How big Australia makes us poorer and less safe - analysis of Lend Lease’s ‘Shoreline’ development.
The Queensland state government is allowing Lend Lease to develop Shoreline in the Southern Redlands Bay which will be the residence for many thousands of people. The land on which it will be built is mostly farmland and a small amount of bush. This development will make us poorer and more vulnerable to climate change because the bush and farms in that area will be turned to brick and tile.
The area is in Southern Redland Bay. The name Redlands comes from the fact that the soil around there is incredible red soil. It is good farmland and turning it into concrete will permanently make us poorer as we will have lower food production forever.
The fact that there are some nurseries and hobby farms there does not mean that no harm is done by their destruction. There will still be demand for nurseries and hobby farms and other periurban activities they will just move to other farmland. So the net result remains the same: we’re poorer and everybody pays more for food because we have less farmland.
The felling of the bush in this area will result in the death by starvation of most of the animals in it. The only ones that will survive will seek out other bush. If they do not get hit by a car in the process they will then compete with other animals for food from the same land and so effect more death by starvation. This will also make us much less safe from climate change as bush is a massive carbon bank.
The Deputy Premier, the Hon Dr Steven Miles made no mention of these problems in his press release. Instead he celebrated the jobs that will be created and the fact that this was the result of the internal migration of people during COVID.
It is true that any construction activity will create jobs. However, these jobs are only temporary. After the construction finishes we will have more people and less agricultural exports to pay for the phones, televisions, furniture, clothes and cars these people will want. Everybody in Australia will be poorer.
Blaming COVID for this misses the point. While COVID has caused a lot of people to move to South-East Queensland, they would have come anyway because Australia’s population is growing so rapidly. The below graph is from page 14 of the Commonwealth Government’s inter-generational report and shows that COVID is going to be a speed hump on the way to cities covering over ever more of our farms.
This is why I don’t spend any time lobbying state governments about new developments: people have to live somewhere. There is a valid argument to be had with state governments about where exactly these people need to live. Some developments (e.g. Toondah Harbour) should be resisted completely because there are other bits of nature that are better sacrificed to house people. But in the main, I don’t spin my wheels lobbying a state government to not destroy a particular bit of green space in order to house people because even if you’re successful this can only ever result in another bit of green space getting levelled.
Instead I concentrate on the Commonwealth government and am imploring them to stop our population from growing. Migration is critical to population because Australia’s fertility equation (safe, affordable family planning plus welfare payments whenever you’re unemployed, disabled or old) is already mission accomplished. Fertility cannot get much lower. This means the part of Australia’s population growth caused by natural increase (births minus deaths) cannot get much lower than it is. It is slowly decreasing and but for immigration, we would soon reach zero population growth.
Migration however tops this up. Once the borders re-open the government plans to return to issuing 160,000 permanent visas and allow uncapped temporary migration. Unlike natural increase, this is simply a choice the government makes.
At a stroke of the Home Affairs minister the Hon Karen Andrews MP’s pen, the permanent visas could be reduced as much as she wanted. By act of Parliament, the various temporary visa schemes could be capped. Together these would end positive net-overseas migration and end the growth of the population. This would radically transform the politics of urban sprawl because it would no longer be profitable to keep building ever more houses. Every bit of farm and bush would cease being the prey of the property developers and their highly effective lobbying.
Unfortunately, the property industry is just better at politics than the citizenry and we are headed for population growth without end, headed for urban sprawl without end and no end to the wilful destruction of our own agricultural assets and bushland.
This is why I have joined Sustainable Population Australia the only environmental organisation in the country that is willing to discuss the importance of population in protecting our green spaces.
