Australia is growing, and Canberra is growing even faster. Last year, the country added about 405,000 people, surpassing 25 million. That was an increase of 1.6 per cent in a year. It was by no means rapid growth, and much of it was due to migrants arriving from overseas.
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Meanwhile, the ACT's population grew by 1.8 per cent - or about 7600 people. Overseas migrants made up most of Canberra's new arrivals, too (about three in every five).
For much of the past three years, this city's population expanded at a faster rate than most other states and territories. Yet that phase now appears to be over. The capital's recent rapid growth spurt is slowing. The latest ACT budget's estimated population growth for this financial year - 2 per cent - was almost certainly too high. Its forecasts of 1.75 per cent for each of the coming four years also seem overly optimistic.
Some nostalgic Canberrans would celebrate these signs of slowing growth, because they believe Canberra is already too large. This may be true of stretched cities such as Melbourne and Sydney, but there is little basis for suggesting this of the ACT. There will come a time when Canberra is approaching the limits of its growth, but we are far from that point. This city has an extremely low population density. The ACT government is rightly committed to building upwards rather than outwards, and, over time, Canberra's increasing density will allow its residents to be more efficient consumers of water, fuel and other finite resources.
Population growth is also crucial for the ACT economy. Not because more people means more consumption, but because Canberra's economic future depends on the development of a sizeable, specialist labour market. We need to build and maintain a reputation as a city with a high concentration of highly skilled workers; a place where the people themselves are a financial lure.
Some nostalgic Canberrans would celebrate signs of slowing growth, as they believe this city is already too big.
There are two challenges to this.
One is the federal Coalition's apparent ambivalence towards (and perhaps even rejection of) Canberra as the rightful home of government administration. While the ACT has embraced other industries - only one in four Canberra workers are Commonwealth employees - the city still depends deeply on federal spending. As the Legislative Assembly's independent budget adviser warned this month, "given the current fiscal stance of the Commonwealth government, it is difficult to see how population growth for the ACT will not moderate to some degree in the years ahead". The adviser's report noted the three-pronged threat of the Coalition's fiscal restraint, its plans to decentralise parts of the public service, and its recent decision to increase the annual "efficiency dividend" (cuts to government agencies' operating budgets).
The other challenge - which is related to Commonwealth job opportunities - is the ACT's struggle to retain new residents. Many people who come to Canberra don't put down deep roots; they leave within a handful of years. Internal migration data for the last financial year was positive for the ACT: it showed healthy net migration to Canberra from elsewhere in Australia. But the net flow of residents in each of the previous four years was out of this city.
This outward flow of people coincided with steep public service cuts under Tony Abbott, and with the staffing cap he introduced and his Coalition successors retained. There may be little the ACT government can do about federal Coalition policies. But while these policies harm Canberra, the local Assembly must do everything it can to keep building a city to which other Australians are willing to move to and stay.
