Year: 2011

After a decade of experience with European monetary union in practice, Sarrazin is sceptical about its future. “All attempts to legislate for fiscal stability, limited debts and no-bailout rules have not proved watertight. As it looks now, Europe is on a slippery slope towards becoming a full-blown transfer union,” he said. For someone who has first-hand experience in creating such a permanent transfer mechanism within a country, this must be a frightening prospect.

Of all the probable results of Australia’s inevitable population growth the social impacts of migration are probably the most controversial. This is unsurprising. Migration can change the face of a country and alter the social and
ethnic composition of entire cities or individual neighbourhoods.

On Monday, The Centre for Independent Studies did something that the Australian government did not deem necessary: We provided a very warm welcome to Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic.

Debate about Australia’s population is framed with national aggregates and ignores how local governments deal with increased population. Part of the reason Australians are averse to more people is because local councils are ill equipped to absorb them and many are forcing residents to pay for them.

Amid the noise of the euro rescue summit last week, one important announcement received very little attention. This is surprising since it was a strategic message from Europe’s only real tiger economy, which grew by more than 8 per cent last year, and has a population of more than 73 million people. It was an announcement from the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The fight between the lofty ambitions of planners and the cold hard reality of economics still rages. Politicians and planners still believe that they know better. Yet despite all their efforts they regularly fail to suspend the laws of geography and economics.

Open societies need a free exchange of ideas, however unpleasant and offensive they may be to some. Freedom of speech is empty and meaningless if you may only say what other people like to hear.

Population growth has been one of the major political debates during the past two years. However (and despite all the federal noise around population growth) Canberra is not the place where the debate belongs.