This is isolated to South Australia and is due to the incompetence of the SA state government. The rest of the country are doing fine in regards to keeping their lights on.
Maximum population of Australia?
- Thread starter dirtyjapaneseman
- Start date
This is isolated to South Australia and is due to the incompetence of the SA state government. The rest of the country are doing fine in regards to keeping their lights on.
Riain
Banned
Victoria will probably struggle when the Latrobe Valley shuts down. With a bit of a luck they'll add the steam plant to Mortlake NG-GT plant and make it a combined cycle base load plant.
If Australia populates Kimberley, Darwin area, and Northeast Queensland more, it could support 50 million to 100 million at most.
Redbeard
Banned
If that is the factor then a lot of the richest and most happy places on earth should be practically empty!
If say the Australians were very funny and could get all the other people on Earth to spend fortunes on buying Australian jokes, then I guess you could fit in a billion rich and happy people on the Australian continent! Of course very little of what they consume and enjoy would be produced in Australia (apart from jokes) - but as long as you have the money from selling jokes to pay for oil, chewing gum and hamburgers - that really isn't a problem!
This of course makes it quite difficult to predict the max. population of an area, but the core of my claim is that it has only little to do with where the natural resources are located.
Anyway, your post on Australian resources etc. is nothing short of superb and very informative. It is not at least such posts that makes the board worth spending time on
roger
Banned
Still not so necro...
Australia can feed and house his 20M people because it have a overprodution of food to sell to China and Japan, if 10M more australian people eat that overproduction of food and wáter and settle in the arable land that is also the habitable land, what they gonna sell to China and Japan to have a rational life level? also if Australia food productioon fall then the USA-Canada-Argentina food production prices rise and again what Australia gonna sell to buy expensive american food? Dont they already treatment nuclear waste for a rational Price.
China, Japan and South Korea buy food because they sell everything else cheaper or better that the rest.
Las Vegas (Clark County) is inhabitable, it buy food and wáter and stuff to his 2M habs by selling gamble and fun to 300M americans. But Asia already have is own Casino-cities.
And this thread deserve fall in the Future History section.
Australia can feed and house his 20M people because it have a overprodution of food to sell to China and Japan, if 10M more australian people eat that overproduction of food and wáter and settle in the arable land that is also the habitable land, what they gonna sell to China and Japan to have a rational life level? also if Australia food productioon fall then the USA-Canada-Argentina food production prices rise and again what Australia gonna sell to buy expensive american food? Dont they already treatment nuclear waste for a rational Price.
China, Japan and South Korea buy food because they sell everything else cheaper or better that the rest.
Las Vegas (Clark County) is inhabitable, it buy food and wáter and stuff to his 2M habs by selling gamble and fun to 300M americans. But Asia already have is own Casino-cities.
And this thread deserve fall in the Future History section.
Loli American
Banned
Australia is a resource extraction export country, and a pretty damn good one at that. Though I think without agricultural exports, they would focus on manufacturing more as they did historically.
So, pretty much no idea about Australia whatsoever? Agriculture is nice but it's far from our most important export. 10 million people would also come no where near to eating all our surplus.
I'm sure the American agricultural industry would quite enjoy this, with the higher prices making for increased output.
I don't see what Las Vegas has to do with this, might as well have said Atlantic City or (insert reservation casino here).
Isaac Beach
Banned
I'm not convinced Australia is being utilised nearly as intensively as it could be. Which is a good thing in my opinion. But there are a lot of cattle stations the size of England with but a few hundred thousand cattle and farms that look more like wildlife reserves than agricultural centers. We don't go for the California-Midwest mass centre-pivot irrigation, dense plot style of farming; again I think it's much nicer that we don't but if Australia were to pursue such a policy we could probably support ten or maybe twenty million more people than we currently do, at least. With the right POD that's doable I feel. Though I'm not a farmer so I couldn't be certain of the logistics.
Everything I know seems like it's possible. Plus there's Tasmania which is definitely underpopulated, since any "maximum population of X" assumes we give the middle finger to the environment.
Zachariah
Banned
With an early enough POD, I'd say that Australia could support a maximum population somewhere between ten times and sixty times higher than its current population IOTL. After all, Australia as a whole, on average, is at least as hospitable and fertile as Rajasthan, and theoretically capable of supporting an equally high population density, provided that they have the right crop package. And using present-day Rajasthan's population density, of 200/km2, as a general guide for the maximum theoretical population density possible for Australia as a whole, we end up with a population figure of more than 1.5 BILLION people for the continent of Australia- comparable to that of India and Pakistan combined today, with just over half the population density. Yes, it does seem OTT from OTL's perspective on Australia, but it'd still theoretically be plausible. Even with a later POD, after the OTL European discovery of the continent, a far higher population would easily be plausible. The easiest way would be to simply have the British East India Company get in on the act with the initial colonisation period of Australia; instead of just having Australian settlement established through penal colonies and transporting British convicts over there, to provide indentured labor under penal servitude, why not have the British East Indian Company utilize the Indian indenture system to populate the continent at well, transporting Indian indentured laborers and convicts over there along with the penal transportation of people from the British Isles?
That way, you could easily increase the initial settler population of Australia more than tenfold compared to OTL. And with their own preferred crop package, bringing along their own far more suitable and productive crops for the Australian climate, such as grams, lentils, pulses, oilseeds and spices, they'd find it far easier to establish agriculture where the British convict settlers failed, as well as identifying indigenous Australian varieties of potentially lucrative cash crops such as cotton, agarwood and sandalwood which would further increase early settlement prior to the Gold Rushes. Then, simply allow population growth trends to continue from there, resulting in an Australia with a culture, history and demographics which parallel those of Mauritius IOTL, but on a far larger scale. IMHO, in such a TL, even with a POD as late as the 1800s, it'd be more than plausible for Australia to have a population of 100M or greater by the present day, without its standards of living, HDI level and GDP per capita being adversely affected. What do you think?
That way, you could easily increase the initial settler population of Australia more than tenfold compared to OTL. And with their own preferred crop package, bringing along their own far more suitable and productive crops for the Australian climate, such as grams, lentils, pulses, oilseeds and spices, they'd find it far easier to establish agriculture where the British convict settlers failed, as well as identifying indigenous Australian varieties of potentially lucrative cash crops such as cotton, agarwood and sandalwood which would further increase early settlement prior to the Gold Rushes. Then, simply allow population growth trends to continue from there, resulting in an Australia with a culture, history and demographics which parallel those of Mauritius IOTL, but on a far larger scale. IMHO, in such a TL, even with a POD as late as the 1800s, it'd be more than plausible for Australia to have a population of 100M or greater by the present day, without its standards of living, HDI level and GDP per capita being adversely affected. What do you think?
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Zachariah
Banned
Culturally, demographically and agriculturally, I guess so. If you'd also consider Mauritius to have been turned into a part of India, then yeah. After all, we're trying to get Australia its largest possible population; India's the best model of how to overcome those relatively arid conditions and still be a net exporter of food. They've got the most suitable crop package to support the highest possible population density in Australian conditions.
Are we sure that would work though? I am wondering what could stop that from happening. I have to wonder about the soil. Could the crops that are grown not take?
If Australia had been settled around maybe 2000 years ago by a people similar to the Japanese instead of the real-world settlements would that be an actual assumed population today perhaps?
Zachariah
Banned
The majority of those crops grow in similar or worse soils in India; they're specially adapted to poor soil conditions and to endure extensive drought conditions, with the majority of the pulses, tubers and grams coming from plants which have nitrogen-fixing root nodules. This enables them to readily take and colonize poorer soils where available nitrogen is scarce, like moraines, volcanic flows or sand dunes. When the plant dies, the fixed nitrogen is released, making it available to other plants, and allowing them to be used as green manure to enrich and fertilize the soil. And the value of green manure has been recognized by farmers in India for thousands of years, as mentioned in treatises like Vrikshayurveda- in traditional Indian farming practices, it was standard practice to rotate the fields through various types of crops, which usually included one consisting mainly or entirely of legumes. So if anyone could transform Australia into an abundant and plentiful land, capable of supporting a massive enough population to take it above OTL's South America in the continental population rankings, it'd be the Indians.
What would be a good POD to cause the Indians to take notice of Oz?
Zachariah
Banned
Well, I'm doing a Papuan civilization wank timeline that's just reached the point of them having migrated to establish settler colonies across Northern Australia, i.r.o 2600YA, and there's a whole heaps of similarities between them at that stage and the Japanese of the late Yayoi Period (2000YA), so you'll have to wait and see just how big its population is by the time we reach the present day in that timeline. But yeah, expect it to make a very big difference...
Zachariah
Banned
Well, like I said, the easiest, least radical and most plausible POD wouldn't require the Indians themselves to take notice of Oz at all- it'd be for the British themselves to simply export Indian indentured laborers over there to join the convicted penal settlers and expand the workforce, using their established Indian indenture system, in exactly the same way that they did IOTL pretty much everywhere else where they held colonial territory except for Australia and New Zealand. That'd end the white Australia concept before it had a chance to be born ITTL, and thus vastly expand the immigration pool, as well as vastly increasing the food productivity and commercial viability of the Australian colonies from the off.
Alternately, if you want an earlier POD that'd really be a wank scenario for both Australia and India, why not stretch Greater India and the Indosphere just that tiny step further, across the Timor Sea? Perhaps the Srivijaya Empire, Majapahit Empire, or even the Kingdom of Tondo could have extended the reach of their thalassocracies to Northern Australia, either via Papua or the Outer Banda Islands, establishing trading posts and settlements on the Australian mainland, and thereby adding them to the Indian trade routes. In an ATL in which 'Indonesia' came to encompass New Guinea and Australia as well, how much more populous might they be?
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