A huge Asian population increase will leave Australia increasingly isolated

By COLIN FRASER in The Australian
AUSTRALIA is on the brink of an offshore population explosion that threatens to change almost every aspect of our lives during the next 40 years. It may well decide who will own our country in centuries to come.
Locked in combat over essentially domestic issues, none of our political parties is seriously addressing or explaining the unprecedented rise in people numbers already happening in Asia and Southeast Asia.
One map on this page records our reassuring atlas's vision of our country: a unique island continent, its importance and security confirmed by its huge land mass.
But the new political reality is revealed in the right-hand map, in which the area of each country in our region has been re-configured according to its population.
As never before, Australia, a Western island in an Asian sea, faces the possibility of becoming a remote outpost in a new Asia-dominated world. Every year the gap between our populations is increasing with extraordinary speed.
The UN and US census bureau say that during the next 40 years Australia's population will rise from 22 million to a minimum 29 million. An Australian Treasury forecast is for 36 million.
Simultaneously, seven or eight already overcrowded countries across an arc to our north are predicted to increase their total numbers by some 1.25 billion, at least 90 times Australia's gain.
Within 40 years, people in Asian countries will number six of every 10 worldwide.
Coincidentally, one of the US's most respected research organisations, the 70-year-old non-profit Foundation for the Study of Cycles, has identified the start of a 500-year geopolitical cycle. It says its result will be a huge and permanent transfer of relative wealth and power from West to East.
Australia faces an urgent need to create a new population strategy that goes way beyond just stemming the flow of a few thousand boatpeople.
We now attract record numbers of approved migrants: 297,000 net in the year to June last year, compared with 97,000 a year 10 years ago. Even on the basis of the UN-US lower prediction of 29 million, our average annual intake must be at least maintained at its present level till 2050.
If the more favoured prediction of 36,000,000 should prove the reality, our intake will need to rise to some 350,000 a year. Comparatively few Australians presently welcome such a prospect. Nor are we prepared for it.
Already, in most of the countries above us, the need for adequate water is chronic, affecting some 40 million in China alone, even more in India. Food shortages multiply while groundwater tables fall year by year.
As populations mushroom, it is inevitable pressure on our borders will come not just from uninvited asylum-seekers, but from northern governments, demanding Australia pull down its barriers and share our energy, ore and agricultural good fortune on practical and humanitarian grounds.
We may argue others don't understand the challenges of our country's great distances and desertified landscape. But in times of great human trial, rationalisation gives way to desperation. History shows that the urge to conquest is rarely far below the surface. It is scarcely a somewhere else phenomenon.
This writer was in Dili, East Timor, and little more than 700 km from Darwin, just ahead of the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific. On the pretext of helping Timor's then Portuguese masters, Japanese military, naval and civil administrators were already outnumbering Europeans four to one. Their interest in Timor was patently, unquestionably, as a springboard for a future move on Australia.
Remembered also is an amicable conversation with a Japanese professor during a seminar coffee break in Tokyo 10 years after Japan's defeat. "You know," he said, "we can't help looking at that big empty country of yours and thinking, 'We would have done it better.' "
Australia has long enjoyed the protection of two of the world's leading powers: for a couple of centuries the British empire, for the past 70 years the US.
It is unlikely that we can now rely on the protection of either. Both have extraordinary burdens of entrenched unresolved debt. Their governments must focus on their own survival.
Economists calculate US unresolved debt now exceeds the combined cost in today's dollars of all its financial crises since 1803, including world wars I and II, Vietnam, Iraq, the Great Depression, the moon landings and the entire NASA space program. And now the government's massive post-meltdown stimulus payments.
As the world's wealth and power moves to the East, Australia's destiny almost certainly lies in becoming the new Switzerland of our region. Despite its size, Switzerland has weathered centuries of surrounding turmoil. It is respected for being economically strong; highly industrious; determinedly independent; self-sufficient according to plainly promulgated principles; technologically advanced and, for a small nation, defensively deterrent.
Australia's future security must be earned similarly.
Our claim to special status lies almost entirely in our Lucky Country's natural bounty: extraordinary coal, natural gas and ore resources; expanding offshore and onshore oil and gas fields; huge areas of unoccupied land; abundant water (but most of it's falling in the wrong places and most running out to sea); vast quantities of uranium (as new technology and safeguards propel nuclear power into a major source of future energy in country after country); and, in our drought-free years, a vital source of grain, livestock and produce to help feed the world.
We must respect the pressing magnitude of our region's challenges. For instance, China and India alone estimate that the global financial crisis threw about 70 million of their citizens out of work, more than three times Australia's total population.
Despite China's disposition for conquest or absorption (Hong Kong, Tibet, potentially Taiwan) it is highly probable Australia's real-politik path will prove to be a mutual benefit and co-operation agreement between our two nations, and a similar one with India.
As with Switzerland, our contribution to such stabilising alliances will be that we continue to provide the things the most powerful countries above us need.
If the new mining tax's effect should be to diminish Australia's perceived reliability as a future supply partner, its biggest unintended side effect may be to accelerate China's and India's search for new sources of alternative oil, coal, gas and uranium.
Certainly Australia holds no long-term monopoly. Billions of serious dollars are being spent to increase production and to prove promising new discoveries in at least 20 countries. China scours the globe to appease its appetite for energy, with no shortage of government funding available to pay for assured supply.
Australia must accept quickly that we cannot refuse to share our good fortune, nor set our own comfortable pace.
China continues to build new-coal-powered plants, each month adding the generating output of Australia's entire electricity network. It is surging ahead with the expansion of its infrastructure, building 30 new high-speed rail networks and thousands of new roads. It is planning 30 new nuclear-based power-generating plants and plans to soon market safe turn-key generators to the world. It is still increasing its network of dams, both in China and beyond its borders in the Mekong.
It is determined, along with India, to become the world's biggest automotive manufacturer and its most profitable and competitive manufacturing power.
By contrast, Australia is perceived to have slipped from its pre-eminence (with Canada) as the nation which entered the global financial crisis with an enviably sound economy, the product mostly of strictly focused policies from the Howard-Costello administration. While China (and India) race to build their infrastructures, Australia has largely exhausted its Building Australia Fund on poorly explained and administered projects (broadband, domestic ceiling insulation, assorted school buildings, emissions trading scheme) at an estimated cost of $8 billion. Many see a desire to make good these expenditures as the principal reason for the estimated $9 billion mining tax.
Infrastructure Australia, a body set up by the Rudd government about two years ago to involve leading businessmen to help attack Australia's ever-growing infrastructure backlog, now calculates its necessary budget at $770 billion.
Of this, Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson has said Australia needs to spend $100 billion to keep power on and avoid inevitable blackouts, brownouts and health and business disasters.
No determined plan appears to exist to finance a solution, nor to save us from repeatedly rising domestic and industrial electricity charges. No co-ordinated plan to build new generating installations for up to 14 million new citizens appears in sight.
As in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, investment in refurbishment of coal-fired generation has been extinguished by fears of carbon particle pollution.
For our northern neighbours, our coal is a humanitarian product. In China, especially, it sustains jobs and powers its manufacturing industry. It also powers the cheap electric pumps that raise groundwater for millions of small farmers. Indian authorities say any loss of cheap coal, or even the removal of its subsidies, would trigger a widespread and chaotic rural revolt.
Both countries regard the discomfort and health effects of carbon particle fallouts as localised problems to be endured for a time in their quest for larger, longer-range economic objectives and not to be confused with the Copenhagen claims that carbon dioxide can permanently and disastrously change the world's upper atmospheres and its future climate.
Few of us welcome the prospect of a surge of millions of new immigrants, but we need to accept their coming presence as inevitable and valuable. They underline our obligation to radically attack our neglected infrastructure. We are not building the housing or infrastructure to absorb them.
The world needs to know that we are leaders in our quotas for immigrants and genuine refugees. But we must also state clearly our tough-cop rules: uncompromisingly no admittance for boatpeople returning to the lowest levels of the Howard years.
We urgently need to find a public consensus about the individuals and families we most want and need to bring to our country, their skills, their backgrounds of hardship, their readiness to commit to Australia's attitudes and values.
As in Switzerland, we need to ensure that our defensive capability is constantly modernised and strengthened. Defence Minister John Faulkner has noted with concern that China is rapidly expanding its naval forces, with plans for new nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.
In modern Australia we must demand an end to incompletely explained and appallingly administered government ventures, initiated without cost-benefit evidence.
The 40 years to 2050 is a heartbeat in the global timetable. Many of our needed responses cannot be readily bought off-shelf, nor can the skills to bring them to life be imported at short notice.
Time now for a rapid overview of the tasks which must be attacked most urgently, their priorities, justifications, employment needs, estimated costs and financial benefits.
The clock is ticking. Too fast for comfort.
Journalist Colin Fraser was sent to Timor and Singapore by Keith Murdoch at age 19. He was Australia's youngest accredited war correspondent in World War II. He held senior editorial and management positions with Melbourne's Sun News-Pictorial and The Herald, forerunners of News Limited's Herald Sun. He was an Australian television pioneer and later national vice-chairman of advertising agency George Patterson.