27 years without a recession, a minimum wage of $22/hr, an endless supply of perfect beaches and natural wonder; a most-developed, low crime, strong social safety net country not far from Asia for holiday. Sounds pretty good
I think the real issue with sustained high levels of immigration is that most immigrants end up living in one of two major cities, Sydney or Melbourne. Melbourne is on track to have a London-sized population by mid-century - but that’s of course based on estimates. Which as the article points out, were completely wrong by three decades in 2005.
It's a lot more than what you get in Asia or the US, or most of the world. Maybe not as good as Western Europe, and not as good as Scandanavia or Switzerland
For reference, Australia's GDP went from $1.57t in 2013, to $1.38 in 2017.
Nearly all nations tanked similarly, but only when priced in US dollars. It was caused by a record USD bull run. The USD gained a lot of ground vs the AUD in just two years.
Germany went from $3.88t to $3.36t one year later.
France went from $2.85t to $2.43t one year later.
Canada went from $1.84t to $1.55t in two years.
Japan went from $6.2t in 2012, to $4.4t in 2015. I assure you, their economy didn't actually contract by 29% in three years. That's solely due to the dollar / yen exchange. They didn't shutter a third of their stores or factories. A year later their USD GDP value jumped by ~11%, solely due to the exchange rate, their economic production did not expand by 11%.
The US dollar dropping by a considerable amount during the Bush years, was similarly responsible for artificially inflating the GDP of Australia (and all nations) in USD terms.
Our GDP "growth" is largely because property price inflation is somehow considered economic growth.
As an Australian, my conclusion is that Australia has failed to diversify its economy. Money comes in through mining, agriculture, property sales and to a lesser extent tertiary education. The rest is a services economy, and I think the joke about Australia being a country where we all serve each other lattes captures the idea in as few words possible.
I've just left the US, and instead of going home I went to Europe to start my company. Denmark is amazingly progressive with how it spends its public purse setting up an environment for innovation. Australia on the other hand seems to have abandoned any idea of establishing a sovereign wealth fund (mining tax) and instead blown millions courting US dollars which hasn't succeeded in turning Australia into a foreign branch of SV.
Worse than Mauritius, Macedonia, Oman, Moldova, Vietnam, Egypt and Botswana.
Worse than Georgia, Kuwait, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and El Salvador.
Sitting embarrassingly and awkwardly between Kazakhstan and Jamaica, and worse than the Dominican Republic at 74 and Guatemala at 75,
Australia ranks off the deep end of the scale at 77th place.
77th and falling. After Tajikistan, Australia had the fourth highest loss in Economic Complexity over the last decade, falling 18 places.
Not the behavior of a modern, mixed economy that many Australians pretend that we have. We are an anomaly. A third world economy with a first world standard of living. Will is last?
That was an amazing read - thanks for sharing. Being pointed to these kinds of brilliant longform pieces of thinking is one of the best things I consistently get out of HN.
And growing xenophobia that made legal skilled immigration harder and harder over time. I've tried moving to Australia several times. Gave up after spending months interviewing with companies who at the end never pick the foreigner. Most don't even bother talking to you if you're not a permanent resident. Very much like the US.
Shame there is no water though. Unless you like it with added salt.
Same goes for the land, the 'topsoil' that is left also comes with added salt.
The place is living on borrowed time, an environmental catastrophe unfolds in the news headlines and before our eyes. Only the ingenuity of man can prevent the place going back to the default 'Aboriginal' carrying capacity. The government can't magically buy feed for the farmers to give to their 'livestock' forever.
It can be simply achieved via income tax change. There’s already a tax rebate depending on the degree of ‘remoteness’. But it’s a political hot potato because the majority of the population lives in three cities.
They do exactly what you describe. Moving to Adelaide, for example, gets you 5 points. I believe it can be even more for country towns if you possess much-needed skills eg. are a doctor.
It's not the gross population that's the problem, it the rate of growth in population and the infrastructure that's required to support it.
The basic problem is that if infrastructure last 50 years, you have to replace 2% of it every year. Now, for every 1% of population growth, you also have to (on average) also build 1% more infrastructure, so you need to build 3% in total, or 50% more than if you had no population growth. But you only have 1% more revenue to build it with, so inevitably only a fraction of what you need gets built, hence the problems. And the higher the population growth, the worse the problems.
What a really odd logic.
So then let's bring immigration down to 0%. Woohoo!
Now you still got to "replace 2% of infrastructure every year" with 0% more revenue. How's that working out for you?
You argue 0 immigration -> 2% infra costs
You argue 1% immigration -> 3% infra costs but also 1% more revenue to use for infra costs
At some point there's a (not entirely) rethorical question about what's a "good" growth rate for a town, and a politician indicate 5% is good. 1.05^15 ~ 2. So that's a doubling in the period between someone enters kindergarten and leaves high school.
Did you miss this part "Yet the majority of Australia’s 3 million square miles is uninhabitable desert, and even many of the greener parts along the coast struggle to secure adequate supplies of fresh water and face periodic drought and wildfires."
But as someone who grew up in Sydney, I got to observe first-hand how the rail system / other critical infrastructure development projects...did not develop.
When I first came to Asia and compared Australia to, say, trains in HK, or Japan. I knew the problem.
To some extent, yes, I think we have to control immigration but blaming stressors on immigration is political expedience typical of the change-ineffective democracy we have there. A more useful culprit I see is the refusal / inability to choose to take responsibility to make the changes to critical infrastructure that could have created improvements with alleviating these stressors.
We had a mining boom (thanks, China!) and could have reinvested that free money back into growing out critical infrastructure, with decades-long future planning to exceed capacity.
But we didn't. Credit loosened the banking sector gobbled up the profits in a (mostly residential) property boom, while the population twiddled their political thumbs and battled viciously (assisted by a complicit media) over small-stakes issues, seemingly benumbed by the spectacle of 66 leadership changes in 13 years[0].
But blaming politicians is "public expediency". The people didn't do anything about it, and in the face of some challenges, are they showing much more than learned helplessness and useless blaming of politicians, without creating some changes?
I want to finish by saying that Sydney was fine, back in the late 90s. Before there was any type of pressure. But to think that situation would last forever is the height of naivety, when you have such an attractive resource. We didn't plan ahead, and we wasted the mining piggy bank I think we could have used to extend capacity to meet future projected needs. It's really very sad I find, because you have a great city, beautiful in every way, with decreasing value / utility because the quality of forward looking planning / action was so poor. Maybe the worst part of it is, Sydneysiders / Australians think quite highly of themselves, and are quite aspirational / ambitious, but they didn't enact that attitude into reality.
Yes, its always funny, peak ressource, the butchering of citizens by another, the crimes done by youth with nothing to loose, its all funny. Then you turn around and point at the superficial motives - the racism, the desperation, the drugs needed and start yelling.
I want a adult as communication partner. It was funny enough while it blasted. Somebody who can take uncomfortable decisions and is able to go against his/ her instincts, when they are proven wrong.
Even if that's true, Australia covers 7 million sqkm. Eyeballing from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Australia, I'd say at least 0.5 million sqkm seem super habitable. That's more than enough to support 25 million. For comparison France isn't super crowded, it's about the same size and has 65 million people...
Easy. Urbanization is super high but because of various policies which benefit property owners, these people get to keep their property values super high and ever increasing.
As a result, everyone crowds to the same places and the housing supply (and associated infrastructure) is strained.
From what I've seen it's a repeating pattern in the developed world. I've seen New Zealanders, of all people, complaining about NZ being overcrowded (it has one of the lowest population densities in the world, especially considering its climate and abundant natural resources).
TL;DR: Rich property owners block/delay construction to get high rents or sell their properties at a very high prices. Average people suffer. Rich people point average people to immigrants and "overcrowding".
Hit the nail on the head. Decades of underinvestment in critical infrastructure has left the whole system vulnerable to even small influxes.
Driving down the eastern seaboard of Australia one is struck by the hundreds of kilometres of perfectly habitable empty space. You could put two or three Hong Kongs on the coast between Sydney and Melbourne and no-one would even notice. We just need the damn infrastructure!
Given its land mass, Australia at 25m is a joke. We can support ten times that. That "uninhabitable desert" is no worse than Arizona really. All that's needed is a little bit of long-term thinking and investment.
Anyone familiar with my comments knows I'm no fan of "high-functioning autocracies" like China or Singapore but bloody hell - it would be good to get them in charge for just a few years and build stuff.
You have high taxes. You have lots of income from mining and your rich natural resources.
Then just build 3 Hong Kongs. What's the problem? Immigrants will be happy to build their new cities. Hong Kong didn't just suddenly show up. It grew over time on an island that had basically nothing on it. It's neighbour Shenzhen was a 10,000 people fishing village and is now a 10 Million metropolis.
One thing I noticed about Australia is that compared to the USA, population density falls off rapidly as you leave the CBD of one of the major cities. If you go ten miles out from a major US city, you will still likely be in a relatively dense suburban town, if not a neighboring city. When I went to Queensland a few years back, I stayed in Taigum -- 16 km north of Brisbane's CBD -- and it was already boonieville. Had I gone much further out, I would have been "out in the bush" as the locals say. So if everybody stays close to one of the city centers, and immigrants come -- and, looking for work and public infrastructure, they are likely to stick to urban areas as well -- you can see where there might be a population problem. The government may well choose to incentivize more development in the bush and encourage more people to move away from the CBDs, but that's likely to attract backlash from environmentalists and nature conservationists.
Depends where you are. Perth is pretty massive in terms of land area, with a low population - It's larger than London with about a quarter of the population.
> Australia has all the resources and land in the world to support much, much more people.
But not the water, and a large part of what makes living in Australia appealing is that it is comparatively uncrowded, even in the cities. It leads to a relaxed feeling when compared to large US, Asian or European cities.
Should citizens be asked to give up one of the major positives of living in Australia in the name of 'growth' ?
>Is their current lifestyle supported by that growth?
No.
The people who are the most negative here about population growth are Australians.
It's getting to the point where at a Bunnings sausage sizzle you can't tell if you're talking to someone from One Nation or the Greens when you ask what they think about immigration.
Population growth is good for nominal GDP growth, but doesn't do much for per-capita growth. Since our labour market has very high levels of labour underutilisation and underemployment and the main population growth is from a very large skilled migration program, some of our record-low wage growth is probably driven by that too.
This is especially laughable as a claim when you look at European countries with high immigration and at best very weak economic growth. How do they explain that?
I cringe when i hear western european leaders talk about how their countries must accept immigration from third world countries to "save the economy" or "stabilize the social service systems". Even if these immigrants end up to be net tax payers after all the costs of feeding, housing, integrating these people... well, guess what, eventually they get old too and this circle starts over.
Sorry to tell you that there is a big difference between regular immigrants and refugees. A regular Immigrant to Europe usually is a net win from day one because they have been educated for free in their country of origin, while the upfront cost of raising someone in your own country with your own taxes is quite high (Kindergarten, school, university...).
This is an oversimplification. A lot (most?) of the problematic immigrants in the EU come from developing countries and are not very well (if at all) educated.
There are exceptions of course. In Germany where I live there has been a massive wave of immigrants coming from Greece. Having met quite a few, a lot of them have a university-level education and decided to immigrate in order to escape from a corrupt non-meritocratic state and make the most of their abilities. Greece is a member of the EU and culturally belongs in the west thus there are no cultural clashes or assimilation issues, which is why Germany is a net winner in this case.
On the flipside, we also have a lot of immigrants from Africa / Egypt / Morocco / the Middle East that lack any sort of education and contribute to rising crime and cultural dilution. Islam makes it even worse, since it's very exclusive and does not allow for cultural assimilation to take place. Now, keep in mind that a lot of these immigrants also seek to game the state via rent-seeking and typically have a lot of children.
The writing on the wall if the current policies continue is not hard to discern. For immigrants coming from outside the EU, I'm a firm supporter of Singapore's first-order eugenic criteria. Countries should adopt harsh immigration policies and accept people who probabilistically will turn out to be assets to society.
Unfortunately, populism is experiencing a renaissance in Europe, and it's very easy for politicians to appeal to the brainwashed masses on "humanitarian" grounds to vote for policies that will lead to major clashes in the future. In some EU countries, implementing said liberal immigration policies has led to the rapid rise of nationalist parties so backlash is already happening (and in the worst possible way).
>> "Even if these immigrants end up to be net tax payers after all the costs of feeding, housing, integrating these people"
So, I don't know how immigration works on your planet, but here in the real world immigrants do not get free "feeding, housing" or free anything-else. In fact a key condition in even the most open/lenient countries is that you must show proof that you can provide for yourself. Any other way would simply not make any sense, and I am always in awe at the level of confabulation needed to believe these nativist fairy tales.
Or maybe you're one of these people who mistake immigrants for refugees?
Immigrants and "refugees" are more or less interchangeable. They are both used similarly by politicians who call for immigration and mean refugees and open borders. And they certainly are used very loosely by the people themselves, who just need to mumble that they are Syrian to get all the goodies.
But anyways - both do definitely not have to proof that they can provide for themselves. At least not in large parts of Europe.
There is no reasonable process to verify refugee claims. There are countless cases of refugees having multiple "identities" by just going from center to center and get their money. Even Anis amri (Berlin terrorist) had 14 identities.
the ease and benefits of a refugee status are overwhelming. It's a common "joke" among my (German) colleagues that they should just claim a Syrian refugee status for bonus money
In Germany, there was a case of a german native man getting multiple refugee identities by claiming he was from Syria, without speaking a single word of arabic. To make things even more absurd, he was an active member of the german military.
You can read Breitbart and still very much appreciate the difference between legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, and refugees.
Legal immigrants are the most law abiding and some of the most productive people in a community, having worked their asses off to go through a typically arduous process to get where they are.
There’s a great deal of controversy over whether illegal immigrants commit crimes or consume social services and welfare at higher or lower rates than citizens, but there’s zero debate that legal immigrants commit crime and utilize welfare at significantly lower rates than either other group.
It's an honest question. I can't think of any. But for all I know, immigration to some Andorra/Albania/whatever has been significantly higher than emigration every year for the past ten. I can't recall reading anything with data and I'd like to know.
Wonderful. My family and I have been living for the last 80 years exactly 20 miles away from the Andorran border so I am 100% comfortable calling your statements a bunch of baloney, no matter what the mod may say, thank you. And thanks as well for flagging me, that's highly appreciated.
More substantive than the one I answered (OP named random small European countries without any idea of what they are), and intended to have people question the nonsense of that association of Andorra and Albania and thus the pretended knowledge of the poster by at least looking what Andorra is.
Obviously nobody knew nor cares, and he could get away with spreading complete bullshit. I didn't think it could be so, I thought at least a few Europeans would be around, because everybody around knows that associating Andorra and Albania is like associating Monaco or Lichtenstein with Sierra Leone. Hence the sarcastic comment.
So, I'll spend 45 minutes writing this since nobody can read Wikipedia for 5 seconds.
Andorra is a principality, a tiny rich country located between France in Spain, uses Euro as currency, and has some traditional weird governance shared by the president of France and a Spanish archbishop. It is a tax haven which lives on tourism (semi-luxury, I'd say, most expensive ski resorts in the Pyrenees, if it did not change), duty free stores, and more or less shady banking. They speak Catalan, but also fluent French and/or Spanish for business reasons (and because they are so few and the country is so small). That is to say they are perfectly integrated with their French and Spanish neighbours.
So, this is a country of significantly less than 100,000 inhabitants (no, no figure is missing) with a rather fixed structure of "who owns what", that ranks in wealth/inhabitant among Australia and Germany. You still think it makes any sense to talk about immigration/emigration from/to Andorra?
On the other hand, Albania is an eastern country, which was already the poorest country of the Eastern block when it was still a thing; its wealth compares with Venezuela and Mongolia; it has more than 40 times as many inhabitants as Andorra and... a 'tradition' of massive emigration. For example, there is zero geographical, cultural, or historical connection between France and Albania, and yet they represent the most numerous asylum seekers in France; despite the fact that they have zero chance to be granted asylum, since their country is safe and they are not threatened by anyone, yet they keep on coming (same in Germany). There is also the Albanian mafia, spread all around the world.
So, now I have lost 45 minutes explaining stuff of public knowledge on a buried thread none will read... Great.
You could have posted a simple factual reply. You could also have just let it go and not posted anything. The GP was obviously just picking two names at random and not saying anything in particular about Andorra.
As for your 45-minute opus, it's fine to describe the country you live in and not so fine to put down the other country. In fact, you basically cross into slurring it. That's not ok on HN. Please don't do it again.
Correlation does not mean causation. People migrate to richer countries. Richer countries are higher on the technological frontier and therefore it's more difficult to increase their per capita productivity, and therefore have weak growth.
Japan for example has been the poster child for the premise that you desperately need immigration and need to avoid population contraction.
The better solution is to allow your population to contract and seek to boost the per capita output over time through augmentation with higher automation - robotics, AI, et al. The overall net economy size may stagnate or contract... so what, that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is the quality of life of each person.
Less pressure on the environment, less pressure on housing, higher standard of living per capita.
The primary argument I see in the developed world for needing endless overall population expansion, is that a lot of entitlement programs are shaky ponzi schemes that require ever larger numbers of new workers to pay for the last generation's benefits or the entire thing collapses in a shattered social contract. Sweden for example is dealing with that debate:
The 1% of the population you are talking about needs 20 years before adding to the economy. The results will be visible once they will enter the market.
Well yes, but how suitable is GDP/capita as a measure? e.g. If you care for your own parents or children you have contributed nothing to GDP, but if you put them in a nursing home or daycare then you have. If you grow your own food and eat it, you have contributed nothing to GDP, but if you buy it, you have. If you clean your kitchen you have contributed nothing to GDP but if you hire a cleaner then you have.
A country where your actions are judged on whether they improve improve GDP or GDP/capita would be a terrible place to live.
Don't forget that when you care for your own parents or grow your own food, that money you've saved by not putting them in a nursing home or buying food, can either be saved, invested or spent on something else.
Lots of people spending lots of money may boost GDP in the short term, but if it isn't sustainable, then there will be a corresponding fall in GDP in future.
GDP is actually a pretty damn good measure, and if it is slowing, then it matters to us all.
GDP might best be thought of as a measure of how much economy there is to be taxed. A government can effectively raise taxes by getting more people to outsource their needs.
The difference is that in a pyramid scheme regardless of how many people enter at the bottom, people further up are putting in a fixed amount and then stop contributing. The money in the pyramid only flows upwards. In the case of population growth new people act as a multiplier for people already in the network - businesses are able to grow with new customers, provide new services, hire more people, pay them, and they buy things, so money flows both up and down the pyramid.
Did Germany really has grown only 1% if we consider migration and the refugee crisis?
WRT to the article Australia seems to be paradoxically "big" and small at the same time (it's the biggest country after Brazil), with the big desert areas making its habitable area much smaller than one could suppose (Japan has a similar problem, even though it's bigger than Germany)
I'd love somewhere like Australia to take on a big terraforming experiment. Even "just" digging a channel from the coast to the middle of the desert. Fish, crabs find their way in, birds start feeding along the channel, fertilising the shore, small plant growth, ... or something.
Quote: "The water of the Snowy River and some of its tributaries, much of which formerly flowed southeast onto the river flats of East Gippsland, and into Bass Strait of the Tasman sea, is captured at high elevations and diverted inland ".
People don't drink land and we get decade long droughts that make California's look tame by comparison. The majority of Australia has the same hospitality to human habitation as does the Sahara.
Right, the only country that receives less rain is Antarctica. Most of the country receives less than 24" of rain in a non-drought year (of which, the last 11 have been).
For Americans that don't get what the big deal is: Australia has a livable area about the same size as does California. The rest of the continent is desert that gets so hot they had to invent new colors to describe it [0].
Even towns in the 'habitable' area get in the upper 40C [115F] regularly during summer. The last three years have been relatively cool, but in between 2008-2012 there were days where Melbourne and Sydney basically had to shut down because the heat made infrastructure unusable without damaging it.
There is hardly any water and the cities were designed around cars far more than any city outside Los Angeles. Add a population that's three times what the neighborhoods were planned for and you see why Mad Max was thought up here.
Is the Australian habitable land that low, though? From what I see, they seem to count all the subtropical land as uninhabitable and there's plenty of subtropical countries out there...
I'd definitely lean towards agreeing with you there. And on top of that, I live on the west coast of Australia, and there are people living fine from Albany (at the bottom) to Broome (at the top), but there's probably only 5% of the coast that has people living on it - scattered from top to bottom (but obviously mostly in Perth). Seems like there's a lot of empty space here. I have relatives that live in-land (in the "wheat belt"), and the climate is perfectly livable there. I think the only places where it is not-so-livable is in places like Marble Bar (second hottest place in WA), and yet there are still a bunch of people that live there - my friend grew up there.
and particularly, about a third of the way down, the aerial photography and the arid interior, and consider that that arid desert extends from the equivalent of Oregon to Tennessee, South Dakota to Oklahoma.
There is hardly any water and the cities were designed around cars far more than any city outside Los Angeles.
As a past/present resident of both LA and Melbourne, I would modify that to say that Syd/Mel are as dependent on cars as much as Los Angeles, but without the planning commitment to cars that LA has exhibited. Bring up maps of LA and Sydney/Melbourne on the same scale. LA has a grid of freeways with a cell-size of 10-15 km. Not so for Sydney and Melbourne, and their surface streets are much worse. Roads designed as two lanes each way made into 3 narrow lanes each way by turning the shoulder into a new lane. Nowhere to go when someone breaks down. Without a commitment to either a comprehensive transit system, or a decent freeway network, Syd/Mel have half-arsed implementations of both.
In LA I was comfortable cycling along PCH, Santa Monica Blvd, Sepulveda Bvd etc, but I would never consider cycling on their Melbourne equivalents.
This is true. Note that Sydney has fairly unique infrastructure. Sydney has extensive heavy rail that runs from a web of regional areas straight into the city via underground tunnels and this then becomes a circular underground subway system with numerous stops in the city itself. The Sydney system is great. I used to commute 90mins each way on Sydney trains but the fact that I didn't have to change trains to get to my inner city subway stop meant I took a seat, got my laptop out and it became no different to being at my desk at work. A few less distractions in fact. I might be gushing a bit because I now live in SF which has made me realise just how good Sydney was.
Melbourne is similar to SF. They love their above ground trams for inner city transport but those trams do nothing to get people into the city in the first place. The love is pure historical admiration and not rooted in reality. Being above ground is a flaw in terms of adding to congestion and different track gauges and thus train changes is a hassle we could all do without.
Even towns in the 'habitable' area get in the upper 40C [115F] regularly during summer
I'm curious about how "uninhabitable" is defined in this context.
There are American cities of millions of people (Phoenix, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, etc...) where summer high temperatures never get below 100-110° for months on end.
They, too, are in the desert, but not classified as "uninhabitable." (OK, maybe Vegas is uninhabitable... ;) )
Down the road from Las Vegas is a town called Baker, California where the hottest temperature on earth was recorded. 134°, IIRC. Thousands of people still live there.
>There are American cities of millions of people (Phoenix, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, etc...) where summer high temperatures never get below 100-110° for months on end.
There are places in Australia that have set records - including this "160 consecutive days above 100F" - note that this isn't talking 'highs', it was above 100 the entire time.
Nah, the Great Artesian Basin has been overexteacted for decades for agriculture. It can’t be relied upon long term if you start using it in areas with big population growth.
The outflow of the Mississippi River is literally like six or seven times larger than from all our river systems combined
That's a fun bit of trivia. But I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion. The sources of New York and Los Angeles water are up to a thousand miles away from the Mississippi River watershed. Neither gets its water from there.
I use to say this as a joke that if Australia sells itself to USA, they will have 10 more big cities.
Australians tend to overstate the nature of their desert. It is true that a large part is very hot but then they can have few more cities long the coastline with desalination plants.
But all those sort of things are possible only when you have adventurous people trying to implement radical ideas which the USA gets in disproportionate numbers thanks to its immigration programs.
Australian immigration is only about high skilled immigrants and they do not attract the likes of Steve Jobs to Elon Musk.
Los Angeles and some other American cities get water from hundreds of miles away, even crossing mountain ranges to do so.
These days that kind of ambitious engineering would be largely unthinkable. Some bean counter somewhere would say it’s not worth the expense and the politicians would go along with it.
Recently I learned that until 2005 Navajo Indians were transporting coal 300 miles via a slurry pipeline to Nevada power plants. Again, something that would be inconceivable in these small thinking days.
I’m glad that a few crazy adventurers like Musk and Bezos and a few others have popped up. It’s been a long time since America had that kind of pioneering spirit.
If people in the 1930’s had today’s mindset, Los Angeles would be just another desert gas stop on the coast road between San Diego and San Francisco.
Glad to see that comment non down-voted. California's paralysis is so bad that they have not built a single new major road in last 25 years and absolutely no new water-reservoirs though population has doubled. Hippie environmentalism and misplaced priorities of politicians are to be blamed here. During the draught their priority was saving some fish by airlifting them from drying ponds rather than figuring out new reservoir projects.
Every time I visit Las Vegas I am reminded that the American prosperity is built on the sweat and blood of those badass pioneers who crossed the desert in unbearable heat, overcame all odds and built a fabulous city.
Read this story for example of a Sicilian man turning hard pen land into an underground orange farm in the middle of Fresno.
I think the real problem is that the growth has improved the economy but reduced the quality of life. A few decades ago it was affordable for most families to buy a nice house close to the beach. Now the big cities have doubled in population and quadrupled in price, that is no longer achievable.
Yes Australia could easily have 100m people living there, but they wouldn't be as comfortable as when there were 15m.
Its a bit like California. LA & SF in the 60s and 70s sounds dreamy - and we'll never get back to there.
I spent a bit of time in Adelaide and found it to be quite easy to get around without using a car. The trains, light rail, and busses all did an excellent job, in my opinion.
A bit pricey perhaps, but I did manage to cover an awful lot of ground without a car while I was there.
This might be a bit of an insensitive comment, but alas so be it (not living up to my nickname unfortunately). I'm too used to this discussion in my own country and have little sympathy for the other side because in The Netherlands they have been wrong for 70 years now. The "we are getting too full comments" come from emotions, not from facts and I have the prejudiced feeling that in Australia it isn't any different.
Australian planologists should talk to Dutch planologists, and it'll be fine. I am culturally biased but I think it will become a problem once they reach about 200 to 250 million. The Netherlands as well: it can still grow a huge bit before it will hit a ceiling. Yes, it'll get more crammed, it just means you have to organize yourself better as a nation. But my point: if the Dutch can live in a crammed space, so can the Australians.
> Australian planologists should talk to Dutch planologists, and it'll be fine
By the way, in English planologie is called "city planning" or "urban planning" and a planoloog is an "urban planner" or "city planner". We don't really have the terms planology and planologist (although they sound pretty awesome!).
I agree... its absurd to continually just grow grow grow without looking back to see if we're losing what makes us humans in the process.
We're getting so stuffed in the USA that national parks are starting to limit visitors and close gates at capacity - that for me alone is signal that a) we should take a serious look at our population b) we should do more to preserve and open more public lands for this growing population.
has grown much faster than population, due to heavy advertising by national parks and a general increased awareness of visiting national parks as a "thing to do" on vacation rather than e.g. going to Disney Land.
> I do still think it's worthwhile for us to have the conversation about growth rate regardless of what we could handle in the long run.
Of course, good to point out. I would call this a scientific discussion. Not that we necessarily only need to have this conversation on scientific conferences and the like but keeping it scientific as much as possible is the extent to which such a discussion is useful, in my opinion.
It’s not so much insensitive as much as completely devoid of facts, observations, or relevant experience. Somebody says that they have a problem. You have zero experience with the problem, and tell them that they are wrong. Thanks for the contribution.
Give us the fresh water per acre the Dutch have and Australia would have been a second US in the 20th century already.
250 million. There's more to how many people a country can support than what you can see on a map. That's as ignorant as looking at Antarctica and saying "Yes, they can support 200 million people there, just look at the Netherlands."
I like how economists are always touting the economic benefits of immigration. "Sure, government is not coping with the influx of migrants by providing necessary infrastructure, but at least GDP is up 2.5%."
One of the amazing abilities of most higher-order organism colonies observed in biology is the ability to self-regulate reproduction within an environment. If native population growth is low, it’s usually for a reason. Native human population growth is between -2% and 20% annually, excluding war, famine, and disease. If you have a population of field mice in equilibrium, and you introduce more field mice, the net population does not increase. The number of births drops dramatically, and the number of deaths by causes mentioned above increases from negligible to potentially 100%. It takes a special kind of westerner hubris to believe that we’re any different. Japanese understand this, and place blame for lack of growth squarely where it belongs: poor economic and social conditions for raising a family due to failed programs of social engineering from the 70s.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadhttps://www.smh.com.au/opinion/miserly-newstart-keeps-unempl...
I think the real issue with sustained high levels of immigration is that most immigrants end up living in one of two major cities, Sydney or Melbourne. Melbourne is on track to have a London-sized population by mid-century - but that’s of course based on estimates. Which as the article points out, were completely wrong by three decades in 2005.
Nearly all nations tanked similarly, but only when priced in US dollars. It was caused by a record USD bull run. The USD gained a lot of ground vs the AUD in just two years.
Germany went from $3.88t to $3.36t one year later.
France went from $2.85t to $2.43t one year later.
Canada went from $1.84t to $1.55t in two years.
Japan went from $6.2t in 2012, to $4.4t in 2015. I assure you, their economy didn't actually contract by 29% in three years. That's solely due to the dollar / yen exchange. They didn't shutter a third of their stores or factories. A year later their USD GDP value jumped by ~11%, solely due to the exchange rate, their economic production did not expand by 11%.
The US dollar dropping by a considerable amount during the Bush years, was similarly responsible for artificially inflating the GDP of Australia (and all nations) in USD terms.
> Nearly all nations tanked similarly
Is this true though?
As an Australian, my conclusion is that Australia has failed to diversify its economy. Money comes in through mining, agriculture, property sales and to a lesser extent tertiary education. The rest is a services economy, and I think the joke about Australia being a country where we all serve each other lattes captures the idea in as few words possible.
I've just left the US, and instead of going home I went to Europe to start my company. Denmark is amazingly progressive with how it spends its public purse setting up an environment for innovation. Australia on the other hand seems to have abandoned any idea of establishing a sovereign wealth fund (mining tax) and instead blown millions courting US dollars which hasn't succeeded in turning Australia into a foreign branch of SV.
For a longer read, this is obviously one person's analysis, but I fail to find a flaw in his conclusions. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/australias-economy-house-card...
Where does Australia rank on the global scale?
Worse than Mauritius, Macedonia, Oman, Moldova, Vietnam, Egypt and Botswana.
Worse than Georgia, Kuwait, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and El Salvador.
Sitting embarrassingly and awkwardly between Kazakhstan and Jamaica, and worse than the Dominican Republic at 74 and Guatemala at 75,
Australia ranks off the deep end of the scale at 77th place.
77th and falling. After Tajikistan, Australia had the fourth highest loss in Economic Complexity over the last decade, falling 18 places.
Not the behavior of a modern, mixed economy that many Australians pretend that we have. We are an anomaly. A third world economy with a first world standard of living. Will is last?
[1] http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/rankings/
If you're going to get all in a tizzy about crowded cities and beaches, move somewhere else!
Theres tonnes of places in Australia where you can have beautiful beaches and no-one else around for 100's of km.
Same goes for the land, the 'topsoil' that is left also comes with added salt.
The place is living on borrowed time, an environmental catastrophe unfolds in the news headlines and before our eyes. Only the ingenuity of man can prevent the place going back to the default 'Aboriginal' carrying capacity. The government can't magically buy feed for the farmers to give to their 'livestock' forever.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2018-07-29/the-big-dry-see-...
That’s a well thought out position.
Adelaide/Hobart +10 Melbourne/Sydney -10 etc.
This might mean companies that need immigrants have to set up offices in Adelaide and Hobart. Fair enough.
* I'm assuming you read the article re: points scheme
The basic problem is that if infrastructure last 50 years, you have to replace 2% of it every year. Now, for every 1% of population growth, you also have to (on average) also build 1% more infrastructure, so you need to build 3% in total, or 50% more than if you had no population growth. But you only have 1% more revenue to build it with, so inevitably only a fraction of what you need gets built, hence the problems. And the higher the population growth, the worse the problems.
You argue 0 immigration -> 2% infra costs You argue 1% immigration -> 3% infra costs but also 1% more revenue to use for infra costs
I fail to see your issue
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL76483D7434812A0D
At some point there's a (not entirely) rethorical question about what's a "good" growth rate for a town, and a politician indicate 5% is good. 1.05^15 ~ 2. So that's a doubling in the period between someone enters kindergarten and leaves high school.
But as someone who grew up in Sydney, I got to observe first-hand how the rail system / other critical infrastructure development projects...did not develop.
When I first came to Asia and compared Australia to, say, trains in HK, or Japan. I knew the problem.
To some extent, yes, I think we have to control immigration but blaming stressors on immigration is political expedience typical of the change-ineffective democracy we have there. A more useful culprit I see is the refusal / inability to choose to take responsibility to make the changes to critical infrastructure that could have created improvements with alleviating these stressors.
We had a mining boom (thanks, China!) and could have reinvested that free money back into growing out critical infrastructure, with decades-long future planning to exceed capacity.
But we didn't. Credit loosened the banking sector gobbled up the profits in a (mostly residential) property boom, while the population twiddled their political thumbs and battled viciously (assisted by a complicit media) over small-stakes issues, seemingly benumbed by the spectacle of 66 leadership changes in 13 years[0].
But blaming politicians is "public expediency". The people didn't do anything about it, and in the face of some challenges, are they showing much more than learned helplessness and useless blaming of politicians, without creating some changes?
I want to finish by saying that Sydney was fine, back in the late 90s. Before there was any type of pressure. But to think that situation would last forever is the height of naivety, when you have such an attractive resource. We didn't plan ahead, and we wasted the mining piggy bank I think we could have used to extend capacity to meet future projected needs. It's really very sad I find, because you have a great city, beautiful in every way, with decreasing value / utility because the quality of forward looking planning / action was so poor. Maybe the worst part of it is, Sydneysiders / Australians think quite highly of themselves, and are quite aspirational / ambitious, but they didn't enact that attitude into reality.
[0]: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-10/australia-political-le...
I want a adult as communication partner. It was funny enough while it blasted. Somebody who can take uncomfortable decisions and is able to go against his/ her instincts, when they are proven wrong.
Australia has all the resources and land in the world to support much, much more people.
As a result, everyone crowds to the same places and the housing supply (and associated infrastructure) is strained.
From what I've seen it's a repeating pattern in the developed world. I've seen New Zealanders, of all people, complaining about NZ being overcrowded (it has one of the lowest population densities in the world, especially considering its climate and abundant natural resources).
TL;DR: Rich property owners block/delay construction to get high rents or sell their properties at a very high prices. Average people suffer. Rich people point average people to immigrants and "overcrowding".
Driving down the eastern seaboard of Australia one is struck by the hundreds of kilometres of perfectly habitable empty space. You could put two or three Hong Kongs on the coast between Sydney and Melbourne and no-one would even notice. We just need the damn infrastructure!
Given its land mass, Australia at 25m is a joke. We can support ten times that. That "uninhabitable desert" is no worse than Arizona really. All that's needed is a little bit of long-term thinking and investment.
Anyone familiar with my comments knows I'm no fan of "high-functioning autocracies" like China or Singapore but bloody hell - it would be good to get them in charge for just a few years and build stuff.
Then just build 3 Hong Kongs. What's the problem? Immigrants will be happy to build their new cities. Hong Kong didn't just suddenly show up. It grew over time on an island that had basically nothing on it. It's neighbour Shenzhen was a 10,000 people fishing village and is now a 10 Million metropolis.
But not the water, and a large part of what makes living in Australia appealing is that it is comparatively uncrowded, even in the cities. It leads to a relaxed feeling when compared to large US, Asian or European cities.
Should citizens be asked to give up one of the major positives of living in Australia in the name of 'growth' ?
No.
The people who are the most negative here about population growth are Australians.
It's getting to the point where at a Bunnings sausage sizzle you can't tell if you're talking to someone from One Nation or the Greens when you ask what they think about immigration.
This is the main ingredient of any pyramid scheme.
Our economies are built on the assumption of endless growth. Those immigrants better have children above the replacement rate.
There are exceptions of course. In Germany where I live there has been a massive wave of immigrants coming from Greece. Having met quite a few, a lot of them have a university-level education and decided to immigrate in order to escape from a corrupt non-meritocratic state and make the most of their abilities. Greece is a member of the EU and culturally belongs in the west thus there are no cultural clashes or assimilation issues, which is why Germany is a net winner in this case.
On the flipside, we also have a lot of immigrants from Africa / Egypt / Morocco / the Middle East that lack any sort of education and contribute to rising crime and cultural dilution. Islam makes it even worse, since it's very exclusive and does not allow for cultural assimilation to take place. Now, keep in mind that a lot of these immigrants also seek to game the state via rent-seeking and typically have a lot of children.
The writing on the wall if the current policies continue is not hard to discern. For immigrants coming from outside the EU, I'm a firm supporter of Singapore's first-order eugenic criteria. Countries should adopt harsh immigration policies and accept people who probabilistically will turn out to be assets to society.
Unfortunately, populism is experiencing a renaissance in Europe, and it's very easy for politicians to appeal to the brainwashed masses on "humanitarian" grounds to vote for policies that will lead to major clashes in the future. In some EU countries, implementing said liberal immigration policies has led to the rapid rise of nationalist parties so backlash is already happening (and in the worst possible way).
I have seen some generalizations on HN but this is a howler - takes the cake.
So, I don't know how immigration works on your planet, but here in the real world immigrants do not get free "feeding, housing" or free anything-else. In fact a key condition in even the most open/lenient countries is that you must show proof that you can provide for yourself. Any other way would simply not make any sense, and I am always in awe at the level of confabulation needed to believe these nativist fairy tales.
Or maybe you're one of these people who mistake immigrants for refugees?
But anyways - both do definitely not have to proof that they can provide for themselves. At least not in large parts of Europe.
Maybe you should stay off the chans and Voat there buddy, maybe stop reading Brietbart.
edit: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38516691
Pretty sure you don't have to be a migrant to do that. Plenty of people doing it in my country are locals.
Just one example, i could bring up hundreds.
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article165956201/Ein...
https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Bundeswehrsoldat-lernte-Arabisch...
Legal immigrants are the most law abiding and some of the most productive people in a community, having worked their asses off to go through a typically arduous process to get where they are.
There’s a great deal of controversy over whether illegal immigrants commit crimes or consume social services and welfare at higher or lower rates than citizens, but there’s zero debate that legal immigrants commit crime and utilize welfare at significantly lower rates than either other group.
That's an egregious slur. If you post anything like this again, or use HN for this kind of flamewar again, we will ban you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's an honest question. I can't think of any. But for all I know, immigration to some Andorra/Albania/whatever has been significantly higher than emigration every year for the past ten. I can't recall reading anything with data and I'd like to know.
Obviously nobody knew nor cares, and he could get away with spreading complete bullshit. I didn't think it could be so, I thought at least a few Europeans would be around, because everybody around knows that associating Andorra and Albania is like associating Monaco or Lichtenstein with Sierra Leone. Hence the sarcastic comment.
So, I'll spend 45 minutes writing this since nobody can read Wikipedia for 5 seconds.
Andorra is a principality, a tiny rich country located between France in Spain, uses Euro as currency, and has some traditional weird governance shared by the president of France and a Spanish archbishop. It is a tax haven which lives on tourism (semi-luxury, I'd say, most expensive ski resorts in the Pyrenees, if it did not change), duty free stores, and more or less shady banking. They speak Catalan, but also fluent French and/or Spanish for business reasons (and because they are so few and the country is so small). That is to say they are perfectly integrated with their French and Spanish neighbours.
So, this is a country of significantly less than 100,000 inhabitants (no, no figure is missing) with a rather fixed structure of "who owns what", that ranks in wealth/inhabitant among Australia and Germany. You still think it makes any sense to talk about immigration/emigration from/to Andorra?
On the other hand, Albania is an eastern country, which was already the poorest country of the Eastern block when it was still a thing; its wealth compares with Venezuela and Mongolia; it has more than 40 times as many inhabitants as Andorra and... a 'tradition' of massive emigration. For example, there is zero geographical, cultural, or historical connection between France and Albania, and yet they represent the most numerous asylum seekers in France; despite the fact that they have zero chance to be granted asylum, since their country is safe and they are not threatened by anyone, yet they keep on coming (same in Germany). There is also the Albanian mafia, spread all around the world.
So, now I have lost 45 minutes explaining stuff of public knowledge on a buried thread none will read... Great.
As for your 45-minute opus, it's fine to describe the country you live in and not so fine to put down the other country. In fact, you basically cross into slurring it. That's not ok on HN. Please don't do it again.
The better solution is to allow your population to contract and seek to boost the per capita output over time through augmentation with higher automation - robotics, AI, et al. The overall net economy size may stagnate or contract... so what, that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is the quality of life of each person.
Less pressure on the environment, less pressure on housing, higher standard of living per capita.
The primary argument I see in the developed world for needing endless overall population expansion, is that a lot of entitlement programs are shaky ponzi schemes that require ever larger numbers of new workers to pay for the last generation's benefits or the entire thing collapses in a shattered social contract. Sweden for example is dealing with that debate:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-26/now-even-...
A country where your actions are judged on whether they improve improve GDP or GDP/capita would be a terrible place to live.
Lots of people spending lots of money may boost GDP in the short term, but if it isn't sustainable, then there will be a corresponding fall in GDP in future.
GDP is actually a pretty damn good measure, and if it is slowing, then it matters to us all.
Doing things yourself is not free: these tasks take time, which is then not available for other jobs.
Pretty good indicator given its simplicity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
Is there a metric as simple as that that correlates as well with quality of living for a majority of the population?
WRT to the article Australia seems to be paradoxically "big" and small at the same time (it's the biggest country after Brazil), with the big desert areas making its habitable area much smaller than one could suppose (Japan has a similar problem, even though it's bigger than Germany)
Not that I am keen on ridiculous population growth, but just interesting to think about.
Edit: an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)
Quote: "The water of the Snowy River and some of its tributaries, much of which formerly flowed southeast onto the river flats of East Gippsland, and into Bass Strait of the Tasman sea, is captured at high elevations and diverted inland ".
Sorry, what? Australia is 6th largest, after Russia, Canada, China, the US, and Brazil.
There are official migration statistics, so you can look that up and check for yourself - here is a good start:
https://www.destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/SocietyState/Populat...
People don't drink land and we get decade long droughts that make California's look tame by comparison. The majority of Australia has the same hospitality to human habitation as does the Sahara.
Many places average 4" of rain a year.
Water supply is a ... challenge.
That 10% is generally really nice though! (Not that there aren't also cool places to visit in the desert/outback too).
Even towns in the 'habitable' area get in the upper 40C [115F] regularly during summer. The last three years have been relatively cool, but in between 2008-2012 there were days where Melbourne and Sydney basically had to shut down because the heat made infrastructure unusable without damaging it.
There is hardly any water and the cities were designed around cars far more than any city outside Los Angeles. Add a population that's three times what the neighborhoods were planned for and you see why Mad Max was thought up here.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/it...
What is the population of California, and what is the population of Australia?
California = 39 million in 163,696 square miles of total land.
California has twice as many people in an area half the size (not including inhabitable parts of California since half of it is a desert).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outback
and particularly, about a third of the way down, the aerial photography and the arid interior, and consider that that arid desert extends from the equivalent of Oregon to Tennessee, South Dakota to Oklahoma.
Maybe better to compare available water or other resources. Cities in the desert are viable if you have water.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.PRCP.MM?end=2014...
As a past/present resident of both LA and Melbourne, I would modify that to say that Syd/Mel are as dependent on cars as much as Los Angeles, but without the planning commitment to cars that LA has exhibited. Bring up maps of LA and Sydney/Melbourne on the same scale. LA has a grid of freeways with a cell-size of 10-15 km. Not so for Sydney and Melbourne, and their surface streets are much worse. Roads designed as two lanes each way made into 3 narrow lanes each way by turning the shoulder into a new lane. Nowhere to go when someone breaks down. Without a commitment to either a comprehensive transit system, or a decent freeway network, Syd/Mel have half-arsed implementations of both.
In LA I was comfortable cycling along PCH, Santa Monica Blvd, Sepulveda Bvd etc, but I would never consider cycling on their Melbourne equivalents.
Funny you say that - when I visited Sydney I thought the regional rail network was better than anywhere in the US outside the eastern seaboard.
Melbourne is similar to SF. They love their above ground trams for inner city transport but those trams do nothing to get people into the city in the first place. The love is pure historical admiration and not rooted in reality. Being above ground is a flaw in terms of adding to congestion and different track gauges and thus train changes is a hassle we could all do without.
I'm curious about how "uninhabitable" is defined in this context.
There are American cities of millions of people (Phoenix, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, etc...) where summer high temperatures never get below 100-110° for months on end.
They, too, are in the desert, but not classified as "uninhabitable." (OK, maybe Vegas is uninhabitable... ;) )
Down the road from Las Vegas is a town called Baker, California where the hottest temperature on earth was recorded. 134°, IIRC. Thousands of people still live there.
There are places in Australia that have set records - including this "160 consecutive days above 100F" - note that this isn't talking 'highs', it was above 100 the entire time.
even deep under the ground?
We’d probably have to build heaps of desalination plants around the coast and pipe it in to put more people further out.
That's a fun bit of trivia. But I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion. The sources of New York and Los Angeles water are up to a thousand miles away from the Mississippi River watershed. Neither gets its water from there.
What I mean is that the problem is not the distance, but that sufficient water just isn't available anywhere in the continent.
Australians tend to overstate the nature of their desert. It is true that a large part is very hot but then they can have few more cities long the coastline with desalination plants.
But all those sort of things are possible only when you have adventurous people trying to implement radical ideas which the USA gets in disproportionate numbers thanks to its immigration programs.
Australian immigration is only about high skilled immigrants and they do not attract the likes of Steve Jobs to Elon Musk.
Los Angeles and some other American cities get water from hundreds of miles away, even crossing mountain ranges to do so.
These days that kind of ambitious engineering would be largely unthinkable. Some bean counter somewhere would say it’s not worth the expense and the politicians would go along with it.
Recently I learned that until 2005 Navajo Indians were transporting coal 300 miles via a slurry pipeline to Nevada power plants. Again, something that would be inconceivable in these small thinking days.
I’m glad that a few crazy adventurers like Musk and Bezos and a few others have popped up. It’s been a long time since America had that kind of pioneering spirit.
If people in the 1930’s had today’s mindset, Los Angeles would be just another desert gas stop on the coast road between San Diego and San Francisco.
Every time I visit Las Vegas I am reminded that the American prosperity is built on the sweat and blood of those badass pioneers who crossed the desert in unbearable heat, overcame all odds and built a fabulous city.
Read this story for example of a Sicilian man turning hard pen land into an underground orange farm in the middle of Fresno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpBL_at8FAY&t=3s
Giants are gone and we are living in the times of pigmies.
Yes Australia could easily have 100m people living there, but they wouldn't be as comfortable as when there were 15m.
Its a bit like California. LA & SF in the 60s and 70s sounds dreamy - and we'll never get back to there.
It’s full of homeless camps, traffic is a gridlock. Rents are insane. Salaries are low.
A bit pricey perhaps, but I did manage to cover an awful lot of ground without a car while I was there.
California's population is 39M.
Australian planologists should talk to Dutch planologists, and it'll be fine. I am culturally biased but I think it will become a problem once they reach about 200 to 250 million. The Netherlands as well: it can still grow a huge bit before it will hit a ceiling. Yes, it'll get more crammed, it just means you have to organize yourself better as a nation. But my point: if the Dutch can live in a crammed space, so can the Australians.
By the way, in English planologie is called "city planning" or "urban planning" and a planoloog is an "urban planner" or "city planner". We don't really have the terms planology and planologist (although they sound pretty awesome!).
Words mean what people use them to mean. Dictionaries are only, and can only be, historical records.
The only issue is that this conversation keeps getting derailed by racists so I just stay away completely :(
We're getting so stuffed in the USA that national parks are starting to limit visitors and close gates at capacity - that for me alone is signal that a) we should take a serious look at our population b) we should do more to preserve and open more public lands for this growing population.
has grown much faster than population, due to heavy advertising by national parks and a general increased awareness of visiting national parks as a "thing to do" on vacation rather than e.g. going to Disney Land.
Of course, good to point out. I would call this a scientific discussion. Not that we necessarily only need to have this conversation on scientific conferences and the like but keeping it scientific as much as possible is the extent to which such a discussion is useful, in my opinion.
Aus population has grown much more quickly than The Netherlands, even if it isn't full yet.
250 million. There's more to how many people a country can support than what you can see on a map. That's as ignorant as looking at Antarctica and saying "Yes, they can support 200 million people there, just look at the Netherlands."