The irony about this book is that there isn't really a debate about the size of the Australian population. There may be mutterings in the pub about rapid population growth in Sydney and Melbourne, but seven years after the publication of Bigger or Better? Australia still doesn't have a population policy... though this article argues that we don't need one.

My interest in this book was triggered by another book that I'm reading. I'm about half way through Tim Watts' recently published The Golden Country: Australia's Changing Identity and there's a fair bit in that about the impact on population of the Howard Government's changes to immigration policy, and how Australia has mostly fudged the question of population policy. More about that later when I've finished it, but it's been interesting to companion-read Lowe's book, even though some of it is now out of date.

Well, I remember this flurry about 'big Australia' but it's not a topic in the media at the moment. There seem to be two reasons for this: one is that the nexus between population growth and economic growth is 'settled' dogma, and the other is that it's a complex subject easily subverted into prejudice about migration. Lowe's book is useful for clarifying the issues, and it appears to me to be reasonably even-handed, but he is upfront about being a patron of Sustainable Population Australia so it's clear where his opinion lies.

The book consists of a brief history of population growth in Australia, tracing the years when it was generally accepted that Australia needed to grow its population, through to the early 1970s where there began to be world-wide concern about the earth's capacity to support an ever-increasing global population. But nothing much happened. Then there was another flurry in the 1990s but immigration and the national birth rate went on increasing under the Howard government's policies anyway.

There's a longish chapter about the economic arguments for and against, most of which suggest that we've been led up the garden path about the benefits of population growth—but what I found most interesting of all was the chapter titled 'Who's Who in the Population Debate, and What are their Agendas.' Whether it's intended to or not, this chapter goes a long way to explaining why in fact there is so little discussion about the future of our population. It's very complicated indeed.

To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/11/14/bigger-or-better-australias-population-debat... ( )