Last week, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced a 2 per cent leap (439,000 people) in the country’s population in the year to March, a huge dust storm blew in from the arid interior to blanket much of Eastern Australia. Are the two things connected?

Green groups would probably say, yes. Others, maybe. “Dust storms are a natural phenomenon, but they are influenced by human activities and are now just as serious as traffic and industrial air pollution,” says Laurence Barrie, chief researcher at the World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva, which is working with 40 countries to develop a dust storm warning system.

Most of the recent population increase -- almost 300,000 people -- was from immigration. But the birth rate is up, too, with 160,000 babies born during the year. On that basis Australia’s population could “balloon” form its present 21.8 million to 35 million over the next 40 years.

Conservationist Charles Berger says immigration should be cut back. The government seems ambivalent; it reportedly welcomed the population boom because it means the economy will keep growing. But it already has cut back on immigration and says it can continue to do so.

As for the baby boom (the birth rate rose from 1.73 to 1.93 between 2001 and 2008) family trends researcher Barry Maley says the recession, along with present government policies affecting marital stability and family income, may put an end to that -- with implications for the ageing of the population.

There must be some new ideas the Aussies can come up with to make more of their huge country inhabitable and productive.

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