Cocks and Flannery, who attempt occasionally to quantify their views, toss around various figures for arable land available in Australia. They appear to concede that most estimates of available arable land, made by people who know something about the subject, show that there are still vast areas of unused arable land in Australia.

Nevertheless, they manage, by ingenious manipulation of the figures to argue that this is really not significant, because the arable land is in Northern Australia, the water is in Northern Australia and we should be ultra-cautious. They continually express animosity to agriculture, which seems to be the hallmark of quite a few modern pseudo-geographers and pseudo-anthropologists.

There is a whole school developing of semi-scientific popular journalism devoted to the argument that agriculture is destroying humanity. Flannery even argues that it would be a good idea to make a large part of Australia into an enormous ecological theme park, finding large mammals from overseas to replace the diptodron in the ecological niche that it used to occupy about 10,000 years ago. Flannery often seems to prefer animals to humans. I disagree with this approach.

Past arguments about Australia's population. Tim Flannery's curious legend about Griffith Taylor

Many of the ecological opponents of migration make a hero of Griffith Taylor, a past Australian geographer. Tim Flannery paints Taylor as an opponent of further increase in Australian population, and as someone who shared Flannery's view that Australia has a very small population carrying capacity. He repeats this legend about Taylor and paints him as a kind of martyr to the forces in Australia, “the boosters”, who in the past favoured a large increase in Australian population, and are said to have forced Taylor's academic exile from Australia to North America.

A rather vigorous academic argument has developed about the long-dead Griffith Taylor, with opponents of migration ascribing to him this martyr status, and academic liberals and leftists responding indirectly by drawing attention to Taylor's mad, racist views, which he shared with many other geographers and anthropologists of his time, of which a representative and interesting sample is found in a letter from Ian Castles of the Academy of Social Sciences, in the March 2000 Quadrant.

Castles says of Taylor:

The demeaning assumption was alive and well in the 1920s. Second-year students in Australia's first university department at the University of Sydney were instructed by its head, Griffith Taylor, to “insert the measurement of three skulls in a table”, using calipers, tapes and radiometers; and were directed to a paper on the Kamilaroi tribe, co-authored by Taylor, for a discussion of “the changes in skin-colour and nasal index which result from hybridisation”. In 1924, Taylor solemnly told the Royal Society of New South Wales of a teacher's opinion “that blacks at the age of 14 were about as intelligent as white children at the age of 10?. In his Environment and Race, published by Oxford University Press in 1927, Taylor asserted that the development of man's reasoning faculties was “correlated with the size of the brain”, and that “we can show a continuous series of measurements leading from the primitive Negro (69) up through the Iberian (75) group … and West Europeans to the Alpine (85) and the Mongolian peoples.

As Ian Castles is quite right to point out about Taylor, he obviously shared the nutty phrenological racism current among many academics in his time and place, but this argument about Taylor is eccentric for another, rather more basic, reason.

I have recently discovered that the Tim Flannery version of Taylor's views on migration and the carrying capacity of Australia just isn't true. I recently bought, in a package of secondhand books, Griffith Taylor's book in the Oxford Geographies series, the fourth edition on Australia, published in 1925.

For that time, it's a pretty good potted geography of Australia. What fascinated me most is the fact that Taylor's views on settlement and population, as expressed in this very basic geography textbook, are almost the opposite of the views attributed to him by Flannery.

On page 262, Taylor asserts that there are 616,000 square miles of land suitable for close temperate settlement, 100,000 square miles of tropical agricultural lands, 1,009,000 square miles of good pastoral lands and 655,000 square miles of fair pastoral lands.

If anything, this is an overestimate in the opposite direction to Flannery's views. Taylor was also a strong advocate of a large expansion of irrigation for agriculture, if his 1925 standard Australian geography book is any guide. The very last paragraph in the book, the postscript, commences with the following.

In a paper published in the American Geographical Review, July 1922, the writer shows that the prospects of the fertile temperate regions in Australia are very hopeful. Using the present condition of Europe (with her 400 millions of population) as a criterion, he deduces that 62 millions of white settlers can establish themselves in eastern and south-western Australia.

Despite his bizarre anthropological racism, Taylor wasn't a bad prophet on some matters. He is well known for his prediction that Australia would have between 19 million and 20 million population in the year 2000, which has turned out to be spot on.

It is pretty fascinating the way legends grow. Rather than being a fierce opponent of population growth as painted by Flannery, Taylor was a bit of a “booster” himself in relation to population.

Flannery and company also praise the conservative economist Bruce Davidson, who conducted a constant polemic in the 1950s and 1960s against northern agricultural development, on dry economic grounds. In this instance, their account of Davidson's views is probably accurate.

My heroes in this area are the “boosters”: people such as Ion Idriess, J.C. Bradfield, William Hatfield and Jack Timbery, who advocated various and quite feasible proposals for agricultural development, particularly in the immediate postwar period. The Snowy scheme was one product of this kind of outlook.

In the 1970s a vigorous Australian resident opponent of Malthusianism and supporter of Australian development and high migration was the late Colin Clark. He had worked as an economist for the World Food Organisation and been a major English university economist, and he conducted a considerable argument with Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s and 1970s. His predictions about world agricultural production etc have generally been confirmed by subsequent developments.

Ehrlich's more alarmist predictions have repeatedly been refuted by later events. Colin Clark had a very serious debate with Derek Llewellyn-Jones, in the book Zero Population Growth published by Heinemann in 1974. Most of Colin Clark's predictions have turned out more accurate than those of Llewellyn-Jones.

It is necessary to make some assumptions about likely future world developments concerning food, agriculture and resources. In this field I have found the very detailed literature of the World watch Institute of considerable use.

While the Worldwatch Institute is, in the main, overly alarmist, it has performed an enormous service over recent years in tracking world developments in food production, arable land, fertiliser use and many other important things. A very useful understanding of what is really happening on a global scale can be acquired from the very serious crossfire that takes place between Malthusians such as the Worldwatch Institute and major capitalist growth advocates such as the Hudson Institute.

The truth about likely future world developments lies somewhere between the opposite projections of these two schools of thought, and anyone seriously interested in these matters can derive great value from studying the material produced by these two currents of thought, and the debates between them.

Nevertheless, there is no serious doubt in my mind that the Worldwatch Institute alarmism is somewhat closer to the reality than the Hudson Institute optimism, for the medium-term future. There is likely to be a global shortage of food and arable land and water for quite a while, although not as catastrophic as the Worldwatch Institute believes.

Despite the short-term low world prices for commodities, artificially created by the global financial speculations of finance capital, over time there is likely to be enormous demand for food on a world scale, and ultimately prices for it must rise. That reality underpins my argument.

The second reality is that the global shortage of arable land and water produces a situation in which Australia cannot possibly afford to indulge the fantasy of Flannery and Paul Sheehan about making our country a big ecological theme park. We will be under constant pressure to develop agriculture to produce more food and we will be under constant pressure for more migration to these shores.

Politically it is much smarter to anticipate these developments by maintaining our historically highish, and now non-discriminatory migration policy, and we will, for obvious reasons of survival, have to improve our agricultural practices and remediate the Australian environment to fulfill our global human responsibilities in food and population.

Australia's real carrying capacity

Stripped of all the manipulation of figures, the situation is that there is very large unused water capacity in Australia and also a very large amount of land that could be properly irrigated without environmental damage, as long as careful, modern and conservative irrigation methods are practiced.

The late Jack Kelly, an important economist who assisted in the establishment of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, was critical of many, initially faultily conceived, northern development schemes. Kelly knew an enormous amount about practical irrigation, and also about the economics of irrigation, agriculture and pastoralism.

He made a study of the Kimberleys in north-western Australia and of the Northern Territory in the 1960s. He was sceptical about the Ord River Dam because it was in his view on too large a scale, and in the wrong place.

In his useful book, Struggle for the North (Australasian Book Society, 1966), he located about 50 possible places for smaller dams that could supply water for assorted agricultural activities, irrigation agriculture and livestock uses. Jack Kelly had a particular objection to the way that the big pastoral companies, particularly the foreign-owned ones, such as Vesteys, had locked up control of the strategic riverfront grazing lands for extremely nominal rentals, and the way this monopoly control of the strategically placed holdings held back useful agricultural development.

He favoured small-scale, local, individually owned pastoral and agricultural developments, and his book is an eloquent plea in favour of such developments, and a specific blueprint for where they would be possible. Another major set of proposals for Australian development, the longstanding Bradfield-Ion Idriess schemes for Queensland rivers, are from a technical and engineering point of view, quite feasible.

A number of the technical problems inherent in such schemes were solved during the development of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and these days most such major infrastructure projects are technically feasible.

Obviously what would be required for any of these important development projects would be labour and credit and, as many people know, in conditions of national emergency, credit can be created by government, as it was during the Second World War, despite the avaricious way global finance capital attempts to preserve for itself alone the right to create credit.

There are enormous technical and practical problems in such agricultural and infrastructure development, but none of them are insuperable. For instance, the problem of salination is a question of drainage, and of selecting suitable land for irrigation instead of land in which there are already large amounts of salt at certain levels. (Often because this land consists of ancient seabeds.)

One innovative solution to some salination might be Israeli-type tapping of the ground water below the salt for irrigation, thereby lowering the water table. The question of markets for the food will be solved in the medium term by the inevitably increasing shortage of food on a global scale.

Already, the very important project of the railway through western Victoria, NSW and western Queensland to Darwin, and the other Adelaide-Darwin project, and a Wyndham-Derby-Darwin rail project, which could easily be devised, could create a satisfactory transport framework for food exports to our potential Asian markets.

None of these tasks are technically impossible. The real problem is finding the proper balance between these necessary projects and the equally necessary dimension of preserving the natural environment in an appropriate way.

In my view it would be possible to develop a gigantic agricultural program of this sort, at the same time as withdrawing a great deal of unsuitable land from scrubby pastoralism and marginal agriculture. (The land withdrawn could be turned into national parks.)

The agricultural future of Australia lies in developing large-scale, carefully designed, ecologically sustainable irrigation agriculture, rather than speculative pastoralism and marginal agriculture on semi-arid lands. Looked at in the framework of appropriate, intensive Australian agricultural development in the future, the proposition that we could not feed many more people is thoroughly unsound.

A recent issue of The Australian has a fascinating article about local proposals in the Bowen area of north Queensland to develop infrastructure, dam several rivers and commence a new major irrigation area, which is strongly supported by the whole local community. Similar projects are possible in many parts of northern Australia.

The example of Israel/Palestine

Tim Flannery, Doug Cocks and others make great play about the enormous difference in the agricultural potential between Australia and Europe, pointing to what they call ENSO or, in other words the variable Mediteranean nature of the climate, as an enormous obstacle to agriculture.

This comparison is a bit beside the point. Australia is obviously different agriculturally to northern Europe because of its Mediteranean climate. Therefore, it is useful to study and emulate the highest points of agricultural developments in similar Mediterranean environments.

As an example, the whole area of Israel/Palestine is about 20 per cent larger than the Sydney statistical district from Broken Bay to Loftus and out to Katoomba.

Sixty per cent of Israel/Palestine is desert, but it supports five million Jews and three million Arabs, with a Western diet, on a high calorific level, and in fact produces about a net 25 per cent agricultural surplus for export. While it is true that very special circumstances have applied there over the last 70 years, it is a fact that while developing agriculture to its maximum, the Israelis have substantially remediated the land from past environmental degradation resulting from more than 5000 years of relatively unplanned human activity.

The technical achievements of the Israel/Palestine agricultural set-up are of enormous practical importance in Australia, and include optimum use of water, very frugal and effective irrigation techniques, carefully designed arid agriculture, use of saline water in some circumstances, etc.

Looked at in the framework of the Israel/Palestine experience and comparing it, say, with the Sydney region, the argument over Australian carrying capacity falls more clearly into place. The intrinsic upper limits to Australian carrying capacity are still very far off.

The real task is to design optimum development, both to expand agriculture and to remediate the environment at the same time, and to do that you need more people and the creation of development credit at government level to overcome the artificial grip on credit of the global rentiers.

What the argument is about

It is worth noting at this point, even allowing for the aridity of the Australian continent, and taking into account the rainfall and the amount of well-watered land, that if Australia was to have a similar level of population development to the United States, the population would be 50 million.

Using a similar method of calculation, if we were to have a similar level of population to Europe, Australia could support 130 million people. Presently, we only use for agriculture about 11 per cent of the water that falls on Australia as rain.

Nevertheless, political and social realities underline all arguments about population. No one like myself, who is in favour of increased population and the continuance of mass migration, is arguing for anything more than the average continuance of the basic 1.5-2 per cent annual net population increase that has been the norm over the past 200 years.

The argument is between the continuation of the normal highish migration of a relatively new country, or the adoption of net zero population growth, which is appropriate to overpopulated countries. As the above figures indicate, we are a considerable distance from any situation where a continuance of the substantial mass migration of the last 200 years could present any real threat to the interests of the Australian people.

The footprint of cities

Another argument of the anti-immigrationists is that because most migrants settle in cities, the footprint of cities is the problem.

There is a limited element of truth in this in Australian conditions. In Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, due to the relatively unplanned nature of city growth, too much agricultural land has already been lost to urban development.

Even in these cities, however, this could be overcome for the future by a change to forward planning for city growth. For instance, further population expansion in Melbourne could be concentrated in the area out towards and past Tullamarine Airport (obviously away from the flight paths) where the land is of little agricultural potential.

In Sydney the logical places for further urban development are the sandstone plateaus north of Hornsby and south of Loftus which, in both instances, happen to be on major rail lines, rather than allowing further urban sprawl on usable agricultural land in the far western suburbs.

The Sydney region, Melbourne region and the Brisbane region could thus be developed into mixed urban and agricultural areas, like many similar areas in Europe and in Israel/Palestine. Australian society and the environment will degenerate rapidly, whether we have more population or we don't, unless we make major and serious changes to our agricultural and urban practices.

The real task is the adoption of appropriate technologies, including the highest level of modern agricultural practices in all fields.

For the past 20 or 30 years many thousands of urban Australians have been stirred by a strong desire to go back to rural life, evidenced by the popularity of magazines such as Earth Garden and Grass Roots and the many thousands of people who have settled in rural areas, either individually or as part of collective experiements.

Much of this phenomenon has been marked by enormous human enthusiasm, sometimes not enlightened by much careful scientific experiment and enquiry. Nevertheless, the existence of this deep urge provides a basis for possible future development in agriculture.

What is to prevent us using all the technical achievements of Israeli agricultural practice in Australia? Other potentially useful techniques are the well-tested, Australian-invented, P.A. Yeomans keyline water harvesting and irrigation system, permaculture techniques, and the cultivation of new varieties of food crops, for which the markets are now emerging.

The possibilities in these areas are very great, and maximum government research and development funds should be devoted to such projects. What is so irritating about the Flannery/Cocks/O'Connor view of agriculture is that it is almost totally static, and focussed on the past.

Unless we dramatically improve agricultural practices, the Australian environment will suffer, regardless of the population. With appropriate agricultural improvements, increased population will benefit the environment.

Youth unemployment is a chronic problem in all major Australian cities. Many young people, including many young unemployed, share the urge to get back to the land that is fairly widespread in the population. The federal government has exploited this, in a mildly cynical way, by forcing unemployed youth to engage in work-for-the-dole schemes, a lot of which involve rubbish collection and land care activities, which are often rather cosmetic in relation to the real problems and possibilities of agriculture.

A much more useful kind of scheme would be for the government to sponsor the development of kibbutz-style farming experiments on usable agricultural land on the fringes of major cities, which are in fact locations quite close to big concentrations of youth unemployment.

Such experiments, if backed by government support and funding, could be combined with well-organised agricultural education for unemployed youth. Such activities would beat the hell out of some present cosmetic make-work schemes.

In the area of the new technologies that could contribute in agriculture, industry and other areas, to a more civilised energy-efficient Australia, once again an Earthscan Worldwatch book is of great assistance. This book is Factor 4 by Weizacker, Lovins and Lovins.

This book describes a fascinating variety of technologies that have been used successfully in different places, all of which could be adapted for Australian use. There is no lack of possible technologies to remediate both Australian agriculture, Australian industry and the Australian environment.

A civilised migration policy for Australia for the 21st century

The population policy I advocate is on the following lines:

(a) No discrimination in immigration on grounds of race, religion, nationality or political belief.

(b) A highish numerical objective at the top end of numerical objectives since the Second World War.

(c) The maintenance of a humane mix of high-income business migrants, skilled migrants and poorer migrants looking for a better life. To achieve the third end, and for basic reasons of humanity, extensive family reunion.

(d) Periodic amnesties for illegal migrants.

(e) The extension of the completely free movement that now applies to New Zealand, to the rest of the Pacific islands, to New Guinea (the whole island) and to Timor. The small populations of the Pacific have been the victims of Australian imperialist activities in the Pacific and as a proper moral compensation they should be allowed free access to Australia.

(f) A very proactive attitude to refugees. The current crises in Timor and Fiji and the crisis in Kosovo underline the importance of allowing refugee migration on the widest possible scale when crises arise. Much of the immigration history of Australia since the Second World War and, indeed, since the Irish Famine in the 1850s, has been based on providing safe haven for refugees. This is appropriate for a new country such as Australia, and people who come to Australia in these circumstances usually make a considerable effort to make a life in Australia.This migration program should be backed up by a considerable commitment to appropriate national infrastructure and agricultural development etc, at the same time as a vast public program to remediate the Australian environment.I believe that is the kind of policy on which both the labour movement, and possibly Australian society as a whole, will settle, and quite soon. The reason that this will be so is the effect of the already established cultural diversity and ethnic mix in the new Australia, and the obvious political implications of our location in the world.The current crisis in relations with Indonesia, produced by the necessity of defending the right of national self-determination of the East Timorese people, heavily underlines the need for nailing down such a general policy on migration.

Only the kind of multicultural, diverse Australia that I've outlined can have a reasonable prospect of further development, or even survival, in the rapidly changing world of the 21st century. Such an Australia will have a bright future as a civilised example to the rest of the world about how to handle the migration and population question in a relatively young nation in a difficult world.

Sydney University Law School graduations as a snapshot of a new Australia

Several close personal friends of mine have recently graduated in law from the tough Sydney University evening course - one of the few significant evening course left at Sydney University in these relatively affluent times. It used to be called the Barristers Admission Board Course and is notoriously the hardest way to do law.

My personal friends are a group of four Anglo women in their late 30s and early and middle 40s and I have attended two of their graduations. They have been, from my point of view, absolutely fascinating events.

Notoriously, many people drop out of this difficult course, but nevertheless, the two graduations I attended, six months apart, averaged 140 graduates each, adding to the very large number of law graduates crowding the marketplace.

The first interesting sociological feature was that about half of the graduates were women. The second fascinating feature was the ethnic and cultural mix of the graduates. Going by names, an average 40 per cent were of some non-British migrant background: Italian, Greek, Chinese, Indian, Arabic and many others, and another 15 per cent had recognisably Irish names, suggesting that at least 15 per cent, and probably more were of Irish Catholic cultural background.

Judging by appearance, an even larger percentage than the 40 per cent had non-English-speaking backgrounds, as some people with Anglo names were of Chinese or Indian appearance. At one of the graduations I noticed two good-looking young men, possibly brothers, with wonderfully exotic Indian subcontinent-sounding names, such as Fawez Nazmi Cameron and Duncan Ismael Cameron.

Events of this sort are very emotional and moving for the graduates and their families. The majestic, gracious and pleasant old Great Hall of Sydney University, built by the racist British ruling class of the colony in the 19th century, with its impressive portraits of past vice-chancellors, on these occasions was crowded with the families of the graduates, in their infinite, moving and boistrous variety.

One had only to look around to see our new Sydney and our new Australia as it really is. What is striking at these events is the matter-of-fact, routine cosmopolitanism of Sydney life. Obviously, many of these graduates of the evening course work in law, accountancy, unions, real estate, the public service, and even nursing and teaching.

The striking thing is the genuine mix of the new and the old. The Anglo middle classes and commercial classes are still fairly strongly represented. For instance there are quite a few older Anglo men who obviously work as paralegals and have finally got their law degree, and there are also obviously confident young women of the Anglo North Shore middle-class, etc.

Nevertheless, the extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity of the families and the graduates underlines the irreversible cosmopolitanism of our new Sydney and new Australia. At these graduations it is possible to see the future and, in terms of ethnic and cultural diversity, the future really works. It's also worth commenting that in terms of the eccentric new class theory, all these graduates, by definition, immediately enter the so-called new class, which underlines the speed with which that class is broadening and expanding, to the point that the new class theory becomes ridiculous.

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