LEON BYNER:
The Minister for population growth is Tony Burke. Tony thanks for your time.
TONY BURKE:
Pleasure to be here, Leon.
BYNER:
I know that the population growth in places like south-east Queensland is high but that's mainly through internal methods. One for the country, as Peter Costello used to say, but we have a massive problem now Tony because we are bringing in people into Australia. We are growing the population at a rate that we cannot sustain. We've had to ration water. Services are at a wits end in many of the big cities. What on earth are we going to do?
BURKE:
I think the reference you've made there, Leon, to water is exactly what's changed community thinking on this issue. There's always been an economic argument and a national security argument about the benefits that we have as a nation from a bigger population. But with what people have seen in water in recent years, it's caused people I think, to ask a new question and that is, 'what's the carrying capacity of a continent like ours and are there parts of Australia where because of different forms of limits on infrastructure, are parts of Australia where arguably we certainly have to put a check against population growth in those parts of Australia?'
BYNER:
How are you going to do that? I mean, I think you would know we've got cities like Melbourne, and Sydney and now it's starting to happen in Brisbane - not so much Adelaide although we'll get to that in a sec - but those cities now, their public transport infrastructures - and some of them are very good and have good traditions - but they just can't cope.
BURKE:
There's the person who is in gridlock in one of those cities who says to you, 'why on earth would you want to bring more people to put more cars on this road?' who is making a legitimate point. Some of it goes to urban planning. Some of it goes to total population numbers.
The challenge that I've got, which we've never really been able to look at before, is to say, how do we reconcile the very real problems that are happening with infrastructure being stretched in those areas with the employer in a regional part of the country, often in Western Australia, who says I just can't find the workers I need for my business. Both stories are true. It's part of the two speed economy that people often refer to and we've never had a way of dealing with those differences in different parts of the country properly before.
BYNER:
Tony, I want to get really specific. Adelaide for example, we had a wonderful deluge yesterday, albeit not a flood, not to the standards of flood that you might have seen in northern New South Wales or indeed up in Queensland. But nevertheless, here is a city of just over a million people and we have government saying we're going to be two million in, what, 30, 40 years. The fact of the matter is we couldn't sustain that.
BURKE:
And those projections that came out from Treasury, it's not government policy for us to get to those sorts of numbers. Those projections simply showed if you took what happened in the last 40 years, reduce the rate of growth by a little bit, this is where you'd land in 2050. So the projections tell us if we change almost nothing that's the direction we're heading in. The challenge that I've been given, is to try to answer the question not of where would we be if we changed nothing but where should we be.
BYNER:
Now, there's a couple of interesting things. Business wants more population into Australia because they can have more customers but there's unemployment, although by standards that we've seen previously it is relatively low. But again, under-employment we don't collect statistics on, but we know that's an issue. You've got people like Don Burke talking about the north-west of WA where there's huge amounts of water and he has suggested that at some point in time Australia is going to have to consider building communities where there is more than adequate water supply. Is that something that's factored in your thinking about this?
BURKE:
Yeah it is. The north isn't as easy as some people think because while there are huge amounts of water it all comes down in about three months of the year. And there's very few places where you can actually dam and harvest the water. Now, some properties are using the underground storage to be able to harvest water. So it's not as simple as just, there's heaps of water there so we can move communities there, but there's no doubt that in the north into the future we're going to be able to do more there than we've done in the past.
BYNER:
Okay. This is the controversial bit Tony, and that is that with immigration policy we've had a mix of skilled migration where because we don't have skilled people here we bring them in from elsewhere. I've always been a little worried about that because we have so many people here growing up into the community who would love a skill, they'd give their eye teeth to get one, they don't have one, but over the top of them we're bringing in people from other places because they trained them and we didn't and I'm not sure that's the perfect policy. But the other really pointy part to this is, that we are inviting into Australia on compassionate grounds large numbers of people who will be, whether we like it or not, at least for the first five years - and that's in information I've received from the parliamentary library which is a good source - these people will be welfare dependent. Now you've got at the moment in front of you, the Henry Tax Review and it's putting to you a whole lot of options which you may or may not consider and some you'll do, some you wouldn't touch with a barge pole, to use the words of the Prime Minister. The fact of the matter is, can we afford to keep importing people who will be at least for the foreseeable future welfare dependent? Surely that's got to factor in to your discussions and your thinking on this?
BURKE:
The total numbers that come under that humanitarian program that you talk about are 13,000 a year and it's been that precise figure for a very long time Under the previous government it was 13,000. It's still 13,000 and Australia is seen as carrying a good deal of ...
BYNER:
….Absolutely, but is it not true though, that instead of taking people from refugee camps of who there are millions and millions around the world, when we have people who seek asylum and they grant it and they come in, into the community, they then take the place of those who we might have chosen sitting in refugee camps. Is that not the case?
BURKE:
Oh, that's right. The total numbers don't go up as a result of somebody coming by a different method.
BYNER:
So are we going to continue to have people smugglers dictate to us our way of dealing with people who have the same compassionate reasons but are sitting in camps in squalor in places like Indonesia and other countries whom think that they might be in some sort of queue but because others who have a little bit of money, and some spend considerable dosh getting here, are we going to continue to allow this?
BURKE:
I think from both sides of politics there's always been a very strong view that in the first instance you do everything you can to stop the people smuggling racket for the reasons that you've raised but also people drown on the way here. It's not good whichever way you look at it.
BYNER:
Yes.
BURKE:
The second challenge though is to make sure that you're able to target the people smuggling operations without adding a layer of cruelty to people who have been found to have a genuine need.
BYNER:
That's Tony Burke, the Minister for Population, this morning.