The argument about Australia’s carrying capacity
The anti-immigrationists make three main appeals. One is to the perceived latent resentment of Anglo-Australians against changes to the ethnic and cultural mix of Australia. This line of argument is essentially an appeal to cultural ativism.
It is usually there in the arguments, but it is often veiled a bit to avoid offending the more civilised Australians. At the popular level, talkback radio hosts, and the One Nation bunch exploit this perceived ativism mercilessly. At a theoretical level people such as Miriam Dixson and Paul Sheehan implicitly invoke this perceived feeling while ostensibly deploring it.
The second line of argument is that migration is economically bad for Australia. That argument is unsustainable and I’ve dealt with it above.
The third argument is much more powerful and potent these days, even with many people who are opposed to overt racism, and regard themselves as civilised. It is expressed in the viewpoint of the organization called Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Society and in the political outlook of the conservative electoral formation, the Australian Democrats, who advocate zero net immigration.
The best-known popular advocates of this point of view are Tim Flannery, author of The Future Eaters and his disciple Paul Sheehan, author of Amongst the Barbarians. Other people who write about these questions and claim some expertise in the field, are the poet Mark O’Conner, the CSIRO scientist Doug Cocks, Ted Trainer the deep ecologist, the Birrell supporters and Katharine Betts.
Their essential argument is that Australia is a supremely eroded, overwhelmingly arid continent, that we are already overpopulated, and that if our present rate of population growth, the historically general 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent annually that has been the case over most of our history, continues further, disasters will develop in the not-too-distant future.
In one article, Flannery advances the argument that we should reduce the population from 19 million to 12 million. One wonders whether that includes an offer of voluntary euthanasia on his part! This line of argument involves a very considerable virtuosity with statistics.
Cocks and Flannery, who attempt occasionally to quantify their views, toss around various figures for arable land available in Australia. They appear to concede that most estimates of available arable land, made by people who know something about the subject, show that there are still vast areas of unused arable land in Australia.
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Nevertheless, they manage, by ingenious manipulation of the figures to argue that this is really not significant, because the arable land is in Northern Australia, the water is in Northern Australia and we should be ultra-cautious. They continually express animosity to agriculture, which seems to be the hallmark of quite a few modern pseudo-geographers and pseudo-anthropologists.
There is a whole school developing of semi-scientific popular journalism devoted to the argument that agriculture is destroying humanity. Flannery even argues that it would be a good idea to make a large part of Australia into an enormous ecological theme park, finding large mammals from overseas to replace the diptodron in the ecological niche that it used to occupy about 10,000 years ago. Flannery often seems to prefer animals to humans. I disagree with this approach.
Past arguments about Australia’s population. Tim Flannery’s curious legend about Griffith Taylor
Many of the ecological opponents of migration make a hero of Griffith Taylor, a past Australian geographer. Tim Flannery paints Taylor as an opponent of further increase in Australian population, and as someone who shared Flannery’s view that Australia has a very small population carrying capacity. He repeats this legend about Taylor and paints him as a kind of martyr to the forces in Australia, “the boosters”, who in the past favoured a large increase in Australian population, and are said to have forced Taylor’s academic exile from Australia to North America.
A rather vigorous academic argument has developed about the long-dead Griffith Taylor, with opponents of migration ascribing to him this martyr status, and academic liberals and leftists responding indirectly by drawing attention to Taylor’s mad, racist views, which he shared with many other geographers and anthropologists of his time, of which a representative and interesting sample is found in a letter from Ian Castles of the Academy of Social Sciences, in the March 2000 Quadrant.
Castles says of Taylor:
The demeaning assumption was alive and well in the 1920s. Second-year students in Australia’s first university department at the University of Sydney were instructed by its head, Griffith Taylor, to “insert the measurement of three skulls in a table”, using calipers, tapes and radiometers; and were directed to a paper on the Kamilaroi tribe, co-authored by Taylor, for a discussion of “the changes in skin-colour and nasal index which result from hybridisation”. In 1924, Taylor solemnly told the Royal Society of New South Wales of a teacher’s opinion “that blacks at the age of 14 were about as intelligent as white children at the age of 10″. In his Environment and Race, published by Oxford University Press in 1927, Taylor asserted that the development of man’s reasoning faculties was “correlated with the size of the brain”, and that “we can show a continuous series of measurements leading from the primitive Negro (69) up through the Iberian (75) group … and West Europeans to the Alpine (85) and the Mongolian peoples.
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As Ian Castles is quite right to point out about Taylor, he obviously shared the nutty phrenological racism current among many academics in his time and place, but this argument about Taylor is eccentric for another, rather more basic, reason.
I have recently discovered that the Tim Flannery version of Taylor’s views on migration and the carrying capacity of Australia just isn’t true. I recently bought, in a package of secondhand books, Griffith Taylor’s book in the Oxford Geographies series, the fourth edition on Australia, published in 1925.
For that time, it’s a pretty good potted geography of Australia. What fascinated me most is the fact that Taylor’s views on settlement and population, as expressed in this very basic geography textbook, are almost the opposite of the views attributed to him by Flannery.
On page 262, Taylor asserts that there are 616,000 square miles of land suitable for close temperate settlement, 100,000 square miles of tropical agricultural lands, 1,009,000 square miles of good pastoral lands and 655,000 square miles of fair pastoral lands.
If anything, this is an overestimate in the opposite direction to Flannery’s views. Taylor was also a strong advocate of a large expansion of irrigation for agriculture, if his 1925 standard Australian geography book is any guide. The very last paragraph in the book, the postscript, commences with the following.
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In a paper published in the American Geographical Review, July 1922, the writer shows that the prospects of the fertile temperate regions in Australia are very hopeful. Using the present condition of Europe (with her 400 millions of population) as a criterion, he deduces that 62 millions of white settlers can establish themselves in eastern and south-western Australia.
Despite his bizarre anthropological racism, Taylor wasn’t a bad prophet on some matters. He is well known for his prediction that Australia would have between 19 million and 20 million population in the year 2000, which has turned out to be spot on.
It is pretty fascinating the way legends grow. Rather than being a fierce opponent of population growth as painted by Flannery, Taylor was a bit of a “booster” himself in relation to population.
Flannery and company also praise the conservative economist Bruce Davidson, who conducted a constant polemic in the 1950s and 1960s against northern agricultural development, on dry economic grounds. In this instance, their account of Davidson’s views is probably accurate.
My heroes in this area are the “boosters”: people such as Ion Idriess, J.C. Bradfield, William Hatfield and Jack Timbery, who advocated various and quite feasible proposals for agricultural development, particularly in the immediate postwar period. The Snowy scheme was one product of this kind of outlook.
In the 1970s a vigorous Australian resident opponent of Malthusianism and supporter of Australian development and high migration was the late Colin Clark. He had worked as an economist for the World Food Organisation and been a major English university economist, and he conducted a considerable argument with Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s and 1970s. His predictions about world agricultural production etc have generally been confirmed by subsequent developments.
Ehrlich’s more alarmist predictions have repeatedly been refuted by later events. Colin Clark had a very serious debate with Derek Llewellyn-Jones, in the book Zero Population Growth published by Heinemann in 1974. Most of Colin Clark’s predictions have turned out more accurate than those of Llewellyn-Jones.
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It is necessary to make some assumptions about likely future world developments concerning food, agriculture and resources. In this field I have found the very detailed literature of the World watch Institute of considerable use.
While the Worldwatch Institute is, in the main, overly alarmist, it has performed an enormous service over recent years in tracking world developments in food production, arable land, fertiliser use and many other important things. A very useful understanding of what is really happening on a global scale can be acquired from the very serious crossfire that takes place between Malthusians such as the Worldwatch Institute and major capitalist growth advocates such as the Hudson Institute.
The truth about likely future world developments lies somewhere between the opposite projections of these two schools of thought, and anyone seriously interested in these matters can derive great value from studying the material produced by these two currents of thought, and the debates between them.
Nevertheless, there is no serious doubt in my mind that the Worldwatch Institute alarmism is somewhat closer to the reality than the Hudson Institute optimism, for the medium-term future. There is likely to be a global shortage of food and arable land and water for quite a while, although not as catastrophic as the Worldwatch Institute believes.
Despite the short-term low world prices for commodities, artificially created by the global financial speculations of finance capital, over time there is likely to be enormous demand for food on a world scale, and ultimately prices for it must rise. That reality underpins my argument.
The second reality is that the global shortage of arable land and water produces a situation in which Australia cannot possibly afford to indulge the fantasy of Flannery and Paul Sheehan about making our country a big ecological theme park. We will be under constant pressure to develop agriculture to produce more food and we will be under constant pressure for more migration to these shores.
Politically it is much smarter to anticipate these developments by maintaining our historically highish, and now non-discriminatory migration policy, and we will, for obvious reasons of survival, have to improve our agricultural practices and remediate the Australian environment to fulfill our global human responsibilities in food and population.
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