I like The Project’s Waleed Ali. But he displayed his ignorance last night when he lashed Dick Smith’s call for lower immigration, bringing-up the false argument that immigration is needed to stop population ageing. Here’s the exchange (which you can watch via the link):
Dick Smith: “I’ve said that the part of her [Pauline Hanson’s] policy that says immigration should be around 70,000 per year I strongly support. We need to not keep expanding our population. It’s impossible to have more and more people forever. So let’s keep Australia at about 26 million… I just happen to agree with this policy that you cannot have perpetual growth. Pauline Hanson is going to be very popular because people are so fed up with the so-called political correctness of the normal politicians… they are not saying it as it is. That’s the problem with our typical politician”.
Waleed Aly: “But we’re in this position where we have an ageing population, and the number of people working is going to be outstripped by the number of people supported in retirements. So, how are we going to do that without an immigration program that provides those people for the workforce to support the elderly?”.
Dick Smith: “wouldn’t it be great if you could solve it by bringing in more people now? But the problem is they get older and the whole problem becomes worse. It’s what you call a ponzi scheme. That’s what we’ve got now and they are illegal in Australian”…
Waleed Aly: “A whole lot of young people are going to have to work with taxes at huge levels to support retiring, keep it [immigration] at a level so that it [the population pyramid] looks a bit squarer, right so then… Otherwise, you would have to level with us now and tell us how much tax you want young working people to pay so that the ageing population can have a retirement?”
Dick Smith: “That’s absolute rubbish. You don’t understand basic economics, but all I can say is it is going to get worse and worse. Peter Costello said ‘we’ve gotta have 3% growth’. That doubles everything every 25 years. It gets to the most incredible levels: a billion people in 200 years of modern Australia. That would be ridiculous… A ponzi scheme would just affect young people. It’s irresponsible”.
Dick Smith is 100% right on the topic of immigration and population ageing. It is nothing more than a giant can kick and a ponzi scheme – mitigating the ageing problem for a few years, but creating much greater problems down the track.
What Waleed Aly doesn’t seem to understand is that migrants themselves grow old. Hence, Australian would need to import more and more people in a vain attempt to stall population ageing – an impossible and unsustainable task that amounts to little more than ‘ponzi demography’.
On multiple occasions, the Productivity Commission (PC) has exposed the fallacy of Waleed Aly’s argument that mass immigration should be used to counter population ageing. For example:
- PC (2005): “Despite popular thinking to the contrary, immigration policy is also not a feasible countermeasure [to an ageing population]. It affects population numbers more than the age structure”.
- PC (2010): “Realistic changes in migration levels also make little difference to the age structure of the population in the future, with any effect being temporary“…
- PC (2011): “…substantial increases in the level of net overseas migration would have only modest effects on population ageing and the impacts would be temporary, since immigrants themselves age… It follows that, rather than seeking to mitigate the ageing of the population, policy should seek to influence the potential economic and other impacts”…
- PC (2016): “[Immigration] delays rather than eliminates population ageing. In the long term, underlying trends in life expectancy mean that permanent immigrants (as they age) will themselves add to the proportion of the population aged 65 and over”.
Not surprisingly, immigrants age as well.
Of course, Waleed Aly has also not accounted for the extra taxes that would be required to fund all the extra economic and social infrastructure to cope with an expanded population (see here for detailed analysis).
For example, the PC’s final report on An Ageing Australia: Preparing for the Future projected that Australia’s population would balloon to 38 million people by 2060 (mostly via immigration) and warned that 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:
The in its recent Migrant Intake into Australia report, the PC warned that:
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.
The bottom line is that running a high immigration program requires massive investment and costs a lot. Australia’s governments have failed dismally on this front, preferring to take the sugar hit from added demand while leaving the problems to be solved down the track on somebody else’s watch (i.e. never).
The obvious solution is to significantly scale back immigration and forestall the need for costly new infrastructure investment in the first place, especially given immigration is also useless in forestalling population ageing.
One final point: Waleed Aly frequently complains that he cannot afford to purchase a house in Melbourne. Does he think housing will be more affordable under current immigration settings, which project that Melbourne’s population will grow by 1,850 people per week (97,000 people per year) for the next 35 years:
Or that housing would be cheaper under moderate population growth?
The answer is obvious.
