The Treasury has predicted there will be 35 million people in Australia by 2050. While it may be a huge boost for the the economy, is the environment heading for disaster? Shevonne Hunt reports.

Australia's population is set to increase dramatically. Image: James Cridland

Debates between economists and environmentalists are firing up as Australia’s population prediction (35 million by 2050) has raised questions about how the country will be able to support such a growth.

While the new Minister for Population, Tony Burke, has one year to form a planning strategy, the Opposition government has called for him to cut migration.

However, others say that immigration is necessary to meet the current labour demand.

Peter McDonald, director of the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute at the Australian National University said: “The resources boom is generating a big demand for labour.”

He said the resources boom also has a knock-on effect, as it generates wealth which in turn generates a demand for labour in the services industry, as “people are wanting to pay other people to do things for them”.

“The resources boom, a lot of the contracts are already signed. There’s kind of no turning back. It can’t be switched off,” he said.

“So there’s no question that for at least the next decade, we’re going to have to meet the labour demand emerging from the resources boom.”

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However, environment groups argue that while the services industry may call for, and benefit from a population growth, the environment may not sustain it.

“This question of what is a sustainable level, is going to be one of the first questions that has to be answered. And I think we need the advice for instance of the CSIRO,” said Sandra Kanck, national president on the non-government lobby group, Sustainable Population Australia.

“We can not depend on the economists because they have got a self interest in there that they often don’t declare. So it means coming at it from the point of view of science,” she said.

“And only when we know what is a environmentally sustainable level will we know what the limits are with our water supply for instance, the capacity of the land to produce the food we need to eat. Only then can we look at the other questions about what level of immigration there ought to be.”

Cam Walker from Friends of the Earth said that it’s how the population will be managed, not the projected increase itself, that counts.

“We could choose to live here much more carefully. Anyone that’s traveled even to Western Europe would know that compact densely built cities can be really lovely places to be. They can be very convivial. They can be very livable,” said Mr Walker.

“Our model is much more on the US approach which is based on sprawl, car dependence and quite massive wasting of land. So we could have more compact cities, they could be much more convivial, they could be much nicer places to live and they could also require us to use far less resources.”

Mr Walker believes that re-organisation of the city will inadvertently produce better environmental effects.

“If we rein in our ecological footprint and our carbon debt, we could actually live here better with more people than under the current forward planning scenarios, which is continued urban sprawl, continued low density living, continued reliance on the private car to do all our travel.”

Shevonne Hunt is a producer for the Wire.

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