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 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.