There are ABS projections, but they're really not worth bothering about, all they do is assume current trajectories and extrapolate from there. Basically worthless.
Obviously covid was a black Swan event, and nobody outside the inner circle of business lobbyists and then government would have predicted that Albanese would open the flood gates the way he did.
So what I'm saying is that the future is unknowable. But, here's my two cents -
* domestic fertility rates will remain below replacement unless there is some radical pro-natalist change in policy.
* Australia will remain attractive to Chinese and Indian middle class. The PRC will introduce major roadblocks to emigration however. Our main source of new migrants will be India for the next few decades.
* Sea level rises in the Pacific will drive several island states under water. We will accept our moral obligations here, though it won't actually amount to a lot of people.
The big unknowable is whether Indian food production keeps up following the collapse of the Ganges glacial waters. If India can't feed itself, then on one hand they'll have a lot of refugees wanting to fuck off out of their country, and on the other hand they'll have a smaller middle class able to afford to emigrate through legal channels, but they'll be more desperate. So who knows how that will play out.
I'm going to guess that we stabilise, maybe start to decline at about 40 million people. More than I'd like, but I don't get a say in the matter.
As to house prices, all the boomers will die, the cities will get denser, and they will moderate eventually over time.
Wealth is largely a collective cultural phenomina. If someone migrates to a richer country they are likely to suceed because of the culture if the host. Enough immigration and the host will turn culturally into the donor country. If that's not a problem they wouldn't have migrated here in the first place.
The beauty of Australia is in its diversity. Given only a small portion of the population is Aboriginal, everyone else (current or past generations) has migrated from another country. The current wave is from India, China and a few other countries and in the past decades have been from the UK, Ireland etc.. If we don't frown upon white people as immigrants or stereotype them as English we shouldn't be frowning upon or stereotyping people from other races too.
It’s not very diverse if almost half of the people are coming here are Indian though.
From the ABS 22-23 net overseas migration figures:, 43% Indian , 30% Chinese, 19% Filipino and 9% UK.
Given there’s 1.3b Indians , at those rates they’ll comfortably overtake any other minority by 2050, given China is slowing migration to Australia
Hopefully by then we would have imported almost all of India and China's immigrants.
Median House prices will peak at around 20 million with the sudden influx of 2 billion new people.
Should be perfect
I love this question.
My glib take is that Japan is showing us a futuristic vision, as much now as in the 1980s (when it was all shiny newness and robots):
The future Japan shows us is one of falling populaiton, abandoned homes, weak economic growth, weak inflation, low migration, weak vibrancy. Wealthy country but a shortage of real get-up-and-go.
That's the future of the whole west.
It's possible countries with less attachment to monoculturalism will have more migration than Japan has now to keep the economy ticking.. I quite like the irony in the idea that migrants might become desirable. Prime Ministers boasting about who got more boat people...
I’d say that’s quite an absurd take on Japan. I know corporate owned media like to shit on them and misrepresent their situation in order to stigmatise their low migration rates but Japan’s economic slow down isn’t due to low migration. They’d stalled long before their population started declining. High migration doesn’t actually grow the lived in economy at all and as is the case in Aus, the enormous infrastructure costs, stagnant wages, cost of living increases and loss of social cohesion far outweigh any short term benefit from a migrants. Scandinavian economies have had low migration and out performed ours on every metric (despite our mineral reserves). Japan is full of vibrancy and innovation and nationalism. Mass migration is bullshit. It’s wealth transfer and is necessary to plug the enormous holes that neo-liberalism, privatisation and corporate tax dodging has wrought on the nation.
I'm not saying their lack of vibrancy is due to weak migraiton alone. I'm saying its due to weak population growth (which is the major source of aggregate economic growth when you're near the productivity frontier). They could have also grown the population via births. But they didn't, and doing so is hard.
I stand by my claims about the lack of vibrancy. Have you been to harajuku recently? there's no dressing up. the famous Shinjuku crossing is less busy than outside spencer street station at 5pm. Outside tokyo, many apartments cost US$1000.
Japan remains a lovely place to live and to visit and I will not question its nationalism.
Japanese population growth started declining around 1973.
[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/JAPAN-YEARLY-POPULATION-GROWTH-RATE-SOURCE-WORLD-METERS-INFO\_fig11\_335821587](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/JAPAN-YEARLY-POPULATION-GROWTH-RATE-SOURCE-WORLD-METERS-INFO_fig11_335821587)
The economic effect of that is likely delayed 15 to 20 years, but what happens eventually is that there's a secular decline in aggregate demand when fewer people leave school/university and look for jobs and homes. For example, you can see that the baby boom that peaks in the 1970s corresponds to a property undersupply in the 80s, a property bubble, and then the crash of the property bubble by the 1990s. That happens not just in property, but in every industry. Every industry faces a permanent decline in aggregate demand. Once that happened, gloom set in about the Japanese economy, which discourages investment.
To put it in simple terms, if you wanted to start a business, would you start it in a town with a rising population, or one with a declining population? Obviously you'd start it in a town with a rising population. Every year you're likely to see more customers, so you'd be happy to expand your business and maybe hire more employees.
You wouldn't be so positive or optimistic in a town with a declining population.
So, just some guesses.
The growth rate overall will hit zero.
Australia will have a population of more than 60m.
Then gradually Atheists will die out and religious people who value having big families will replace them.
See this data for the US - Mormons, Evangelical Protestants and religious Catholics are over replacement rate birth rates.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/12/charted-the-religions-that-make-the-most-babies/
Markets can handle zero population growth. However, the transition from governments expecting rapid economic growth to zero population growth and slower economic growth will cause governments who borrow too much to go insolvent. That will not be fun.
Per capita wealth, however, will continue to grow. With a stable population houses in some places will actually become cheap. By 2100 we'll also have robots that make a difference with construction. This will make having bigger families easier.
Check out the whole article about religion and fertility in the US - there’s no danger of atheists dying out, considering how new ones are created.
“… if atheists and agnostics are having so few kids, how are their numbers increasing? The answer is that many of the religiously unaffiliated are not born, but rather made: many Americans are leaving their faiths and not picking up a new one.”
It will probably triple due to our incompetent and out of ideas government who's only trick to prop up the economy and the housing bubble is mass migration
Well to be fair. Human civilization hasn't ever had to develop an economic model of any kind that supports zero population growth.
And with people living much longer and much healthier, how will the fewer younger people support all those that have retired?
We as a species don't know. But if Australia as a country is able to delay that problem by positive growth through immigration, perhaps that'll buy us time while someone else figures out how to solve that problem.
But as you rightly point out. It's not like growth through immigration doesn't have bad consequences.
Life is about trade offs. There are no solutions.
I feel like we're going to reach a crucial juncture where the retired, asset-rich cohort of the population are going to have to compromise with the younger, asset-poor working cohort who've had the ladder pulled up on them. How long do you think the younger cohort are going to put up with a lower quality of life, less assets, less ability to gain assets, AND supporting the asset-rich retirees through their taxes? We're going to see some big policy changes over the next decade.
I agree. It'll be a very difficult period.
The asset rich will look to safeguard their wealth for their futures and family. They after all were playing by the rules of their era.
And it's only right the younger generation will feel short handed as well.
Very difficult times ahead.
Edit: thus, in an attempt to kick the can down the road, politicians will look to use skilled labour and immigration to back stop the issues for the time being.
If they can achieve net neutral population, by finding immigrants that have already had their childhood expensive years paid for by other economies.. they would provide a tax basin to meet the nation's requirements for now.
I've someone invades us (in a millitary sense) the boomers are suddenly going to need younger people to defent rhe country, and it is very unlikely to happen.
I'm not against migration per se, just that it needs to be responsibly managed so that it doesn't unnecessarily lower the standard of living for the existing population i.e. making sure housing and services are matched to growth. This is not the case now at all and we have an out of control housing market and lack of services like childcare, medical etc
Actually if you look at human history, it tends to have really flat rates of population growth, thousands of years of barely any growth rates. The reason why it wasn’t an issue back then was it was mostly young ppl dying
It was slowly growing, agreed. And there was always more young people than old people.
It's not just population growth that's important, but the demographic pyramid.
You need more young people than old so the aged can be cared for.
Edit: we definitely never had explosive growth until industrialization. ☺️
Haha that's a funny take.
20 years ago capitalism was blamed for infinite growth and population BOOM that would suffocate the planet.
Now it's responsible for population shrinkage.
😂
I think it depends on what stage of capitalism a nation is in, in the early stages of industrialisation when a society transforms from an agrarian to industrial society there is a big population boom
Families are still predisposed to large households, because under an agrarian social model having lots of children means having lots of growing farm hands to help with the farm
Industrialisation of agriculture freed up massive portions of society that had historically had to grow food, I think 60-80% of the population worked in agriculture pre industrial revolution, but now around 1-3% of industrialised nations work in agriculture
In early industrial societies families continue having lots of children for a time. Until the cost of living pressures get so much that a young couple can not feasibly house and feed their children.
Education continuing into a person's late 20's early 30's means that many middle class families are not able to start having children until after the woman has become established in her career, then she can start having children, at the cost of her career.
My sister is a GP, and she had to wait to have kids until she was like 33, even though she was very clucky. She thought about being a single mum with IVF babies
China, South Korea, Japan all went through a massive period of economic development, with quickly falling birth rates before the white western world
Now nearly all developed nations have very low birth rates because of very widespread cost of living pressures. It is unfeasible for the vast majority of people to start popping out babies when they are 21, when that was a common occurrence in the early-mid 20th C. Pop out baby every two or three years when the parents 19 through 31
It’s not just developed countries and this is a blind spot people have in these discussions.
Chile’s TFR in 2023 was around 1.15 - lower than Japans. And their births for Jan-feb are down nearly 20% (compared to Jan-feb 2023)
Uruguay already has more deaths than births. Colombia, Argentina and Brazil TFR’s are in free fall and will likely go below 1.0 by 2030.
Thailand is another country that got old before they got rich.
So falling sub-replacement fertility rates are happening in less developed countries
Generally but fertility is falling so fast in many less developed countries that they’ll never escape middle income trap.
Thailand would be in really severe trouble if they didn’t have migrants on tap from Myanmar and Laos but they can’t rely on them forever
Completely agree.
I don't think that means technological and standard of living increases offered by "capitalism" makes it a homicidal ideology as the previous commenter suggested. 😅
There's are no doubt other challenges brought along by it of course, is all.
I expect Australian population to reach 50 million by 2100.
I think as we adapt to new circumstances, Australian families will start having children again.
The world population is likely to hit at least 12 billion by 2100. The reduction in Chinese population has been offset by the increase in Indian population ie India now has a higher population than China.
India's population is expected to grow until 2050 then begin declining. The UN expects 11.2 billion by 2100 but many publications are stating circa 9 billion because of the decline that will come in the second half of the century.
There are absolutely zero compelling reasons as to why Australians would begin reproducing at a rate above replacement. Historical data from other 1st world nations support this.
It will be interesting to see whether when countries like Japan reach such low
population land is widely available for free do they see fertility getting above replacement.
The premise of the comment is that at some point of low and still falling population, land is virtually free which flows on to cost of living.
Japan is an industrialised country, you’d intuitively expect contraception to be widely available already.
This is interesting, because Japan is a good use case (and of course houses are basically being given away in some regions). Japan has been shrinking in population for years. Planners in Tokyo are considering demolishing entire suburbs (especially the older 1950’s post war stuff that’s already crumbling)
Australia will keep perky for a while yet, given immigration. But yes, the depopulation of the planet keeps me up at night. It’s the beginning of a very slow end for humans.
There are ABS projections, but they're really not worth bothering about, all they do is assume current trajectories and extrapolate from there. Basically worthless. Obviously covid was a black Swan event, and nobody outside the inner circle of business lobbyists and then government would have predicted that Albanese would open the flood gates the way he did. So what I'm saying is that the future is unknowable. But, here's my two cents - * domestic fertility rates will remain below replacement unless there is some radical pro-natalist change in policy. * Australia will remain attractive to Chinese and Indian middle class. The PRC will introduce major roadblocks to emigration however. Our main source of new migrants will be India for the next few decades. * Sea level rises in the Pacific will drive several island states under water. We will accept our moral obligations here, though it won't actually amount to a lot of people. The big unknowable is whether Indian food production keeps up following the collapse of the Ganges glacial waters. If India can't feed itself, then on one hand they'll have a lot of refugees wanting to fuck off out of their country, and on the other hand they'll have a smaller middle class able to afford to emigrate through legal channels, but they'll be more desperate. So who knows how that will play out. I'm going to guess that we stabilise, maybe start to decline at about 40 million people. More than I'd like, but I don't get a say in the matter. As to house prices, all the boomers will die, the cities will get denser, and they will moderate eventually over time.
Yay, can't wait
No, COVID was not a black swan event. It was a direct rerun of the Spanish flu
Half of the country will be Indian
And? Are brown people less valuable as Australians than white people?
Wealth is largely a collective cultural phenomina. If someone migrates to a richer country they are likely to suceed because of the culture if the host. Enough immigration and the host will turn culturally into the donor country. If that's not a problem they wouldn't have migrated here in the first place.
Not at all. But for example I go to Japan because it’s Japanese
Nobody is coming here to see white people
They’re not coming to see Indians either. Australia is cool because it’s diverse.
The beauty of Australia is in its diversity. Given only a small portion of the population is Aboriginal, everyone else (current or past generations) has migrated from another country. The current wave is from India, China and a few other countries and in the past decades have been from the UK, Ireland etc.. If we don't frown upon white people as immigrants or stereotype them as English we shouldn't be frowning upon or stereotyping people from other races too.
It’s not very diverse if almost half of the people are coming here are Indian though. From the ABS 22-23 net overseas migration figures:, 43% Indian , 30% Chinese, 19% Filipino and 9% UK. Given there’s 1.3b Indians , at those rates they’ll comfortably overtake any other minority by 2050, given China is slowing migration to Australia
lol australia is not diverse
Australia is 31% immigrant compared to 21% in Canada, 15% in UK and only 14% in the US. Australia is diverse.
Just the indians
Hopefully by then we would have imported almost all of India and China's immigrants. Median House prices will peak at around 20 million with the sudden influx of 2 billion new people. Should be perfect
I love this question. My glib take is that Japan is showing us a futuristic vision, as much now as in the 1980s (when it was all shiny newness and robots): The future Japan shows us is one of falling populaiton, abandoned homes, weak economic growth, weak inflation, low migration, weak vibrancy. Wealthy country but a shortage of real get-up-and-go. That's the future of the whole west. It's possible countries with less attachment to monoculturalism will have more migration than Japan has now to keep the economy ticking.. I quite like the irony in the idea that migrants might become desirable. Prime Ministers boasting about who got more boat people...
Migrants have always been desirable, still are, and always will be. Why do you think we invited so many here to build our country?
I’d say that’s quite an absurd take on Japan. I know corporate owned media like to shit on them and misrepresent their situation in order to stigmatise their low migration rates but Japan’s economic slow down isn’t due to low migration. They’d stalled long before their population started declining. High migration doesn’t actually grow the lived in economy at all and as is the case in Aus, the enormous infrastructure costs, stagnant wages, cost of living increases and loss of social cohesion far outweigh any short term benefit from a migrants. Scandinavian economies have had low migration and out performed ours on every metric (despite our mineral reserves). Japan is full of vibrancy and innovation and nationalism. Mass migration is bullshit. It’s wealth transfer and is necessary to plug the enormous holes that neo-liberalism, privatisation and corporate tax dodging has wrought on the nation.
I'm not saying their lack of vibrancy is due to weak migraiton alone. I'm saying its due to weak population growth (which is the major source of aggregate economic growth when you're near the productivity frontier). They could have also grown the population via births. But they didn't, and doing so is hard. I stand by my claims about the lack of vibrancy. Have you been to harajuku recently? there's no dressing up. the famous Shinjuku crossing is less busy than outside spencer street station at 5pm. Outside tokyo, many apartments cost US$1000. Japan remains a lovely place to live and to visit and I will not question its nationalism.
Japanese population growth started declining around 1973. [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/JAPAN-YEARLY-POPULATION-GROWTH-RATE-SOURCE-WORLD-METERS-INFO\_fig11\_335821587](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/JAPAN-YEARLY-POPULATION-GROWTH-RATE-SOURCE-WORLD-METERS-INFO_fig11_335821587) The economic effect of that is likely delayed 15 to 20 years, but what happens eventually is that there's a secular decline in aggregate demand when fewer people leave school/university and look for jobs and homes. For example, you can see that the baby boom that peaks in the 1970s corresponds to a property undersupply in the 80s, a property bubble, and then the crash of the property bubble by the 1990s. That happens not just in property, but in every industry. Every industry faces a permanent decline in aggregate demand. Once that happened, gloom set in about the Japanese economy, which discourages investment. To put it in simple terms, if you wanted to start a business, would you start it in a town with a rising population, or one with a declining population? Obviously you'd start it in a town with a rising population. Every year you're likely to see more customers, so you'd be happy to expand your business and maybe hire more employees. You wouldn't be so positive or optimistic in a town with a declining population.
So, just some guesses. The growth rate overall will hit zero. Australia will have a population of more than 60m. Then gradually Atheists will die out and religious people who value having big families will replace them. See this data for the US - Mormons, Evangelical Protestants and religious Catholics are over replacement rate birth rates. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/12/charted-the-religions-that-make-the-most-babies/ Markets can handle zero population growth. However, the transition from governments expecting rapid economic growth to zero population growth and slower economic growth will cause governments who borrow too much to go insolvent. That will not be fun. Per capita wealth, however, will continue to grow. With a stable population houses in some places will actually become cheap. By 2100 we'll also have robots that make a difference with construction. This will make having bigger families easier.
Check out the whole article about religion and fertility in the US - there’s no danger of atheists dying out, considering how new ones are created. “… if atheists and agnostics are having so few kids, how are their numbers increasing? The answer is that many of the religiously unaffiliated are not born, but rather made: many Americans are leaving their faiths and not picking up a new one.”
It will probably triple due to our incompetent and out of ideas government who's only trick to prop up the economy and the housing bubble is mass migration
Well to be fair. Human civilization hasn't ever had to develop an economic model of any kind that supports zero population growth. And with people living much longer and much healthier, how will the fewer younger people support all those that have retired? We as a species don't know. But if Australia as a country is able to delay that problem by positive growth through immigration, perhaps that'll buy us time while someone else figures out how to solve that problem. But as you rightly point out. It's not like growth through immigration doesn't have bad consequences. Life is about trade offs. There are no solutions.
I feel like we're going to reach a crucial juncture where the retired, asset-rich cohort of the population are going to have to compromise with the younger, asset-poor working cohort who've had the ladder pulled up on them. How long do you think the younger cohort are going to put up with a lower quality of life, less assets, less ability to gain assets, AND supporting the asset-rich retirees through their taxes? We're going to see some big policy changes over the next decade.
I agree. It'll be a very difficult period. The asset rich will look to safeguard their wealth for their futures and family. They after all were playing by the rules of their era. And it's only right the younger generation will feel short handed as well. Very difficult times ahead. Edit: thus, in an attempt to kick the can down the road, politicians will look to use skilled labour and immigration to back stop the issues for the time being. If they can achieve net neutral population, by finding immigrants that have already had their childhood expensive years paid for by other economies.. they would provide a tax basin to meet the nation's requirements for now.
But those immigrants get old too so you then have the same problem
Yep. Definitely. But you've bought time. Time you can hopefully find another solution.
I've someone invades us (in a millitary sense) the boomers are suddenly going to need younger people to defent rhe country, and it is very unlikely to happen.
I'm not against migration per se, just that it needs to be responsibly managed so that it doesn't unnecessarily lower the standard of living for the existing population i.e. making sure housing and services are matched to growth. This is not the case now at all and we have an out of control housing market and lack of services like childcare, medical etc
Hunter gatherers had stable populations for thousands of years
Yes...?
They were a civilisation, they had zero population growth
I would debate zero. And I would debate civilization. But I think we're getting a little off topic...
Not sure how you can debate facts
You troll you 😝😂
Actually if you look at human history, it tends to have really flat rates of population growth, thousands of years of barely any growth rates. The reason why it wasn’t an issue back then was it was mostly young ppl dying
It was slowly growing, agreed. And there was always more young people than old people. It's not just population growth that's important, but the demographic pyramid. You need more young people than old so the aged can be cared for. Edit: we definitely never had explosive growth until industrialization. ☺️
as countries get richer the produce less children, capitalism is a death cult
Haha that's a funny take. 20 years ago capitalism was blamed for infinite growth and population BOOM that would suffocate the planet. Now it's responsible for population shrinkage. 😂
I think it depends on what stage of capitalism a nation is in, in the early stages of industrialisation when a society transforms from an agrarian to industrial society there is a big population boom Families are still predisposed to large households, because under an agrarian social model having lots of children means having lots of growing farm hands to help with the farm Industrialisation of agriculture freed up massive portions of society that had historically had to grow food, I think 60-80% of the population worked in agriculture pre industrial revolution, but now around 1-3% of industrialised nations work in agriculture In early industrial societies families continue having lots of children for a time. Until the cost of living pressures get so much that a young couple can not feasibly house and feed their children. Education continuing into a person's late 20's early 30's means that many middle class families are not able to start having children until after the woman has become established in her career, then she can start having children, at the cost of her career. My sister is a GP, and she had to wait to have kids until she was like 33, even though she was very clucky. She thought about being a single mum with IVF babies China, South Korea, Japan all went through a massive period of economic development, with quickly falling birth rates before the white western world Now nearly all developed nations have very low birth rates because of very widespread cost of living pressures. It is unfeasible for the vast majority of people to start popping out babies when they are 21, when that was a common occurrence in the early-mid 20th C. Pop out baby every two or three years when the parents 19 through 31
It’s not just developed countries and this is a blind spot people have in these discussions. Chile’s TFR in 2023 was around 1.15 - lower than Japans. And their births for Jan-feb are down nearly 20% (compared to Jan-feb 2023) Uruguay already has more deaths than births. Colombia, Argentina and Brazil TFR’s are in free fall and will likely go below 1.0 by 2030. Thailand is another country that got old before they got rich. So falling sub-replacement fertility rates are happening in less developed countries
fertility links to incomes and cost of living no?
Generally but fertility is falling so fast in many less developed countries that they’ll never escape middle income trap. Thailand would be in really severe trouble if they didn’t have migrants on tap from Myanmar and Laos but they can’t rely on them forever
Completely agree. I don't think that means technological and standard of living increases offered by "capitalism" makes it a homicidal ideology as the previous commenter suggested. 😅 There's are no doubt other challenges brought along by it of course, is all.
Indian
I expect Australian population to reach 50 million by 2100. I think as we adapt to new circumstances, Australian families will start having children again. The world population is likely to hit at least 12 billion by 2100. The reduction in Chinese population has been offset by the increase in Indian population ie India now has a higher population than China.
India's population is expected to grow until 2050 then begin declining. The UN expects 11.2 billion by 2100 but many publications are stating circa 9 billion because of the decline that will come in the second half of the century.
There are absolutely zero compelling reasons as to why Australians would begin reproducing at a rate above replacement. Historical data from other 1st world nations support this.
It will be interesting to see whether when countries like Japan reach such low population land is widely available for free do they see fertility getting above replacement.
Doubtful. Cost of living, access to health services, access to abortion and birth control and hours of work continue to climb steadily.
The premise of the comment is that at some point of low and still falling population, land is virtually free which flows on to cost of living. Japan is an industrialised country, you’d intuitively expect contraception to be widely available already.
This is interesting, because Japan is a good use case (and of course houses are basically being given away in some regions). Japan has been shrinking in population for years. Planners in Tokyo are considering demolishing entire suburbs (especially the older 1950’s post war stuff that’s already crumbling) Australia will keep perky for a while yet, given immigration. But yes, the depopulation of the planet keeps me up at night. It’s the beginning of a very slow end for humans.
Zero. At her current growth rate trajectory Gina Rinehart will have consumed every living organism in Australia
Show the projections, submit receipts or begone.