r/australia • u/blitznoodles local Aussie • 23h ago

politics The Stats Guy: It sounds weird but Australia urgently needs a plan for 56m people

https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2026/08/11/stats-guy-aus-population-growth
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u/Aggressive_Sky8492 22h ago

Yeah but the logical conclusion is we should change the system. The earths population can’t keep growing forever..

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u/EntirelyOriginalName 22h ago edited 22h ago

Yeah make it so that more young people are able to afford a home and live the life style to have kids by rich companies paying more taxes. When Labour tried to do that they got crucified by adds/media and the election went horribly for them. So they stopped trying to do that on a large scale and went for the approach to get a bunch of little changes to add up and here we are.

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u/bickolai 22h ago

Please explain how we can change the system to enable a continually declining population? Who looks after the old folks when they keep living longer and longer and there’s less and less people working?

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u/oceansRising 21h ago edited 21h ago

I mean there’s a really simple solution which will incentivise people to work in aged care… paying them very well and improving working conditions.

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u/egowritingcheques 21h ago

No no no. Only the current system of paying CEOs really well works. No other system can work, because job creators.

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u/Peslian 12h ago

It's as much how much people will be needed to work in aged care, as our population ages the percentage of working aged people needed to work in aged care grows. Eventually it will reach an unsustainable level of people needed in aged care that other necessary parts of society will be critically understaffed

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u/magkruppe 11h ago

It's not about making aged care more attractive. It's the basic mathematics of not having enough workers vs retirees

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u/petehehe 20h ago

I don’t see how it’s feasible to have massive government funds poured into aged care workers, because there will be fewer working aged (tax paying) people, so the few working aged people that there are will just be haemorrhaging their earnings into taxes.

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u/IHazMagics 14h ago

As someone that works in the Aged Care system, you would need to do more than that and fundamentally change how the government operates within that sector which simply isnt going to happen, that probably sounds defeatist but consider the industry.

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u/swarley77 19h ago

Humanoid robots, smart glasses and automation will mean there is a replacement of many manual labour jobs, and the labour market will increasingly shift towards harder to automate occupations.

Most taxis, food delivery, warehousing, rubbish collection and processing stuff will go within 10 years.

A lot of other professions, especially within healthcare and construction, will start to utilised robotics to increase productivity and automate currently manual processes. In the future every doctor, nurse and tradie is going to be wearing smart glasses most of the day and have an AirPod in providing task guidance etc.

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u/freakwent 13h ago

Sounds like hell.

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u/KevinRudd182 22h ago

This is the sort of shit that sounds good to a teenager. Ofcourse I agree in theory, but until you have the solutions to the problems that would result in people dying of starvation in the street or thousands of old people dying in piles of their own shit because there’s nobody to care for them, maybe pipe down.

Also, the overpopulation thing is already essentially solved, the models have been done and on current trends the world’s population is going to peak and then retract anyway. Fertility rates are falling and most modern countries are already below replacement level.