Treasury’s recent upward revision of Australia’s projected population estimate for 2049 of 35 million, due to a rising birthrate and rapid growth in migration, still falls well short of what Australia needs, and what infrastructure visionaries such as Dr J.J.C. Bradfield, or more recently Prof. Lance Endersbee, have demonstrated is possible.

Dr J.J.C. Bradfield, architect of Sydney’s underground railway, Sydney Harbour Bridge and the shamefully still shelved Bradfield Scheme, was calling for a 1991 population target of 40 million back in 1941. Emeritus Prof. Lance Endersbee, former Dean of Engineering at Monash University and a veteran of the Snowy Mountains Scheme and Tasmanian hydro scheme, stated in 2006 that “The top end of Australia could carry 50 million people alone.”

Standing in the way is the Government’s economic rationalist monetary policies, reaffirmed by Treasurer Wayne Swan at the recent launch of a new institute for population ageing research when he committed the government to “spending restraint”: “New policies will have to be funded by reprioritising within existing resources, rather than expanding the total quantum of government spending—doing more with less,” he said.

“Such comments reveal the true impotence of our current political leadership in this country,” CEC leader Craig Isherwood said today. “Dr Bradfield would be turning in his grave, as he himself said, ‘To populate and develop Australia we must spend money to make money.’

“The major infrastructure projects and expanded immigration policies that occurred in Australia during the fifties is the only answer to achieve real economic health for future generations. What’s needed is the political will and courage, as demonstrated by Ben Chifley and his approval of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. Such vision saw Australia’s population increase 25% in that decade and there is no reason it can’t happen again.

“The courage though is to defy the current short sighted economic monetarist dogma and implement our own credit-based system to finance the projects,” Mr Isherwood continued. “We need greater regulatory control of our banking system along with a government controlled national bank, able to issue credit at long term low interest to fund such infrastructure projects. Such a bank could be in the form of government agencies, like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation along with the Tennessee Valley Authority which Franklin D. Roosevelt established in the U.S., which lifted that country out of the Great Depression to become the industrial powerhouse of the world.” (To read more about the measures employed by FDR click here to purchase the LaRouche Special Report, Economics: The End of A Delusion)

“Such growth in the real physical economy, rather than the current speculative ‘growth’ observed in the paper economy, will see real investment returns flowing back into our ailing health and social welfare sectors, which this country desperately needs.

“People need jobs, and major water projects provide a much needed boost to our machine tool industries through their construction, as well as the longer term benefits of opening up more of Australia for more expansive and intensive agricultural development and general rural sector growth.”

Mr Isherwood concluded, “Lyndon LaRouche has forecast the imminent collapse of the U.S. economy and the global monetarist system, unless there is a major policy shift within the Obama administration. If the Rudd government truly wants to take the lead in global economic reform on the world stage, it must invest in some real nation building infrastructure and establish the institutions to generate the credit required to do so.”