babyboom

The Australian Financial Review seems these days only to speak for the corporate land speculators and financiers. Bugger small or medium business which must pay the cost of mass immigration in high rents and reduced profit margins, making its products globally uncompetitive and underpinning the very high rate of business failure in Australia. Predictably, in its support of corporate business interests, the AFR is again trotting out the 'mass immigration keeps us young line' again. (See Jacob Greber,"Immigration supports ageing population, RBA says." June 19, 2018.) If we were to apply logic, however, immigration keeps us older. It's not just because, when immigrants arrive, they are always older than Australians who are born here, aged zero - although that is true. The fact is that Australia never had a big problem with an aging population and what problem anyone has with 'aging populations' is self-solving, through death - as long as we do not keep artificially adding new people. Even in Europe, the baby-boomer bump will pass away around 2050, giving Europe a more natural demographic. If you want to see real aging population problems before they happen in Australia, consider the 'developing world' as its swollen youth cohort ages.

The page I am writing about is on the Australian ABC website, entitled, "You decide Australia’s population, we’ll show you how it looks," by journalist Inga Ting, Mark Doman, Ri Liu and Nathan Hoad. The arguments presented are a kind of demographer's fantasy. Demography is not population science; it is maths and statistics. Maths and statistics are not themselves science. They can be used as much for population science, to test theories, as they can be used for advertising and propaganda. Demographers are often also economists and they usually try to establish trends in population numbers in isolation from the environment, social values, or deep history. What they call population science is usually only economics, which many people think is now practised as a dogma. They do not tend to challenge propaganda and, for this reason, they are very useful for governments and corporate media that want to push peoples' thinking in a certain direction about population.[1] This interactive article on the ABC gets the reader to make certain decisions, comes up with biased feedback, and then invites the reader to change their minds. To be unbiased, this interactive would need to list the positives of lowering population growth. It fails to. It does mention some as opinions, but it does not employ related arguments in its presentation of demographic trends in Australia.