|
I wrote a program a few weeks back to check Danna Vales theory (in fact I don't think she even said it ...). I used numbers from the ABS web-site for total population now, and projected birth-rates, immigration etc. There are no official numbers by religion, but most agree there are probably 500,000 muslims in Australia. There are also no official birthrates by religion, so I guessed a little here. And obviosly the model I wrote can be run with any assumtions you like for all the above. For example running the model with a non-muslim birth-rate of 0.7 and a Muslim birth-rate of 7 (extraordinarily high - definitely greater than actual) gave us, in 2050, a non-Muslim population of 37.5 million versus a Muslim population of 4.5 million. To get the Muslim population to equal the non-Muslim population in 2050 I had to assume a Muslim birth-rate of 14, which I think is probably impossible without some serious reproductive science breakthroughs, or social regimentation (neither of which are absolutely impossible of course ...). Note: I also made assumptions about immigration (100,00 pa, 10% Muslim) and the death rate (no-one in my model dies, which explains the unrealistic 2050 population numbers - but this error doesn't significantly favour either side).
| 
