axe to grind. His comment on the size of Australia was simply idiotic.
Don’t get me wrong. He’s great, Imre. I love the Imre.
I just wonder if he actually knows what lies beyond the black stump on the outskirts of Sydney. The answer (in case he’s reading) is: a gigantic desert.
C.L.
28 Jul 10 at 12:25 pm
.I don’t see why the desert should be an issue to further settlement.
Also true of the middle east. However the Murray-Darling system is at capacity. There are two ways around this.
1. solve the Murray-Darling’s problems
2. open up other catchments for agriculture and development.
Once we solve these, it’s full steam ahead.
My view is that the Murray-Darling won’t be solved without a major, bold, new engineering initiative in the mold of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, for example, re-routing another river into the Darling.
daddy dave
28 Jul 10 at 12:29 pm
I agree.
when it ever becomes necessary to expand beyond the one third that isn’t desert such a scheme would become economic.
in fact wasn’t Dick Pratt working on such a scheme before all that price fixing business?
jtfsoon
28 Jul 10 at 12:30 pm
@Daddy Dave
That would be the Clarence, and there is little or no chance of that happening in this century, maybe in the last before 1950s…
Just set the price of water at the price it costs to produce desalinated water and then water is plentiful.
This is the only benefit I see in this mandated solar and wind i.e. producing desalinated water. Both are hopeless at baseload capacity due to variance and the need for massive water storage (to store the energy).
Paul
28 Jul 10 at 2:27 pm
when it ever becomes necessary to expand beyond the one third that isn’t desert such a scheme would become economic.
We’ve locked up a lot of that one-third in national parks and nature reserves. Look at a satellite image of Sydney on Google maps, for example. it’s surrounded by a sea of green. I’m all for managing the environment, but national parks are not the way to do it. They’re predicated on the assumption that humans don’t belong in nature. They’re equivalent to a scrawled sign saying “Humans keep out!” hanging on the gate.
daddy dave
28 Jul 10 at 2:54 pm
That would be the Clarence, and there is little or no chance of that happening in this century, maybe in the last before 1950s…
Doesn’t look like the Clarence region is being utilised to capacity at present.
daddy dave
28 Jul 10 at 3:02 pm
Sorry Imre but what a tortuously dumb comment. Two-thirds of the country is desert. It’s the dryest continent on earth. Maybe he think we could build a couple of Las Vegases out Birdsville way.
Regardless, the majority of the habitable regions of Australia are still mostly uninhabited.
Apart from the Murray-Darling Basin, the best livable land in Australia is in Tasmania, and the south west of WA from Augusta to Esperance.
Both of those 2 latter places are mostly devoid of people, for no particular reason except that the government for some reason decides to subsidise people to live in large cities with not enough water.
Yobbo
28 Jul 10 at 4:37 pm
FMD, I agree 100% with CL! Imre IS an excellent journo/satirist, but this one missed by so much, I cringed.
Preferring to see the good in all and all things, I will let this one go through to the keeper, and look forward to the next.
Peter Patton
28 Jul 10 at 4:56 pm
Dale
Actually, stripped of her want of educated dissembling and rhetorical manipulations by Oldfield and co, all Pauline was arguing against was multiculturalism, and in favor of assimilation. Even she now agrees that her parliamentary maiden speech was less demographically informed than was pleased explained by the authors of said maiden speech.
Peter Patton
28 Jul 10 at 5:06 pm
Both of those 2 latter places are mostly devoid of people, for no particular reason except that the government for some reason decides to subsidise people to live in large cities with not enough water.
Another prime region for population is the South East coast, where Victoria and NSW join. A lot of the land is locked up in national parks, and the NSW government actually has an active policy of de-industrialisation there. For example, There used to be a vibrant fishing industry, but the state has been gradually buying out all the licences.
There’s nobody there. It’s deep wilderness, even where it’s not national park.
daddy dave
28 Jul 10 at 8:12 pm
I’m certain that the habitable regions of Australia could comfortably sustain a population of a hundred million.
dover_beach
28 Jul 10 at 8:49 pm
In The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery even Flannery actually says at one point he believes that Australia could support 50 million people.
Karl Kessel
29 Jul 10 at 12:06 pm
What do you mean Yobbo when you say the governments subsidise the cities? (Through infrastructure projects, etc?)
TimT
29 Jul 10 at 12:26 pm
Infidel Tiger’s comment on the open forum is worth repeating in this thread.
daddy dave
29 Jul 10 at 2:09 pm
What do you mean Yobbo when you say the governments subsidise the cities? (Through infrastructure projects, etc?)
Yes. Look at WA for example when the majority of our production is generated on mines and farms hundreds of kms from Perth. Yet the majority of govt spending is spent in Perth and the surrounding suburbs.
There is also the issue of water subsidisation – people in the large Australian cities are not paying the full amount for the provision of water they consume. If they stopped subsidising this it might encourage people to move to areas with higher rainfall.
Yobbo
29 Jul 10 at 5:07 pm
I’m with Yobbo on this. He’s absolutely right.
Smaller States or more powerful local Govt. would help.
.
29 Jul 10 at 5:54 pm
Governments AND business would prefer to build where it’s cheap and easy to do so, and that’s near existing economies of scale.
Mining companies used to build whole towns near their operations in WA. Now they buy investment properties in Perth and a fleet of planes to shift their workers around.
It’s a shame neither public nor private developers have more long-term vision than that, but what are you going to do?
I know! Blame the government!
FDB
29 Jul 10 at 6:56 pm
So how does that explain for example that minng ntensve FNQ used to pay a lot more in taxes than it received in services?
.
29 Jul 10 at 7:09 pm
It’s a shame neither public nor private developers have more long-term vision than that, but what are you going to do?
WFT? Dude most of these so-called “towns” in the middle of the desert are not towns at all, but temporary work camps.
Why would anyone want to create permanent towns in these out of the way shithole areas. If you want to build an outback town, do it on your own dime and stop expecting others to build it for you.
And who are you to be telling firms how to allocate capital? They’ve done the numbers and if it’s more economic to do fly in fly out operations they’re better at figuring this out than you are.
JC
29 Jul 10 at 7:14 pm
Now they buy investment properties in Perth and a fleet of planes to shift their workers around.
So, what’s the problem? The mining lifestyle is terrific and plenty of people seek out FIFO work. If you want to settle down and live near a mine that isn’t a problem either, but you probably won’t be living in a flash ‘investment property’ in a lovely city.
Michael Sutcliffe
29 Jul 10 at 7:24 pm
WFT? Dude most of these so-called “towns” in the middle of the desert are not towns at all, but temporary work camps.
I think FDB’s point is that we’re missing an opportunity to decentralise and build new cities. Either that, or illustrating the futility of hoping that new cities will be built.
daddy dave
29 Jul 10 at 7:47 pm
Exactly DD.
Frankly, it seems like some of you guys want central planning of population distribution. Even more than we already have – where as it stands the economic incentives are distorted to make regional investment in property development and infrastructure artificially attractive (in Victoria at least – I presume elsewhere). But still the cities grow apace, simply because that’s where people want to live.
FDB
30 Jul 10 at 9:00 am
Yes, the temptation to centrally plan where the population lives should be resisted. Deregulate land use and let it happen naturally.
daddy dave
30 Jul 10 at 9:44 am
But still the cities grow apace, simply because that’s where people want to live.
Actually I think most people want to live near the coast; living “in the city” is a priority for a smaller subset.
daddy dave
30 Jul 10 at 9:45 am
No FDB. Automatic stabilisers play their part. How are they not central planning?
.
30 Jul 10 at 10:26 am
Automatic stabilisers play their part.
How do automatic stabilisers affect where people live?
daddy dave
30 Jul 10 at 10:59 am
I should have said path dependency. This is heavily influenced by State Government expenditure and decisions.
.
30 Jul 10 at 11:03 am
Governments AND business would prefer to build where it’s cheap and easy to do so, and that’s near existing economies of scale
Only to an extent. Economy of scale is only one factor of many to weigh up. Planning bodies evaluate new housing projects, for example, on whether they use “existing infrastructure” or not, and will reject the ones that don’t. Look at the fight over Huntlee in the Hunter Valley, for example. So basically developers are being told to load more and more resources onto the already overloaded existing infrastructure.
daddy dave
30 Jul 10 at 11:33 am
Which is the point Yobbo and I are partly making. You’d see a regional Balassa-Samuelson effect – developing new areas would be cheaper as capacity is not already running high.
.
30 Jul 10 at 12:17 pm
“Actually I think most people want to live near the coast; living “in the city” is a priority for a smaller subset.”
Yes, but most would like healthcare, schools, retail etc too. Sorry, what I write could read oddly today – the keys betwee ‘b’ ad ‘,’ are faulty o this shitty keyboard, so I’ll try to use words without those 2 letters.
FDB
30 Jul 10 at 1:25 pm
…cue jokes about FDB’s usual legibility: 3…2…1…
FDB
30 Jul 10 at 1:28 pm
Well hey the last few days I’ve lost 8 , i, k and , – very frustrating!
.
30 Jul 10 at 2:08 pm
I should have said path dependency.
This is an interesting point. The placement of cities is somewhat random (somewhat), and thereafter people simply live there because that’s where the city is.
daddy dave
31 Jul 10 at 12:59 pm
They aren’t completely random, most cities are placed on rivers ajoining natural sea harbors. However those sorts of things aren’t really as necessary to founding a city nowadays as they were in the early 19th century.
Yobbo
31 Jul 10 at 8:35 pm
“However those sorts of things aren’t really as necessary to founding a city nowadays as they were in the early 19th century.”
So what is it? Market failure? False consciousness?
FDB
31 Jul 10 at 8:43 pm
It’s a combination of economies of scale, and heavy subsidisation which further increases the effects of those EoS.
City sizes have a natural limit, which is reached when the population exceeds the size of its water supply. However, extensive subsidisation of water costs mean that most Australian cities are already supporting far more people than their natural size allows.
An average yearly water bill for a house in an Australian capital is around $1000. That price is far too low (not sure exactly by how much), because not only is the government selling those water units to households and businesses on a per unit basis at a loss, but also the price in no way attempts to recoup any of the fixed costs associated with providing that water supply.
And because it’s being sold on a per-unit marginal cost loss, the more water you use, the greater a subsidy you are receiving. And certain businesses are receiving massive subsidies due to getting water basically for free from taxpayers.
Force those high-usage industries to relocate to areas where providing their own water would be simple (e.g. High Rainfall areas or underutilised rivers), would certainly encourage new settlements, but instead Australia chooses to provide free water to everyone and then wonders why people all want to live in the same place.
Yobbo
31 Jul 10 at 9:34 pm
In the one notable example I can think of a large city formed long after original settlement, both these things held true.
1. Business forced to establish in the area due to unfavourable conditions elsewhere.
2. Water available from a nearby underutilised river system.
That city is called Las Vegas.
Yobbo
31 Jul 10 at 9:37 pm