Population Politics and National Elections

David Ritter - 19th August 2010

One of the characteristics of the current period in human history is a rapidly expanding global population. Around the time of Napoleon there were around one billion of people in the world; now the total population is rapidly nearing seven billion people and we are expected to reach nine billion by 2050. You can watch the second-by-second increase on your desk top courtesy of the US Census Bureau’s world population clock.

There is no doubt that the booming human population is putting immense pressure on the earth’s ecological carrying capacity, but the stress is uneven. Most of future human population growth is expected in the developing world, which is less able to cope with the further increase. The swell is also likely to be concentrated in the cities. In 2007, for the first time in human history, a majority of people lived in urban locations, rather than the country.

On the other hand, in developed countries, improvements in public health, standards of living, education and the availability of cheap contraception have raised life expectancy and lowered fertility rates throughout the developed world, making for ageing populations. Developed nations increasingly rely on immigration to sure up the productive workforce and tax base. Yet despite this reliance, the national politics of immigration is not always simple. Indeed, the overall global politics of population remains distinctly uneasy.

It has often been observed that the restriction of movements on people is the missing element of globalization and obviously out of synch with the increased and increasingly free flows of goods, investment and ideas that are endemic to twenty-first century globalization. There is no global convention covering migration to facilitate the movement of people and no prospect of one any time soon, particularly given the global economic downturn.

Current political events in Australia are providing a case study for how the politics of population can play out in a national context in a globalizing world. In Australia this year population growth emerged from nowhere to become one of the most contentious issues in the lead-up to a tight national election, which will be decided this Saturday. Both the ruling centre left Australian Labor Party and the opposition centre right Liberal-National Coalition came out with policies declaring their circumspection about further national population increase. The opposition in particular declared that they would slash current immigration levels.

To the outside world, Australian perturbation about population pressures must appear mystifying. Australian population density is very low, while at the same time the country continues to rank highly according to the various measures of wealth and development. Yet there is no doubting the extent to which population growth is currently a contentious public issue as depicted, for example, in this feature program shown on the national broadcaster last week.

The anxieties about over-crowding and loss of amenity that are present in Australia are a timely reminder of how easily the politics of immigration can become vexed even in a national context of comparative economic affluence and political stability.