Spending time with intelligent people who care is a blessing. Its also challenging.
Thankfully, I'd chosen to bring a bottle of Shiraz (Red Belly Black, surprisingly smooth) to the Sunday night dinner party, and it fitted right in. Not sure how it came up, but Australia's immigration policy took a bit of a hammering, particularly from the European contingent, and this was pre London riots.
The basis of the indignation was a little simplified, and I disagreed with most of the statements and yet I still agreed with its conclusions - that Australia could afford to and economically would probably benefit from increasing the quota of refugees that we take in.
The argument consisted of a number of independent statements, which centred around Australia being a lucky country with plenty to go around, so we should share. Individually this was represented by teh following arguments:
- Australia has heaps of land and even if only a small percent of it is habitable and productive, it would still be more than what is available in Europe on a per capita level.
- The claim that Australia doesn't have enough water is a localised issue, as the QLD floods demonstrate that in some places Australia has too much water.
- That Australia is a rich country because of its abundance of natural resources and this has contributed to the low level of national debt and low unemployment rate.
Now, I know lots of Australian's would scoff at some of the statements above. But do we base this understanding on myths or on facts?
1. Population density.
No one doubts Australia is big (5th largest country globally after Russia, Canada, USA and Brazil), and as a young nation our population (20,601,000 at last count - 2008 census data) is still small compared to other countries our about size (e.g., US, Brazil).
The typical defence to our low population density (2.68 ppl/Sq km compared to Germany's 230.71 ppl/Sq km) is the amount of arid land we have, mostly due to a lack of water.
Finding stats for inhabitable land is harder. What I did find was this infogram by www.human.org.au which was pretty interesting. If you can't read the stats below, adjusted for inhabitable land than you should download the original here. The stats unfortunately are not well referenced (other than they come from the University of Wollongong) and I have struggled to find anything better on the web.
The message is pretty simple though and it is that based on inhabitable land quantity, Australia is still pretty empty.
Judgement: We have plenty of room - which is not a surprise, but the extent of the difference is.
2. Availability of fresh water in Australia.
Australia has 398 Cubic km of annually renewable fresh water. (Pg 227, 'The worlds water, 2006-2007: the biennial report on freshwater resources' By Peter H. Gleick, Heather Cooley, David Katz). That equates to 0.05 Cubic METERS of water per Square km. Comapre that with Austria (Sorry Kristop, Germany wasn't available) which has 84 Cubic Km of annually renewable fresh water and just 84,000 Sq Km of land. That is 1 Cubic Meter of fresh water per Square Km. Quite a difference but not really a surprise. Access to water is a big issue for us and I will do further research at another time to determine if it is taken into consideration in the 'inhabitable land' considerations, as it should be.
Another good source of water data for Australia is the BOM.
Judgement: Availability of water is a major concern for Australia. What is needed to address the issue (in my opinion) is investment in infrastructure for water security and good policy on water rights. Not easy, but achievable and no excuse.
3. Australia is a rich country because of our abundance of natural resources, particularly the mining industry.
Australias latest national account are available here. They indicate on Pg 32, table 14 that Mining contributes about $120,000 M in Gross value add to the GDP per year. That is 9.26%. That is about the same as manufacturing (which everybody knows is dead, right?) or a little more than construction or a little less than either finance and insurance services or professional and technical services. I wont even go into employment figures which I know are even less!
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| According to these latest stats, Mining is by no means going to be our saviour from the current global economic situation either, as it was the largest shrinking industry in the last year to March 2011. |
3 comments:
Perhaps, instead of sending our refugees to Malaysia or keeping them in camps, we should consider sending them to mining, farming and rural towns to help support our primary industries in order to sustain our growing population ...
I'm in favour of providing a positive and contributory role for possible immigrants to Australia. There are a number of concerns that need to be thought carefully about though; including:
- what kind of job security / working condition requirements have to be met. I.e., do they receive the same job protection as Australian residents? Examples of places that employ such a working class immigration system are Dubai and Singapore. There are a lot of positives with those systems but there are also a lot of negatives.
- Is it legally possible or even feasible to force people to work in a certain geographical location?
- Is it practically feasible to monitor and maintain and what if it is not? An example to consider here is Texas and California in the USA where they have a large problem with monitoring and managing migrant workers.
All of the examples I've given have problems of their own. Politically, instigating a system that has been used before seems a safer option because your not putting your neck out. You always have the person who came up with the idea originally to blame if it doesn't work too well.
I agree with your judgement. If fact I would Bolster it by saying that the government is not interested in supporting any other industry other than commodities as they are doing nothing to reduce the Australian dollar. High Aussie dollar affects tourism industry and manufacturing (exports). The reason why the government does care is because it is easy to sit back and tax the mining and oil and gas industries (commodities) at the expense of the other industries.
I however do not agree with increasing immigration of refugees just because Australia seems under-populated. The rest of the world is over-populated, increasing life expectancies etc. There is plenty of evidence that says that the worlds population is increasing rapidly to the point that it will become unsustainable for the world to support (crops, food etc). By letting refugees into the Australia does not solve that issue just delays the inevitable. Governments need to take responsibility for their own countries(look at Greece where nobody pays tax and 80% of the country work for the government, and they wonder why they can't pay their debts)
Anyway end of my rant, excuse the framed and spelling, best I could do on the IPAD.
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