The population debate

I've seen a few articles as of late discussing the population debate - locally and globally... They interest me a lot especially when we so often hear people say 'we need to have x number more people in NZ to be productive/prosperous' or whatever.

I've always thought this was an odd . For one, population per se means little if you're talking about productivity/prosperity. We should aim to improve productivity and prosperity - I don't see why having more people is any ticket to this. More productive people yes, but more per se means little - as most of the world shows.

Another issue I consider is what New Zealand ought to be like. What do we want it to be like? Do you care? I always think our relative low population density is one of the best selling points - moreso every year and even moreso in the future. Adding more and more people - wont we eventually end up going 'darn, we had something good but it got screwed it once we passed X million'?

Moreso, the richer a nation is, generally the lower their birth rate - except in religious/ethnic groups. Now. If the - for example - Catholic, Greek or Somali populations of NZ tripled proportionately in the next 30 years would NZ still be the place you want to call home?

Is significant ethnicity/religious percentages creep an issue to you at all? Would you happy if a future Auckland council or central government had not only Maori representation seats but catered also specifically for Somali or Muslim ones? Because, as it stands, any significant population rises almost guarantee this will happen someday.

Anyway - some articles on this broad topic:
On Africa: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14302837

Economist has two new ones which are subscription only at the moment. Will post them up when they become free.

love the economist mag.
i think you're forgetting economies of scale work for populations as well as corporations. A bridge/train etc is a lot more cost effective if 20x the number of people use it. Think Kopu. its just not been that important. But if a million people lived on the Coromanderl

I tend to think that this population via immigration has been seen as a solution for underutilsation of infrastructure in NZ.

And that will/has? impacted our pop density

I'd love to see NZ retain low density but I'm not sure I think thats entirely feasible.

I think NZ would be a HAPPIER country with 1 million people rather than 4. OK, maybe 3. But there is easily 1 million people we could get rid of without harming the country.

I don't think they necessarily do - especially in critical areas. A train/bus can take (within reason) X number of people - by the person no matter who they are. But people themselves vary hugely in their productivity and are also swayed in choices by, for example, overseas pay-rates for what they do.

We are often told though that we need more people to fill many roles when a solution in some cases could be to encourage people already here to do them.


Why though? If we increased our productivity there would be less and less need - especially since the prosperity would also allow more things to be imported.

Our issue seems to be more about productivity than head-count. We also have some particular immigration traits not seen to such an extent in most countries. When we import an expert in a certain field we invariably have to cater for four people (the partner and two kids) which often almost instantly renders the added productivity of that individual irrelevant.

As Vads alluded to... the reason people want to live here is partly because of what the place is like in terms of numbers. How do we know when we've passed the mark beyond which we've just become one of the countries we look at and go: hate to live there.

one of the killer awesome things about NZ, is that you can go not 45 mins from central Auckland, be on any number of beaches, and actually catch decent fish/dive for scallops etc.

An increase in population density would really impact the natural environment, and it would end up like Aussie.

Here in QLD - I've packed/sold all my cray fish catching gear, catch bags, nooses, spear guns etc, cos the marine life here is rooted. Why? too high a population density.

In Wgtn, you could drive down to island bay after work, grab a couple of Paua and cook up dinner within an hour of finishing work.

I'd love to see NZ stay the same population size.. sure.. you may lose some of the economies of scale, but I think its far outweighed by the advantages of keeping the population low.

That economist article is weird ...

China's huge population is as much the product of the (historical) wealth of China as China's total wealth is the product of its population. Nor are numbers the only cause of the reemergence of China and East Asia generally in recent decades. I don't trust the economist on much, they've been spectacularly wrong on China before, so i'd take whatever they have to say about Africa with a huge dose of salt.

I do think it would be possible for NZ to have a much greater population without compromising our environment, but culturally we are so used to being small in numbers - and desiring the things that go with it (a house with a yard for the kids) - that it would not be an easy adjustment for most kiwis.

And what would all those extra people do? Our competitive advantage is in agriculture, but we've plenty of farmers already (waves around the red rag).

the average age of our farmers is in the 60's...

Because the capital requirements of farming these days are astronomical


put the peasants back on the land!

The best thing about NZ is our low population.

I reckon immigration should be totally limited to the swapsies system, 1 for 1, some kiwi fulla wants to move to England then we give some english lad a spot here! It would help those that want to head somewhere else get a foot in the door, and it would help those back home keep their awesome low population lifestyles.

of the farmers, or of the land owners without including the farm hands etc.?

The farmers - but the farm hand probably cant manage the farm effectively just like the machine operator probably cant run an engineering company like the engineer/owner.

Trapper - WB - what happens when the kiwi wants to come back to NZ after their OE?

China displaces UK in family migration to NZ
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10620758
Professor Paul Spoonley, a Massey University immigration researcher, said it would make sense for Kiwis to start learning Mandarin, for their own personal economic and social good

Nice link Peat. It is an interesting milestone of sorts.

As much as we have migrants of different base-languages coming here - what do people feel about our future - where (assuming the trend continues) mandarin and or other foreign languages become dominant in some suburbs/cities/industries to the point where you wont even be able to do business with/converse with etc with anyone in those areas? Does that necessarily reduce the NZ-ness of NZ?

Following from the start of this thread, roll forward 40 years to when most of us here would be relatively old - the likelihood is that our current projections would have NZ with a miles larger population (a large chunk of which would be followers of very foreign religions/languages to our history and wielding significant economic and political influence). What would the net effect of that be on NZ's laws? Or our social/ethnic/religious antagonism/peace? Or, generally, its affect NZ as a place you'd want to live?

Seeing the recent debate in the UK over the wearing/banning of traditional Muslim head gear shows this is interesting times indeed. Although their (and France's) issues are not about population per se it brings some topics to light which are something NZ will certainly face in the future. Is a wait-and-see approach the way to go? Or should our population/migration policies have a more 50+ years approach instead of the 5-20 years we seem to be focussed on?

personally I hate the Asian invasion of our country... tho it gives me more insight on how the Maoris' must feel. but I've become a bit of a bigot in this respect and I recognise that too. I guess I dont see any similarities between Asian culture and what we regard as Kiwi culture - I just see them as having overpopulated their own countries and the wealthier of them are looking for boltholes where money can buy them a better quality of general living. To me we havent really encouraged multiculturalism we've just let lots of Asians in, and as they have in every other country they've formed their own little Chinatowns etc.....
Feel free to bash me on this.... not sure how racist I'm being so tell me....

NZ is not really a good example of multiculturalism. Multi-ethnic, yes... but our different cultures rarely mesh/morph into a new hybrid drawing from both. This is another area which is worthy of discussion too. Simply, how different would NZ be (economically/socially etc) if we let 250,000 Chinese people compared to 250,000 Canadians or 250,000 Italian people??

We know that Asian/Midlle-eastern and highly religious people have significantly higher birth-rates - so it would make sense (if you assume the current NZ to be the status quo you'd like to maintain) to consider this when accepting migrants.

Would you be happy if NZ vetted potential migrants based on not only their age, education, language but also on their religion? Or having bias towards countries deemed more similar to NZ's traditional make-up.. Australia, Canada, UK etc. Or having migration policy which proportionately spreads the source of our talent geographically (i.e. keeping the inflow capped, percentage-wise, for different regions of the world).

re the birth rate thing the Chinese one child policy has an interesting effect given our immigration policy:

Parents can be sponsored to become permanent residents if they have half or more of their children living in New Zealand.

Thus, under the centre of gravity rules which defines a family's "centre of gravity" as: "the number of their adult children lawfully and permanently in New Zealand being equal or greater than those in any single country"; Chinese resididng here permanently are at an advantage for sponsoring their parents' immigration.

Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman says there are no plans to change it.

The thing that astonished me from the related 'centre of gravity' article was the Chinese shop-assistant mentioned. She got permanent residency how? I had two friends, both with degrees, from the UK who were denied residency in NZ. Both were working in retail - both as GMs of large stores/brands - with, on average, a dozen stuff or more working under them. One even launched a prominent Australian retail chain into NZ.

They didn't say he qualification but in my mind a shop assistant isn't generally a high-skilled role worth enough to allow families to follow. Anyway, she has helped her parents come over... that's two people who are almost surely net-losses to our country. Then her partner - and he is also sponsoring his parents... So, basically, we'll allowed 6 people to come in off the back of a shop assistant?? WTF? Seems pretty counter-intuitive to improving our nation in the long run to have such easy access for other members of the family or (unmarried) partners.

And they do this while we're worrying like crazy about our ageing population and how we'll fund it...

Its pretty strange eh.

I'm worried about taking in too many people to allow for effective integration, police already have to have access to interpreters. which leads to culture clashes, particularly in poorer areas. Culture clash leads to even less integration then throw in a downturn with unemployment and you get nationalist groups etc etc.

If we are talking about Asians - I don't mind Asians as immigrants so much as they are generally hard working and value education. However they also have little in the way of environmental appreciation and come from countries where corruption and nepotism is considered normal business practice. That said many of the NZ born/ young immigrant Asians seem to fit in reasonably well.

But yeah letting in elderly parents should raise lots of questions as to how we intend to pay for their care.

On a related note, I met an actual Nazi. He is in his eighties and was part of the Hitler youth and from what we could tell was expelled from a number of countries after the war for his views. He was travelling with his son who we have known for more than 30 years and now we know why he seldom talks of his father. While we don't speak a lot of German got the gist of the conversation when he kept indicating a big nose and talking about the financial crisis his son refused to translate. It was actually a very interesting to see how that kind of thing can persist for so long.

People dont forget (the perception of) racism which is why in my opinion cultures should mix in a fairly slow manner.

Yeah, glad you mentioned the other side of the coin. As lovely and hard-working as Asian migrants generally are, they are often coming from cultures where low business morals are the absolute norm - they will do anything to make a buck, which includes tons of things which are counter to the NZ way of doing things (this is true of most countries though, even Aussie).

Back on the populations debate though - I'm still yet to see a good reason why raising out population - wiping out one of the key reasons NZ is so desirable in the first place - is needed and where stricter selection of migrants and tag-along family or focussed education/work schemes wouldn't steer us in the general direction anyway.

Do you think our home grown gangster P manufacturers give a fuck about the environment or NZ values?

Umm yeah NR we were saying that each and every single asian has no environmental concern and that every single NZer does. If you want to post in CA you need to apply a little bit more brain and less generalisations are proven/disproven by specifics.

Do you dis/agree with the generalisation that asians have less of what we would call business ethics and less of what we consider environmental ideals? If you disagree, why?

well I think our self perception is not necessarily all that

we have wrought much damage on our environment with only the small population we had/have

judging from what I see of things and peoples' attitudes and looking only at our wonderful example of corporate corruption re the finance companies we are not much better and would be a whole lot worse if our population levels approached anywhere near those of our Asian neighbours

Agree with NR -- some of the holier than thou comments ITT are a bit cringeworthy tbh.

well those stereotypecasts are also getting bandied about by academics and in this case presumably an Asian himself - in an article today in the immigration series being run in the herald thats says (amazingly ) that govt agencies are shifting their emphasis TO Asia in particular Singapore
"Massey University marketing researcher Henry Chung says shifting the focus to Asia will help New Zealand plug into the global economy. "We have found Asians to be more entrepreneurial and to have better business networks, not just with their home countries but also in their industries
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10620873

Well that is a much better answer than what you originally gave re p manufacturing.

But, bollocks on both counts. NZ doesnt have the cleanest greenest image that we think and what we do have is, in part to do with the lack of people but that is not to say that as a culture we dont have a much greater environmental conscience than many Asian countries - you can argue the causes if you like but the fact remains. Secondly corruption in NZ is extremely low and I very much doubt that it has anything to do with our population - look at the pacific islands where who have much much less people than us and still a lot of corruption. China and Korea both have deeply ingrained societal norms or what we would call corruption, to them its just business/ governance.

Theres plenty of things about NZ culture that are pretty arse but that is a separate issue and in my mind is mostly irrelevant other than having immigrants that have somewhat compatible values or even perhaps values seen as better than your average NZer - like education/ hard work (though anyone who leaves their own country tends to be hard working, even aussies in the UK ).

No other culture is perfect but as pointed out in the thread plenty of other countries have found to their detriment AND the immigrants that large scale immigration with a culture that isnt fully compatible is difficult and leads to isolation, resentment on all sides and all sorts of problems.

An example would be fundamentalist christian or islamic beliefs regarding the place of women - I don't think that has any place in NZ.

NR and Gummi. Though they may seem holier than thou that's not the intention I'm sure. Having lived in a number of Asian countries myself I've seen first hand - as would anyone else who'd done the same - the good and bad of it all at an intrinsic, cultural level. People love to pull out the cliched lines: they work hard, are family oriented, keep out of trouble etc but tha is not even the half of anyone's make-up in life. People's ethical 'breaking point' for example is important - how much acid before you stooped lower than those around you. NZ's level is extremely high by world standards and any rise in very foreign cultures serves only to lower that - to the detriment of all. Can people simply turn off generations of habit? I think not.

You say that we don't have anything to crow about regarding our treatment of our environmental - we may not, but we still do moreso than any almost other country - even if it is merely having the good fortune of being remote and having a low population density. That is our attraction and a major reason why I bought this topic up - a rising population will all-but guarantee we get worse in that area and one-day we'll look back and go: bugger. Why not look at population from another point of view.. even if it's for the local good alone and not considering the global concerns. Why make the same mistakes much of the rest of the world are shining examples of why not to have larger and larger populations.

He gets on a plane??

How do you calculate the ideal population size for anywhere? I am having a quiet morning in at home so I've looked at this from the point of view of our immigration policies compared to Australia, since they are quite different...

It is absolutely certain there is probably five billion to many humans on the planet if everyone is to live like an Westerner. The problem is now that all those people ARE here, who is going to volunteer to do the dying to get the numbers down? I suspect we'll have a Malthusian catastrophe at some point, with steep population decline as more and more of the world reverts to Haiti like levels of over population and poverty and environmental degredation and climate change reduces food production. We would do well to have a think about how we can avoid that fate for our people.

Interestingly, both Australia's and NZ's populations have doubled at roughly the same rate - NZ had one million people in 1914 and it doubled roughly every forty or so years. The same with Aussie - almost five million in 1916, ten million in 1956 and twenty million in 2000. The apparent aim for population growth (eagerly embraced by the Aussie government with it's prententions to middle power status) is 35 million by 2050 - forty years from now. Funnily enough, this is described in the Aussie media as a possibly worrisome "accelerating" rate of population growth when in fact from what I can see it represents a slight slowing down. On the doubling every forty years rule the Australian population in 2050 will be well in excess of forty million.

Australia's population is forecast to grow faster than any other industrialised nation over the next 40 years, including China and India. The economic impact of this population growth - seven or eight million since 1984 alone - is almost never discussed when we talk about "catching up" with Australia, yet it should be obvious that it must have provided a sustained boom for the construction sector, to name just one. How long they can keep it up is the question.

Astonishingly, according to the Optimum Population Trust New Zealand can sustain almost the same population as Australia whilst maintaining current lifestyles and biodiversity and a larger near absolute population - here are the figures (in millions):

Current Population: Australia 22.5, NZ 4.3
Carrying capacity due to CO2 world emission limit of 2.5 GtC/yr: Australia 3, NZ 1
Carrying capacity at present lifestyle, allowing 12% for biodiversity: Australia 10, NZ 9
Carrying capacity at 'Modest' lifestyle, allowing 12% for biodiversity: Australia 21, NZ 29

Check out that last figure!!!!!!!! I suspect it almost entirely a factor of rainfall. New Zealand has an average mean rainfall of 14-1500mm, Australia only has a mean rainfall of around 550-600mm and a lot of that falls well north of the tropic of capricorn.

Australia it seems to me is hooked on immigration, and is hurtling towards envirronmental disaster, especially if you consider the potential impacts of global warming on what is after all basically a desert continent with some moist to damp fringes.

It seems to me that with 4.5 - 5 million people New Zealand has currently got a well balanced trade off between numbers, environment and lifestyle, with some wiggle room for a few million climate change refugees. Therefore it seems to me an ideal time for us to have a proper population debate, and we should consider what size population is consistant with our biodiversity, lifestyle and CO2 footprint. Certainly, in the long term (a century or so) New Zealand seems set to not just catch up but pass Aussie in terms of things like GDP per capita if the Australians stick to their population boom policies.



http://www.optimumpopulation.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Australia
http://www.niwa.co.nz/education-and-training/schools/resources/climate
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/rain.shtml

interesting stuff Tom... One thing which I think might not be considered too often is usable land in a country.. Australia for example is huge, but tons of it is unusable in practical terms.. NZ also had large areas which are too hilly for example. Japan exemplifies this with only about 10% of their land mass being easily habitable. I saw somewhere many years ago that about 20% of NZ is habitable in practical terms. Now whether that is based purely on 'flatness' or proximity to infrastructure I don't know.

Likewise, do they consider the current environment.. i.e. - sure we could have another 4 million people or whatever, but how much would it ruin some areas of NZ? It's implausible for it to happen in the main cities only and not have a massive impact on all manner of things - transport, water, sewerage. crime/prevention etc.

One thing I saw the other day which was interesting... Haiti has approx 1/10th of NZs land mass but double the population. That is insane really... especially when you consider how far NZ is down the ranking list of population density on the wikipedia page. Are we just being completely unreasonable expecting to keep NZ looking somewhat as it does today?

Interesting stuff alright Tom. However, asking for that level of sophistication of debate is rather optimistic i fear and i just cannot see it happening ever, unfortunately.
It doesnt surprise me that NZ is capable of supporting a much greater population, however we already are in a sense through our agricultural exports.

you alreeady have the desertification model with the gulf states et all, all unsustainable without the petrodollar

And you sent the brit back?