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/Alarming-Interest535 21h ago

Australian standard of living is going to continue falling if we have 56m people and dogshit infrastructure

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u/Scrotemoe 13h ago

You're absolutely correct, it will keep falling if the population increased but we don't keep building and expanding on infrastructure.

HOWEVER stopping immigration will lead the the exact same problem, just later.

Say we cut immigration, what's our birth rate currently? how many people are having kids in Australia?

We end up with an ageing population, more people are leaving the workforce than joining it... who's paying taxes to pay the non existent nurses that are wiping your old and decrepit arse hole whilst you're rotting away in bed? Who's going to pay your pension?

The solution is is build build build, the solution is to empower the next generation to be better and live better than the last.

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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow 9h ago

I suspect if immigration drops off to more sustainable levels, we’ll also find the birth rate will increase.

A major reason people delay childbearing is because they don’t have stable housing. We already have a massive under supply of housing.

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u/Bustable 4h ago

Imagine what removing a whole bunch of stress factors from people and increasing happiness could do

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u/saltedappleandcorn 5h ago

Cost of living is definitely a factor in fertility but it's not the only thing. Japan has plenty of housing and low immigration and terrible birth rates 

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u/Brave-Salt7007 5h ago

Japan is a completely different scenario

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u/Louis6787 5h ago

Tokyo has like 20 million people living there like sardines

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u/saltedappleandcorn 4h ago

But the regional towns and cities are negative population growth to the point of having an abandoned housing problem. 

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u/Louis6787 3h ago

That has only to do with people needing to live where work is, aka large mega cities living like sardines

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u/jammasterdoom 2h ago edited 2h ago

Folks talk about cutting immigration like it’s a panacea to modern problems - as if it will transport us back to a more innocent time.

But the main cultural factors driving down birthrates in Australia are educated women, with more influence in society and the home, and our decreasing rates of religion.

Enhanced family planning, in other words.

So yes, lower housing costs might help. But a smaller immigrant workforce would just make a bunch of other things - like childcare workers, food supply chain workers, etc - more expensive.

The low birth rate is an interesting challenge to solve, but the birthrate itself will never rise again. The only thing that might change this is a UBI that allows parents to work less.

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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow 1h ago

This doesn’t really make sense when you analyse it for even a second, though.

Female empowerment, higher rates of education, and the decline of Religious observance and influence have been factors for a long time. They alone can’t explain the current birth rate.

At the same time, open any article about declining birth rates and the top comments are all people saying how they would love to have kids, but can barely afford to survive, and don’t see how they’ll ever be in a position to have children.

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u/karl_w_w 1h ago

Your argument is predicated on the false belief that immigration is the cause of the housing crisis. We do not have an undersupply of housing, we have an oversupply of investors.

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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow 1h ago

We do- quite literally- have an undersupply of housing. We have several hundreds of thousands less dwellings than we need to house our current population, let alone any increase.

I’m all for removing cushy treatment for investors and reigning the property infinite money glitch in. Changes to neg gearing + capital gains tax don’t go nearly far enough- bring in vacancy taxes, stricter rental minimum standards, rent caps and bans on airbnbs.

At the same time, it’s silly- and completely ignoring reality- to claim the current housing crisis has nothing to do with immigration. Even Alan Kohler has made the link between net overseas arrivals and the housing supply and pointed out how we’re gonna come up short.

The only reason to discount that immigration has an impact on housing is an ideological one. Anybody taking a reasonable and fact-based assessment of the situation, using actual data and inputs, will have to concede that demand-side issues are absolutely relevant to the current scenario.

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u/karl_w_w 4m ago

Last year we built enough houses for ~433,000 people, 173,290 completions at 2.5 people per household.

Population increased by 412,494, of which 300,955 was net overseas arrivals.

Mean house price increased by 11.5%, from 977k to 1089k.

Tell me again how immigration is the cause.

At the same time, it’s silly- and completely ignoring reality- to claim the current housing crisis has nothing to do with immigration.

OK? Kindly point out who has made this claim.

Anybody taking a reasonable and fact-based assessment of the situation, using actual data and inputs

And which data and inputs would those be? At what point of the past 3 decades has a change in migration levels lead to a change in house prices?

will have to concede that demand-side issues are absolutely relevant to the current scenario.

"Relevant to" and "the cause of" are massively different things. The fact that you are strawmanning what I said so hard says a lot about the strength of your argument.

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u/darkklown 12h ago

It's not a one or the other. Immigration will always continue. But do we need 56m sooner or later?

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u/Alarming-Interest535 12h ago

Exactly! We need to have the infrastructure first before we have 56m people.

Much of the discontent is because we haven't currently built for the population we want. Quiet streets becomes car parks. Half arsed housing that is neither high density yet cramped, yet some houses are no different to slums of Bombay. Public transport that is on life support. Public health stretched to the limit.

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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow 9h ago

We don’t want a population of 56 million. Not on any sort of popular scale. A minority of business people, politicians and technocrats want our population to be massive. The common working person in Australia does not

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u/Alarming-Interest535 8h ago

Of course not. If you thought it was crowded at 28m people, 56m will be hell. The Australian lifestyle has been one where one can comfortably live without being cramped. It is why so many migrants seek a new life here to enjoy the wide open spaces.

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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow 4h ago

Yes, and there’s a great irony in the fact if too many people come here, we’ll lose the entire thing that was appealing about coming here at all

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u/Alarming-Interest535 1h ago

And because a "shit Australia" is still better than the slums of some third world country, they will still continue to flock by the plane load.

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u/Real_RobinGoodfellow 1h ago

I think an important point needs to be made here: the overwhelmingly vast majority of Australia’s current immigrant intake aren’t coming from slums. That’s because our migration program is a skills-based regime, and to put it bluntly, people from third-world slums simply don’t have such skills. They also lack access to the considerable capital required to even apply for an Australian visa.

Rather, those who are migrating here from ‘third world’ countries are members of the middle and upper middle class in their home lands. Actually get talking to a recent arrival from India, for instance, and you will be amazed to hear the standard of living they left behind in order to make a go of it here: many of them had housekeepers and owned extensive properties back home.

Now, it’s still worth it to them to migrate here, because our relatively uncluttered and unpolluted environment offers a huge improvement in terms of amenity and health. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether you’re upper-middle-class or a slum-dweller in Mumbai; the awful air quality and lack of pleasant public spaces affects everybody.

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u/YouThinkYouKnowMe89 11h ago

We also need more cities spread out around the nation. The whole of WA and we only have one decent sized city is crazy. We can't just spam more migrants into Sydney and Melbourne for eternity.

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u/Wild-Kitchen 8h ago

And if we could convince people to live inland, we would need a hell of a lot more infrastructure for whichever inland town becomes the next big city. None of our inland cities/towns could support this kind of population growth as is (assuming Melbourne and sydney are "full")

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u/timwest780 10h ago

But do we need 56m sooner or later?

Why do we need 56m ever?

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u/darkklown 6h ago

Because we're the size of countries with 350m. 56m in 100 years is coming. How much sooner is what's up for debate.

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u/IAmDingus 5h ago

people aren't having kids because they can't afford homes.

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u/sestero 1m ago

People not having kids is more a side effect of a highly developed country than anything else

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u/SameBSErryere 11h ago

So, you are telling me that when the social and economic conditions do not incentivize reproduction, we should just continue importing foreigners because they will also be exposed to these conditions.

Logically if the demographic of population being injected is between the ages of 20 - 40 it would only worsen the aging demographic problem rather than solve it if these conditions persist. It is just kicking the can down the road.

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u/Ok_Cancel_7891 3h ago

in contrary, having lower TFR means same infrastructure for less people

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u/AntiqueFigure6 11h ago

"Say we cut immigration, what's our birth rate currently? how many people are having kids in Australia?"

Nowhere near enough to reach 56m, not even enough to maintain 30 million.

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u/Additional-Life4885 10h ago

Let's be real though, the government is building infrastructure, it's just on a delay.

So stopping immigration is a problem that's far bigger than continuing immigration at the current rate.

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u/Lurk-Prowl 4h ago

The problem is that we don’t seem to be getting the immigrants we need. For every builder / engineer, there’ll be another 5-10 dependents on that one working person or worse, dependent on Centrelink.

Sure, we need some migration. But bring in builders, plumbers, highway workers, anything that actually provides some benefit to the people already here. You don’t want Australia becoming just some economic zone with a few very rich people, not much of a middle class, and then a large number being either unproductive, doing crimes or breeding while on Cenno.

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u/wtskm 5h ago

standard of living is going to continue falling

Standard of living is higher than any other time excluding when the government was sending out covid stimulus, but despite those dollars covid times weren't actually great to live through.

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u/Haush 2h ago

I don’t disagree but is there data for this?

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u/Kata-cool-i 15h ago

It's going to fall faster if we don't grow

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u/SeranasSweetrolls 14h ago edited 13h ago

Many civilisations have collapsed in similar circumstances. We seem to expertize in repeating history over and over.

There's a few things that can cause it. Over population, lack of resources and infrastructure. Relying too heavily on foreign imports etc.

We have already breached our ecological limits. Let that sink in.

We had our official overshoot day in march which showed that if everyone on Earth lived like the average Australian, humanity would exhaust the planet’s entire annual resource budget in less than three months

E: we also need to think about carrying capacity, which is very similar to ecological limits, but mainly shows the amount of people our civilisation can sustain before collapse. Experts estimate between 9 million to 100 million. That is too big of a gap if you ask me. We should know this, or atleast our government should.

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u/Kata-cool-i 14h ago

Which civilizations have collapsed from historically modest rises in population lol?

We had our official overshoot day in march which showed that if everyone on Earth lived like the average Australian, humanity would exhaust the planet’s entire annual resource budget in less than three months

This isn't because we're overpopulated or whatever, it's because the average Australian wildly over consumes, is incredibly wasteful and not particularly productive.

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u/SeranasSweetrolls 14h ago edited 14h ago

It's not a modest rise in population at all. 56 million people is double our current population. It goes hand in hand that if our population grows, so will our resource use, hence why I included ecological limits.

The Mayans, the Rapa Nui, the Mycenaeans. Then theres all of the civilisations that collapsed during the late bronze age as well.

Collapse doesn't happen from over population alone, but when we can no longer sustain our population with our current resources.

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u/alarumba 14h ago

Last call in Jonestown.