In addition to skilled labour, author Bernard Salt calls for strong and visionary leadership to manage the profound demographic challenges of the 2010s.
"Australia needs the skills, the labour, the tax-paying capacity of new migrants to maintain living standards, to underpin the tax base, and to capture the prosperity of the mining boom.
"If we adopt a small-Australia policy of 70,000 migrants per year, this will add barely 500,000 or three percent to the working age population by 2021.
"If we take the big-Australia path of 180,000 migrants per year, we will add 1.4 million or nine percent to the productive tax-paying population by 2021," Mr Salt explains.
The new book outlines how Australia can add 180,000 migrants per year and deliver a sustainable future.
"We should be directing new migrants to those places where workers are needed in the same way that post-war migrants were directed to Cooma to build the Snowy in the 1950s," Mr Salt said.
The book looks at the demography, the culture and the consumer environment over the 2010s and beyond.
Bernard Salt wrote the book as a response to the most common question he receives from business: “What will Australia and our customers look like at the end of the decade?"
- Australians' loss of confidence in managing the future — scared of growing by 60 percent from 22 million to 36 million over 40 years. And yet over the last 40 years the nation has increased from 12 million to 22 million which is an 80 per cent increase. It’s almost as if this generation of Australians has lost confidence in our ability to manage the future.
- The rise of the special generation — We are all so special. I’m special. You're special. Our kids are special. 'Specialness' is a disease of the modern world and it leads to the thinking that no-one has to make sacrifices. This is all well and good until something like The Big Tilt (or the baby Bust) comes along and forces the nation into a more frugal lifestyle. The special generation doesn’t do hardship.
- The rise of NETTELs, PUMCINS and other urban tribes — Do you compare iPhone diaries to co-ordinate the week’s family activities? Then you are probably a Nettel or Not Enough Time to Enjoy Life. Nettels are everywhere but they are mostly in Canberra where the Nettel hotspot is Curtin. Do you eat goat's cheese? Then you might just be part of the PUMCINS set, Professional Urban Middle Class In Nice Suburbs.
- Beware the Cougar and single men in their 40s deluded about their hotness — It all comes down to demographics. There are more single women than men aged 40-something. This demographic fact is producing two mutually exclusive trends. Older single women who cluster in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay and Melbourne’s St Kilda and single 40-something men who think they are more attractive than they really are because women pay them so much attention.
- Smartphone addiction and intoxification — the insidious fusion of phone and internet has allowed work to expand into a 24/7 proposition. iPhone owners read emails on the weekend On holidays. We are breeding a generation of workers who never switch off. Will there be mass burn out in the 2020s?
- The rise of the moral consumer — the global financial crisis has changed consumer sentiment. Gone is the live-in-the-moment ideology; in its place is a more measured consumer interested in value, paying back debt and atoning for the sins of the past. But how long will this new consumer paradigm last?
- Fastest growing places in the 2010s will be lifestyle and muscle towns — based on projections sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics the fastest growing towns in Australia over the 12 years to 2021 will be Hervey Bay (up 52%), Bunbury (up 39%), Gladstone (up 37%), Gold Coast (up 36%) and Sunshine Coast (up 34%).
The Big Tilt: What Happens When the Boomers Bust and Xers and Ys Inherit the Earth was written by author, columnist and KPMG partner, Bernard Salt.
The book, published by Hardie Grant, takes both a broad and a micro view of the Australian continent and people in the era that lies beyond the baby boom. The big tilt refers to baby boomers tipping or tilting out of the workforce and into retirement.
The Big Tilt is Bernard Salt's fourth book. His previous books: The Big Shift (2001), The Big Picture (2006) and Man Drought (2008).