Australia, the sunburnt country with vast empty spaces and fragile ecosystems, is on a collision course with demographic madness. According to projections highlighted in recent analysis, our population is barrelling toward 84 million by 2100 under current high-migration trends. Entrepreneur Dick Smith has sounded the alarm, warning of a potential 100 million souls crammed into this arid land by century's end, a figure his grandchildren could witness. Yet even these eye-watering numbers represent a conservative floor for what some deranged elites in business, bureaucracy, and politics quietly champion. Talk of 150 million, or even fantasies of one billion in the wilder corners of globalist ambition, has floated in policy circles and think-tank musings. Open borders as the ultimate ideal? Let's run with the reductio ad absurdum: limitless immigration in a world of 10 billion competitors. The result isn't a thriving superpower but a dystopian nightmare of sardine-can living, where "filing cupboard" apartments make today's cramped rentals look like spacious luxury.
The MacroBusiness piece lays out the trajectory driven overwhelmingly by net overseas migration, not natural increase. Australia's fertility rate hovers below replacement, meaning the engine of growth is imported population. Successive governments, Labor and Coalition alike, have supercharged this, with intakes hitting records amid housing shortages, infrastructure strain, and cost-of-living crises. Dick Smith's point is blunt: relentless immigration levels project us into absurdity for a dry continent where water, arable land, and liveable climate are finite. Yet the growth lobby: property developers, universities hooked on international students, big business craving cheap labour, and Treasury models addicted to headline GDP, pushes harder. "Big Australia" isn't a slur; it's their North Star.
Scale it up. At 84 million, Sydney and Melbourne balloon into megacities rivalling Tokyo or São Paulo, with gridlocked roads, overburdened hospitals, and vanishing green spaces. Push to 150 million as some industry voices have endorsed, and you're talking densities that rival Bangladesh in pockets of the east coast while the interior remains largely uninhabitable. Billions? That's pure fever dream, the entire current world population squeezed into a landmass the size of the contiguous US lower 48 but with far less usable territory. Open borders in a globalised world means competing not just with skilled migrants but with the planet's masses fleeing instability, poverty, or simply seeking better prospects. House prices? Forget the current crisis. With demand from a theoretical 10 billion global pool, median homes in capital cities wouldn't just be unaffordable; they'd be lottery tickets for the connected elite. The rest? Vertical slums: micro-apartments, pod living, or "filing cupboards" stacked like shipping containers. Sardine tins would envy the elbow room.
This isn't sustainable abundance; it's a Ponzi scheme on steroids. Mass low-skilled inflows inflate GDP through consumption and construction but dilute per capita wealth, wages for ordinary workers, and social cohesion. Infrastructure lags decades behind: trains at capacity, schools bursting, hospitals queuing, water catchments stressed. Environmental toll mounts — more land clearing, biodiversity loss, emissions targets missed despite the rhetoric. Australia's unique ecology, already battling droughts, fires, and invasive species, wasn't designed for European-scale densities, let alone Asian megacity ones. Quality of life erodes: longer commutes, less nature access, higher crime in some enclaves from rapid cultural imports without assimilation pressure. Natives feel like strangers as "spot the Aussie" becomes a grim joke in major cities.
Elites preaching this vision insulate themselves in leafy enclaves or gated compounds. They benefit from cheaper nannies, baristas, and tradies while asset prices soar on their investment properties. Ordinary Australians — young families, renters, outer-suburban workers — pay the price in stagnant real wages, delayed homeownership, and a sense of lost nationhood. Birth rates among citizens stay suppressed by high costs, yet policy doubles down on replacement rather than incentivising families through affordable housing, tax relief, or cultural support for parenthood. Dick Smith is right to flag the ridiculousness: a dry land can't magically sustain endless growth without trade-offs that hollow out the Australian dream.
The reductio exposes the folly. Limitless borders in a world of billions guarantees not cosmopolitan utopia but stratified chaos: a thin layer of global oligarchs and compliant professionals atop a seething underclass in vertical favelas. Competition for every resource: jobs, water, space, schools, intensifies. Social trust frays as parallel communities form. Strategic risks rise with demographic shifts altering voting patterns and loyalty. Far from "enriching diversity," unchecked scale risks importing the very dysfunctions people flee. Europe's experiments with rapid non-Western inflows offer cautionary parallels: knife crime spikes, welfare strain, native backlash.
Australia's strength has always been selective migration: skilled, assimilable inflows that build on our high-trust, high-productivity foundations. A sane policy caps net migration at sustainable levels, say 70,000 or less annually, allowing natural stabilisation around 30-40 million. Prioritise citizens first: housing supply reforms, family incentives, infrastructure ahead of population. Reject the growth-at-all-costs ideology that treats people as economic units rather than inheritors of a unique way of life.
84 million by 2100 isn't destiny; it's a policy choice. The elites' bolder visions of 150 million, a billion, or open floodgates are suicidal. Australians must demand better; a smaller, richer, greener nation where the next generations inherit liveability, not congestion and compromise. The vast continent deserves stewardship, not suburban sprawl to the horizon. Time to slam the brakes on the migration Ponzi before the dream turns into a nightmare of filing-cabinet existence.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/06/australias-population-on-course-for-84-million-by-2100/