When we observe Trump’s systematic destruction of democratic institutions, with chilling similarities to the way Hitler operated soon after seizing power, we’re inclined to believe, smugly, that our democracy is rooted more firmly. But in an article in the Canberra Times – The frightening truth: we're one election away from utter chaos at home – Adam Triggs has a warning:

If an Australian political party managed to win both houses of Parliament, a simple Act of Parliament is all it would take to abolish the Australian Electoral Commission, abolish the Reserve Bank, abolish ASIC, the ACCC, the AFP, Treasury, Prime Minister & Cabinet, the Department of Finance and any other government institution that was politically inconvenient.

To that list he could add a “bipartisan” move to abolish preferential voting (possible in an unholy Labor-Coalition deal).  

(It’s unfortunate that The Canberra Times keeps its opinion pieces behind a paywall. Its all-or-nothing subscription business model is a poor alternative to levying a small charge for specific articles, because the 27 500 000 Australians who don’t live in the ACT have no interest in the condition of Kaleen’s cycle paths, reviews of restaurants in Dickson, or the scores of the Molonglo under 15s girls’ basketball team.)

A longer-term and global perspective on immigration

While Australia is distracted by right-wing alarms about mass immigration, a demographer presents basic global demographic data.

For the last 80 years Australia has relied on immigration as a way to keep our population young – among the youngest of all “developed” countries. Our median age of 38 compares with median ages of 50 in Japan, 48 in Italy and 47 in Germany. These are stand-out examples, but among “developed” nations only Iceland and New Zealand have a lower median age than ours.

China, with a median age of 40, is worried about long-term projections showing a rapidly increasing age-dependency ratio.[1]

Fifty years ago economists and demographers were concerned about rates of growth in population and in per-capita demand on resources, as articulated in the Club of Rome’s warnings about limits to growth. But over the last half-century fertility rates across the world have fallen quickly, which means the world’s population may be peaking much sooner than previously expected.

This does not mean the Club of Rome’s warnings about demand on resources was wrong – the planet’s per-capita resource intensity continues to grow – but it does mean that most countries are having to plan for a future in which their populations will be ageing.

In this context Joe Walker had drawn our attention to a lecture by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania, The demographic future of humanity. He takes us into the basic arithmetic of fertility rates, pointing out that populations can go on growing for a while even while fertility rates are falling below replacement levels. That’s why ageing and population decline can catch policymakers by surprise.

There is a general view that while for most of the world population is peaking, there are still high fertility rates in Africa and parts of South Asia. Fernández-Villaverde disputes this view. He points out why data from these regions is biassed to overstatement, and why, because of high infant mortality in the poorest countries, and high male-to-female sex ratios, total fertility rates just to maintain population have to be well above the 1.1 rate applying to other more prosperous regions.

Demography is difficult territory, even for the reasonably numerate, but Fernández-Villaverde’s 55-minute lecture stands out for its clarity to those who may be intimidated by equations.

Some may question his interpretation that low or declining population is necessarily a problem. He refers, for example, to Japan’s “20-year funk” and its declining tax base. But perhaps we could take a broader perspective, reflecting on ways historical reductions in population, such as the 1347-1500 bubonic plague in Europe, made life better for the two-thirds who survived, mainly through increasing real wages and reducing inequality. Perhaps we can now achieve the same benefits without the misery of the Black Death.

1. Data on median ages covering 229 countries in 2024, are in the Median age page of the CIA Factbook. ↩