Professor Peter McDonald is the Director of the Australian Demographic & Social Research Institute.

Abstract

In its recent policy report on population, the Australian Government concluded: it is more useful for governments, businesses and communities to focus on ways of improving our wellbeing, protecting our environment and making better use of the resources we have, rather than trying to determine an absolute limit to our population and focussing efforts on restricting growth in order to not exceed this ‘limit’. In doing so, it distanced itself not only from Kevin Rudd’s ‘big Australia’ statement but also from the voices calling for a ‘small Australia’. Peter McDonald argues that, after 12 months of debate characterized by a great deal of demographic nonsense, the Government’s statement was a welcome relief in that it recognized that the long-term, future population cannot be exogenously determined by policy makers but will be an endogenous outcome of social, economic and environmental determinants. He calls for much greater attention being focused upon more accurate estimates of population in the intermediate term, 10-20 years out. In the paper he discusses likely trends in this shorter time frame and ways that estimates can be improved.