Pratyush Chalasani

Back in 1990, Beyond 2000 aired a special episode looking forward 30 years to how Australia might be in the year 2020.
Thanks to a scholarly gentleman/lady who uploaded the video to the Internet Archive, we can look back on the predictions they made and see how they match up with the current reality:

When I first saw this back in the day I was too young to really understand most of what was being discussed, I mostly watched the TV show for the cool gadgets and technologies they would review.

I’ve written up some non-exhaustive notes on the themes discussed in the video (ignoring Bruce Ruxton’s ramblings — you can guess exactly what they are). I’ll post an update in the future when I have time to add more details.

Population

The prediction of 25 million was spot on.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics puts the national population as of June 2019 at approximately 25,364,300.
At the end of June 1990 the population was approximately 17,026,800. This represents an almost 50% increase over 30 years.

The video claims the growth will come from a combination of 150K overseas immigrants and 250K local births per year.
The ABS data linked above shows a natural increase of 143,300 and net overseas immigration of 238,300 (for the year ending June 2019). For the last year at least, the numbers seem to be reversed with immigrants outnumbering local births (although, I haven’t gone back to check previous years to see if it’s just a recent trend).

Japan

There were a lot of worries about Japan taking over the world back in 1990. This was a year before their economic bubble burst, so they were seen to be riding high at the time with no end in sight.

Interestingly, the video claims that while there was a lot of foreign investment by Japan it still ranked behing New Zealand at the time.

I’m guessing the fears mostly came more from perceptions of what they might do in the future and the more substantial investments they were seen making in the US.

Even the claims about military superiority didn’t really play out.

Although, nowadays it’s all about China taking over the world, there’s no mention of China in the video. I guess they weren’t taken too seriously at the time.

Culture

Lots of fears about the Asianisation of Australia. This seems to be resurging again with Chinese foreign investment.

Aboriginal Society

A treaty is definitely going to happen, and aboriginal people are have to make it happen. That treaty is going to give the aboriginal people pride, and pride itself will carry aboriginal peoples’ future.

There’s been a national apology, but no formal treaty (yet).

In 2020 they’re still over-represented in unemployment and the prison population, and have chronic health issues.

Economy

Australia once had the highest standard of living in the world. We are now ranked 27th.

It seems an earlier mining boom in the 60’s gave the country a nice windfall, which was not re-invested in building up out local industries.
This seems otbe a recurring theme for Australia.

Back then and still now, we rely heavily on exporting agricultural produce and raw matreials.

There was a passing mention that the manufacturing industry won’t succeed without a local base population of around 40 million to support it. I wish they went into more detail on this.

Politics

“The chances of a woman becoming Prime Minister are better than they have ever been… The population is ready”

Julia Gillard became prime minister in 2010.

Crime

Lots of talk about rising crime rates. In reality, the statistics show crime trending down in general.

Defense

There were worries about lack of surveillance of Australia’s coast, especially towards the north since it was feared Indonesia might attempt an invasion in the future.
In 1997 the Jindalee Operational Radar Network was completed. It provides an over-the-horizon radar capability over the northern coastline.

Environment

A lot of talk about the greenhouse effect and how it will cause weather patterns to become more extreme (I noticed they didn’t use the term Climate Change anywhere in the video).

There’s likely to be a longer bushfire season, and in some areas the likelihood of tragic natural disasters will be increased.

Spot on, again. As of writing this post in the summer of 2020, there are unprecedented bushfires still raging that have burned large parts of the country.

Unfortunately, our current prime minister is a climate change denier. It looks like we (collectively) haven’t learned much in 30 years.

Also expect more tropical cyclones, which will be 20% more intense… Possible areas where they occur could shift several hundres kilometres south.

I don’t recall seeing reports of more frequent cyclones (not sure about their intensity either).
Thankfully they haven’t migrated further south as of now.

Water from icebergs was floated as an idea to handle future water shortages. This never ended up happening on any large scale, but there are some niche products out there for people with too much money.

It also looks like we were playing catch-up with Melbourne with our dust storm in 2009. It turns out Melbourne already had theirs in 1983.

Travel

Talk about VFT between Sydney and Melbourne, which would cover the distance in 3 hours. The plan was to build it based on European TGV system.

I remember lots of talk on and off over the years about this, but it still just never goes anywhere. In 2020, it still takes just as long to get to Melbourne from Sydney.

I believe by the year 2020 we’ll have very fast rail of the sort we’re talking of from Brisbane through Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne to Adelaide.

Nope.

Also talk about building supersonic aircraft:

The timescale that you're talking about, perhaps those will be here. In which case we'll be travelling 3 times as fast.

Nope. Concorde was retired in 2003, and no new commercial supersonic aircraft have flown since.

Multi-Function Polis

This is another project I remember reading about. The idea was to build a new city (possibly along the new VFT corridor) to support research and new businesses, kind of like a city-sized technology park. Due to Japanese investment, there was concern of it becoming an Asian enclave.
It never ended up being built.

There are 2 examples given of overseas cities built along similar lines:
Tsukuba Science City in Japan has received criticism for being a generally unhappy place to live.
Sophia Antipolis in the French Riviera seems to have turned out a lot better.

Space

Australia has the georgraphic pre-requisistes to have an involvement in space industry.

There was a plan for a space port in Cape York, but it was never built.

Internet

This was something I noticed was missing from the episode.
There’s no metion of the Internet at all. In 1990 it mostly existed as an academic network. The World Wide Web would not be invented until 1993.

A mere 5 years later in 1995 (and only 2 years after we got the Web) they would air their Cyberspace special episode, showing how quickly the Internet starting have an impact on society.

Construction of the National Broadband Network would not begin until 2011, and then completely stuffed up after a change in government.