The term 'Ponzi demography' has now entered the Australian population debate.

It originated from the research and analysis of Joseph Chamie, the former head of the United Nations population division to describe a 'pyramid' population growth policy pushed by vested interests out to profit from a rapid expansion in consumer demand.

We first came across the term while preparing for an interview with Mark O'Connor, co-author of Overloading Australia, just broadcast (July 30) in the program One Plus One on ABC News 24 and available on iView.

A 'Ponzi' scheme or scam is named after the 1910 US fraudster Charles Ponzi and made contemporarily relevant with the recent jailing of another US fraudster Bernard Madoff. Basically it is a fraud built on pushing the plausible belief that money coming into the investment entity will forever be increasing.

Joesph Chamie has been quoted as saying: "Like all Ponzi schemes, Ponzi demography is unsustainable. Among its primary tactics, it exploits the fear of population decline and ageing. Without a young and growing population we are warned of becoming a nation facing financial ruin and a loss of national power. Appeals are also made to one's patriotic duty to have children in order to replenish and expand the homeland."

With both PM Julia Gillard and the alternative PM Tony Abbott now conceding that current rates of domestic Australian population growth must be constrained to "sustainable" levels, those concerned Australians, including former Democrats senator Dr John Coulter, who has been researching and analysing the population question for more than 20 years, and the late great Australian poet Judith Wright, are at last having their voices heard.

They have long been involved with academic researchers in an NGO called Sustainable Population Australia. A political party with similar views, the Stable Population Party of Australia missed out on being registered for the coming half-Senate election, but has been permitted to run as "Group T". Mark O'Connor, a much-published poet, is one of two candidates.

"First time in my life I've joined a political party, but the time is ripe," he said.

The Gillard/Abbott current consensus about constraining population growth does not appear to have been motivated by any voter concern about Australia's prosperity. It has come because they acknowledge quality of life is declining, major cities are increasingly gridlocked, housing is unaffordable, there is a discernible degree of mortgage stress and infrastructure, particularly public transport, is inadequate. The population growth debate was provoked by former PM Kevin Rudd's faux pas that he favoured a 'big Australia'. The debate exposed a very real concern that, if allowed to continue at present levels to the projected 36 million people by 2050, population growth will only exacerbate these adverse conditions.

(Added to the political mix of course would be the streak of xenophobia among many Australians apparent in the irrational fear about the (numerically negligible) number of queue-jumping asylum seekers.)

Mark O'Connor is co-author with William J Lines of Overloading Australia, now in its third edition. This was the book bulk purchased by concerned citizen Dick Smith and posted to all state and federal politicians and all mayors around the country.

In our ABC News 24 One Plus One interview, before we got to domestic population issues, we talked about the global population crisis. For about the last 40 years this has also been known as the population 'explosion'.

"The graph of world population is pretty striking," Mark O'Connor said.

"It took all of human history to put the first one billion people on the planet... and another 118 year years to put on the second billion by the early 20th century.

"Thereafter it's come down to about 12 or 14 years for each extra billion. We're currently adding one billion every 14 or 15 years and yet the United Nations is hoping we'll only add another two billion... or in other words... that birth control will become much more popular even in poor countries".

One Plus One challenged Mark O'Connor over the use of the term 'population holocaust' in his book. Didn't this indicate an alarmist or extremist position?

"I use it in the context of other species. I'm not suggesting that necessarily humans will wipe each other out, but I think for all other species it's a grim situation."

Anybody who had worked in developing third world countries and encountered a forest with a few villages on the edges would notice that within 10 years most of the forest would be gone to be replaced by many villages.

"Now you can lose 50 per cent of the forest and lose hardly any species but if you lose the bulk or all of the forest that's where you get wholesale extinctions. And that's where the world is at present."

Agricultural practices using heavy fertilisers were salinating and acidifying soil which over time would have a devastating effect on food production capacity. There was now a real concern about the sustainability of seafood from the world's oceans.

"The UN is hoping (world population) will peak at nine billion but the less attractive variant is that it might be 12 billion. If most of those 12 billion want to move up in living standards to those enjoyed by people in richer countries that will constitute 12 times the present load on the planet and it's very dubious if the world's eco systems can stand that," he said.

Mark O'Connor does not advocate coercive population control practices like those in China with its mandatory one child policy. Education and information about contraception and birth control is vital as a global response to the population growth crisis.

Interestingly there was a discernible trend to smaller families in richer countries - even in Catholic Spain and Italy the birth rates had declined as people defied the church and actively used contraception to limit the size of their families.

"Paradoxically if you're a peasant (in the third world) an extra child involves no real extra expense and will soon be out in the rice fields planting. But when you're in a rich country you're expected to put your children in school for 12 or more years requiring lots of support. Children cost you more so you have fewer and put more resources into each," he said.

But in the United States population growth was out of control.

"Yet it is entirely immigration fed - both the immigrants coming in themselves and the fact that they often take one or two generations themselves to stop having large families and eventually conform to the countries they've entered. Mexicans in fact have larger families if they can get across the border into the USA."

Mark O'Connor was asked to address what the sustainable population activists call the myths about population growth in Australia.

Myth One: We need population growth to build the Australian taxation base from younger income earners to support an ageing population, particularly through the high cost of their health care demands.

"Old people, far from being a drain on the public purse, are a net contributor to the younger generations up to the age of 75," he said.

While many older people required intensive care in their final years this had to be balanced against the certainty of the total dependency of new-borns and economically unproductive youth up to the age of 20. The current high cost of health care was largely technology driven. Mr O'Connor derided former treasurer Peter Costello's famous urging to Australians to lift their fertility:"One for mum, one for dad - and one for the country".

"In Australia couples are averaging under two children per couple - or per woman - as the demographers prefer to say, since unfortunately couples aren't stable," O'Connor said.

"And that's what we need if we're going to have a positive net migration - more immigrants coming in than emigrants going out. We need to have a birth rate that's a little below two children per woman. And we do."

Myth Two: We need a skills migration program to address this country's skills shortage.

"What skills shortage? The CFMEU says 100,000 young Australians dropped out of work last year and were unable to find work or unable to compete with imported labour," O'Connor said.

"We're told that there's 25 per cent (youth) unemployment in most areas which is crucial. Because that's the age when you either get into the work force or you don't. Teenagers are particularly vulnerable to competition from people coming in who've already got work experience. They're in that position where they can't get experience because they haven't got a job and they can't get a job because they haven't got experience.

"Their best friend is a slight shortage of labour - so that the employer says, 'Before I can send you to the mines to drive a 100 tonne tip truck, I'll have to spend three weeks at my own expense training you. I'd rather hire someone who's already got that, but I can't, so I'll train you'. Importing people pre-trained is a great deal in a small way for that employer; but if you consider that an Australian then has to be supported on social security it's a huge bill for the taxpayer. It makes no sense."

The sustainable population activists are advocating limiting net overseas migration to 70,000 people per year. This would allow Australian families to have as many children as they could individually afford. It would allow for an increase in Australia's humanitarian refugee intake to 20,000 a year and a substantial reduction in 'skills' migration. The aim is to keep Australia's population to around 26 million souls.

At the moment neither the PM nor the alternative PM are anywhere near these suggested solutions or objectives. The sustainable population activists are also critical of the Greens Party which they say has avoided the population question even from a climate change or carbon footprint perspective.

(Professor Tim Flannery, former Australian of the Year and a patron of Sustainable Population Australia guesstimates the long-term human carrying capacity of the Australian continent and Tasmania might be as low as 8 million to 12 million people. Taken to its logical conclusion this would mean that, like kangaroos in plague proportions, we would have to start culling Australians to get back to the species balance needed to restore biodiversity. Only joking. That's the thing about humans says Mark O'Connor. We're a very long-lived species. Once you've got a given collection of people you've got them for a very long time.)

And what about sustaining Australian prosperity and living standards without further building the domestic consumer market through increasing the population? This is not an issue in Australia's current buoyant commodity-based circumstances, according to SPA. And it is unlikely to be a factor for many years to come.

"We can't go on growing our population forever, perhaps to 36 million by 2050 and over 100 million by the end of the century, just to make business conditions easier," O'Connor says.

Constraining population growth goes against the consistent advice to Australian governments from the Business Council of Australia which represents 100 of the biggest companies and corporations operating in the Australian market. It also goes against the submissions of the Urban Task Force, representing the biggest players in the Australian housing and construction industry.

Former PM Kevin Rudd made his 'big Australia' remark at a BCA luncheon in October last year. Sydney and Melbourne would grow to seven million people each by 2049.

"Brissie will double to four million.. Perth to three point five million" he said happily to the receptive business folk effectively repeating BCA policy.

Since the cat was let out of the bag by these remarks the political resistance across the Australian polity has grown, leaving the BCA president Graham Bradley to backpedal somewhat in a recent opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review (July 23):

"None of this is to say that Australians should be expected to support further population growth without reassurance that justifiable concerns are being addressed. Gaining support from citizens already worried about clogged roads, strained services, pollution and social cohesion means governments across the country have to do a better job in explaining growth, but, more importantly, in planning for it."

In his article Is population growth a Ponzi scheme? Joseph Chamie remarked:

"'Economic growth requires population growth' is the basic message that Ponzi demography want the public to swallow. No mention is made of the additional profits they reap and the extra costs the public bears."

This is where the Australian population growth debate will now go, whichever party is elected on August 21.

For the rest of the world though, post-GFC and in the context of climate change and the global population explosion, building prosperity without economic growth has emerged at the most crucial of questions.

Prosperity without growth**.

Discuss!

**Prosperity Without Growth - Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson was published by Earthscan in the USA and UK last year.

Quentin Dempsterpresents Stateline NSW on ABC 1 and is a contributor to One Plus One on ABC News 24.