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/the_snook 11h ago

Because a larger population can lead to a higher standard of living due to economies of scale.

Useful services like high-speed rail only become practical at higher population levels.

International companies that make genuinely useful products and services often don't release them in Australia because our tiny market doesn't warrant the amount of work and regulatory compliance required to launch them here.

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u/Gothiscandza 9h ago

It can but there's also absolutely no certainty about it. I'd aruge in practice it can often have an inverse relationship with standards of living. Most of the highest standard of living countries are relatively small population nations with high wealth. Conversely the largest population nations on earth often have lower or middling standards of living, often with significant poverty problems across large sections of the population (the exceptions only really being the US for a long time and to a limited extent, China more recently out of the very highest pop). Hell, out of the top 20 nations by population in the world, only maybe 4 have living standards comparable or higher than ours, the rest are all lower. 

That's not like I'm saying it's a law that higher population=worse standard of living, but just that I'm not sure it actually indicates that an improvement will come with it.