Whaaattt?

Yes, Australia is an extremely arid continent. And even around the coast, the clearance of forest a century or more ago has led to a lot of ground becoming heavily salinated and infertile. There is an excellent recent documentary about it here .

Canada and Alaska have permafrost, mountainous terrain and general inaccessibility.

 

No need for more housing in the UK...........apparently a high %age of 16 to 40 year olds are leaving the UK for the likes of Australia and the UAE for better salaries and lifestyle. All sorted ( that is of course if you can understand/believe the recent immi/emigation figures compiled by the authorities )

 

Well good luck to them in Australia, the salaries might look good but they have a very high cost of living, unliveable summer temperatures and some of the most venomous snakes in the world.

 

Australia is very arid, but Canada isn't. Canada has some major inland cities. Calgary, Winnipeg and Edmonton to name just 3, with a joint population in excess of 4 million.

 

Indeed! Smoke-and-mirrors figures, I'd say. Not that the BBC showed any willingness to explore their veracity.

Re the aforementioned institution, there is actually a programme I will watch on next week - David Dimbleby exploring the point of the monarch. Now, it could all turn out to be some obsequious propaganda in favour, given his previous work commentating on major royal events, but if he does actually turn over a few stones and look underneath, it might have some useful purpose.

 

I never said Canada was arid? I said it has a lot of uninhabitable land. It has only 4.5 people per square km. In a list of countries ordered by population density it is at number 230 out of 242. Australia is at number 237 with 3.5 people per square km.

List of countries and dependencies by population density - Wikipedia

 

What an interesting list, @Escarpment. I never knew the residents of Gibraltar were so squashed in. Maybe that's what happens when a place converts into a tax haven.

 

Macau must be pretty scary, since it appears to be 3 times as crowded as Hong Kong and we know how bad that is ...

 

I had a cousin that came from Winnipeg, she moved to California
I think the minus 35c temperatures in winter got her down.

 

Gibraltar was always crowded because of the limitations on flat enough ground to build on. Also children wanted to live within reach of their families, so tended to stay on the Rock rather than ‘emigrate’ across the border. I remember (60 years ago) visiting a couple living in a two bedroom flat with their grown up son. He was about to get married, and his wife would move in with them. They very proudly showed us a fold down shelf they had just installed, to act as a dining table to give the young couple some privacy!
Now of course, there are all the areas of land reclaimed from the sea, mainly built up with blocks of flats. The biggest restriction on expansion is the availability of fresh water. Lots more desalination plants now, whereas the population used to rely on water collected from the concreted rainwater capture areas on the higher slopes. Homes would have two taps, one with fresh water which only operated during restricted times of the day, and a second one with pumped salt water for other household uses. I believe that saltwater is still provided for flushing loos and the like, although the fresh water is now virtually all from desalination plants.

 

A friend of mine lives in Vancouver. Her newly wed daughter and partner couldn't afford the house prices there, so they moved to Calgary, about an hr's flight away. However, because of the mountainous terrain between the two, the weather in Calgary is much less benign, with huge amounts of snow and a lot of minus temps. It was quite a shock after mild, temperate Vancouver.

 

Macau is pretty much all urban, Hong Kong has some non-urban mountainous areas and some fairly large country park regions. I think the urban/built-up parts are just as densely populated.

 

Canada has one of the highest house price to income ratios among developed nations. Canada's 'regular' homes now cost millions. Can a new government fix it?

Another interesting statistic is that 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border. And only about 5% of Canada's landmass can be used for growing crops.

 

I wasn't suggesting it was a particularly good idea but each makes a choice - no different from someone choosing to live in the UK or the USA ad infinitum. They believe the opportunities are better. Who knows - maybe in 20 years they'll arrive back here.
Unless I've missed something, people in Australia manage to survive in their summer temperatures - may take a bit of getting used to ( as well as air conditioning ) and some areas are worse than others. Venemous snakes yes and also the odd venemous spider. Every country in the world has risks - that's a part of life so little point in denying it.