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Sustainable Population Australia

Patrons: Hon. Bob Carr, Dr Paul Collins, Prof Tim Flannery, Em Prof Ian Lowe, Dr Mary E White

Youth Ambassador: Ms Bindi Irwin

www.population.org.au

28 February 2017

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Foreign Policy White Paper

whitepaper@dfat.gov.au

Submission on a Foreign Policy White Paper

Sustainable Population Australia is the peak non-government organization in Australia

concerned with the environmental and social impacts of population growth and population

density. It is a national, independent, non-political, member-funded environmental charity,

established in 1988. We welcome the opportunity to comment on Australia’s future foreign

policy.

The global geopolitical landscape is changing at an accelerating pace. The Australian

Government’s review of foreign policy is therefore timely, if challenging given the scale of

uncertainties involved.

A storm on the horizon

Through this submission, we wish to stress that population pressure is an increasingly

important driver of global instability. This has major implications for both the risks Australia

faces and the nature of influence Australia can have globally.

The urgent need to address population growth in the Sahel was vividly addressed in a recent

press conference1 by Toby Lanzer, who is the Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the

Sahel for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA):

Why should we care? Why does it matter? We’ve got so many other things

happening in the world. I think what really sparks my concern and motivates me to

act, across the Sahelian belt, is this rather stark reality of population growth. One

hundred and fifty million people currently live along this sliver of land that we call the

Sahelian belt. That’s today, 150 million people. But in 20 years’ time, and for many of

us, we know that 20 years is tomorrow, that population will have grown to 300

million people. It would have doubled.

Now, in order to stay even, in order to have the same GDP per capita, to have the

same sorts of enrolment rates that are currently prevalent across the region, to have

1 UNOCHA Toby Lanzer press conference - YouTube http://oasisinitiative.berkeley.edu/news/

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the same access to health care that communities have today, one would need 11%

GDP growth on an annual basis. You raise your eyebrows – you look at me. We know

that 11% annual GDP growth is not possible. So in essence, unless the countries of

the Sahel tackle this demographic challenge that faces them, the countries will get

poorer, communities will suffer more, enrolment rates will go down, not up, fewer

women will have access to health care, and the Sustainable Development Goals, just

to mention one hot topic, will not be met.

So I believe that the time is ripe, and it’s absolutely vital that there be a greater,

broader, deeper international engagement across the Sahel, whether it’s on

questions of stability, trade, development such as infrastructure, or indeed tackling

the humanitarian issues, because if we do not, there is no question in my mind, that a

tempest of incalculable proportions awaits us in the future.

From Egypt and Syria to northern Nigeria and Central African Republic, political unrest and

collapse of governance has been triggered by severe deprivations caused by overpopulation.

There is always a cocktail of other influences at play, but overpopulation is the common

element underlying them. Where conflict occurs without underlying population pressure,

such as the Ukraine, the situation does not escalate into ongoing humanitarian crisis,

collapse of governance and mass displacements of people.

Many people have framed the escalating tensions in the Middle East as symptomatic of the

energy crisis. However, for the depleted oil states themselves, it is not an energy crisis but

an income crisis. Their population growth has only been enabled to date through generous

state programs, including food and fuel subsidies, funded by oil revenue. But once they

passed their peak of oil production, the descent in revenue was exacerbated by their rapidly

growing domestic demand for energy.

The political scientist and investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed recently explored these

dynamics in the book “Failing States, Collapsing Systems: Biophysical Triggers of Political

Violence”.2 He anticipates profound impacts on global stability once Saudi Arabia is in

decline. He includes the following summary of the predicament facing oil producing nations

(Table 1).

2 Ahmed, N.M. 2017. Failing States, Collapsing Systems: Biophysical Triggers of Political Violence. Springer.

94 pp. http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319478142

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Table 1. Overview of biophysical factors (water scarcity, peak oil, population) for oil-

producing nations, from Ahmed (2017).

For many of these countries, and other rapidly growing nations from Pakistan to Niger,

escalating food import-dependence is exacerbating an already untenable economic

situation. The rest of the world can’t carry such countries for ever on food aid. A new era of

famines seems imminent.

While agricultural production has so far kept pace with population growth, yield growth has

slowed. Consequently, new land is increasingly being recruited through deforestation, and

land is being farmed more intensively than it can sustain in the long term. In addition, areas

where production is rising most do not necessarily match those areas where population is

rising most, so an increasing proportion of the world population is dependent on

internationally traded food.

A 2015 report by the WorldWatch Institute noted that “imports of grain globally increased

more than fivefold between 1960 and 2013 as more nations turned to international markets

to help meet domestic food demand.”3

A highly acclaimed analysis by Lagi et al. (2011) found a strong relationship between the

FAO’s global food price index and the incidence of violent unrest.4 They concluded that

prices above a trigger-point were inclined to trigger unrest. While these incidents in the past

have been transient, generally corresponding to weather patterns negatively affecting food

production globally, the baseline of food prices has been rising as demand increases

inexorably while supply faces increasing challenges to expansion. A world of sustained high

food prices will be one of protracted instability and dysfunction.

3 Gardner G. 2015. Food Trade and Self-Sufficiency. WorldWatch Institute – Vital Signs Report. http://

vitalsigns.worldwatch.org 4 Lagi, M., Bertrand, K.Z., Bar-Yam, Y. (2011) The food crises and political instability in North Africa and the

Middle East. New England Complex Systems Institute. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455.pdf

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Figure 1. FAO food price index and start date of ‘food riots’ and unrest. Death toll in

parentheses. From Lagi et al. (2011).

The effect of population growth is to make the global food system more brittle. In 2015,

Lloyds published a scenario analysis examining the insurance impacts of acute disruption to

global food supply.5 Their simulation of a moderately strong El Niño event had disturbing

ramifications for geopolitical instability and the global economy.

A taskforce of experts convened by the UK government’s Global Food Security programme

also concluded that the global food system is vulnerable to production shocks caused by

extreme weather, and that this risk is growing.6

These risk analyses are based on past yield responses to climate events. A more sustained

risk is posed by the depletion of freshwater resources on which a large share of global food

production is based.7 Koniko (2011) estimated that the depletion of groundwater had

reached 145 km3/yr by the 2000’s, contributing 0.4 mm per year to sea level rise.

8 The

increasing depth of groundwater, falling beyond reach of smallholders, is already fuelling

rural-urban migration and tensions between small and larger farmers in the Middle East and

the Gangetic Plains.

5 Lloyd’s 2015. Food System Shock: the insurance impacts of acute disruption to global food supply. Lloyd’s

Emerging Risk Report 2015. 6 Extreme weather and resilience of the global food system (2015). Final Project Report from the UK-US

Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience, The Global Food Security programme, UK. 7 U.N. Environment Programme 2012. A Glass Half Empty: Regions at Risk Due to Groundwater Depletion.

January 2012, www.unep.org/pdf/UNEP-GEAS JAN 2012.pdf 8 Konikow L.F. 2011. Contribution of global groundwater depletion since 1900 to sea‐level rise. Geophysical

Research Letters 38, L17401, doi:10.1029/2011GL048604.

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Figure 3. The annual increment of global population 1990-2010, and that projected under

the UN’s medium fertility and constant fertility projections (UNDESA 2013).9 Black dots give

estimates of actual increment reported annually in the Population Reference Bureau’s

“World Population Datasheets” (PRB 2011-2016).10

International aid spending on family

planning is plotted against the right axis (Source: UN Economic and Social Council 2010).11

Instead of embracing such a cost-effective opportunity as voluntary family planning, the

development community continues to insist that population growth is economically neutral,

and in any case it is poverty reduction and education for girls which drives fertility decline.

The data to support this position are very weak. While poverty reduction and girls’

education are desirable goals in their own right, it is evident that family planning programs,

by reducing population growth, have contributed more to reducing poverty and improving

education access than development and education programs have reduced fertility. This

evidence will be summarised below. Every country which ran a successful voluntary family

planning program until fertility was below two has seen great economic advance, taking off

after fertility fell at least below three children per woman. In contrast, the considerable

advances in education and economic growth in Africa and central Asia under the Millennium

Development Goals were accompanied by less, rather than more, fertility decline.

9 UNDESA (2013) World Population Prospects, the 2012 Revision. Population Division, United Nations

Department of Economic and Social Affairs. http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/publications/world-

population-prospects-the-2012-revision.html 10

PRB (2011-2016) World Population Datasheet. Population Reference Bureau

http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2015/2015-world-population-data-sheet.aspx 11

UN Economic and Social Council (2010) Report of the Secretary-General on the flow of financial resources

for assisting in the implementation of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population

and Development. E/CN.9/2010/5 http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/documents/cpd-

report/index.shtml

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A safe climate depends on rapid resumption of voluntary family planning efforts

The false presumption that fertility decline will be driven by development is embedded in

the population projections used by the International Panel on Climate Change in the

“Shared Socioeconomic Pathways”. These are a set of global scenarios designed to assist

emissions modelling. These projections are also shown in Figure 7, demonstrating that most

of these scenarios have wildly optimistic assumptions about rapid fertility decline, assumed

to be driven by education and development. Only SSP3 (the worst case scenario for extent

and impact of climate change) exceeds the UN’s medium projection, which we have already

demonstrated to be over-optimistic.

The probability of limiting global warming to less than two degrees is highest in SSP1, and

extremely slim in the other scenarios. Although it is rarely mentioned when these scenarios

are discussed, the population outcome is a dominant determinant of the emissions

outcome. Yet SSP1 can only be achieved through urgent and substantial recommitment to

voluntary family planning programs in all remaining high fertility countries.

Australia’s response

Foreign aid

By far the greatest contribution that Australia can make to global stability is through strong

support for family planning programs, in all countries with above-replacement fertility (i.e.

more than 2.1 children per woman). As UNICEF has said,

“Family planning could bring more benefit to more people at less cost than any other

single technology now available to the human race.” UNICEF Report 1992

Such programs have become politically unfashionable, through the false association

between campaigns to lower desired family size and coercive measures such as China’s one-

child policy and India’s forced sterilisations. Coercive practices are not only repugnant, but

have not been proven effective in lowering fertility. Even in China, most of the fertility

decline occurred in the decade before the one-child policy under a popular voluntary

program. The most successful fertility reduction programs, from Iran and Mauritius to

Thailand and South Korea, achieved their ends with popular support and without coercion.

Ensuring they are voluntary and rights-based is not difficult to achieve. Shunning family

planning programs for fear of coercive practices is like banning schools for fear that they will

host child sexual abuse.

Since the London Family Planning Summit in 2012, there has been some renewal of support.

At that summit, Australia committed to raise its funding of family planning to $50 million per

year. That commitment was not honoured by the incoming Coalition government. Nor has

population growth been acknowledged by Australia as a threat to development and security

in the nations most dependent on our development support, including East Timor, Papua

New Guinea and the South Pacific nations.

The University of California’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health estimated that

the total cost to satisfy unmet need for contraception in the developing world is US$9.4

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billion per year, or an increase of $5.3 billion annually from current levels.14 This is a small

proportion of the net official development assistance (ODA) of $134.8 billion provided by

donors in 2013. And it is a temporary commitment, only needed for a couple of decades. If

these funds were found by taking a little from the budgets for health, education and

agriculture, the result would be greater health, education and food security. By

underfunding family planning, all other agenda are ultimately a lost cause.

Distributing this cost in proportion to GDP, the Bixby Center calculated that Australia’s fair

contribution would be US$119 million (in 2015). This translates to around A$160 million

today. This is barely 4% of our foreign aid budget, even at its currently depleted level. Given

the current constraints on funding from USA under the Trump administration, it would be

appropriate to increase Australia’s share to at least 5% of our aid budget.

DFAT has often argued that we fund what the recipient countries ask for and can’t force

family planning on them. This is a feeble excuse when there are programs in each of our

recipient countries much in need of support. In East Timor, Kirsty Sward-Gusmão has long

supported programs for women’s health and empowerment. Had family planning been a

feature of Australia’s support following independence, heading off the post-war baby boom,

East Timor would be a lot wealthier, more food-secure and better educated than it is today.

Papua New Guinea’s population has recently exceeded 8 million and fertility remains over

four children per woman. At independence it was a nation with such high development

prospects due to a high ratio of natural resources per citizen, but now it has foundered

under the burden of population growth. The emergence of large populations of landless

internal migrants on urban fringes is an increasing threat to stability. PNG's “National

Strategy for Responsible Sustainable Development for PNG” notes that, “The number of

human beings in any given limited space is a fundamental driver of need. Rather than seeing

this as a desirable aspect of a progressive economy, it should be recognized as an underlying

contributor to the development problem. Ever increasing numbers of people require

resources to service them and places pressure on Government to pursue unsustainable

policies.”15

PNG's National Family Planning Policy (2014) states that, “High fertility, besides being

recognized as a key population issue affecting socio-economic development and gender

equity, and is a major obstacle to poverty reduction.”16

In Papua New Guinea, there is a reported 44% of women with an unmet need for

contraception and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world. Just this

year, the PNG Parliamentary Group on Population and Sustainable Development launched

the “5 Mama Campaign” to promote women’s reproductive health and family planning.

Marie Stopes International has been running high quality services and has the capacity to

scale up, if the resources were supplied.

14

Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health 2015. By slowing population growth, family planning can help

address food insecurity and climate change.

https://intranet.bixbycenter.ucsf.edu/publications/files/PFC_Feb_3_2015.pdf 15

PNG Department of National Planning and Monitoring 2014. National Strategy for Responsible Sustainable

Development for PNG (StaRS), 2nd

Edition. http://www.planning.gov.pg/images/dnpm/pdf/StaRS.pdf 16

PNG Department of Health 2014. National Family Planning Policy. http://www.rhtu.org.pg/wp-

content/uploads/2013/02/Family Planning Policy June 2014.pdf

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Similar threats from mounting population and opportunities in existing programs exist

throughout the Pacific, and in other aid recipients such as Cambodia and Laos.

Australia’s population policies

Over the past dozen years, Australia has fostered very high immigration rates, on the

premise that it bolsters our economy. The experiment has proven enormously detrimental

to our productivity, gross national income per capita, income inequality, housing

affordability, job security, hospital waiting lists and infrastructure deficits. Fiscal debts

incurred to provide infrastructure have resulted in cuts to welfare and service.

Refugee numbers are likely to escalate in coming years. In contrast to the costly business of

resettling a relatively tiny number of refugees here, Australia can better alleviate refugee

needs by generous support to UN camps, reconciliation efforts and post-conflict rebuilding

programs. That said, there are specific groups whose prospects of regaining security in their

homeland are dismal and who have a better than average chance of integrating well in

Australian society. We support Australia’s current focus of selecting appropriate refugees

from UN camps. We would support our annual quota being increased to 20,000.

Many people have the perception that our non-refugee immigration program also meets an

international obligation. However, Australia has never set immigration quotas for the

benefit of immigrants. Nor could we have significant impact on population pressure

elsewhere through immigration. While running the highest per capita immigration rate in

the developed world, we receive merely 0.2% of the world’s annual increase in population.

Our efforts as a global citizen are much better exerted to help people where they are.

Indeed, Australia is a major exporter of staple foods, which helps keep global food prices

stable. But our population growth is eroding our capacity to export food. Already we feed

barely 30 million people in a drought year, and droughts are likely to get deeper and more

frequent. We risk both our own food security and that of import-dependent countries by

exceeding this population.

The impossible infrastructure bill

The infrastructure bill for population growth is responsible for the blow-out in debt of State

and local governments. The Grattan Institute reported “unprecedented infrastructure

spending by states and territories is largely responsible for a $106 billion decline in their

finances since 2006,” and “after a threefold increase in capital spending over the last 10

years, states are paying 3 per cent more of their revenues in interest and depreciation.”17

The fiscal strain of trying to keep pace with population growth has driven much privatisation

of public assets – deeply unpopular actions. It is also responsible for austerity measures

cutting community services and increasing user charges. For all these sacrifices, the citizens

have nothing to show except more costly housing, more competition for jobs, more

densification and loss of open space.

17

Daly, J. 2014. Budget pressures on Australian governments 2014. Grattan Institute.

http://grattan.edu.au/report/budget-pressures-on-australian-governments-2014/

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Former Treasury head (and now Chair of NAB) Dr Ken Henry said in a recent speech to the

Committee for the Economic Development of Australia (CEDA)18

:

In the broader community, there is considerably less support for a larger population.

People are concerned about the impact of a growing population on traffic

congestion, urban amenity, environmental sustainability and housing affordability.

And they worry about our ability to sustain Australian norms of social and economic

inclusion. These concerns are understandable…

Even with strong growth in the size of government and public debt, we do not have

the infrastructure capacity to support today’s population, far less the population of

the future.

How will we fund the biggest infrastructure build in our history? And what about

infrastructure planning?…

On the basis of official projections of Australia’s population growth, our governments

could be calling tenders for the design of a brand new city for two million people

every five years; or a brand new city the size of Sydney or Melbourne every decade;

or a brand new city the size of Newcastle or Canberra every year. Every year.

But that’s not what they are doing. Instead, they have decided that another 3 million

people will be tacked onto Sydney and another 4 million onto Melbourne over the

next 40 years.

Already, both cities stand out in global assessments of housing affordability and

traffic congestion.

And even if we do manage to stuff an additional 7 million people into those cities

what are we going to do with the other 9 million who will be added to the Australian

population in that same period of time?

Have you ever heard a political leader addressing that question? Do you think

anybody has a clue?

The Productivity Commission’s 2013 report “An Ageing Australia: Preparing for the Future”19

calculated that, if Australia’s population reaches the projected 38 million people by 2060,

total private and public investment requirements over the 50 year period are estimated to

be more than 5 times the cumulative investment made over the last half century:

18

Henry K. 2017. Speech to the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia, 23/02/2017.

http://news.nab.com.au/nab-chairman-ken-henrys-speech-at-ceda/ 19

Productivity Commission 2013. An Ageing Australia: Preparing for the Future. Research Paper, Canberra.

http://www.pc.gov.au/research/completed/ageing-australia/ageing-australia.pdf

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� - From Productivity Commission “An Ageing Australia: Preparing for the Future”

In its more recent “Migrant Intake into Australia” report, the Productivity Commission

observed that:20

Governments have not demonstrated a high degree of competence in infrastructure

planning and investment. Funding will inevitably be borne by the Australian

community either through user-pays fees or general taxation.

O’Sullivan (2012) demonstrated that the infrastructure costs of additional people greatly

exceed any additional revenue they could generate.21 Although the existing community

bears the cost, as the Productivity Commission observed, it does not benefit, as this

expenditure is only to accommodate additional people. In a four-decade longitudinal study

on the UK, it was found that ‘capital widening’ to cater for population growth cost around

6.9% of GDP per 1% p.a. population growth rate.22

An analysis of Australian data found a

similar figure, of 6.5% of GDP per 1% population growth, in the four decades to 2004,

preceding our recent population growth surge. Around a quarter of this was government

expenditure, amounting to well over $100,000 per additional person.23

However, the recent doubling of Australia’s population growth rate led to a more than

proportional increase in spending on Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF).10

It appears that

a number of factors increasingly compound the cost per added person, as growth rate

increases. These factors include the diseconomies of density (requiring more elaborate

infrastructure, like tunnels and desalination plants, to cope with high volumes of demand),

the high cost of retrofitting already-built-up areas, the need to over-cater in expectation of

future growth, and the inefficiency of removing still-functional assets to replace them with

higher-capacity versions (for example, in densifying suburbs, when a house is demolished to

make room for two, we get one additional house for the price of two).

20

Productivity Commission 2016. Migrant Intake into Australia. Inquiry final report, Canberra.

http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/migrant-intake/report/migrant-intake-report.pdf 21

O’Sullivan, J.N. 2012. The burden of durable asset acquisition in growing populations. Economic Affairs

32(1), 31-37. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0270.2011.02125.x/pdf 22

O’Sullivan, J.N. 2013. The cost of population growth in the UK. Report for Population Matters.

http://populationmatters.org/documents/cost_population_growth.pdf 23

O’Sullivan J. 2014. Submission to the Productivity Commission Inquiry into Infrastructure provision and

funding in Australia. http://www.pc.gov.au/ data/assets/pdf file/0004/135517/subdr156-infrastructure.pdf

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Many people clamour to advise the government simply to borrow more money to provide

the needed infrastructure. The assumption here is that this infrastructure is an investment,

which will generate the productivity improvement to pay back such loans. This is a

misconception: while ‘capital deepening’ (better provision per capita) may be an

investment, ‘capital widening’ is a recurrent cost, merely running to stand still. It is the price

we pay to reverse the productivity and amenity lost by population growth crowding existing

infrastructure. Funding it via debt only leads to an ever-escalating cost of debt-servicing

while borrowing to fund the next round, inexorably increasing costs to existing residents

while delivering them no net benefit.

There is no planning or funding model which delivers a net benefit from population growth.

Only through population stabilisation can the deterioration of our environment and quality

of life be reversed.

Recommendations

1. Australia should increase its support for family planning programs to at least 5% of the

foreign aid budget. In each aid-recipient country, an assessment should be made of the

barriers to women and couples avoiding unwanted pregnancies, and the factors

impeding adoption of small family preferences. Programs designed to address these

constraints should be integrated across other health, education and livelihood programs.

2. Australia should reduce its permanent immigration quota from all programs to below

70,000 per annum. The reduction should come primarily from the skilled migration

program, while the humanitarian program should be sustained or increased. The skilled

immigration program has been shown to bear no relation to real skills shortages and has

been widely rorted to the detriment of Australian job seekers. Family reunion places

should be trimmed back as the lower level of skilled migrants will generate fewer claims

for family reunion.

3. Australia should embrace its own population stabilisation as an opportunity to improve

services and amenity for citizens, to ensure ongoing environmental health and food

security, and to end the futile pursuit of ever-more debt to fund ever-more

infrastructure. Demographic ageing is far less costly than population growth, and has

many benefits. Indeed, the countries which are already aged, such as Japan and

Germany, have not seen any reduction in proportion of people employed, only fewer

people unemployed. Population growth can’t diminish ageing much, and poses a greater

threat to pension liability by creating a generation of people who will retire without

assets due to housing unaffordability and insecure work preventing them from saving

throughout their working life. It is time to end our rash demographic experiment, and be

a global leader in creating a sustainable society.

Dr. Jane O’Sullivan, National executive member

Ms. Sandra Kanck, National President

Sustainable Population Australia