immigration rate of about 30,000 pa.
A population of 25 million as advocated by the Prime Minister and others required a net immigration flow of about 70,000 pa. High migration levels were thus illogical. In the 1960s there was a deficit of the "working cohort": immigration had been the logical response to that situation. The democraphic facts should be recognised: different policies were now required.
In one of the more provoking interventions, Phillip Ruthven, Director of the IBIS Group poured scorn on most of the interventions we had so far heard on this subject, arguing that Australia was taking an inside-out approach. It was wrong to ask what an ideal population level should be. Instead we should consider the world's view of the right population for Australia, what this would mean for immigration numbers in the future and where the world considered migrants should come from. Realism was needed. He identified a number of myths affecting the immigration debate:
i)
Australia is approaching the limits of its people-carrying capacity: persuade the world whose average population density of 107 persons/km compared to Australia's 2/km2.
ii)
Most of Australia is desert: if two-thirds is desert, Australia's population density rises to 6/km*. Anyway, look at eg China.
iii) No water resources: wrong. Australians don't live
where the water is: in the top third of the continent.
iv)
People can't live there: wrong. European Australians. have not wanted to. That does not mean others can't or do
not want to.
v) Too many more people will damage the delicate ecology: wrong. 17 million doing the wrong things can do more harm than 170 million behaving in an environmentally conscious fashion.
vi)
The economy can't afford high immigration: wrong. Fiscal policy needs adjustment.
vii) Migrants take away jobs. Shown to be nonsense in the longterm.
viii) "We found the place first"
NO. The aborigines
did. "They thought it was their's too, up until 1788".