Whereas most recycling (apart from composting and metals) is pretty energy-costly and pollution-generating and not worth doing, recycling of drink containers that can actually be reused - notably glass containers - would substantially reduce litter and plastic pollution. Complementary to such a scheme should be discouragement of throw-away plastic containers. There is so much we can still do to reduce our energy-footprints, as well as reducing population growth.

Humane Society investigation reveals workers kicking piglets like soccer balls, swinging sick piglets in circles, and ruthlessly beating mother pigs, who were trapped in 'gestation crates'.

CO2 Group's Chief CEO, Andrew Grant says that anthropogenic climate change science is quite simple really: "It's a function of increased population on the earth." Candobetter.net received the following as a press release today. We obviously like the idea of wildlife corridors connecting national parks. By the same token, nothing in the corporate or the government area can be taken at face value. Until the corridors are established; until we can see that more is not taken away by related interests somewhere else, we have to remain cautious. Nonetheless, on face value, this is cheering news. So is the Chief CEO of CO2 Group's attitude to human population growth and carbon emissions.

We applaud the initiatives of the Gillard Federal Government today in refunding Aged Care. PM unveils $3.7bn overhaul of aged care, Friday April 20, 2012. We are particularly impressed to read that: "The [Gillard] government rejected a Productivity Commission recommendation that proposed allowing the use of reverse mortgage facilities to help fund care costs." Good on the Gillard government! Reverse mortgages steal inheritances, impoverish youth and render them homeless, and amount to double charges for old age care provision (on top of taxes). We republish a relevant and well-researched article on this matter. See also "Ageism" and ABC article on reverse mortgages.Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk

The period since the Murray-Darling Basin Authority released its guide to the proposed plan, nearly two years ago, has been marked by sustained outrage from all quarters.

Sustainable Population Australia(SPA) is pleased to announce the auction of the 4 piece art work “Encroachment” by noted Kimberley artist and SPA member Jackie Ellis.

The Lebensborn program was a completely demented creation of Hitler, overseen by Himmler in Nazi Germany. The aim was to create a 'super-race' by organising 'superior specimens' (many who were SS men) to produce children with more or less willing German and other completely unwilling women in occupied countries. The German women apparently agreed to surrender any infants to the German government, where they were raised in orphanages.

Call for Victorians to write to the Hon. Anthony Albanese, Minister for Infrastructure and Transport at A.Albanese, to oppose funding of the East West Link and to support funding public transport instead, especially the Doncaster Rail Link along the Eastern Freeway.
The Baillieu Government has resurrected Sir Rod Eddington’s discredited road transport project and the Premier now has it as the centerpiece of his recently announced transport plan. The Victorian State Government has asked the Federal Government to provide funds of $30 million for a “review”. This would be the third review in the last 10 years. Victorian citizens, members of Protectors of Public Lands Victoria, working free on behalf of the public, and representing 16 democratic groups, traveled to Canberra recently to put the case for public transport. Here is their report.

Also published by Yarra Campaign for Action on Transport

Public housing’s operating model is unsustainable. Costs are outstripping rental income and the division is forecast to be in deficit in 2012–13. Full report here.

Peter Verwer of the Property Council of Australia is publicising a 'campaign' to convince politicians that Australians want a bigger population and cities. It's called "www.makemycitywork." The spin is that the only problem the public perceive with big cities is that the infrastructure hasn't kept up with demand. So the Property Council and its business allies plan to fix that, don't they. The content is thin but it's all part of a blitz on the public from the Growth Lobby, along with Bernard Salt's plans for astroturfing public support for population growth and big business, Elizabeth Prosser's push to abolish local councils in Victoria, Mary Massina's lobbying for council amalgamation in Tasmania... It's yet another relentless campaign by big business to further reduce Australia to a mine and real-estate economy for their own benefit and it requires getting rid of more of Australians' democratic rights, along with anything natural and free that gets in its way.

The information in this article, which most Australians find quite shocking, has for a couple of years remained at the bottom of a very long article about Melbourne 2030. Since we have published (above) an article about the Property Council of Australia's latest good cop campaign, it seems very important to draw peoples' attention to the much more naked bad cop Property Council campaign of 2010. We have therefore reproduced the guts of it below. (And below that, another way forward, a counter-growth lobby view.) (Linked to from Twitter. tinyurl.com/bvaupkb bit.ly/HeU7FM)

SELECTION CRITERIA: Members of the board must collectively possess the following required skills and/or experience: * business acumen, * public entity governance, * strategic planning, * conservation and land management, * community affairs, * knowledge of Indigenous issues, * tourism and recreation, * law, * academic research, * leadership experience. Parks Victoria have been very weak on fauna and hopeless on population policy, so consider applying and making a difference.

"Oakeshott has been very vocal about the need to "challenge the power of money in politics" yet he seems to have been strongly influenced by the desperate native forest logging industry to support forest furnaces. We are very disappointed with his actions on this." (Prue Acton, Australian Forests and Climate Alliance.)

VicForests must this week pay Environment East Gippsland $630,000 in legal costs which it incurred defending its wrong action in planning to destroy wildlife habitat forest in Australia. This, and a pending case also mentioned in this article, is a welcome indication of independence in Victoria's judiciary, despite wide corruption of the democratic system in Victoria and the rest of Australia.

The producers of Q and A have their favourites when it comes to “thinktanks”, with the free marketeering IPA topping the list with 4 different panellists and 11 appearances in total (not including appearances by former staff members). Meanwhile, prominent progressive think tank The Australia Institute has never featured on Q&A, despite TAI’s current head Dr Richard Denniss debating Lord Christopher Monckton about climate change at the National Press Club last year and its former head being prominent author and intellectual Professor Clive Hamilton.

Parliament votes on Monday! As a result of a peculiarity in the way Government works, the motion to call native forest furnace electricity ‘renewable energy’, has been sneakily placed on the 'non-controversial' list. That means that unless the Labor Government decides to force a vote, within days this back-door change in renewable energy policy could sneak through Parliament without there even being a vote!

Nicolas Sarkosi wants to reinforce European business, using the US example of giving public work to American companies. "Why should Europe forbid what America, the most economically liberal country in the world, permits itself? In this way European taxes would support European companies that have chosen to produce and manufacture in Europe." Sarkozi has also called for tighter immigration controls in Europe.

Australia is the world's second largest arms importer, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Yet there are no armed wars in Australia and our local crime industry could not possibly use $1,677,000,000 worth of military weapons as estimated to be our imported value in 2010. Are we on-selling and who is involved?

Free Software Melbourne is hosting Brett Smith from the Free Software Foundation on 5 March 2012 at 6pm at Melbourne University.
Public lecture: Free Software and the Law

This audit assessed whether State Trustees is effectively managing the financial and legal interests of represented persons. It examined the extent to which State Trustees is meeting its legislative and administrative responsibilities, the systems and processes that enable State Trustees to measure quality, timeliness and cost effectiveness, and the adequacy of State Trustees' communication and accountability processes to represented persons. The audit found that State Trustees is not able to clearly demonstrate that it is fulfilling its obligations to represented persons. State Trustees’ direct engagement with represented persons is not sufficient for it to be assured that their needs and wishes are properly understood.

In her marvellously lucid book, Wilful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan, writes about the institutionalisation of denial in the service of profit, the acquisition of wealth, and the defence of personally comforting ideologies. "Bandura has spent a lifetime dissecting the moral disengagement required for the perpetration of criminal and inhuman acts, a journey that has taken him from the tobacco industry, the gun lobby, the television business to the multiple industries implicated in environmental degradation. He has a deep understanding of the forces at work which encourage employees to be blind to their collusion in these processes. But nothing enrages him more than the economic justifications used to defend continued population growth."

Inside see video for the non-technical. This article is about a new free and open source software solution for schools that cuts down radically on power and hardware - therefore on cost. Userful Corporation, which calls itself "the global leader in Linux desktop virtualization", has released the next generation of it's Userful MultiSeat™ solution which it describes as turning "one Linux computer into multiple high performance independent computer stations using the HP t200 thin client. At $99 including the keyboard and mouse, the HP t200 is the worlds lowest cost thin client device."

The guest speaker at the AGM will be Kelvin Thomson, Federal Member of Parliament for Wills and advocate of sustainable population. He will speak on: "A bigger Melbourne is not a better Melbourne”. All are very welcome to the meeting.

Address to Australian Conference, “Is It a War on Terror or a War on Truth?” Sydney, Australia 16 Mar 2008. George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard described as in rebellion against the authority of the people. "No more Iraqs. No more Kosovos. No more El Salvadors. These are not isolated incidents of stupidity. They are part of a long, bloody history of foreign policy being conducted for the financial interests of the wealthy few. It is a new form of colonialism. It violates our Constitution. It endangers our national security. It mortgages our future. It sacrifices our children. It must stop … ."

Gail Graham's 17 year old son, Jimmy, was brain injured when his car ran into a tree in Queensland. The accident was unwitnessed and Queensland has fault-based law and insurance for traffic accidents. Because Jimmy was too injured to say what had happened and no witnesses came forward, he was uninsured. You might expect that medicare would pick up his medical bills, and it did, but the care it subsidised was hardly care at all. In a sublimely logical response to an utterly absurd situation, Mrs Graham came close to murdering her son's doctor.

On 16 September 2010 I attended an unusually inspiring political and humanistic movement amid the half-deserted towers of Melbourne's sparsely populated but nature-poor Docklands. (Ed. Some small changes made on 22 Jan 2012 due to mistakes in transcription being picked up by a reader.)

HA NOI — Significant outcomes have been attained in curbing population growth in Viet Nam, with 18.5 million people lower than estimated by 2010, according to health officials. "Achievements of population activities have contributed much to spur the country's socio-economic development, realise Millennium Development Goals, and combat hunger and poverty."

It is typical of the English speaking world that governments that pretend to be democratic, use planners to ride roughshod over the rights of citizens. Here is something from Los Angeles: "In the name of updating its zoning code, Los Angeles is on the verge of overriding community plans across the city by carving out "overlay" neighborhoods in which city employees can approve — by decree and without a hearing or Environmental Impact Report — residential and commercial projects of far greater density than now allowed."

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that, with the exception of Singapore, during the last 5 years Australia ran far and away the biggest per capita migration program in the world – 11.1 migrants per thousand people per year. After us came Italy, with 6.7, Canada 6.6, Sweden 5.8, Hong Kong 5.1, the United States and the United Kingdom 3.3, and New Zealand 3.1. In fact we could cut our migration program to 74,000, rather than 174,000, and we’d still be running one of the biggest per capita programs in the world – as big as the UK, Italy and Sweden, and bigger than the US and New Zealand.