Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [247]
The fallacy behind this policy of “filling up” Australia is that there are compelling environmental reasons why, even after more than two centuries of European settlement, Australia has not “filled itself up” to the population density of the U.S. Given Australia’s limited supplies of water and limited potential for food production, it lacks the capacity to support a significantly larger population. An increase in population would also dilute its earnings from mineral exports on a per-capita basis. Australia has recently been receiving immigrants only at the net rate of about 100,000 per year, which yields an annual population growth by immigration of only 0.5%.
Nevertheless, many influential Australians, including the recent Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, the leaders of both major political parties, and the Australian Business Council, still argue that Australia should try to increase its population to 50 million people. The reasoning invokes a combination of continued fear of the “Yellow Peril” from overpopulated Asian countries, the aspiration for Australia to become a major world power, and the belief that that goal could not be achieved if Australia had only 20 million people. But those aspirations of a few decades ago have receded to the point where Australians today no longer expect to become a major world power. Even if they did have that expectation, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Singapore provide examples of countries with populations far less than that of Australia (only a few million each) that nevertheless are major economic powers and make big contributions to world technological innovation and culture. Contrary to their government and business leaders, 70% of Australians say that they want less rather than more immigration. In the long run it is doubtful that Australia can even support its present population: the best estimate of a population sustainable at the present standard of living is 8 million people, less than half of the present population.
Driving inland from the state capital of Adelaide in South Australia, the only Australian state to have originated as a self-supporting colony because of its soils’ decent productivity (high by Australian standards, modest by standards outside Australia), I saw in this prime farmland of Australia one ruin after another of abandoned farms. I was able to visit one of those ruins preserved as a tourist attraction: Kanyaka, a large manor developed as a sheep farm at considerable expense by English nobility in the 1850s, only to fail in 1869, to become abandoned, and never to be reoccupied. Much of that area of inland South Australia was developed for sheep farming during the wet years of the 1850s and early 1860s, when the land was covered with grass and looked lush. With droughts beginning in 1864, the overgrazed landscape became littered with the bodies of dead sheep, and those sheep farms were abandoned. That disaster stimulated the government to send the surveyor-general G. W. Goyder to identify how far inland from the coast the area with rainfall sufficiently reliable to justify farming extended. He defined a line that became known as the Goyder Line, north of which the likelihood of drought made attempts at farming imprudent. Unfortunately, a series of wet years in the 1870s encouraged the government to resell at high prices the abandoned sheep farms of the 1860s, as small overcapitalized wheat farms. Towns