Welcome to Richard Carmody Independent for Grey's Population Page!
Population Policy Explained
-A stabilisation in our population growth is what I want to achieve.
-The reason for wanting to reduce population growth is to reduce the stress on the environment and resources of our country, to reduce cultural friction and to set an example for other countries whose populations add far more people than our own.
The main issue of overpopulation is at the global level not at Australia, but I don't see why we shouldn't act to become a stable population. We Australians also consume too many resources and that is a problem. However, lets fix this systematically, lets get the population levelled off, lets get a job guarantee in place to make people's future secure, then after that we can begin to go much harder at resource consumption. That said, I support any waste reduction or consumption reduction effort being made currently.
-The incumbent population has children below the 2.1 replacement birthrate and it has been this way since the 1970's, most of our population increase comes from immigration.
-The current immigration rate is about 160,000pa, I would like to bring that down to 70,000pa. This is the rate of immigration we had for many years prior to the early 2000's when it was raised by John Howard without a democratic mandate. It isn't anywhere we haven't already been before.
-At that rate there would be zero net migration and so population would grow far more slowly and would be nearly constant.
-In case you are worried this might be harmful to the economy, there is no clear link between population growth rate and economic performance.
-The current rate of refugee entry into Australia is 15,000 to 25,000 per year. Within my limit of 70,000 immigration into Australia, I am willing for that to be up to 50% refugee intake (ie up to a split of 35,000 refugees/35,000 economic migrants per year).
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