Sheila Newman's blog

Demographer, Peter McDonald's extreme projections of population implosion and his advocacy for population growth need wide scrutiny. Sheila Newman

Murdoch's Queensland Courier Mail has long been in the business of marketing unacceptable development, but the April 9 2008 editorial read more like a medieval sermon on the benefits of floggings. What must Queenslanders have done to the Gods to provoke such punishment as

“freeways, chemical plants and new powerstations at their back door; transport corridors and dams which endanger the environment and destroy local communities”

... which the editorialist identifies as our inescapable and deserved fate?

A huge rise in serious mortgage 'delinquencies', and the food riots all round the world (coming soon to a place near you) in the context of oil depletion and the ridiculous market price pressure to grow grain for ethanol, just makes Mr Rudd's summit, Ms Bligh's proposal to concrete over the Brisbane River, and Mr Brumby's Housing uber al (following on in a line of terrible impositions on the public, from Kennett through Bracks) and WA Inc-revisited's excavate and desertify economy, look that much more dangerously insane.

The Brisbane mayoral election should have been anything but boring. Four candidates declared policies against population growth, but received next to no press coverage. These candidates for fundamental change ran right up against the major vested interests in the outcome of the Brisbane Council election. Those vested interests are the property development industry and its upstream and downstream dependents, which include the Courier Mail. Many group under the Australian Property Council umbrella. Choosing to structure themselves around continuously increasing population growth, naturally these industries prefer mayors who won't seriously challenge their objectives. Greg Rowell is employed by the Australian Property Council and “Can Do” Newman has been giving them what they want and telling Brisbanites that this is what Brisbane needs, for years now, in what the APC calls “the cooperative relationship between the State Government and Liberal Lord Mayor Campbell Newman."

See also "Courier Mail provides 'boring', yet unbalanced, coverage of Brisbane City Council elections"

Australians are enraged by the undemocratic transformation of every aspect of their landscape, government and society. Does the reader need reminding that a criteria of facism is the close association of governments with big business? We are coming out of the induced euphoria that this is all about multiculturalism to realise it is about exploiting all of us, with no heed to the destruction of our life-support system.

On December 4, 2003, Australia’s population was estimated at 20 million and projected to reach about 30 million by 2050. Slightly less than 50 per cent of this growth rate resulted from net overseas immigration. By 5 November 2007, Australia’s population had ballooned by more than one twentieth of itself (or 5.66 per cent) to 21,131,216 and was projected to reach 34 million by 2050. In fact, with that growth rate of 1.5 per cent per annum, it is on course to double within less than 50 years. Annual immigration has been responsible for more than half this growth, even though the birth-rate had increased in a context of misleading pronatalist propaganda.

I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.

The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.

Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.

Also published on Web Diary. See also: "Shock Doctrine's Shocking Short Shrift" of 8 Nov 07 by Carolyn Baker.

The fight against slavery relied on the fight for decent pay and conditions for every worker. As long as there remain categories of persons who may receive lesser wages and conditions than others the conditions for slavery and conflict are present.