Populate or perish -- Aussie dilemma

By Michael Christie

SYDNEY (Reuters): Nearly three times the size of India, Australia has just two percent of the sub-continent's one billion people. Or put it another way.

While 107 people clog each square kilometer of Indonesia, in the archipelago's neighbor to the south, Australians could easily build a giant castle each as there are just 2.3 of them for every square kilometer.

With just 19 million people scattered across the sixth biggest country in the world, Australia periodically wrestles with a burning issue -- populate or perish.

The debate is bubbling away again as Australia's Asian neighbors continue to swell and some in Australian industry and politics worry about their country becoming an insignificant outpost in a globalised world.

It is a particularly hot topic for Adm. Chris Barrie, head of the Australian Defense Force, who is having trouble finding recruits for an expansion of the armed forces.

"If I looked at the next 50 years, I would say one of the most significant challenges we have to address is our standing," Barrie told a recent regional security seminar in Sydney.

"We will be significantly outnumbered and potentially our economy will just be a minnow in a very large region."

Australia is a vast land.

The Northern Territory, for example, is five times the size of Britain but, with 190,000 people, has the population of a London suburb.

Australians are concentrated on the coasts, in particular the cities of Melbourne and Sydney in the south and southeast.

In the rugged outback, roads stretch endlessly through red scrub, deserted except for the occasional kangaroo roadkill. Some farms, or "stations", are as large as European countries.

Australia remains an empty land despite a mass migration drive after World War II, when it feared a Japanese invasion.

The population grew rapidly from seven million in 1946. Most immigrants were British or Eastern Europeans, in keeping with the "White Australia" policy, which ended in the 1970s.

In the last decade, society has become more multiracial, with Asian immigrants overtaking Europeans in the mid-1980s.

Faced like other developed nations with an ageing population and declining birth rate, Australia continues to import around 100,000 new migrants every year.

But the aim is not to grow.

It is to keep the population steady so that it will peak at 24 million in the middle of the next century, and to maintain a steady inflow of skilled workers that cannot be found locally.

Some feel Australia ought to be making more of an effort, especially as a global battle for skilled migrants heats up among developed nations searching for manpower.

A leading proponent of a renewed immigration push is former conservative prime minister Malcolm Fraser, who wants Australia to aim for a population of 40 million by the end of the century.

Fraser believes that Australia's goal in the post Cold War world is to enhance its independence by adding muscle.

As a middle power with a middle economy, it also needs to grow its domestic market so that its companies are strong enough to compete on the global stage, and to resist being swallowed up by multinationals with no care for Australia's national interest.

"There is no country in the world where there is such opportunity reserved for so few," Fraser said in a recent speech.

The proposal to double the population is highly controversial in a country that cherishes its quarter-acre house plots.

One of the main arguments against immigration is that Australia is one of the driest landmasses in the world. It could not support a larger population.

"In a lot of Australia you simply cannot survive," right-wing politician Graeme Campbell told Reuters.

Australia cannot be "Fairy Godmother to the world", he says.

"You could take 100 million people out of India, 100 million out of China, and it wouldn't make a scrap of difference to them but give us a living standard like Bangladesh," he said.

Environmentalists do not necessarily share the maximum sustainable population argument.

Environmental destruction is more tied to land use than population, said Frances MacGuire of Greenpeace. A million sheep can do more damage to a fragile eco-system than a million people.

Despite the end of the White Australia policy, some nationalists also play the race card, opposing Asian immigration in particular as a threat to Australia's cultural identity.

The potency of that lobby was made clear in a 1998 election when 10 percent voted for Pauline Hanson's xenophobic One Nation party. One Nation is expected to feature again in a new election conservative Prime Minister John Howard must call by year's end.

While backing an influx of skilled migrants to keep the labor force supplied, neither Howard nor the opposition Labor Party appear interested in a new mass migration drive.

Yet proponents of immigration say there may be more at stake than merely occupying empty land.

As some other developed countries become more multiracial, Australia could become sidelined as a white anomaly. Canada, for one, is wooing 235,000 new migrants a year in a policy aimed partly at making it a mirror of the world's racial mix.

"I do wonder what private thoughts and assumptions the next generation of Canadians would harbor about an Australia that has chosen, for whatever reasons, to remain overwhelmingly white," Canadian intellectual Gwynne Dyer said in Sydney this year.