The Ageing Population

Sir: Oliver Friendship raises some important issues relating to the ageing of the Australian population (“Our Ageing Population and the Constraints on State Power”, April 2021).

He notes, correctly, that higher immigration cannot realistically solve the issues associated with an ageing population. While the “Big Australia” lobby continues to claim that higher levels of immigration are needed to combat population ageing, the unavoidable reality is that immigrants grow old too. Higher immigration has almost no long-run effect on changing the age structure and simply increases the total size of the population. This creates bigger problems in the future.

The infrastructure costs alone associated with rapid, immigration-led population growth are eye-watering. The infrastructure costs of settling one new immigrant have been estimated at $100,000. In 2018-19 net overseas migration to Australia was 244,000, implying an infrastructure bill of $24.4 billion for that financial year alone. By all accounts Australia is already facing a chronic infrastructure deficit, previously estimated to be around $800 billion.

There is also evidence that elevated immigration levels have driven down Australian fertility rates. Higher immigration tends to place more upward pressure on housing costs and downward pressure on wages, thereby making it harder for younger Australians to establish themselves. This delays family formation and reduces family size, a point made by economist Andrew Stone in his recent book Restoring Hope.

According to researcher Katharine Betts at the Australian Population Research Institute:

The projections show that if policy makers were serious about modifying Australia’s age structure the most cost-effective way to do this would be to support the two-child family. One way to do this would be to prune the immigration intake and, by reducing competition, improve housing affordability. This in itself would promote a modest increase in fertility from its current level of 1.74.

Far from fixing the ageing population “problem”, current federal government policy might actually be making things worse across the board—a classic case of the treatment being worse than the disease.

Alexander Walsh

Disruptors and Adjusters

Sir: May I suggest our categorising of left and right wing as driven by organisation and ideology is wide of the mark? The same could be said for the battles in the “culture war”.

It seems the people the media dote on are in reality frustrated with their position in life and envious of people who are different or have more. They are well entrenched in our institutions and influential in the private sector at this time. But they are not organised, have no agreed manifesto or hidden string pullers. Let’s call them the Disruptors.

The other mindset is not so much right-wing as more aware of the complexities of the world, and usually older. They are the Adjusters, preserving things and adapting when it is necessary. Not media-sexy.

The culture war is then the swing of the pendulum from one to the other as societies change and generations age. Whether this distinction could ever replace the left/right dichotomy is another question.

Wayne Fletcher

The Narrowed University

Sir: Amidst the remonstrations and fuss about the present state of Australian universities, partly abetted by the article by Mervyn Bendle in your October issue, and how matters were better in the past, I feel impelled to offer a comment on the basis of my actually having “been there” as a student, academic, lecturer and researcher in the 1960s, while still active in the present.

Readers may wish to be reminded that, certainly into the decade of the 1980s, the accepted collective noun for academics was an “absence”. The knocks of students on locked staff doors, responded to by resounding silence, were the key feature of being in a department in those days. If staff and students now only communicate by email, as proposed by one of your correspondents, then at least there is a form of communication which was entirely absent in the past. Unfortunately, in my present experience of universities, many senior academics do not even respond electronically.

Young academics today are present and not absent. They communicate and support in ways far beyond past practices. All of this during times when these academics are either in casual or fixed-term appointments and trying desperately to keep the system alive for the sake of the student. And the staff have no time to do the research which continues to be the avenue whereby they may hope to have a future in the system. All of this is done without the salaries (and the 17.5 per cent superannuation loading and the leave loadings) enjoyed by staff in the past.

History as it was lived by students forty to fifty years ago needs to be remembered rather than imagined.

J.M. Innes

Abusing the Confessional

Sir: In his article “The Legislative Assault on the Seal of Confession” (December 2020), Rocco Loiacono argues that forcing priests to report sexual abuse claims made in confessionals may discourage the victims of sexual abuse to “disclose that abuse in the confessional if the priest was obliged to report it”. He misunderstands the purpose of the Catholic Church’s confessional. The website Catholics Come Home states that the confessional allows sinners to obtain forgiveness for their sins and reconcile with God and the Church. “The sacrament ‘washes us clean’, and renews us in Christ,” it claims.

It seems unlikely that victims of sexual abuse would consider themselves to be sinners and choose to repent the acts of others in the confessional. This therefore strikes me as a straw-man argument unworthy of serious consideration as a reason to oppose criminalising the failure of priests to report sexual abuse presented in the confessional.

A serious oversight in the article is the reason why deviant priests confess their sins in the confessional. Most priests found guilty of sexual abuse did not perpetrate this most horrible of crimes just once or twice but dozens or hundreds of times. It is likely that they made use of the confessional so that they could be forgiven for their crimes and to have their soul (and conscience) washed clean, allowing them to renew their criminal activities afresh. Further, if a priest died after making his confession and before committing more sexual abuse, his soul would be free from mortal sin and he would ascend into heaven (depending upon what other sins he had committed and confessed).

Having been taught by Catholic nuns and priests for twelve years, it now seems clear to me that the confessional was and is likely to still be used by many sinners including criminals to clear their conscience, return their soul to a pure sin-free state and allow them to repeat their sexual abuse, knowing that the church would again absolve them when they next confessed their sins in the confessional. In other words, some priests (and undoubtedly some lay members of the Church) have used the confessional to allow them to continue their deviant and destructive behaviour in the knowledge their sins had been forgiven by God.

The forgiveness of sin, washing of the soul and renewal in Christ provided by the confessional serve to perpetuate the sinful behaviour. All that is required is a false or insincere repentance as stated by the confessor to the priest in the confessional. It is time for this vicious circle of abuse/repentance/forgiveness/abuse to be broken by criminalising the failure to report such abuse to the police.

Bernie Masters