22 million in September 2009

In September 2009 the population of Australia clicked over the 22,000,000 mark.

Over the last five to six years Australia’s population has been growing at over double the world average. The net population growth for Australia is 2.1 percent annum

In 1999, when our population growth was running at around 1.1 percent per annum, it was forecast that Australia’s population would not reach 22 million until around 2020; maybe as early as 2018. But here we are at the beginning, more or less, of 2010 and the population today—as I check the Population Clock [use Ctrl+Click to open link in a new Tab] on the Australian Bureau of Statistics site— is 22,284,364.

The net population gain for Australia is a new person every 1 minute and 46 seconds. If it takes you about one and half minutes to read this post then, in that time, the population of Australia has gone up by one—and that is the net count, so that is even after taking into account people dying and leaving . . . But does anyone actually ever really leave Australia? Hmmm.

At 2.1 percent per annum this means that by 2020, when the population was supposed to be just nudging 22 million, the population is actually going to be something more like 27 million. In fact it would not take much of a change in the per annum rate to have the population at 30 million by 2020.

Given that two thirds of this growth comes from immigration does anyone but me maybe think that this is not a good thing?