Australia’s population is predicted to tick over 25 million in early August.
The country is adding a new person every 83 seconds, taking into account births, deaths, and net migration.
The 25th million resident is likely to be a female aged 26 from China who moves to western Sydney on a higher education visa, he predicted.
“We are growing, not only faster than a lot of the developing countries that normally have a faster growth rate—our growth rate is way above China and other countries in Asia. We’re also growing faster than most OECD nations,” McCrindle told Fairfax.
According to Fairfax, about eight of 10 new migrants last year settled in Sydney or Melbourne.
“We need to rebalance the population,” McCrindle told Fairfax.
“We’ve got red-hot growth in some cities, population decline in other very established cities, and we’ve got a city like Darwin that goes up and down with the economy.
“We need to modulate our population growth so it’s sustainable, so it’s planable, so that it’s decentralised and not all about just the east coast capitals ... to grow our regional economies.”“The current approach is just to let it [population growth] happen and that generally means it happens in Sydney and Melbourne,” Dr Troy said. “It creates a lot of pressures and a lot of that is borne out via the urban development process because we need to find new houses.
“Congested cities are more polluted cities and at the same time if you keep pushing outwards it creates other environmental issues, like how we live [and move] in the city.”
In February, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott called for the permanent migration intake to be cut from 190,000 to 110,000 a year to alleviate pressure on wages, house prices, and infrastructure.“At least until infrastructure, housing stock, and integration has better caught up, we simply have to move the overall numbers substantially down,” Abbott said in a speech to the Sydney Institute.
“A strong migration program in the long term doesn’t preclude a smaller one in the short term, especially when there’s acute pressure on living standards and quality of life.”
Entrepreneur Dick Smith, a longtime proponent of population control, said the issue has been ignored by the major political parties.
“What I’m amazed at is there’s no discussion,” he said.
“I get stopped in the street all the time, people say, ‘Dick, it’s terrible, 14 per cent youth unemployment, my grandkid can’t get a job.’”
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