immigration

Observations on how we are being backed into a corner

The propaganda against the 1/4 acre block started a few decades ago. - appearing as opinion pieces in newpapers. I believe this propaganda was aimed at very ordinary people in or suburbs with traditional blocks. It was to prepare them to relinquish their lifestyle and for their children not to expect it in the normal course of events. I don't think it was aimed at rich people as they are different - a special case. The very rich can actually do the opposite to "urban consolidation." The rich can buy the next door property in Toorak, bulldoze the house and annexe the land for their own pleasure in the form of a tennis court or swimming pool.

The propaganda seems to have been on behalf of those who wanted to effect radical change in values and rights for the sake of population growth, which for various reasons they derived benefit from - usually financial.

Why this is important

The 1/4 acre block affords some local self sufficiency to the ordinary person. 50 years ago it was quite common for people to keep chickens in the suburbs- some still do but I don't think it's as usual. There is probably an economic reason for this . Vegetable gardens were common then and they may be trying to make a return now.

Recently in Sydney I visited a cousin who has built her eco friendly dream home in the suburb of Ryde. The garden was for low rainfall, the house worked on passive temperature control and in the corner of this living arrangement was a chicken house with inhabitants. Area of block- 1/4 acre approx.

As oil depletion continues I believe self sufficiency will become more important. The more land per family we lose the less self sufficient we can be.

How dare we be talked into denying children the rights that we grew up with?

I believe the people of Melbourne are losing their land by stealth and propaganda. I also wonder how people can, on the one hand, be talked into having more children, and, on the other hand, talked into letting go of those children's rights.

In 2007 I made a submission to the Melbourne 2030 review. I made some of the points below. (Now Melbourne 2030 is out of date, of course. They are trying to bring in something even worse. )

Urban temperatures rising, trees and water disappearing

Urban temperatures are higher than those in the country, and made worse by air conditioners. I worry about the reduced ability of land to absorb water with increased concrete bitumen, housing and impermeable surfaces in general. I can see this affecting the water table and possibly having ramifications with regard to street trees and other trees and vegetation on public land. We should be preserving trees to keep the city cool and moist instead of infilling and concreting everything.

I would have thought with all the apartments and townhouses shooting up in the bastardized process known as suburban infill, that we would want to keep backyards full of trees etc. Never mind that I'll never own a $1.8M 3BR house in Hawthorn East, I'm just glad someone owns it so that there aren't twenty people in 6 townhouses there instead.

So God bless those rich people in their big houses!! (Unless of course they are developers and politicians telling the rest of us to go and live in high-rise infills.)

Even if I have hardly any garden at all, I want to protect other people's gardens. They are part of the environment and even if the garden is not mine- I benefit if I walk past or live near it. I breathe the oxygen that its greenery exudes. I am cooled by the transpiration of the leaves. Even if I live in a one bedroom apartment in the same street, I am better off if this house and garden remain than if this house in turn is bulldozed for another block of apartments. I can see what the obvious counter argument is to this - homelessness - but that problem is circular; the root cause of homelessness is rapid population growth.

Urban wildlife is yet another issue - one I feel so deeply about that I can hardly even write of it. Gardens provide some habitat for native animals, birds reptiles, and insects. The more the city is consolidated, the more predictable every space within it becomes and there will be little room for any species other than humans, dogs and cats. And, even then, the dogs must be on leads and the cats must be kept indoors. It would make more sense if we made friends with the neighbourhood possums, but the government has designated them as pests.

If we continue with population growth at 2% per annum- we stand to lose the few advantages we still have very quickly. If we have a population growth rate of 1% per annum we will still lose it but at half the speed.

I do not think that Australian politicians have a moral or any other right to do this to us.

The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly's misnamed book The March of Patriots, chronicling the Prime Ministerships of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard's, has been supplemented, at taxpayers' expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio stations Conversations program.

See also: "Review of Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'" of 21 Nov 07

The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly's misnamed book "The March of Patriots," which chronicles the Prime Ministership of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard's, has been supplemented, at taxpayers' expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio station's "Conversations" program.

"Conversations" is hosted by former Doug Anthony All Star Richard Fidler, who is now a Radio Presenter in Brisbane.

Tired old platitudes

The tired old platitudes that Kelly and other pro-corporate journalists have long used to sell these two discredited leaders to the Australian public -- "what you see is what you get", "a Prime Minister of conviction", etc. -- were lapped up uncritically by Richard Fidler in an astonishingly dull interview lasting almost an hour. Fidler challenged none of the 'free market' premises that Paul Kelly has used to justify the economic, social and ecological carnage wreaked on this country by Keating and Howard.

The central, supposedly controversial, thesis of Paul Kelly's book, is that today's wonderful, modern, prosperous 'free market' economy was created from a tired, outmoded, overly-regulated, protected, public-sector-dominated economy, through a common 'struggle' by these two leaders at different times.

Until now, many of us had naively assumed that both these men had been working to counter eachother's political agendas.

In reality the supposed 'struggle' amounted to these two men imposing a neo-liberal free market agenda on the Australian public with full cooperation and support from Paul Kelly and others in the Murdoch Press.

Shock doctrine techniques

The techniques used by the ex-prime ministers resemble those Naomi Klein describes in her towering work of political analysis, The Shock Doctrine of 2007. The Shock Doctrine documents cases where the neo-liberal project was imposed through trickery and deceit in apparently democratic states, rather than through outright military dictatorship. Although The Shock Doctrine does not contain any chapter on Australia, readers are still likely to gain a vastly better understanding of what happened to Australia under Keating and Howard than they will from reading The March of Patriots.

Paradoxically, the initial stages of the economic neo-liberal project began during the Whitlam years. In spite of Whitlam's many other economic nationalist policies, some manufacturing tariff barriers were reduced. The Fraser Coalition Government which followed in the late seventies and early eighties allowed greater rights to foreign concerns to buy Australian mineral wealth and companies. These policies were given a boost with Keating's sudden embrace of financial deregulation and his floating of the Australian dollar when he was Federal Treasurer, shortly after Labor won office in 1983. During the 1985 election the then opposition leader, John Howard, announced a hit list of twelve publicly-owned enterprises that would be sold off by a Coalition government if it won.

Howard lost that election, but by the time he won government in 1996, of the twelve on Howard's hit list, only Telstra remained in public hands. The other eleven, including the Commonwealth Bank, QANTAS and the national satellite company Aussat, were all disposed of in a Labor Government frenzy of privatisation.

Similar agendas - Howard and Keating

The other key plank of economic neo-liberalism implemented by Keating was the privatisation of retirement income, otherwise known as 'superannuation reform'. This was first undertaken by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Not even the corrupt, cravenly pro-corporate Bush regime dared try to put that one over the American public, but the Keating 'Labor' Government did so to Australians in the late 1980's and we are all reaping the terrible whirlwind this decade with the global financial meltdown.

Howard's policies since 1996, with the possible exceptions of his attempt to break the Maritime Union in 1998, and his imposition of his so-called "Work Choices" legislation in 2005, were merely continuations of Labor's policies.

Hardly 'news'

None of this would have been new to critical observers of these two leaders, so Kelly's 'revelation' that Howard and Keating had worked in office to achieve virtually the same economic and social goals is hardly news.

Even though a good many of both leaders' policies were deeply controversial and strongly opposed by many Australians - often a majority in the case of the privatisations of Government assets - Richard Fidler failed to put any of this to Kelly. Other awkward topics not raised in the inteview included:

• The numerous lies peddled by both Howard and Paul Kelly's Australian newspaper to win public acceptance for the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and
• The Australian Wheat Board (AWB) scandal in which AU$296million in bribes were paid to the very Saddam Hussein Government that John Howard would tell us in March 2003 posed such a mortal threat to world peace that we were left with no choice but to invade immediately.

Boat people

One incredible assertion from Paul Kelly that Fidler accepted uncritically was that Howard's motive for taking a strong stance against boat people in the Tampa and "Children Overboard" affairs of 2001 was not electoral advantage, but rather his strong desire to maintain the integrity of Australia's borders. In fact Howard later loosened entry requirements and ramped up immigration to record high levels as the Sydney Morning Herald's economics editor reported in the story "Back-scratching at a national level" of 13 Jul 07.

The program, far from being a probing interview that Australian taxpayers should rightly expect from their ABC struck me as little more than free advertising for Paul Kelly and the Murdoch media.

Sugaring dubious medicine

Another consequence of the publication of Kelly's new book and the attendant marketing, in which the ABC is now participating, could be a normalisation in retrospect of the Keating and Howard Governments' unpleasant and undemocratic policies. Such a representation of political history could then be used to deter citizens from questioning new asset-stripping, austerity and wealth transfer programs, whether under the current Rudd Labor Government or under a new Coalition one.

See also: "Review of Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'" of 21 Nov 07

Appendix: E-mail sent to Richard Fidler

The following e-mail was sent at 11.30PM, which would have been approximately 25 minutes into an interview lasting roughly 55 minutes.

Date: Monday 21 Sep 2009, 11:30:21 am
From: James Sinnamon
To: Richard Fidler

Paul Kelly's 'revelation' that both Keating and Howard both helped to bring Australia to what it is today is hardly news.

The interview has, so far, proven to be even more dull than "Keating the Musical".

Have you read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Docrtine"?

Even though it doesn't have a chapter on Australia, it gives a much more accurate picture of what happened to this country than what Paul Kelly is giving.

A lot of us dispute that deregulation, privatisation, removal of trade union rights, etc, has been beneficial.

The GDP measures that economists use to prove that this has all been beneficial are flawed and capable of presenting massive declines in quality of life as increases. As an example, just ask yourself why at least two incomes are now necessary to buy even a modest dwelling when one was easily sufficient barely more than a generation ago.

Could you please consider questioning the economic neo-liberal premises of Kelly's glowing tribute to these two abysmal political misleaders?

sincerely,

James Sinnamon

This e-mail had no noticable impact on the remaining part of the interview. No reply has been received so far. If one is received it will be posted below.

According to the latest Intergenerational Report, Australia's population will balloon by a staggering 65 percent to 35 million in just 40 years' time, up from around 21.5 million people at present. This projected increase is around 7 million more than previously forecast and will be driven primarily by immigration.

Already, Australia is struggling to cope with the environmental and social effects of rapid, immigration-driven population growth. A decade of high immigration under both the Howard and Rudd governments has had a major impact on a variety of quality-of-life issues ranging from housing costs, infrastructure overload and traffic congestion to environmental quality, water shortages and social cohesion.

A lone voice of reason in the lower house, federal ALP backbencher Kelvin Thomson says the projected population explosion will have a "catastrophic" effect on the environment and has called for immigration levels to be reduced.

"We are sleepwalking into an environmental disaster," Thomson said. "There will be impact on the availability of food, water, energy and land. These things are already stretched and a 60 per cent population increase will only drive up the cost of these essentials and lower our living standards."

"And what about the impact on our major cities? Declining housing affordability, traffic congestion, over-crowded concrete jungles."

Yet, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is purported to have said that Australia's projected population explosion is "great" news.

It may be great news for the parasitic "growth lobby" which profits from both the cheap labour and additional consumer demand supplied by immigration, but it is far from good news for the rest of us who are forced to carry the costs. In fact, it's a living nightmare.

Read more:

"How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future", January 24 2009.
"Australia 'sleepwalking' into population disaster", ABC News, September 18, 2009.
"Population boom 'a recipe for tragedy'", The Australian, September 18, 2009.

The following paper, published in the Winter 1997-98 issue of The Social Contract journal, was given by Mark O'Connor to the Fourth National Conference of the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia (FECCA) on December 7, 1996 in Adelaide. FECCA is a major promoter of immigration and multiculturalism in Australia.

Where Does the PC Line on Immigration Come From?

By Mark O'Connor

As a member of a group dedicated to reducing Australia's population growth, I worry that Australia over the past 15 years has had by far the world's highest per capita immigration rate. Luckily we seem to have turned a corner, and our net immigration (if you believe the lowest of the figures being put out by government sources) may now be only 50,000 a year, which is a little over one-third of our net natural increase (i.e. the excess of total births over total deaths - currently about 142,000 persons annually). [Sadly, O'Connor's optimistic observation that Australia seemed to have turned a corner has since been proven incorrect. Immigration has crept ever upwards since the late 1990s, and is now running at record high levels.] Clearly our first priority now should be to work on attitudes as to family size.

Yet immigration remains important. It sends a most negative message to the community. How can the ordinary citizen see having a small family as a contribution to the community's well-being when he or she must also watch (and pay taxes to help) the government increasing our population through immigration? Indeed the Department of Immigration has favorably cited a recommendation from the growth economist John Neville that if the birthrate falls or stays low then immigration should be increased to compensate for this.

Clearly we environmentalists must question the rather bizarre assumptions on which the immigration debate is conducted. How can it be "selfish" to resist immigration yet be enormously to our benefit to take in immigrants? How could former Prime Minister Keating simultaneously claim immigration benefits the economy yet want to charge New Zealand for dole payments to our NZ immigrants? How can it be "racist" to want to control immigration when most immigrants, especially until the last few years, have been of the same Caucasian race as the overwhelming majority of Australians? How is it that when we have rescued people whose own countries or cultures have failed them, we are so often and so complacently told by "ethnic leaders" that we are in their debt rather than they in ours?

Similar questions are asked in the United States. In October 1993 I was an invited guest at the annual conference of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. At its final session Professor Otis Graham from the History Faculty at Santa Barbara (CA) spoke brilliantly about the internal contradictions of the USA's current official (or politically correct or PC) line on immigration. Subsequently he was asked how such self-contradictory positions had become established as dogma. He answered, "I simply don't know - I wish someone would explain it to me."

Later in the discussion I offered a rather tentative explanation in the form of a very simplified "story" of how these positions may have been reached. I wasn't very sure how complete or accurate this story (or theory) was, either as a comment on American or even on Australian history; but several of those present, including Professor Graham, pressed me to write it down and publish it. So here it is, still tentative, but a little more fleshed out.

Perhaps our "politically correct" attitudes to immigration come from particular conditions produced in the decay of 1960s and 1970s radicalism. Sociologists like Alvin Gouldner and Katharine Betts have pointed out the paradox that entire groups of the tertiary-educated, who once saw themselves as anti-establishment radicals in fierce opposition to the values of their parents, have now moved up the social system and are running bureaucracies and governments. The old "anti-establishment," these scholars imply, now runs the establishment.

This is clearer in Australia where the more left-wing of the two major parties has won the last five elections. (In the U.S., the Bush and Reagan years prevented there being quite such a conspiratorial left-wing tone to the current bureaucratic power group.) Many such people were among those who "saw the light" in the Sixties and Seventies but then in the Eighties, when they were getting a little complacent, were offered money instead - "the money or the light?" - until they eventually chose the money. They were also (again, this is more clearly true in Australia than in the U.S.) the first generation in which easy access to tertiary education became open to a meritocracy of the talented.

"[This New Class] sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions." Gouldner and Betts₁ see this new ruling class as differing from a traditional aristocracy in that it does not depend on inherited wealth. Its capital is largely intellectual capital, represented by its tertiary degrees. It sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions. Let us accept this term "New Class" on probation, for the moment, and see what we can do with it. (Luckily this is not a matter of speculating about some poorly known and distantly observed group; it is essentially my own class I am talking about, and includes many of my own friends and former class mates. Reading this, they may well complain that I have "turned conservative," though, oddly enough, I believe that it is they who have done so.)

In Australia in the 1980s, many members of this class entered the bureaucracy and went on to earn degrees in economics, often training in the most cynical of economic rationalist schools (like that of the Australian National University). Thus, underneath the cement of avowed radicalism which binds the new ruling class together (serving as their meal ticket and union card) is sometimes a guilty conscience about having betrayed so many of their utopian and Aquarian ideals - for this was a generation whose hopes went far beyond the dull obviousness of social justice. The triumphalism of their politics often reflected the lyrics from the musical Hair "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" - an age of transcendent and psychedelic possibilities, of trusting the universe, and of release from constraints.

The result of this guilt can be a desperate attempt to find new grounds for difference and for moral superiority - no longer, this time, to justify revolution, but rather to maintain an establishment. Any ruling class that lasts more than a decade will feel the need to justify itself by having some ideal to which it appeals. It will invent some central legitimizing principle - usually a moral one. Thus a traditional aristocracy may place a moral value on the notion of "nobility" itself - a quality on which, by definition, it has something of a monopoly. By contrast it may see the classes it exploits as not merely "villains" but "villainous" and therefore needing to be ruled and guided. Our modern ruling class needs some similar principle to justify its free lunches and overseas travel.

They - or let me say "we" - used to be comrades in the struggle that built a better, more humane society. But what radical ideals are left when so many have been abandoned for pragmatic reasons and profit? Most utopian and Aquarian concepts of the 1970s have been quietly drowned. The psychedelic substances are only occasionally used by the successful baby boomers. Experience in running bureaucracies and governments has taught them not to be unduly idealistic about human nature. And so they have fallen back on a more basic or background ideal, one which, at least in Australia, was almost forgotten during the high point of 1970s radicalism. Yet when I went up to university in 1962 this had been the one ideal we all took for granted to treat everyone equally, regardless of race, color or creed (and some were beginning to add of gender).

Almost everyone in Australia believed in this ideal, at least in theory. So it is hardly surprising that the New Class still believe in it, at least in theory. The problem is that it is hard to claim moral superiority on grounds of such a common ideal.

The left-wing and tertiary-educated elite was now quite used to the fruits of power, yet already troubled by increasing evidence that it was just as corruptible as any previous establishment, and that it might soon lose favor with the electorate. In the resulting search for moral self-assurance and legitimacy, radical egalitarianism was the virtue it eventually focused on.

Why? It seems that the divide between left and right, liberal and conservative, is a persistent if fuzzy human tendency. It may be the characteristic mild schizophrenia of our species. And yet, most of the qualities that mark this divide between left and right "Both idealism and self-advancement combined to produce ... believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views."are as morally neutral as those that differentiate, say, French culture from Greek culture. For example, tending to believe or disbelieve in the perfectability of human nature is not of itself a moral position; nor is the tendency to visualize oneself as a rebellious youth rather than as a controlling parent. The one quality by way of which the left can plausibly claim a specifically moral superiority is its concern with equality - its tendency to side with the underdog.

Before long some politicians and media people who were members or aspirants to this successful class were prepared to side with such underdogs as illegal immigrants, and even against the clear interests and beliefs of their own constituents and nation. Both idealism and self-advancement now combined to produce the mild paradoxes of an establishment that favors anti-establishment sentiments and styles in the arts (and often elsewhere), of believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views, and of an elite whose claim to privileged status is based quite largely on anti-elitism.

Yet, even a decade ago it was getting harder and harder, at least in Australia, to find true racist rednecks against whom the no-longer-very-young, left-wing, educated classes could rebel - especially after those classes had been running the government and much of the media for years.

Their answer was a trick borrowed, I believe unconsciously, from the McCarthy-ites of the 1950s, and from their spiritual cousins, the Stalinists of the same era. It involves what Freudians call "projection." You project upon some real or invented victim-class your own secret guilts. If you were one of Stalin's henchmen, your secret guilt was an aspiration to privileged middle-class status in a very poor country. Down with the Kulaks! If you were someone like J. Edgar Hoover you could project upon others your own betrayals of public trust and public interest. Down with the communists!

You might then encourage the media to work up an intense obsessive concern about this evil, a concern which contains its own built-in, self-reinforcing loop. The pursuit of communist conspiracy (or in the USSR of a capitalist-revisionist conspiracy) became so omnipresent and all-encompassing that it readily discovered all the evidence it needed to sustain and even intensify its own belief.

By the 1980s, if "racists" (i.e. anti-egalitarians) had not existed it would have been necessary for the meritocracy to invent them. (In Australia, where most ethnic leaders were Europeans and thus of the same Caucasian race as the population that had invited them in, they used the term "racist" just as freely, even though the differences at issue were not racial but cultural - unless one believes in sub-racial classifications.) For some members of the New Class the term "racist" became a way to disparage anyone who believed in "inappropriate" meritocracies and elites - i.e., ones other than those by which they themselves were sustained.

Their other great trick, also consciously imitated from the McCarthy era, was that when you need to enhance your own moral position you discover a conspiracy against some widely-revered public virtue - a virtue to which you can easily lay claim. Thus, by imagining (or exaggerating) a communist conspiracy the McCarthy-ites turned their own minimal and commonplace virtue - that of allegiance to the democratic rule of law and to the legitimacy of the American state - into grounds for a claim of moral superiority, even of heroism.

How could Betts' New Class, the new ruling bureaucratic class of the 1980s and 1990s, turn their own minimal and commonplace virtue of believing in the brotherhood of man (the siblinghood of humanity) into a special virtue that justified their rule? The high immigration policy, toward which some special interest groups were pushing them, inadvertently supplied an answer.

High immigration alienated and indeed damaged the interests of the non-tertiary-educated majority, yet it did so in ways that were deniable. A media blitz, started or helped by special interest groups, soon turned high immigration into a symbol for acceptance of human rights. Once this assumption was swallowed it became clear that those who opposed high immigration - the majority of ordinary citizens - were wallowing in moral error, denying human equality, and in dire need of "guidance" from an elite. ("How satisfactory!" purrs the Mikado in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.)

Initially high immigration had little cost to the New Class. It wasn't usually their jobs the immigrant workers were after, and poverty-related crime took place mainly in suburbs far from their own. For those who had hitched their bureaucratic careers to ethnic programs or multicultural policies, high immigration was pure profit. They could preach against "selfishness" and take the moral credit to themselves, sending the bill to the ordinary citizen. Like the Unjust Steward in the New Testament parable they had found a failsafe way to buy moral credit with someone's else's money (Luke 16 2-4).

The New Class tend to be internationalists (for a mix of idealistic and business reasons) who are strongly opposed to the evergreen appeal of nationalism. Worldwide, it would seem that nation-states based on ethnicity are being formed at a faster rate than at any time since just after World War I.

Ironically, the internationalists soon found themselves in alliance with those who want to Balkanize, multiculturize or racialize the nation-state. (Remember how often multiculturalism was associated with globalization in the discussions about NAFTA?) By a further, now familiar, paradox the cry of "racism" became a trademark of both the globalist New Class and of its allies, the racialists. Some members of the New Class discovered that high immigration, like some of the extreme forms of multiculturalism, could be a way to bring down the nation-state and undercut its loyal supporters. It was twice blessed it could enhance one's status as an international high flyer and simultaneously as a noble fighter for the underdog.

The New Class globalists found themselves in effective alliance with leaders of certain immigrant groups who were practicing globalists only so long as the rhetoric of globalism could help them increase their "market share" and hence their power within the country. Some of these leaders are chauvinists who play the politics of ethnic pride in a way to resemble the Nineteenth century colonials "We do have the right to enter your country, and on our own terms, because we need it and you don't really own it; and in any case we are doing you a favor by adding an admixture of our wonderfully rich culture to your sterile, narrow and un-diverse Anglo culture."

The new politically correct line on immigration - much like the plethora of new "culturally sensitive" terms with which the ordinary citizen could hardly keep up - was one more way for the New Class to assert its leadership over the insensitive masses, on whose behalf they had shouted in the streets barely twenty years earlier.

And the fact that there was popular resistance to high immigration was reassuring to the New Class. It enabled them to ward off any nagging doubts that they might have lost their radical edge and suffered the common fate of aging into conservatism. If the New Class could not stay forever young they could at least stay forever radical. Some indeed seemed to desire even more public resistance to their ideas. Mark Ulmann recently accused one group in Australia of being "desperate for a witch to burn."

In high immigration and multiculturalism the New Class had found its difference from the bulk of society, and what seemed to many of them a legitimizing moral principle. They could deliver expansive population growth with the steadily rising property values that meant billions of dollars to some of their friends in business. They could extend contempt to all those excluded classes that had failed to advance like them through the mandatory tertiary education into the new enlightenment.

From patronizing a people's culture it can be a short step (as the history of imperialism shows) to denying their aspirations and interests. It soon became politically correct for the New Class to deny that there was such a thing as an Australian or American cultural identity, other than a multicultural one. This made it easier to deny that the American or Australian people had any exclusive right to their own country, or even that there was such a thing as a cohesive Australian or American people. If the nation does not really exist, then why should not its elected and appointed servants sell out its interests in favor of a global one?

That's the story/theory. How well does it fit the facts - in Canada? in the United States? in Australia? in New Zealand?

Notes

1. ↑ Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York, Seaburg Press, 1979.

Katharine Betts, Ideology and Immigration: Australia 1976 to 1987, Melbourne University Press, 1988; "The Environmental Movement, New Class, and Immigration Reform," Papers of the 1993 BIR Conference: The Politics of Immigration, available from the Department of Immigration, PO Box 25, Woden ACT. I am indebted to Dr. Betts for a number of insights woven into my "story."

See also: Forum discussion on Andrew Bartlett's blog in response to this article commencing 5 Nov 09, "Population is destiny" editorial in the Australian of 19 Sep 09, Population boom 'a recipe for tragedy' in News Ltd Online of 18 Sep 09, "35 million Australians? Start preparing now" editorial in the SMH of 18 Sep 09.

In the following article, originally published in the Winter 2008 issue of The Independent Australian magazine, Dr John O'Connor draws attention to Professor Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive and the chapter in it specifically on Australia and its overpopulation woes.

Jared Diamond on Australia's Sustainable Population

By Dr John O'Connor

Perhaps the single most astonishing, ridiculously contradictory set of public policies we face, is the left hand of government promoting reduced greenhouse emissions, conservation of diminishing freshwater, soil fertility and other declining natural resources, while the right hand promotes rapid population growth through high immigration.

Is this a classic example of the left hand not knowing (or wanting to know) what the right hand is up to? One well-disposed but concerned observer from abroad (a frequent visitor to our shores) is the United States’ Professor Jared Diamond, author of (inter alia) the very influential Guns, Germs and Steel (1997). This treatise is a convincing science-based exposition of the geographical and environmental reasons for the technological ascendancy of European nation-states during the second millennium, in addition to the usual social and other reasons advanced by historians. It traces humankind’s global history since the appearance of agricultural settlements in the Middle East “fertile crescent”, Nile and Indus valleys and China, wherever our ancestors encountered domesticable animal and plant species, and the consequent spread of agriculture-based societies throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Prof. Diamond has since published Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (Penguin, 2005: 574 pp) which includes a chapter, "Mining Australia" (38 pp) deserving the most serious consideration by any Australian government, regardless of its party political social theories. In this tour de force, he reviews the reasons for the disintegration of cultures with legacies of abandoned ruins in Norse Greenland, Anasazi Chaco Canyon, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and other Pacific Islands, in Mayan Yucatan, and elsewhere. These reasons - mainly overpopulation and irrational actions driving local environmental degradation - have also played their part in modern tragedies including the Rwandan genocide and the impoverishment of nations such as Haiti, while neighbour states (eg. Dominican Republic) prosper. The prospects for nations including China, the United States, and others subject to environmentally disastrous values, with failure to recognise or anticipate the consequences of irrational political policies and unsuccessful remedies, are comprehensively brought into focus.

He sees Australia, not as a nation facing imminent collapse, but as the first world’s miners’ canary: a developed country facing a rapid decline in living standards as its burgeoning population outstrips its rapidly degrading natural resource base. After consulting widely with government authorities, academics (including Tim Flannery) and grassroots farmers, graziers, and Landcare-type groups, Jared Diamond compares us with other nations, past and present. He details our problems of soil fertility and salinization, land degradation, diminishing freshwater resources, distance costs, over-exploitation of forests and fisheries, importation of inappropriate European agricultural values and methods and alien species, trade and immigration policies. He concludes that the mining of our natural resources - their unsustainable exploitation at rates faster than their renewal rates since European settlement began - gives us the dubious distinction of ”…illustrating in extreme form the exponentially accelerating “horse race” in which the world now finds itself……on the one hand, the development of environmental problems……on the other hand, the development of public environmental concern, and of private and governmental countermeasures. Which horse will win? Many readers……will live long enough to see the outcome.”

Specifically, he concludes:

”Contrary to their government and business leaders, 70% of Australians say that they want less rather than more immigration. In the long run it is doubtful that Australia can even support its present population: the best estimate of a population sustainable at the present standard of living is 8 million people, less than half of the present population.”

The reasons supporting this alarming prognosis (how long is “the long run”?) are very briefly summarised as follows.

• Non-sustainability: ”At present rates, Australia’s forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic……the former are renewable but the latter aren’t.” And: ”While many other countries are mining their environments……among First World countries, (our) population and economy are much smaller and less complex than……the U.S., Europe or Japan……the Australian situation is more easily grasped.”
• Exceptional ecological fragility: ”…the most fragile of any First World country except perhaps Iceland……many problems that could eventually become crippling in other First World countries and already are so in some Third World countries - such as overgrazing, salinization, soil erosion, introduced species, water shortages, and man-made droughts - have already become severe in Australia.”
• An informed population: we have ”……a well-educated populace…and relatively honest political and economic institutions by world standards. Australia’s environmental problems cannot be dismissed as……ecological mismanagement by an uneducated, desperately impoverished populace and grossly corrupt government and businesses……”
• Climate change: clearly exacerbating our ”obvious massive impacts on the Australian environment”.
• Australian soils, especially their low nutrient and increasingly high salt levels. Britain as a trade partner and model society have shaped Australian agricultural practices inappropriate to the Australian landscape (e.g. agricultural practices based on high-yield British soils). We inhabit ”…the most unproductive continent…soils with the lowest average nutrient levels…old, leached over billions of years…only a few small areas have been renewed by volcanic or glacial activity or slow uplift. Agriculture has therefore depended on fertilizers and cultivation of large low-yield areas, with increased machinery and fuel costs, competitive disadvantages vis-à-vis food imports, low agroforestry returns due to slow tree growth, and relatively unproductive coastal and inland fisheries due to low-nutrient runoff.
• Salinity, i.e. salt mobilization. Increasingly, low soil nutrient fertility is worsened by salt, from three causes: sea-salt blown inland over south-west W.A. wheat belt; repeated past marine inundations of the Murray-Darling basin and evaporation of inland lakes; mobilisation of salt by land clearance and irrigation agriculture. ”Salinization…already affects about 9% of all cleared land in Australia……projected under present trends to rise to about 25%.” And: ”The total area in Australia to which salinization has the potential for spreading is more than 6 times the current extent and includes a 4-fold increase in W.A., 7-fold increase in Queensland, 10-fold increase in Victoria and 60-fold increase in New South Wales.”
• Fresh water as a population-limiting factor: ”Australia is the continent with the least of it.” Most readily accessible water is already utilised - domestic, agriculture and industry. For instance, our largest river, the Murray/Darling, has two thirds or more of its flow drawn off each year (in some years no water is left to enter the ocean), and becomes progressively saltier downstream towards Adelaide, with increased burden of pesticides from cotton farming and irrigation practices. Further high-energy desalination plants now seem inevitable for urban requirements. Historically, “Australian land use has gone through many cycles of land clearance, investment, bankruptcy and abandonment” from early colonial times, due to low soil productivity and a disproportionately large fraction of pastoral and arid lands subject to low-average unpredictable unreliable rainfall. This is due to the ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) climatic factor, resulting in uncertain crop returns, bare soil, and consequent soil erosion and salinization. South Australia’s Goyder Line and parts of Western Australia’s Gascoigne provide two of many examples.
• The “tyranny of distances”, imposing large extra costs, both within Australia and between our trading partners. These costs also mitigate against medium-sized towns, producing the world’s most urbanised nation (about 60% of us dwell in the 5 major cities).
• Introduced species: cattle and sheep have been of great economic value, while also damaging fragile ecosystems. Whereas rabbits, foxes, cane toads, carp, feral buffalo, camels, donkeys, horses, goats, blackberry, “Paterson’s curse”, mimosa in Kakadu, and other weed species (about 3000, alone causing economic losses of about $2 billion annually), are expensive disasters.
• Land clearance (encouraged by tax incentives), overstocking and overgrazing have resulted in dryland salinization, soil erosion and land abandonment. ”Rotting and burning of the bulldozed vegetation (in 2005) contribute to Australia’s annual greenhouse emissions a gas quantity approximately equal to the country’s total motor vehicle emissions.”
• Marine overfishing: species which have been “mined” to uneconomically low levels include coral trout, eastern gemfish, Exmouth Gulf tiger prawns, school shark, southern bluefin tuna, tiger flathead, and orange roughy. Damage to freshwater fisheries, e.g Murray cod and golden perch, may also be irreversible.
• Forestry: with only 25% of 1788 forests remaining intact, and still being mined, half our export products are wood chips (as low as $7 per ton) sent mostly to Japan, where the resulting paper sells for $1000 per ton; we import nearly 3 times our forest products exports, one-half as paper and paperboard products. ”One expects to encounter that particular type of trade asymmetry ……when an economically backward non-industrialised unsophisticated Third World colony deals with a First World country……buying their raw materials cheaply, adding value……and exporting expensive manufactured goods to the colony.”
• Trade: ”In short, over the past half century Australia’s exports have shifted from predominantly agricultural products to minerals, while its trade partners have shifted from Europe to Asia.” We are exposed to unprecedented new national security and economic factors.
• Population policy: ”The fallacy behind the policy of “filling up Australia”, despite ”compelling environmental reasons” to the contrary, arises from our aspirations for national security and economic power (with only a few millions each, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Singapore already outstrip us, implying that quality is more important than quantity?) Some politicians and business leaders still call for a population of 50 million, regardless of our declining natural resource base! This may rapidly convert us to “a net food importer rather than exporter of food”, in a world already struggling to feed an expanding population of some 6.6 billion. It will also dilute our per capita earnings from mineral exports.

Professor Diamond sympathetically reviews the many remedial policies, individual and group activities which are attempting to control these and other problems. No doubt some items need some up-dating. But his main point remain valid: because it is all happening so rapidly here, he regards our nation as a warning and an example to the developed world. For this reviewer, one local need stands out above all others: the need for a rational population policy, with numbers in balance with our diminishing natural resource base, having due regard for limiting factors listed above. Indeed, this need applies not only to Australia, but to our Earth entire, recently imaged by the outbound Voyager 2 space probe as a single pale blue pixel, a dust mote suspended in a sunbeam. On this damaged dust mote, we and our descendants will continue our species’ history, our unfolding comprehension of our origin, present existence and attainable future. Or so we hope.

Dr John O'Connor had 25 years lecturing, research (specialising in air pollution, plant stress), and consultancies (government and industry) in the environmental sciences. Now retired, he is active part-time in adult education. When submissions were called for the 2020 Summit, he sent in a précis of Diamond's chapter on Australia.

In the letter included below on 2 Sep 09 to the Melbourne Age, Mark O'Connor, author of "Overloading Australia" noted. that contrary to his earlier claims that immigration had been "slashed", Immigration Minister Chris Evans has recently admitted we have "an unprecedented, unplanned migration wave". In 2008 he claimed net immigration was half what the Bureau of Statistics had said it was. Whether this is through design or incompetence, Evans is clearly serving vested interests at the expense of ordinary Australians and, accordingly, should resign. (Note: two other letters published in the Melbourne Age on the same day are also included)

It's no business for big business

SENATOR Chris Evans' claim that immigration should be the nation's labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants, especially younger, skilled workers, is absurd ("Migration rules set for revamp", The Age, 31/8).

The Australian population should be our normal source of workforce. Decisions about who comes to Australia should not be left to employers. Big employers have a long history of making bizarre ambit claims about the numbers they propose to employ. Often the real aim is to create a surplus of job seekers and thus bully governments into giving the go-ahead for short-sighted projects to create jobs.

The liveability crisis should be a higher priority than importing "skilled and willing" (read "temporarily more docile") workers from elsewhere.

Senator Evans bizarrely claims that his "attempts to have a more sophisticated debate about the topic have totally failed". What efforts?

The book Overloading Australia documents him claiming in May 2008 that net immigration was less than half what the Bureau of Statistics says it was. Recently he claimed immigration had been "slashed", when it was soaring. Now he admits we have "an unprecedented, unplanned migration wave". He should resign and be replaced by a minister who serves the Australian electorate, not vested interests.

Mark O'Connor, co-author, Overloading Australia, Lyneham, ACT

It's time to debate, people

I AGREE that it is "time for a reality check on immigration policy" (Editorial, 1/9). I would go further and say it is time for a national population policy. Tim Flannery, in his Australia Day address in 2002, indicated that a population policy was vital for Australia to have an environmentally sustainable future.

He said the way to achieve such a policy was for the nation to engage in a truthful, vigorous debate, together with a government inquiry charged with setting an optimum population target. Once the target had been decided we should determine our immigration policy in light of it. This, Flannery believed, would take most of the hysteria out of the immigration debate.

In my view, the bipartisanship way the major parties have kept immigration policy debate out of the public arena is an affront to democracy. I believe an appropriate forum for debating a population policy would also act as a prophylactic in keeping irrational ideologies out of the debate.

Questions about the boom

THE boom in immigration, resulting from the wholesale granting of permanent residency to international students on the basis of skill credentials obtained here, is at last being reviewed.

The demographic distortion from this influx may have resulted in increased unemployment and disaffection among migrant and native young people.

Any net benefit from the ''education industry's ''export'' earnings might not withstand examination, with the money cycle involving repayment of loans from Australian earnings, plus huge long-term costs to Australia. Issues include the diversion of educational resources to service this trade and the downgrading of the perceived value of Australian qualifications.

Excerpts from Age article Migration rules set for revamp

"Australia's immigration policy is set for an overhaul amid concerns that it is failing to meet the nation's long-term needs, with a record influx of more than 600,000 temporary residents adding to the strain of a growing population.

"...

"New figures to be released today show that Australia's official migration program recorded an intake of 171,318 permanent migrants in 2008-09.

"When the 13,500 refugees and the 47,780 New Zealanders who settled permanently in Australia are included, the migration program saw 232,598 people arriving in the past year, a 12.8 per cent leap from the previous year's record high of 219,098 people.

"But according to figures obtained by The Age, a further 657,124 temporary migrants with the right to work arrived in Australia during the past year. The 11 per cent surge in temporary migrants was fuelled by big increases in foreign students (up 15 per cent to 320,368) and working holiday visas (up 22 per cent to 154,148).

"...

The surge in temporary migrants with a right to work has created an unprecedented, unplanned migration wave. Senator Evans said Australia needed a rational immigration debate, beyond the hysteria about the few hundred boat people who arrive each year.

"...

"Decisions about who came to Australia would be increasingly left to employers ..."

See also: Overloading Australia - new book about Australia's overpopulation problem of 23 Jul 09 by Sheila Newman, Review by sociologist, Katharine Betts of Overloading Australia of 8 Apr 09, "Migration rules set for revamp" in the Age of 31 Aug 09, Want job, will travel in the Age of 31 Aug 09, Workforce ripe for the picking by John Sutton, national secretary of the CFMEU in the Sydney Morning Herald of 31 Aug 09.

In article in the magazine Christian Science Monitor article "Is population growth a Ponzi scheme?" of 17 Aug 09 by David R. Franks, Joseph Chamie, former director of the population division of the United Nations labels the notion that population growth is a boon for prosperity --- the same notion that is used to justify the Rudd Government's current record high immigration program and the state of Queensland's own pursuit of population growth of "Ponzi Demography".

The article continues:

"The profits of growth go to the few, and everyone else picks up the tab.

"Growth, whether through immigration or natural increase, is a plus for some groups. For business, it means a boost in the demand for products. It also means a surge in low- and high-skilled workers, which can keep a lid on wage pressures. Religious and ethnic groups want more immigrants of their own faith and ethnicity to raise their political and social clout. The military regards young immigrants as potential recruits.

"But the public pays a cost for a bigger population.

"Mr. Chamie speaks of more congestion on highways, more farmland turned into housing developments, more environmental damage, including the output of pollutants associated with climate change."

The article acknowledges that there are costs associated with declining populations as Australia's own population growth pushers never pass up an opportunity to remind us:

"They will need to spend more looking after older citizens and, yes, some industries like housing will shrink. But governments won't have to spend as much on children. And any labor shortage would fade if increasingly healthy older people worked an extra year or two before retiring to maintain their standard of living."

That Queensland's own pursuit of population growth is indeed a Ponzi scheme as Joseph Chamie claims, has been confirmed recently by none other than Queensland Anna Bligh, herself.

In a letter to me in which she justified her Government's fire sale of our ports, roads, forests and railways (see http://saveourpublicassets.org), Queensland Premier Anna Bligh stated: "... a State with a rapidly growing population can't afford to ease off building the infrastructure that supports our economy and community".

In April 2007, Anna Bligh, then deputy Premier defended population growth, stating:

"The only way we could really do that (stop population growth) is to put a fence up at the (Queensland) border, or to cancel or freeze all new home building approvals. That would have a very serious impact on the construction industry that a lot people rely on for jobs." (see "Qld govt rejects population cap")

In other words, according to Anna Bligh, we are selling the family silver, being made to pay ever higher council rates, water, electricity and gas charges, endure traffic congestion, crowding, threatening the Koala, the lungfish, the Mary River Cod, and the Mary River Turtle, etc. with extinction, etc., etc. in order to keep construction workers employed.

Clearly this is plain stupid and any teenager should be able to understand that, but our highly paid political leaders and their advisers would have us believe that they cannot.

The Queensland Government and the minority whose interests they serve, are clearly cynically corrupt beyond anything that I could have, until recently, been able to conceive of in a supposedly enlightened and advanced society such as Australia.

They are not only conspiring to transfer wealth from the majority to themselves, but they are also making each member of our society on average necessarily poorer and therefore causing there to be even less to go around for the rest after they have grabbed their own increased share. On top of that the many are made to bear the cost of the inevitable economic inefficiencies of adding extra people well beyond what is our society's optimum population level. They are knowingly causing additional environmental destruction and additional consumption of non-renewable resources that rightly belong to future generations as well as our own.

And in the meantime, we are also required to lose control of ever more of our own assets often to foreign corporations to sustain popuation growth.

Note: much of the above article was adapted from a comment of mine, which was published on that site.

See also: "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future" of 24 Jan 09 republished on Online Opinion.

ABS stats released today 11 August 2009 tell us that:
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Products/3235.0~2008~Main+Features~Main+Features?OpenDocument

Total Population

The estimated resident population of Australia at 30 June 2008 was 21.4 million people, having increased by 1.5 million people (7.7%) since June 2003, at an average rate of 1.5% per year.

Note that this is ABS looking backwards --to guarantee accuracy in hindsight -- at not very recent figures.

Growth is accelerating! Danger Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!

Since then, more recent ABS estimates of growth are that it has accelerated to 1.8 and then 1.9%.

We may note from this acceleration in the past 6-12 months how rapidly things can get worse. Not that 1.5% p.a. was exactly slow. It gave a doubling time of 47 years, whereas 2% would give 35 years and 1.9% about 38 years.

If you look up the ABS site you will find a lot of other details of sex ratios and population distribution. None of this makes much sense without a context. What does a population of 21.4m mean in absolute terms?

Population numbers without context are meaningless

Nothing. It is the impact of that population in a certain setting. In Australia we are running out of water, soil, land for affordable housing and adequate infrastructure. And we have gone into debt to provide for this population. The growth lobby that is pushing our population upwards by lobbying politicians to adjust the levers of immigration and birth rate, always costs population growth against imagined future profits. It did this in the past and we are now in debt and in biophysical overshoot. But the commercial interests that benefit from debt and population growth are not interested in reviewing their past predictions in the light of current reality. They tend to accuse anyone who does that of being a pessimist.

Population growth is a political and an economic addiction which citizens should not be coerced into supporting financially, ecologically or socially.

The U.K. government is planning to review its immigration policies, in a move likely to make it more difficult for foreigners to become British citizens. The move comes as unemployment is now at a 12-year high and as concerns about terrorism have fueled a surge in protectionist sentiment in the U.K., long one of the world's most open countries. Once-marginal anti-immigration politicians have been gaining ground.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson plant to announce a points system ('PBS') will be modeled after one in use in Australia and introduced last year, that grades workers and students hoping to enter the U.K. on criteria including education, age and need for their skills. Immigration minister Phil Woolas said the scheme would stop the population reaching the 70 million predicted by Whitehall statisticians and bring "control" to the migration system. The number of passports handed out to migrants is on course to hit a record of almost 220,000 this year. Critics in UK say the recent increases to their population, through heavy immigration, are placing a huge burden on public services as hospitals and schools face increased demand but no increases in their budgets.

Traditionally, foreign workers boost both the economies of the countries they work in as well as their home countries. But studies say that the current global economic crisis has sapped much of such cross-border monetary exchanges. The short-term benefits of growth are evident, but the long-term implications are severe.

Other European countries are clamping down on immigration as their economies slow and citizens complain that too many people are being allowed in.

In future migrants to the UK would have to spend five years as temporary residents, before becoming "probationary citizens". Points could also be deducted and citizenship either delayed or withheld for those found breaking the law or engaging in anti-social behaviour.

With record immigration levels to Australia, and so-called "skills shortages" in areas such as hair-dressing and cooks, this system hasn't reduced the number of foreigners entering Australia! Citizenship to Australia is extremely easy to aquire. The "skills shortages" hasn't translated into full employment or increased training courses. HECS and loans are escalating costs for university and now TAFE loans in Victoria and more Australians trying to aquire skills will become casualties of excessive fees.

Assisted by higher birth rates and heightened net overseas migration, Australia added a record 406,000 residents last year. The previous record was 375,000 in the year to June 2007. Bernard Salt: Clusters of growth excite property developers and concern planners. They localise demand for property and intensify demand for infrastructure. Our growth is determined by the property market!

Political lifecyles last until the next election. Australia must try to survive, intact, until at least the next generation and remain "sustainable" after that!

It’s time Australia cut immigration, apart from genuine refugees. Anti-immigration is not racism! It is about having an optimum population plan, a sustainable limit to how our environment, society and economy can equitably cope with the projected number of people.

John Howards "go for growth" mentality, and that record numbers of births implies confidence in the economy, still hasn't been re-evaluated. Developing countries have high birth rates too, to ensure an income in old age!

The points based system is trivial and has done little to reduce our immigration numbers, and legally discriminates against genuine refugees.

Bernard Salt: Population growth at record levels

Eagle's Nest in Bunurong Marine Park between Cape Paterson and Wonthaggi, South Gippsland, Victoria

Fresh water dam capacity is a known determinant of a dependent population's capacity. Once dam levels drop below critical levels, water demand has clearly exceeded supply. So logically, rationally, naturally, excessive demand ought to be tempered and curtailed. This is what rationally follows in macroeconomics, like when Australia's Reserve Bank increases interest rates to dampen excess demand. It doesn't suggest we import more.

But governments think they can spin their own reality and now employ communication consultants to evangelise a 'can do' positivism mantra - irrespective of potentially adverse social and ecological consequences. Who considers the impacts of those judgments and decisions on local families and local ecology?

In Melbourne's case, the Brumby Government seems deeply headlong into some artificial life support to perpeatuate Melbourne's population growth. Where's the rationale?
Otherwise, blind unguided, not though through support of Federal mass-immigration pressures the need for 'desalination' as magic pudding panacea for a tide to which the government has set no high water mark - bit risk these days?.

It's Greenspan's 'irrational exuberance' infesting population growth by Brumby's kneejerk, shortsighted and downright undemocratic Victorian Government. But it has nothing to do with central banking in a democratic society, but everything to do with worshipping some growth divinity, and in the process prepared to sacrifice important ecology and Wonthaggi rural amenity values. Is this Brumby's 'pagan-inspired' sprawl infesting Melbourne's still rural outer fringe?

The Brumby Government's unelaborated growth fetish appears too narrowly focused on the supply end of the problem, yet strangely it denies and ignores the obvious root cause and driver of the growth problem - excessive demand. The prime cause of that increasing demand is our federal government's exuberance to maximise immigration.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics "at June 2008 there were an estimated 3.9 million people residing in the Melbourne ('Statistical Division'), an increase of 74,600 people or 2.0% since June 2007. Melbourne SD experienced the largest growth of all Australian capital city SDs for the year to June 2008. Melbourne SD accounted for 81% of Victoria's population growth between June 2007 and June 2008, and was home to 73% of Victoria's population."

The largest growth areas are on the new 'sprawlskirts' of Melbourne at the local government areas of Wyndham, Casey, Melton, Whittlesea and Hume. The fastest growth areas are Wyndham, Melton, Cardinia, and Whittlesea, plus with the increasing highrise in the central Melbourne itself.

The prime driver of urban population growth is immigration, current peaking into Australia at 400,000 net this year. That is two new Geelongs every year! Illogically, federal and state governments are hell bent on maximising this immigration and so exacerbating the demand problem.

By resorting to water supply from desalination, which has been shown to extravagant in terms of borrowing costs, in its massive continuous energy demand, and in its wastefulness (byproducts of salts, chemicals and organic sludge), the Brumby government is effectively acknowledging that Melbourne's population is outstripping water resource capacity. Melbourne is simply living beyond its means.

Every time we push the natural boundary of what this country can naturally sustain, we damage it and lower our living standards by allowing more people to exploit the same natural resources - land, water, energy, etc. It's as if our politicians compare us to Hong Kong and have a Hong Kong vision for Australians. Well then they can bloody well go and live in Hong Kong on their credit cards, as long as we don't have to fund them.

It's time that triple bottom line scorecard reporting was applied to measure and reward government performance, rather than locked in the spin government PR. Australia's ecological health and Australians' living standards need to be measured and factored into political performance in quarterly results. What's the benefit in economic growth numbers like say 100,000 new dwellings approved for the quarter, when the Thomson Dam keeps reducing its water capacity and the state is debt burdened with an additional $3 billion to fund a 'desal' plant at Wonthaggi?

And we need to question this 'greater good' utilitarian mindset. At Wonthaggi, the Bunurong Marine Park and Coastal Reserve and Wonthaggi's rural community seem sacrificable for the 'greater' Melbourne? To exploit locals for a greater good is morally wrong. And where is that 'greater' obese Melbourne to end in 50 years time?

This is indeed 'so wrong'. Brumby is doggedly locked in an extravagant and immensely damaging 1950s mindset.

Snowy River Lessons

This $3.5 billion desal plant (pre-blowout estimate) is comparable to the Snowy River Scheme commenced in post-WWII 1949. This growth inspired scheme cost $1.16 billion (possibly $7 billion in today's money) to add resource capacity for a growing post-war population. But in the process, the Snowy Scheme tragically castrated the Snowy's wildness and its legend to a trickle. "The creation of the huge Eucumbene, Jindabyne, Blowering and Jounama reservoirs resulted in the flooding of thousands of hectares of land. Two whole towns, Adaminaby and Jindabyne, and numerous farms and homesteads were inundated. Thousands of years of Aboriginal history were also lost beneath the waters. Both Adaminaby and Jindabyne were rebuilt nearby as new towns that were heralded as modern and comfortable. People were compensated by the Authority for their losses and relocated."

SOURCE: Powerhousemuseum.com

The Snowy Scheme did employ hundreds at the time, but destroyed the Snowy, Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers and the way of life of hundreds of established pastoral families that for generations had livelihoods dependant upon these vital flowing rivers.

Fifty years later, a repeat of the Victorian government growth driven 'irrational exuberance' now imposes its undemocratic will on the rural Wonthaggi community and its surrounding natural environment. It is so again an obese Melbourne can exceed its capacity and become even morbidly obese. This is nothing but a government infatuated growth disorder akin to 'bulemic sprawl'.

And Brumby has no ultimate vision as to where this is all leading. He will be Parliamentary pensioned off by that time and he won't care.

Painting: John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (1777)

The nationally publicized assault of a 38 year old black man

The nationally publicized assault of a 38 year old black man in Courtenay, BC by three young white thugs was predictably amplified by a media eager to sound the siren of politically correct paranoia. There was racism under every bed! White racism that is. The other kind, of “black on white” assaults, which statistically is much the more common event in America, is not the subject of polite conversation. It is, after all, socially outrageous to speak the truth in Canada. Best to ban the publication of ethnic crime data to smother bigotry in its cradle. Then again, statistical profiling may very well do the opposite by revealing that crime is not the trademark of any ethnic community but only of a tiny and troubled minority within it. And that culture, not skin pigmentation, is a relevant factor, among many.

When the Mayor of Courtenay, Greg Phelps, failed to comply with a PC injunction to support a “feel good” anti-discrimination ‘protocol’ he found substantially meaningless, to address a problem too over-blown to warrant panic, an activist of self-righteous disgust raised the specter of rampant subterranean racism. You may not see it, but trust me, it’s here, there and everywhere! Courtenay may project the image of placid tolerance, but scratch the surface, and it’s a town in the Jim Crow South. “The mayor,” he said, was “just the tip of the iceberg. And it’s not about the three young white men either. There’s got to be a large peer group who shares their racist views. And don’t forget racism begins at home. These men obviously have parents. And these parents have peers too…” Implication? Let’s find them and root them out! I wonder if Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” is included by the school board in the canon of student texts, along with the slogans of intolerant tolerance that the Ministry of Education mandates.

How inconvenient it was then, when it was later learned that apparently, the three aggressors subsequently attacked a Caucasian man. One wonders would words they applied to taunt him. Was it “fatso”, “gimp”, “four eyes”, “baldy” or “fag”? If so, would it indicate that they were motivated by a hatred of obese, handicapped, bespectacled, hairless or gay people? Or would it reveal that their despicable aggression was more accurately the result of three young punks spoiling for a fight and looking for any handle or epithet to goad their victim and get under his skin?

Media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury

This media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury recalls the outrageous claim made by the then Minister for Multiculturalism, Hedy Fry, that racism had reached such a fever pitch that ‘they were burning crosses in Prince George (BC).” That too was a ridiculous hyperbole and a blatant lie. Prince George was no more a racist hotbed than Courtenay is today. Nevertheless, these kind of charges serve a purpose. And what purpose do they serve? They stoke up a hyper-sensitivity not only about racism, but issues about that are peripheral to it, but not necessarily connected.

The bogeyman of rampant white racism creates an atmosphere of social intimidation that already greets anyone who dares to criticize the state policies of mass immigration and official multiculturalism. And as we have seen here and elsewhere, racial vilification laws and the revision of history are the logical complement to it. The need to suppress and punish odious views is thought necessary to smother any nascent challenge to the corporate agenda of growing the economy by growing the population. Hysteria inflates the constituency for more restrictions on contrarian speech and the ethnic cleansing of textbooks. Since Canada’s immigration selection criteria, in tandem with the second highest per capita immigration intake in the world, ensures that the country will evolve as Courtenay is evolving, into “a growing community increasing in diversity”, ethnic harmony must come at any cost.

Given that imperative, free speech can no longer be regarded as the very condition and pre-requisite of all other rights, but in the classic Canadian light, of merely one right to be weighed against others in determining the public interest.

"Cultural diversity" a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed

“Cultural diversity” is the clarion call of the liberal-left, but it is also the mask of the corporate elite, a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed---and the environmental degradation that comes with it. Big banks, developers and cheap labour employers fly its banner as a smokescreen to obscure their efforts to widen the labour pool and recruit more homebuyers. Immigration is openly promoted as a life-preserver for the shipwrecked home mortgage and home building industry by the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotia Bank and other credit institutions. Cultural diversity is the flavour of the month for an agenda that has no sincere interest in ethnic folk dances and exotic cuisines, but only in the making of money, and the fragmentation of a once cohesive society so that united opposition to its aims become less and less likely as the process unfolds. It is a kind of diversity that comes at the cost of both biological diversity---the staggering loss of species from human population growth in Canada----and intellectual diversity. A nation where people of different origins and hues can co-exist only if they sing the same tune, and the old slogans of “white” nationalism are supplanted by the cant of fake “diversity”. It is the ideology of current convenience, like the “Manifest Destiny” or “White Australia” of times past, to camouflage and disguise the continuing quest to dispossess whom ever happens to be the native population of its share of the economic pie.

For good measure, school textbooks, and history itself, has been revised to advance the new state religion of “Multiculturalism”—Canada’s Ingsoc. The falsehoods of the past have been replaced with politically correct falsehoods of the present. The Chinese head tax and the Exclusion Act, together with the Komagata Maru incident, now form the centerpiece of White Guilt 101, which never looks at the historical context of these events, but assigns retroactive blame on working people and politicians whose main objective was simply to defend wages and living standards from cheap imported labour. No mention is made, for example, that “Chinese exclusion” did not apply to students, diplomats or Chinese business men and their families. Some kind of ‘racism’ that.

Don't play into the PC game-plan

But making the foregoing case plays right into the PC game-plan. That is, draw us into a verbal maelstrom on race, away from the critical issue of sustainability. Away from what should be our primary concern, which is not about how people in our lifeboat treat each other, where they are from or how they look, but how many damn passengers the boat can carry sustainably past the tumultuous storms of peak oil, peak water and peak everything that loom over the horizon. The relationship between humans is secondary to the relationship of humans to nature and the resources it provides. HMCS Canada is a lifeboat, not an aircraft carrier. It is not a vast and boundless land begging for more people to unlock a treasure trove of limitless resources, but a big “little’ land in ecological terms. A nation of frozen tundra, short growing seasons, mined out and marginal soil where 20% of its best farmland is paved over and the rest is under threat from continuing sprawl and the impending loss of oil-based fertilizers. A ship hurtling toward the iceberg of overshoot with politicians on the bridge who want to stop to pick up more passengers and encourage those already on board to have more children.

It is in this context that the crusade of “anti-racism” must be seen. It is the sand that is thrown in our face to get us off our game----stopping growth. And growth is no bogeyman. It is here and it is killing us.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
July 14/09

The consequential problems of maximising immigration intake and associated encouragement of multiculturalism should not be a race issue, but they are unavoidably about displacement of those already here and the unjust pressures of 'dissimilation' (...causing the loss or abandonment of culture or cultural characteristics of a people, society) If Australian's by birth should feel pushed aside by the current flood from immigration, consider what 220 years of colonisation has aflicted Australia's Aboriginal peoples!

If the Australian dominant culture accepts its legimate sovereignty out of historic invasion by armed attrition then these days should Australian-descendants and new borns accept as legimate sovereignty right those arrived through mass immigration? What if the new arrivals outnumber the indigenous and with birth rights? Do sheer numbers mean they have the numbers to overrule and shape Australia?

I could use a specific ethnic example, but then my argument could be dismissed as racist, and I am not. So let me use the example of a non-human invasive species, a species of bird, the Common Myna and the adverse impact it has caused to native birds.

"Common Mynas were brought to Melbourne in 1862 to control insect pests in market gardens, but even though they were not successful at this, they were taken from Melbourne to many other places in Australia, including north Queensland, where it was thought they would control insect pests of sugar cane. Cane Toads were introduced to Queensland for the same reason and have also become pests. Common Mynas have established feral populations in many parts of the world.

Common Mynas can be an economic problem because they damage fruit and grain crops and their noise and smell can be annoying where they are in large numbers.

Perhaps the Common Myna’s most serious “crime” is that it competes aggressively with native wildlife for nesting hollows. Mynas reduce biodiversity by fighting for hollows with native birds like Rosellas, destroying their eggs and chicks and stopping them from breeding. Mynas are capable of evicting even large birds such as Kookaburras and Dollar Birds from their nests. They also evict small mammals, like Sugar Gliders from hollows – which commonly means a death sentence for the Gliders because they have nowhere else to go. It is not uncommon for groups of mynas to mob other birds and mammals like possums.

In the ACT and some other places in Australia Mynas have invaded woodland habitats. There is not much woodland left in Australia and this additional threat to native wildlife can be a serious problem for biodiversity conservation.

Feral Common Mynas are a serious problem for biodiversity conservation in many countries other than Australia. In the year 2000, Common Mynas were listed by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as one of the World’s 100 Worst Invasive Species

Ironically, Common Mynas have not been formally recognised as a problem by conservation agencies in Australia, except in the ACT, where the ACT Government has directed resources to seeking solutions."[SOURCE: Australia National University].

"The Common Myna is an omnivorous open woodland bird with a strong territorial instinct, the Myna has adapted extremely well to urban environments. The Myna has been introduced in many other parts of the world and its distribution range is on the increase to an extent that in 2000 the IUCN Species Survival Commission (IUCN) declared it as one of the just three birds among the World's 100 worst invasive species. It is a serious threat to the ecologies of Australia.

"The common myna thrives in urban and suburban environments; in Canberra, for instance, 110 common mynas were released between 1968 and 1971. By 1991, common myna population density in Canberra averaged 15 birds per square kilometer. Only three years later, a second study found an average population density of 75 birds per square kilometre in the same area.

"In Australia, the Common Myna is an invasive pest. They are now often the predominant bird in urban areas all along the East coast. Currently, common myna populations in Australia are concentrated along the eastern coast around Sydney and its surrounding suburbs." They have also spread into urban Victoria and Queensland.

Compared to native hollow-nesting species, the common myna is extremely aggressive, and breeding males will actively defend areas ranging up to 0.83 hectares in size. This aggressiveness has enabled the common myna to displace many breeding pairs of native hollow-nesters, thereby reducing their reproductive success. In particular, the reproduction rates of native hollow-nesting parrots in the bush land of eastern Australia have been reduced by up to 80% by the common myna. It is known to maintain up to two roosts simultaneously, and both male and female common mynas will fiercely protect both roosts at all times, leading to further exclusion of native birds."Source: Wikipedia

So these species of birds displace native bird colonies and are quick to colonise.

Displacement is the key problem associated with the Common Myna. It is also the key problem that emerges when migrants CHOOSE not to acculturate into their new country, but instead CHOOSE to maintain their existing culture, language, customs, traditions and values. When mass immigration policy stops at the airport, cultural pluralism naturally establishes. It is primitive understandable self-preservation. The larger the immigrant group, the more dominant and more likely to cluster geographically together, establish a distinct territory, change their surroundings and recreate familiarities of the old country. Locals become outnumbered, see their amenity and cultural environment altering. The locality becomes a Chinatown, a Spanish Quarter, a Little Lebanon, a synagogue is built, a islamic school is built, the burkha walks the streets of say Wagga Wagga, the local mayor who has Iranian ancestry then calls for sharia law to be introduced. This is an extreme example, but it highlights what unchecked cultural pluralism can lead to. It can lead to deculturation of the native species.

And ethnic tensions in urban Australia have indeed increased as a consequence of federal flood gate immigration without an overriding population policy. Australian governments continue to abrogate their responsibility for social assimilation and social cohesion flow on needs of immigration. The 2005 Cronulla racial riots and the recent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney are harbingers of ethnic unrest that could escalate if the underlying root causes are not addressed.

This is not to say that members of distinct groups within a society should not be allowed to maintain and celebrate their different cultures or cultural identities. This is not to say that a society should not extend tolerance to distinct ethnic and religious groups in order to promote social cohesion. And do we continue to marginalise the traditional Australians, who were here first, to third world status?

So is it appropriate that immigrants within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities. Many third world countries have maintained cultural pluralism under a 'caste' system. None has worked without ethnic tension and periodically descending into civil unrest as a direct consequence. The issue is do doubt complex, but cannot be ignored.
The dominant culture can't have its cake and eat it too! If enough Chinese, Indians or Lilliputians or whomever immigrate, they may become eventually the dominant culture in Australia.

Multiculturalism theory seeks the ideal of promoting acceptance of various cultural divisions for the sake of diversity, as if being likened to the ideals of biodiversity. Good will to all men etc, etc. Wonderful in theory!

An so immigration is embraced and like the United States, Australia becomes a 'melting pot' for many diverse culture, races and religions all living harmoniously. Heterogeneous societies become more homogeneous - a utopian love fest! Until someone wants special treatment and cries accusations of minority discrimination!

Whereas 'cultural assimilation' or 'immigrant assimilation' is the adoption by an individual/immigrant of some or all aspects of a dominant culture, typically by quarantining immigrants to ensure comparable socioeconomic status, reducing spatial concentration of any one group, local language attainment, and through intermarriage.

But what is Australia's dominant culture. How do we define it. What are its core principles and values? Do we want to preserve it? Such core issues require broad public debate to clarify and crystalise, before Australia can move from multiculturalism to immigration assimilation, if indeed it is prepared to.

Until this important debate is brought to the mainstream, Australia's record unchecked and unsupported immigration risks exacerbating costs on our triple bottom line and steady dissimilation.

Full text of this submission may be downloaded here in a pdf file 293.43kb.

Kelvin Thompson, ALP, Federal Member for Wills, (a House of Representatives seat.) Wills is located in the north-west of Melbourne, Victoria, comprising Coburg, Coburg North, Gowanbrae, Hadfield, Oak Park, Pascoe Vale, and Strathmore, extending as far north as Fawkner, Glenroy and the Western Ring Road and south to include most of Brunswick and Brunswick East and containing parts of the State electorates of Pascoe Vale, Brunswick, Broadmeadows, Thomastown and Essendon. At a local Government level it shares most of its borders with Moreland, but includes Strathmore from the municipality of Moonee Valley and the Essendon Airport.)

It is indeed cheering to hear a member of the Federal Government criticise the policies of the Growth Lobbyists in Australia. The speech quoted at length below was in Labor MP attacks Melbourne's expansion plan ( July 20 2009) misreported in the Age where it was conflated with statements from the Committee of Melbourne. This conflation misled me and others to believe that Kelvin Thompson was against expansion into the Green Wedges, but was calling for open slather along the main arteries of Melbourne. If you read his submission or the quotes below, you will see that he is actually stating that more population growth in Melbourne is environmentally and socially unsustainable. He is critical of arguments for expansion or infilling. He also exposes the related hypocrisy and nonsensicality of the Government's climate change policies in the light of continuous population growth. He even exposes the fact that the Victorian State Government advertises for high immigration, a fact that they constantly avoid making clear to the long-suffering public.

I have to say: Bravo Kelvin Thompson! You show leadership in a government apparently composed mostly of cowards and ignoramuses who take orders from big business against the interests of their electorates. The only thing you have left out is the role that the Federal Government plays in granting the states the numbers they so vociferously demand of it.

Headings are by the candobetter editor:

Kelvin writes:

"Our city is forecast to have 4 million people living in it by the end of this year, with annual population growth rates reaching 2% (Colebatch 2009). The outer fringe of Melbourne is currently taking 61% of our population growth (Buckley 2009). This is placing pressure on the existing Urban Growth Boundary.

Climate change is the biggest moral issue of our time

Climate change is the biggest moral issue of our time and addressing it must be at the forefront of our public policy planning. Compared to other major cities throughout the developed world, Melbourne has one of the highest rates of carbon emissions per capita. Our city’s cars, trucks, motorcycles and public transport services were recently recorded to generate 11 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, compared with just 8.5 million tonnes in London. This equates to 3.1 tonnes of carbon per person in Melbourne compared with 1.2 tonnes per person in Greater London. One of the key reasons for our significantly higher rate of emissions per person is because of Melbourne’s larger geographic area, which means journeys tend to be longer and heavily reliant on cars (Lucas & Millar 2008).

Twice the number of people in Melbourne will mean twice the amount of carbon emissions, congestion and pollution.

Existing Government policies are encouraging an expansion of up to 75,000 people a year. If we continue down this public policy path we will need to accommodate another 1 million people before 2025 (Buckley 2009). By 2036 Melbourne is predicted to have a further 1.8 million people, nearly twice the number forecast in Melbourne 2030 (Moncrief 2008). Twice the number of people in Melbourne will mean twice the amount of carbon emissions, congestion and pollution.

Submission to the Urban Growth Boundary Review

1. Executive Summary

Our city has reached the point where we need to change direction or risk our social and environmental future.

Melbourne is at a fork in the road. For a long time our city, its way of life and the opportunities it offers to all who come here has been the envy of cities around the world. To maintain this desirable situation we must act decisively to address the issues that threaten Melbourne with becoming another crowded, over populated, congested and polluted metropolis. Our city has reached the point where we need to change direction or risk our social and environmental future.

The Urban Growth Boundary Melbourne@ 5 million review provides the opportunity to investigate the issues currently facing our city and the options we still have to address them. This submission will identify the ecological issues associated with expanding the northern, western and southern Urban Growth Boundaries and discuss the long term consequences for Melbourne of the proposed expansion. I am making recommendations which will protect Melbourne’s social and economic
growth, local amenity, transport system and reduce our carbon footprint. I have put forward an alternative plan to that of an ever expanding urban fringe.

Melbourne is one of the world’s most liveable cities. This year it was ranked third out of 140 cities as being the most liveable city. Our lifestyle, employment opportunities, health system, education system, infrastructure and environment are all aspects of a community that is the envy of many around the world (The Age 2009).

Melbourne is now the fastest growing city in Australia, with thousands flocking to live here on a never before seen scale. Melbourne’s population is growing on a scale not seen in Australia before, swelling by almost 150,000 people in two years (Colebatch 2009). The 2001 Census recorded Melbourne’s population at 3.3 million people (ABS 2001). In 2006 our population reached 3.6 million (ABS 2006). It has continued to grow faster than that of any other city in the country.

Melbourne’s population grew by 74,713 in the year to last June and by 74, 791 during the previous year. Melbourne’s population is growing by more than 200 people a day, or almost 1500 per week. Melbourne’s population growth last year far outpaced all other major Australian cities. Sydney grew by 55,047 (1.35%), Brisbane by 43,404 (2.3%) and Perth by 43,381 (2.8%) (Colebatch 2009).

In response to revised population projections showing that Melbourne will reach five million people faster than anticipated, the Victorian Government announced its intention to review the Urban Growth Boundary in December 2008 (DoPCD 2009:i). The Urban Growth Boundary was introduced in 2002 as part of Melbourne 2030 (DoPCD 2009A). The boundary was expressly put in place to contain urban sprawl. It was expressly designed to prevent ongoing urban expansion into rural land surrounding metropolitan Melbourne and its fringe (DoSE 2005). It set out to place a clear limit to metropolitan Melbourne’s development. It sought to concentrate urban expansion into growth areas that are served by high capacity public transport (DoSE 2005A).

The most recent review of Melbourne @ 5 million forecasts an additional 600,000 new dwellings in Melbourne with 284,000 of these needing to be located in growth areas. Most of this future growth will be in the north and west of Melbourne (DoPCD 2009:i).

The State Government is investigating changes to the Urban Growth Boundary in response to updated population forecasts and revised longer term growth issues (DoPCD:6). Areas under consideration for urban expansion include 20,448
hectares in Melbourne’s west around Caroline Springs, Melton and Werribee; 25,385 hectares around Sunbury, Craigieburn and Donnybrook and 5560 hectares east of Cranbourne.

Under the plan Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary would be allowed to grow another 41,000 hectares to accommodate an extra 415,000 people. Development of these areas would lead to a loss of some of the most valuable grasslands on the city’s fringe (Dowling & Lahey 2009).

Around the urban fringe, we have a concentration of some of the most endangered ecosystems in Australia, including Western Basalt Plains Grassland and Grassy Woodland, and a diverse range of other vegetation types and threatened species (Environment Victoria 2009). It is vital we do everything we can to protect these ecologically sensitive and important areas from being overrun by high density development.

The Victorian Government is now seeking public feedback on the proposals regarding the proposed changes to the Urban Growth Boundary before a final decision is made (DoPCD 2009:3). In making a final decision, I encourage the Victorian Government to consider the issues of population, local amenity and liveability, climate change, economic growth and transport. I have put forward recommendations that are designed to tackle urban sprawl and that will continue to protect the
things that make Melbourne great.

Everything that makes our city the great place to live, work and raise a family, is potentially under threat if population growth and urban sprawl continue at the current rate.

Everything that makes our city the great place to live, work and raise a family, is potentially under threat if population growth and urban sprawl continue at the current rate. We must implement a strategy to control population growth, urban expansion and development. Our way of life, open spaces and infrastructure cannot be sacrificed on the altar of ever expanding population. We have a responsibility to secure our city’s future through thorough, thoughtful and detailed planning. This
planning should not include an expanding Melbourne waistline.

[...]

Encouraging urban sprawl and ever increasing high density developments will lead to a more
polluted, congested and unsustainable Melbourne. Bringing millions of people in to Melbourne will increase the stress on water supplies that are already strained, increase reliance on fossil fuels by communities that are on our urban fringe, and it will increase Melbourne’s carbon footprint when we must be reducing it.

Regrettably the planning process in Melbourne is not being used to achieve environmental sustainability. Melbourne is generating more greenhouse emissions, using more water, losing open space and turning into a high rise steel and concrete jungle. Planners and policy makers talk the talk of protecting Melbourne’s environment, but their actions have the opposite effect. They behave as Gough Whitlam once described rowers facing in one direction but heading in the opposite one.

The promise of Green Wedges to give Melbourne lungs of open space in which to breathe has been broken

A fundamental component of planning for Melbourne’s growth during the 1970s was the concept of
urban growth corridors radiating outwards, separated by wedges of non-urban land (Friends of Merri Creek 2009:3). But the promise of Green Wedges to give Melbourne lungs of open space in which to breathe has been broken, and is proposed to be broken yet again. We need to retain Green Wedges as permanent wedges between growth corridors, not as potential urban land supply that is bulldozed as soon as there is a demand for it.

On 19 July 2009, the Sydney Sun-Herald newspaper ran the following article by writer Kelsey Munro: 'Record number of arrivals swells population'

"Figures suggest we're experiencing the biggest boom since the 1950s. A combination of high immigration rates and high birth rates has pushed Australia to a record population boom."

To summarise, Munro identifies the following population statistical trends in Australia from source 'RP Data':

* (Australia's) population growth in 2008 was the highest since the baby boom of the 1950s, according to statistics from RP Data.

* Last year, Australia's population grew by 1.9 per cent, or 406,083 people (nearly 1/2 a million!), to 21.6 million. This is a record figure of 253,415 in net migration (total arrivals minus total departures) represented a great increase over 2007's net migration figure of 184,438.

* Western Australia was the fastest-growing state in 2008, with a 3.1 per cent population increase largely fuelled by overseas migration drawn by the resources boom.

* However, Queensland had the greatest raw number of new residents, with 107,000 new Queenslanders (including births) arriving during 2008.

* NSW grew by 97,509 people but lost 22,690 residents to other states, mostly Queensland. However, this is almost half the number of rescees and publci idents heading north compared with the year before."

Demographer Peter McDonald from ANU claims that our popluation is mainly from immigration, made up from overseas students, New Zealanders, long-stay business visas and working holidaymakers.

Based on 2008's 1.9% cummulative growth rate, Australia's population by 2050 will be at least 44 million.

RE-ELECTION QUESTIONS FOR RUDD:

1. If record immigration offers such net economic and social benefits, why are all Australian states failing to cope and deliver on the flooding demand for public infrastructure and services?

2. Why is Australia's federal government choosing to lead the first world in population growth?

3. Why with such record immigration, is the Australian public denied disclosure of Rudd's federal population policy? - a policy that is the root driver of domestic demand for all resources, for imports, for inflation, for unemployment and for all public infrastructure and services!

4. Why are Australia's living standards and affordabilty being allowed to erode?

In history, there are two types of invasion. One by military aggression, the other by mass immigration. Australia has colonial history of both, which is being perpetuated today in a kind of neo-colonisation. Politically acceptable economics that seeks to silence views on the economics of mass population growth is head-in-the-sand politics that ignores the living standards of a society.

The Rudd Government is perpetuating a policy of 'eco-colonisation' without realisating the triple bottom line consequences. By eco-colonisation I mean a form of unofficial colonisation by way of mass imigration on teh basis of generating domestic economic growth. Like other forms of colonisation, eco-colonisation in mass like Australia has presently can similarly lead to displacement of the existing population by the immigrant population. For instance, more educated immigrants tend to displace the indigenous. A country's indigenous culture can be steadily eroded by an immigrant mass-culture, especially when that immigration involves economic immigrants with employable skills and wealth.

This was the nature of Australia's colonial past and it is being perpetuated today on an economic basis by the current Rudd Government. But importantly, this has nothing to do with race or ethnic origin. The problem is the impact of the sheer volume of immigrants and the impact on local society and environment.

Rudd no understand history.

The Emperor Julian codified the land-tenure laws which Napoleon later consolidated. The substitution of the Napoleonic code for the British inheritance system could help overpopulation and poverty.

July 11 was World Population Day, marking the day in 1987 when the world’s population passed five billion. This year’s theme in the UN is ‘Fight Poverty: Educate Girls.’

Here are some things that the UN does not talk about and which Bill Gates probably doesn't realise.

The third world countries that have natural increase problems began by their steady-state communities being disorganised through massive immigration - then called colonisation, now called industrialisation. The problems began with loss of land-tenure as entire peoples were disorganised and disoriented by having their traditional land removed from their control. Africa and India, for instance, had many stable populations for centuries, as testified by their high biodiversity and healthy natural systems at time of colonisation. The degradation of their natural systems has accompanied the destabilising of their human social organisation and overpopulation.

It was not until the 18th and 19th Century, with the imposition of the English political systems that these populations blew out. Polynesia, micronesia and Australia, colonised later, are succumbing later to the same failure of practical democracy.

The people of the original steady state societies lost their land to the colonisers and were encouraged to become wage-earners instead of self-sufficient. The new economy was initially agricultural and then manufacturing. Large landless families benefited both agriculturalists and manufacturers. Those without land were totally dependent on wages for their labour to survive and could not opt out of the labour market. Thus, people who for thousands of years had been self-sufficient and free, became servants.

Like the Americas and Canada, Australia is still being 'colonised'. The landless people who were forced to come here or who came voluntarily and displaced the aboriginal population are now losing their own access to land here, just like the Aboriginals. At the same time women here are being conned into having more children. It is becoming harder to get a decent education as well.

There is every reason to anticipate that this difficulty will increase.

The Importance of Child Labour Laws in preventing overpopulation:

Once the rot has set in, next thing to go are effective child labour laws. This is because if there is no ban enforced on children labouring, then large families are preferred to educated wives. Once children are a major source of income, mass-education withers away.

Child Labour Laws as a variable in fertility rates[i]

Here are some explanations for changes in human fertility since the beginning of agriculture.

In countries where effective labour laws prohibit the employment of children, those children become costly rather than income-beneficial.[ii] In those countries where working for wages is the main option for survival for many but where child labour is prohibited, then people who rely mainly or uniquely on wages will have fewer children.

Similarly, a woman who has education will be more valuable as an income-earner than as a child-producing wife in a society that prohibits child-labour. Where women earn less than men for doing the same job, in a society which needs skilled workers and prohibits child-labour, then this will be a disincentive for taking such women out of the workforce to have children. It will also be an obstacle to marriage because men's capacity to find work will be undermined by the cheaper but still skilled labour of women. In societies where monogamous marriage is the model for raising children, there are implications for marriage frequency. With children a high cost, only men with high incomes will be able to afford to take a wife out of the workforce to nurture children.

Inheritance Laws as a variable in average wealth differentials

In countries where men can own and inherit land, but women cannot, (England from the 12th century until the 1920s) then lack of land is an incentive for women to marry for material survival, but women who can own land and earn a salary may experience their ability to earn as a disincentive to marriage due to the status and power of running their own lives.

A disincentive also operates in countries where, in divorce, either partner may acquire rights to the assets that the other brought to the marriage.

Some countries have facilitated the ability of women to work, raise and educate children outside marriage -- e.g. France. To this should be added the fact that French women also benefit from equal inheritance rights to men.

Although French women only recently (in the 1970s) regained the right to manage their affairs, this right, coupled with the government's duty to house, educate and assure an income to its citizens, enhances women's security and independence.

France also, through its inheritance system, makes French women more likely to inherit wealth than British women and many British men, who had almost no land inheritance rights until primogeniture was revoked in 1926.[iii] Even though all children may now inherit in societies based on British law, because there is no legal requirement that they inherit, there is still a profound tendency to disinherit children in those societies, through second marriages or due to their being the product of casual union, or based on ideology or a whim. (I often think of how the very rich Australian, Reg Ansett, disinherited his son, Bob, apparently excusing the inexcusable with an ideology that everyone should make their own way in the world, failing to take into account that different generations have very different prospects according to resource depletion and other changes.)

The legally enforceable inheritance rights of any French child, legitimate, illegitimate, issue of first or subsequent marriages is almost certainly a major factor in the lesser disparities between rich and poor in France and those other countries in Europe which benefited from the Napoleonic Code (a Roman law based system). It is noteworthy that Pacific Islands which have inherited the French system do not have the same rates of overpopulation, homelessness and economic poverty as the ones that were colonised with the English system. (Neither do those in Japanese waters, with the exception of those which passed into US ownership after the Second World War. The Japanese inheritance system also preserves land in families.)

Unfortunately the French situation of equity will be affected by changes to the Napoleonic Code introduced by President Sarkozi in 2008. Now it becomes possible for a spouse to make a serious claim on part of a deceased's estate where that estate previously went entirely to blood relatives.

The recent ability of technological societies to prove paternity is a new factor that could be exploited to access additional income for children whose mothers might otherwise be their sole providers. This could act to increase the fertility rate, but men might become more careful about impregnating women under these new circumstances.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] Excerpt from my book in progress below on this subject.
[ii] Doepke, M., Growth and Fertility in the Long Run, Mimeo, University of Chicago, 2000, available in reduced form in Doepke, M. "Accounting for Fertility Decline During the Transition to Growth", Journal of Economic Growth, 9(3), 347-383, September 2004. The speed of the fertility transition depends on policies that affect the opportunity cost of education, namely education subsidies and child-labor restrictions. Doepke considered the case of two countries that started to grow at roughly the same time, but which had experienced very different government policies: (South) Korea and Brazil. Korea had a strong public education system, and child-labor restrictions were strictly enforced, while Brazil had an ineffective public education system, with little systematic enforcement of child labour restrictions. Doepke found, as his model predicted, that the fertility decline associated with development proceeded much faster in Korea than in Brazil.

[iii] The rule of primogeniture in England was not changed until the Administration of Estates Act of 1926.

[This article was initially posted as a comment in response to Brian McGavin's article 'Report on conference to find 10 best of 20 climate solutions'].

A 'Queenslander' style family home in Brisbane

If "Australia was a big country well able to absorb a bigger population" [Ed Miliband, UK Climate and Energy Secretary], then we would have full employment, public infrastructure and services would have excess capacity ready to cope, federal and state governments would be in surplus and there would be no undue pressures on our economy, society or ecology. But this is clearly not the case - just read any newspaper in Australia. It's obvious when commuting to work. Try getting a job. Try getting elective surgery. Try booking children into a school or toddlers into childcare. Try buying a house.

Edward Miliband, an economist and now somehow qualified to be UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in Britain's Labor Party, and somehow qualified to be an authority on Australia and its population capacity and ecological footprint - or else really an ambitious UK polly who will say anything before checking his facts, and who has no expertise on Australia or in population sociology?

Demand stress upon all resources is worsening and at its root, this demand is driven by the growth of human population and its proportionate demand for scarce resources.

What is needed to clarify the problem is to establish measures and benchmarks. The ‘best or most favourable’ population for Australia and each of its cities and regions will be its 'optimum population'. This is one key benchmark. It is a more appropriate measure than 'sustainable population', because 'sustainable' implies the maximum possible, which is a less than ideal outcome. If Australians want to live in congestion akin to Bangkok or Hong Kong, then even if our resources could be pushed further to the sustainable limit, Australia's 'sustainable population' would be a scary number!

Bangkok

But how do we measure the benchmark of 'optimum population'? The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) approaches this measurement by applying the test of ecological footprinting (or eco-footprinting) This seeks to measure the ecological carrying capacity of a district, province, country, global region and even the whole planet. Carrying capacity is defined by OPT as "the size of human population that can be supported in a given territory, in a specified life-style (for example 'Modest European'), without degrading its physical and ecological environment, and without imposing wastes on the global environment beyond a specified limit." OPT Research Co-ordinator Andrew Ferguson defines eco-footprinting as "the process of determining the bioproductive area that a person or a population needs in order to sustain a specified lifestyle."

So the test then comes down to one of lifestyle. Lifestyle is a familiar term but one worth defining at this point. Dictionary .com defines lifestyle as "the habits, attitudes, tastes, moral standards, economic level, etc., that together constitute the mode of living of an individual or group." Perhaps Australians should reflect on this definition -'room to move', 'low cost of living', health, individual freedoms, access to opportunities, access to resources, etc. In Australia, we apparently have one of the best lifestyles on the planet. Australian lifestyle is made up of a set of values that should not be taken for granted.

So if eco-footprinting is about the relationship between a bioproductive area of a person or population to sustain a specified lifestyle, then this assumes lifestyle is inversely proportional to population - where the larger the population and faster the growth of that population the lower the standard of lifestyle - 'room to move', lower costs, opportunities, resource access, reduced competition, etc. In Australia, we apparently have one of the best lifestyles on the planet.

But this is relative and these days it depends on where one lives in Australia and one's socio-economic status. Back in the 1960's Australia was arguably a classless society. These days not so. In 1960 Australia's population was 10 million. In 1970 it was 12 million. In 1980 it was 14 million. In 1990 it was 17 million. In 2009 it is 21.8 million and increasing exponentially currently at 300,000 per year and could reach $23 million by 2010. So in 50 years, Australia's population has more than doubled. With current government policy at both federal and state levels our population will likely double again to 50 million in less than 50 years. Based on policies and historical trends to concentrate population in Australia's capital cities, this means Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and other major cities will be twice the size they are now. Imagine that for a moment! This is the real risk. It is frankly the biggest problem facing Australia.

Some other useful measures to better define the population growth problem are:

'Ecological footprint' is defined by the World Wildlife Fund as "an ecological footprint compares countries' consumption of natural resources with the Earth's biological capacity to regenerate them," or "a measure of humanity's use of renewable resources."

'Ecological space' is "the biologically productive space available to each person on the planet. Divided into equal shares (i.e. divided by world population) it was 5 - 6 hectares per person in 1900 and decreased to 1.5 hectares per person by 2000. Ecological space can expand or shrink depending on resource consumption, technological innovation, population growth and other factors."

Hectare, global (gha) "In eco-footprinting, 1 hectare (10,000m2, or 100m x 100m) of biologically productive space with world-average productivity. In 2002 the biosphere had 11.4 billion hectares of biologically productive space corresponding to roughly one quarter of the planet's surface. These 11.4 billion hectares include 2 billion hectares of cropland, 3.5 billion hectares of grazing land, 3.8 billion hectares of forest land, 0.3 billion hectares of inland waters and 0.3 hectares of built-up land. One global hectare is therefore a hectare representing the average capacity of one of these 11.4 billion hectares. Thus a hectare of highly productive land represents more 'global hectares' than the same surface of less productive land. Global hectares allow the meaningful comparison of the ecological footprints of different countries, which use different qualities and mixes of cropland, grazing land, and forest."

Becoming familiar with these measures and benchmarks will enable us to have a clearer understanding about what population numbers and growth Australia and Auatralians can indeed 'absorb'.

Moama Beach, South Australia...with many hectares per person (and seagull).

A media release from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) last September (2008) reported:

'Net overseas migration to Australia highest on record: ABS'

"Australia's net overseas migration is at an all time high, according to figures released today from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). In the year ended March 2008, net overseas migration to Australia of just under 200,000 people accounted for over half (59%) of Australia's population increase."

* "In March 2008 Australia's population reached 21,283,000 - an increase of 1.6% (336,800 people) from the previous year."

* "Natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) contributed 137,700 people (or 41%)."

As at 31 March 2008, Australia's resident population was as follows:

NSW.......6,947,000
VIC.........5,274,000
QLD........4,253,000
WA.........2,149,000
SA..........1,598,000
TAS...........497,300
ACT...........342,700
NT.............218,400.

While I write about degrading conditions in the United States, the Internet allows my work to travel all over the planet. As you know, relentless immigration endangers America, but also Australia.

Incomprehensible forces push for more population additions in both our countries. Those ‘growthists’ at the power positions operate in a mindless vacuum. They create a Faustian Bargain with the only outcome manifesting in Hobson’s Choice.

Yet, a glimmer of hope exposes average citizens to their dilemma. Mark O’Connor and William Lines wrote Overloading Australia to give everyone an idea of the calamity engulfing Oz.

In the USA, I wrote a piece, “America Losing its Language & Culture without a Whimper” for my fellow citizens. It appears that an Aussie picked it up from the Internet. You may appreciate his response:

“Frosty, you are absolutely spot on! Unfortunately I am seeing the same thing happening in Australia, most of my country men are either walking around in a "fog" or are too caught up in materialism or have been sucked in by the crap being pushed by the multi-cultural/multi-racial industry,” Robert said.

“Over the last two weeks in Melbourne & Sydney there have been large protests (several thousand strong) by foreign Indian students claiming lack of action from government and police to protect them from violent attacks. There have also been protests in India where effigies of P.M. Kevin Rudd were burnt. Indian newspapers have been running stories about Australian racism and saying that the attacks could threaten the income Australia gets from foreign students. The funny thing is: video surveillance tapes and recent arrests have identified the culprits as being of Middle Eastern identity.

“Large groups of India students have taken to the streets of Melbourne armed with clubs and attacked young men of Middle Eastern appearance. The Middle Eastern community is now asking for protection, meanwhile our politicians and self appointed ethnic spokesman are claiming the attacks aren't racially motivated. The average Aussie of European decent is sitting back scratching their head wondering what the bloody hell is going on?

“Regarding fee paying foreign students, I noticed that this is just another back door scam for residency in Australia for Third Worlders, once they complete their University or a basic Cooking, Hairdressing or Assistant in Nursing course at a ”shonk" so called Technical School they get bonus points towards residency status as they are considered skilled workers. At the same time local kids can't get placements at University, the management of Universities prefer the foreign students because they pay higher fees.

“On other matters Sydney's first Water Distillation Plant will be online soon to cope with our demand for more fresh water, the politicians are still blaming Global Warming as the reasons for building the plant, they refuse to acknowledge the demands that an increasing population is placing on our environment, health care system and life style.

“Since retiring, I have been doing a bit of casual work in a hospital, I can't believe the number of elderly people from Third World countries who are using our system and costing the taxpayer a bomb! Most of them have come here under the Family Reunion Program, the taxes their children pay could never cover the cost of providing health care and welfare for their parents.”

Australians must ask themselves if they wish to import the poor of the world to become the new entrenched poor of Oz. In the USA, we’re importing two million poor annually and they are breaking our medical, educational and prison systems. They cannot be educated as their numbers overwhelm our educational systems. Additionally, every poor teenage girl becomes pregnant faster than a hummingbird can flap its wings.

Additionally, those poor immigrants seeking a better life in the U.S. cost our taxpayers $346 billion annually in housing, food, medical, educational and resettlement costs. Immigrants must be costing Oz a bundle of cash too!

Australians may well look toward a total moratorium on all immigration before they find their country devolved into a multi-cultural and multi-lingual polyglot of incoherent mush.

One scholar, Seymour Martin Lipset, put it this way: “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon-all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with its Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans.”

Kant said, “Religion and language are the two great dividers.”

The fact grows more apparent daily: multiculturalism and multilingual societies cannot and do not maintain a cohesive or viable future. Australia will become a nation of strangers.

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com

Original article published on Australia.to News.

Australian-based Japanese students mistaken possum for cat!

I recently received the photograph above with the following email message:

"Subject: Lost Cat found........... posted by Japanese students renting in Brunswick,VICTORIA

AND FEEDING IT CAT FOOD TOO !"

The students had apparently posted a picture of a possum they had found in the street, believing it was a lost domestic cat. Admirably, they were feeding it and looking after it, whilst seeking a rapid return to its owner. Perhaps even more incredibly, the possum seemed to have adapted to its new role as a rescued domestic cat.

Incredible - yes!

Incredible, eh? What cute naivety on the part of those Japanese students. What must the possum think of the whole thing, you wonder? Did it stay with the students? Did it manage to get them to enlarge its diet to include seaweed salad and radishes? Did the students eventually realise that what they had was not a cat, and change the possum over to its rightful diet of gum-nut flowers and coastal tea-tree, perhaps with the occasional desert of red geraniums?

The real story

Actually, this poster is a fake. Sandy Fernee writes, "The possum is one that was in a shelter over 10 years ago, in fact the picture was stolen from the shelter operators' posting."

But the real story is a nice one too. "The possum was released 10 years ago and has probably had lots of babies in the wild [...] This fake poster has been going around for about 2 years now."

She adds, "Please remind people with injured possums that they should call their local wildlife rescue group."
Sandy is the Executive Officer at Wildlife Victoria www.wildlifevictoria.org.au and a licensed wildlife carer.

Photo by Julia Buch

Totoro or Pokemon possums

Come to think of it, while we are on the subject of Japanese view-points, possums look a bit like Tortoro, a giant friendly Japanese wood-spirit made famous through the Japanese anime, film, My Neighbour Tortoro.

And Tortoro looked like a great big Pokemon, the Japanese cartoon animal hero.

It would in fact be nice if the Australian Brushtail Possum were to have the same support that Pokemon has, world wide. As it is, in many places in Australia our brushtail possum wood spirit look-alike is atrociously treated and disrespected. Anyone who has formed a relationship of mutual trust with a brush tail possum - through raising one or looking after an injured one for a long time, knows what fun they are - and how cute - as well as courageous and social. They are, however, mistreated by many councils in Australia, treated as 'pests' by the state government, and seen as a target for cruelty by some members of the public.

The possum is a powerful suburban advocate for all Australian wildlife and so many Australians and Australian visitors miss out on possum magic. Tortoro was a kind of animal god who made friends with some children and protected them and was remembered all their lives. How much richer our lives in Australia would be if we gave that kind of respect to that curious and sociable, playful and mischievious, but independent creature, who tries to get along with us in the suburbs - our friend - the common brush-tail possum.

Australians are losing their human rights to power, water, affordable housing, agricultural land, wild healthy biodiverse landscapes, self-government, education, and sustainable population very very fast.

Do you all know about the current Human Rights Consultation in Australia? You can register your concerns. Deadline is 15 June. Format is not limited to filling out the form; you may express yourself freely.

Please strongly consider writing your concerns about what is happening to human rights in Australia through commercially driven population growth, development, media and government. Circulate this article as widely as you can. Print it out and help elderly people, homeless people and others not able to access the internet to contribute to this consultation. The mailing address is lower down in this article.

This consultation provides avenues for people to record their concerns about the government's big population policy and its effect on human rights.

Examples of rights impacted and diminished by government policy and its coalition with the commercial Growth Lobby include:

- safe clean natural affordable water
- healthy river and soil and forest systems
- beautiful natural landscapes
- a healthy wild biodiverse envelope
- a kind and respectful treatment of farm animals and wildlife, with land-use planning for their welfare
- functioning democracy not overwhelmed by commercial interests fed by population growth
- the right to local self-government
- affordable housing

Towards protecting or retrieving these rights, we suggest that you demand:
- an end to the tendency towards monopoly of ownership, outlets and delivery by the mainstream press
- an end to commercial representation on the boards of the ABC and other public media
- the right to demand that the owners of the commercial press daily declare their commercial and corporate interests and associations to the public in an accessible manner
- public ownership of institutions and assets
- proper consultation about privatisation
- limitation of corporate rights
- add your own (The highlighted areas above may give you some ideas and material.)

The National Human Rights Consultation is seeking views about human rights in Australia on the following, but not limited to the following:

1. Which human rights and responsibilities should be protected and promoted?
2. Are these human rights currently sufficiently protected and promoted?
3. How could Australia better protect and promote human rights?

You can send an electronic submission via the submissions page or send it by mail to
National Human Rights Consultation Secretariat
Attorney-General's Department
Central Office
Robert Garran Offices
National Circuit
BARTON ACT 2600

or register to attend a community roundtable discussion in your state. The Consultation will run from 10 December 2008 until August 2009. The last date submissions can be accepted is 15 June 2009. After listening to the views and ideas of the Australian people, the Consultation Committee has been asked to report to Government on what they have heard by 31 August 2009.

Help http://candobetter.org to amplify your concerns and help you organise

We here at candobetter.org would also appreciate your contributing your submissions or to discussion at http://candobetter.org where we can amplify any ideas. There is no guarantee that the people appointed to represent the submissions will do this adequately without public pressure. Please help us to stimulate and organise this public pressure by sending your submissions to us as well, via the comments section, so that we can keep a public record and promote your concerns, show where others shared your concerns, and publish your views.

Sheila Newman
Population, Environment and Energy Sociologist
Sheila Newman (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto Press, UK, 2008

In his review of "Overloading Australia" by Mark O'Connor and William Lines, Frosty Wooldridge author of America on the brink who has cycled 100,000 miles across six continents in the past 25 years, refutes commonly held misconceptions that the Australian continent is underpopulated.

Also published on Australia.to News and in American Chronicle as part 1 and part 2.

With a scant 21 million people on the vast continent of Australia, how could anyone state with any certitude that Oz suffers from human overpopulation? What impudence might that take? How out of touch? How completely absurd? Definitely not 'fair dinkum'!

China features not much more land mass than Oz but houses 1.3 billion souls. The United States--at least the lower 48 states--equals about the same land mass, but houses 306 million people. Mexico, less than a quarter the size of Australia, features 108 million people.

So what's the problem? How could there be a snag? Australia encompasses an endless amount of land. It features 2,970,000 square miles of terra firma. How do I know? In 1984 through 1985, I cycled 17,000 kms around Australia including Tasmania. One Aussie, after learning that I intended to cycle the entire perimeter of Australia said, "Well Yank, you must be dead from the neck up!" I answered, "Yes, but it's a great adventure." He responded, "Do you know what the Nullabor Plains means?" I said, "No." He said, "It means treeless for 2,000 kms and 40 degrees C. every day. You'll fry in the heat!"

None the less, I traveled from Sydney down the Princess Highway to Melbourne; sailed over to Tasmania, up the Great Ocean Road to see the 12 Apostles, to Ceduna and across the Nullabor Plains (treeless) and on to Esperance and then to Perth, onward to Port Headlands and upward to Darwin. From there to Cairns and back down to Sydney! What did I see and how did I feel? I fried in the saddle and sweated while I slept at night under the Southern Cross. Withering heat at 120+ degrees F. daily! I stopped at the Great Australian Bite, saw Bondy's (Alan Bond) boat that beat the Yanks in the Americas Cup, viewed the Pinnacles of Cervantes, rode past the ant castles, witnessed the 'prison boab tree' near Port Headlands and watched the big crocs in Darwin. A frilled lizard scared the daylights out of me near Tenant Creek and I dove on the Great Barrier Reef. I read A.F. Facey's "A Fortunate Life." I'm still friends with John Brown in Kiama and Lance Hill in Perth. I've backpacked with Lance in Nepal and push-biked across the USA with John. I love Oz and its people.

So why does Australia suffer an overpopulation crisis? From my firsthand experiences, I am here to tell you: desert and sand cover 95 percent of Australia. No water and no arable land! It's a wasteland with kangaroos, emus, wombats and stray camels eking out their existences in the devil's horrid heat.

So why does Australia suffer an overpopulation crisis? From my firsthand experiences, I am here to tell you: desert and sand cover 95 percent of Australia. No water and no arable land! It's a wasteland with kangaroos, emus, wombats and stray camels eking out their existences in the devil's horrid heat. When I traveled Oz, it featured 14 million people which it could support. Today, at 21 million, it's on the edge of its own non-sustainable future. Australians might fool Mother Nature in the short term, but they cannot in the long run. Oz doesn't possess water or arable land needed to grow food thus to sustain a large human population. That's a brutal fact!

However, powerful governmental, capitalistic and growth oriented organizations expect to push Australia's population to 50 million tortured souls. Much the same holds true in the United States and other countries where 'growthists' disregard reality and push human populations beyond the ability of the land and water to sustain them. How do they do it? They promote unlimited immigration from other countries that have already exceeded their carrying capacities---and simply exhaust their excess humanity onto the shores of Australia and other countries that possess stable populations. The third world grows by a net gain of 77 million annually, so the line never ends. That alone should give any Oz citizen pause!

The author Mark O'Connor of Overloading Australia, lamented, "I found this book almost impossible to write." He found the fortitude to finish the project only after teaming with his co-author, conservationist William J. Lines.

With electrifying clarity, O'Connor and Lines spell out a sobering future for Australia. Any kangaroo could figure out what the 'kangaroo' government in Canberra cannot seem to grasp! As one man who has seen more of Australia than 95 percent of Australians, I can vouch for the fact that Oz does not possess the farmland or the water to sustain any more population.

"Rightwing growthists demand endless growth of 'the economy' backed by endless population growth," O'Connor said. "Forced since late 2006 to accept a serious public debate about water supplies and about how to maintain 'growth' without increasing greenhouse gases, they are nevertheless determined to scotch any discussion about limiting growth."

I found it exceedingly exasperating that the 'very' people in charge of Australia's future, like Prime Minister Rudd in 2008, did and does not understand the consequences of his/their own actions. He promotes a "Faustian Bargain' on every citizen in Australia that will force a "Hobson's Choice."

"Rudd announced a million new homes would need to be built over the next six years to house the influx [of people] he did not venture to question," Lines said.

Where might that influx originate? Answer: Australia immigrates roughly 300,000 people annually into its dry and dusty desert country.

Why?

"There is a powerful lobby concerned not with whether human life or that of other species would be better in a 'larger' Australia, but with profits!" O'Connor said.

What 'growthists' create stems from that "Faustian Bargain" or selling their souls to the devil of growth for the present to place everyone into an environmental and unsustainable 'hell' later. Once another five or ten million Australians manifest on that desert continent, everyone suffers "Hobson's Choice": if you pick door number A---you walk through and over a cliff. If you pick door number B---you walk through and sink into quicksand. In other words, all your choices lead to death of your civilization.

How do I know that? My cycling travels across six continents have given me a bird's eye view of death from overloaded countries. Over 18 million people starve to death or die of starvation related diseases every year. Over 10 million of them are children under the age of 12 years.

"'Business as usual' desires even more people each demanding more from a finite Nature. A sustainable future is one in which human demands on the natural environment are within the capacity of that environment to meet. It means living within a boundary set by Nature. As we are already well beyond that boundary, it means reducing our population and our per capita demand. Both! Not one or the other!" John Coulter, author "Population and Sustainability: A Global Role for Australia." (pdf, 83K)

In the first part of this book review, Overloading Australia, by O'Connor and Lines, we covered Australia's daunting future if it continues on its present immigration-driven hyper-population growth path. We discussed a "Faustian Bargain" and "Hobson's Choice." We discovered that Australia does not possess enough water or arable land to sustain more than 20 million citizens.

Yet, corporations, politicians and immigration groups known as 'growthists', defy all logic while pushing their agenda toward a 50 million population in Australia.

Oz and the United States, where I live, share similar paradigms. Both maintain stable populations via their own citizens, but both find themselves suffering hyper-population growth by immigration forced down their throats by pandering politicians. Both countries don't comprehend their end-result of relentless immigration

.

U.S. demographic expert Dr. Albert Bartlett said, "A century of 1.6 percent per year growth, which is Australia's current growth rate, would cause Australia to increase to 100 million."

It shows you that if you were riding in a car with Kevin Rudd, he would drive over a cliff and take you with him. Once you arrived in Heaven, and you asked him why he did that, he might answer, "I didn't realize where I was going."

The fact remains, folks pushing growth agendas don't understand where they take Australia, but overpopulation advocates drive Oz over a cliff.

"First, we need to clear away a quite different objection," O'Connor said. "Clearly the writers of this book care about nature. So why, some conservationists will ask us, are we writing about the number of people, instead of worrying about the amount of damage each person does?"

You'll hear about tons of people pushing alternative gardening, alternative energy and all sorts of environmentally feel-good concepts that fail to address the one issue that will negate all their efforts.

Obviously, like in the U.S., Australian media and politicians deftly avoid the population issue. It's the sacred cow of Faustian proponents. You'll hear about tons of people pushing alternative gardening, alternative energy and all sorts of environmentally feel-good concepts that fail to address the one issue that will negate all their efforts. No matter how many new energy saving light bulbs or 100 kilometers to the liter of gas automobiles or water conservation---when you add another 10 million people, you lose on all counts.

It's simple mathematics, but those devils drive you toward the cliff by spinning the facts into confusion! Amazingly, they assume they are not, nor are their children vulnerable to the consequences.

Simon Grose, writing in the Canberra Times, in 2007, said, "Can we really expect to increase our numbers by about 30 percent over 50 years and keep all fed and comfortable with the hope of a car and a fridge without raising greenhouse emissions? No way!"

Finally, a mind that writes a reality based piece! What a concept! Reality! Deal with it or be swept away by it!

"No one wants to go back to rushlights and mule-back," Lines said. "But there are just two problems. First, any interruption to the power-supply brings chaos and before long, deaths. Second, there seems no way that the planet can provide resources for this lifestyle to be shared by nearly seven billion people, let alone another two or three billion by 2050."

At the head of each chapter, O'Connor and Lines place compelling quotes from experts and world leaders. It doesn't take a Sydney lawyer with an ounce of common sense to connect the dots! Australia already stands in the cross-hairs of terrible environmental conflict with its own human numbers.

Mikhail Gorbachev said, "We are all passengers aboard one ship, the Earth, and we must not allow it to be wrecked. There will be no second Noah's Ark."

What I found most compelling with O'Connor's work stems from the fact that I have witnessed firsthand the ramifications facing other countries that allowed their populations to spin out of control. For example, Bangladesh, not much bigger in landmass than Tasmania, houses 144 million people. Can any Australian fathom Tasmania with 144 million people? That's what's happening worldwide and that's why people flee those countries by the millions.

nstead of absorbing an unending line of immigrants, Australia and other first world countries might help those other countries by NOT taking their refugees, but instead, send them birth control and family planning along with food production techniques and water purification. Help them in their own countries.

Instead of absorbing an unending line of immigrants, Australia and other first world countries might help those other countries by NOT taking their refugees, but instead, send them birth control and family planning along with food production techniques and water purification. Help them in their own countries. If they refuse help, then, in the final analysis, they must suffer their own Malthusian overload. If Australia keeps taking immigrants, then, Australia becomes another Bangladesh or variation thereof at some point in this century.

"Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide, but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all--ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet." Dr. Otis Graham, Unguarded Gates

In chapter 5, the authors land, like the shocking wildfires in Sydney and NSW last year, with a savage reality punch: food or the scarcity of it!

The Green Revolution is basically over, it's gains already cancelled by population growth.

"There are several reasons why Earth is failing---but they all come down to the fact that an increasing number of people are making increasing demands on a single planet," Lines said. "The Green Revolution is basically over, it's gains already cancelled by population growth."

To attest to that fact, an average of 18 million people die of starvation or starvation related diseases annually worldwide. I can say, that in my world bicycle travels, I've seen those deaths firsthand. It's not a benign statistic to me; it's a harsh visual reality. If you look at any "Save the Children" program begging to feed the children, you have seen what I have seen. For anyone that really wants to save the children, first world countries should send birth control with food. (www.quinacrine.com)

"Humans will continue to clear the diminishing lands left to other species," O'Connor said. "Wreaking disaster upon creatures already pushed to the margins."

Worldwide, humans cause the extinction of 100 creatures daily via human encroachment on habitat. In Oz, many kangaroos suffer endangerment as well as dozens of other species.

"The debate ought to be about the carrying capacity of the continent---a continent that has lousy soils, fragile soils and depleted and degraded river systems." Bob Carr, writing for Weekend Australian, June 1994

In the third part of this book review, Overloading Australia by O'Connor and Lines, we covered the fact that Australia cannot sustain added population numbers as to food, energy and water. That hasn't stopped 'growthists' in their 'spin' to obfuscate the realities facing the 'desert continent'.

The authors covered the 'refugee' dilemma, but again, the world grows by 77 million annually, which leaves long-term immigration a futile gesture. At some point, all civilizations must come to terms with their own numbers and their own recovery.

... what's the point of growing more population in Australia when you see what it did to China, India, Indonesia and other hyper-populated countries? Let's face it, the reason those immigrants flee their countries provides the exact reason Australia should stabilize its own population in order to remain within its carrying capacity.e

How many more people can Australia sustain? Short answer: not many! The most realistic question arises from anyone with a three digit IQ: what's the point of growing more population in Australia when you see what it did to China, India, Indonesia and other hyper-populated countries? Let's face it, the reason those immigrants flee their countries provides the exact reason Australia should stabilize its own population in order to remain within its carrying capacity.

John Coulter said in a letter to the editor in The Age, "If I were a Melbournian, I would not reduce my water consumption until Premier Bracks abandons his crazy plan to bring another million people into Melbourne. Why should I save to have my savings squandered by an irresponsible Premier and leave my children in an even worse situation than today?"

The question that Planning Minister Justin Madden should ponder is: how do we cater for increased population given that our rivers, dams and reservoirs are drying up, the drought shows no sign of breaking, one-third of the state is affected by bushfires, and blackouts are becoming commonplace?

Another writer said, "We have been told that Melbourne must populate or perish and that by 2030 we must absorb another one million residents. The question that Planning Minister Justin Madden should ponder is: how do we cater for increased population given that our rivers, dams and reservoirs are drying up, the drought shows no sign of breaking, one-third of the state is affected by bushfires, and blackouts are becoming commonplace?"

O'Connor addressed the 'shortage of workers' façade that also occurs in the United States. While 2.4 million legal and illegal migrants pour over our borders annually, corporations demand hundreds of thousands of work visas for foreign workers.

However, as of March 2009, the U.S. suffers an 11.1 percent unemployment rate and 32.2 million Americans live on food stamps. Yes, that number 32.2 million is correct!

If Australia's politicians prove as cunning and feckless as my country's leaders, both our countries face being overwhelmed by the third world---again with no end of the line of immigrants fleeing their own misery as they grow by 77 million annually. Once millions of poor established in both our countries, our poverty rates, language chaos and sustainability will not survive.

While you read this book, you can't put it on the coffee table. Every chapter enlightens you to greater understanding. If you feel like it, start yelling at the top of your lungs, because it could put you into a logical rage.

"We know that by mid-century the world population is going to be as high as 10 billion people. The world advice is that, that simply cannot be sustained. We are down to fewer than 50 days of flow-on food availability to meet any great emergency and will be facing a mammoth, chaotic social outcome of too many people with too few resources on the planet in the lifetime of some of us here. That is why I asked the government whether it had a population policy, and I do not believe it does," Bob Brown in the Senate, September 16, 2008

That same applies to the U.S. It causes you to wonder if the patients run the insane asylum. Why can the media and government maintain such a high level of arrogance and stupidity side by side?

One writer said, "How can you kill a planet and still expect to live on it?"

O'Connor and Lines in the final chapters of the book provide a sobering rendition of the consequences of endless growth to the 'desert continent'. I invite every politician, college professor, high school and college student in Australia---to read this book. It needs to be read in boardrooms and bedrooms of parents. It needs reviews by every critic across Australia. It needs to be a best seller in the first world. Every mother and father needs to read it because their kids will be wrapped up in this great 'human dilemma'.

Thankfully, the authors addressed 'racism' in the book. I can vouch for Mother Nature that she doesn't care what your race, creed or color happens to be when your species overwhelms its carrying capacity. Mother Nature kills and cripples without prejudice. As in Chapter 15 of the book, "Fooling people, fooling nature", you bluff Mother Nature for only so long, and then, she will kick your Aussie ass! That blunt, that simple!

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, "Twaddle, rubbish and gossip is what people want, not action. Politicians know this. Aided by the media and cheered by intellectuals, they peddle illusion, fantasy, myth, faith and hope."

"But then there is the natural world," O'Connor said. "It's vastly different from politics and our delusions. People can be fooled over and over again, but nature cannot, not even once."

At the end of the book, Lines and O'Connor show how 'green groups' avoid the population equation along with the media. It's a cute and dangerous façade. They address the "Aborigines" guilt complex. They talk about climate change and ecological footprint. They nail it!

"You'd have to be an economist or a fool to think you can keep adding population forever!" said Kenneth Boulding, economist.

While the authors present cogent advice at the end of the book, I found myself laughing out loud at one of their ideas. "Why we should all waste water!" While all the environmentalists and do-gooders cry out to conserve, and the same happens with the Sierra Club in America, all the conservation in the world won't help as Australia adds another 10, 20, 30 or 50 million people. Therefore, start wasting as much water as possible today to force the population issue to the front burner. Frankly, it will power its way into the public's attention either now or later.

As I said at the beginning of this review, I've already seen what's coming in my world cycling travels. It's not pretty. Instead of walking that same perilous path as overpopulated countries, I invite every Australian to read this book, heed its wisdom and change course toward a sustainable nation and bright future for all Australians. Call for an "Australian Sustainable Population Policy" that limits mass immigration to near zero. You cannot save the rest of the world, but you can destroy your own civilization or turn it into a water starved, food scant and quality of life nightmare. Your children will thank you in 2050 and the world will thank you for leading the way for humanity toward a plausible and livable planet. By the way, the rest of Earth's creatures will thank you, too!

Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population
Mark O'Connor & William J. Lines

America on the brink: the next added 100 million Americans

By Frosty Wooldridge

Published April 27, 2009; Available at 1-888 280 7715;  Barnes and Noble   www.barnesandnoble.com ;  Borders ; Amazon www.Amazon.com

Reviewers - Radio, TV, newsprint: for complimentary media copy, call Yvona Doane: 1 888 519 5121 Ext. 5299

"Eye-opening, incisive, brilliant!

"The U.S. has the fastest growing population of any industrial nation, and one of the world's highest consumption rates.  Water, topsoil, forests, fish, petroleum... the more of us, the more pressure we exert on our environment.  Many discuss our personal consumption patterns, but few dare talk about the underlying crisis of population growth.  Wooldridge is one of the few courageous voices warning us about the implications of our current direction, and informing us what we can do to change course."

   - Richard Heinberg, author of Peak Everything

"Electrifying reading!  This is a veritable cannonade of a book.

"Wooldridge targets the people and institutions, from the President on down, who refuse to look at the consequences of population growth in the modern era.   His focus is on the United States, but his range is the world.

"He fearlessly addresses issues that politicians fear to mention, such as the effects of mass immigration on our population future and our social systems.  He engages to force population issues into our local and national political decisions."

   - Lindsey Grant, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment & Population

"The environmental community may be outrageously AWOL on the important subject of population, but not Frosty Wooldridge.  Read this book!"

   - Richard D. Lamm, Governor of Colorado 1975-1987

"Wooldridge's powerful indictment of our political leaders for failing to address U.S. overpopulation should be required reading in classrooms and boardrooms.

"To mindlessly add 100 million more people to our nation's population in the next 30 years will put the United States economy and social order at further risk.  His challenge needs to be addressed on individual, national and international levels before it's too late."

   - William B. Dickinson, The Biocentric Institute

America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans --

injects a whole new dynamic facing the United States in the 21st century.  While national leaders at every level ignore accelerating consequences, immigration-driven hyper-population growth will become THE single greatest issue facing America in the years ahead.

In adding 100 million people by 2035, every crisis facing Americans today accelerates in harsher consequences -- whether it is water shortages, climate change, energy scarcity, dwindling resources, gridlock, air pollution and a decline of quality of life.

Wooldridge compellingly states the obvious... the U.S. cannot continue unplanned population expansion indefinitely.

He offers Hobson's Choice as a final result of mass denial.  If the U.S. adds another 100 million people via immigration, it faces two doors:

   -- if the country picks door # 1, this civilization walks over a cliff.

   -- If it picks door # 2, it walks into quicksand.

Once that 100 million people manifest, no one, no matter what their race, creed or color---escapes.  Americans will endure water shortages, energy problems, crowding and a much diminished standard of living.  The American Dream will no longer be available.

However, Frosty offers concrete ways to change the future.  In all great social change, it takes a 'conscious shift' that leads to a 'critical mass shift' and finally, a 'tipping point' whereby a civilization turns toward a sustainable and viable future.  It's up to each citizen and leader to make sure that 'tipping point' occurs.

The fate of this civilization hangs in the balance.

Author Contact: www.frostywooldridge.com

From a nice suburban garden ....

I am sorry to interfere with world affairs, which have no repercussion outside the English speaking community (or maybe just a little disturbance for the few Italians who have been alerted, count them on the fingers of ONE hand !)

I am referring to the interview of Sir David Attenborough by the witty Camilla Long, which appeared on the News review of the Culture International of the Sunday Times (19/4 /2009). It has been a big surprise for me to hear the complete unabridged views of our great naturalist , which have delighted my spirits with his nature documentaries.

When Sir David Attenborough was promoted Patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), we all have a reason to rejoice.
He has been quoted as saying:

“there are three times as many people in the world as when I started making television programmes 56 years ago. It is frightening. . We are seeing the consequences in terms of ecology, atmospheric pollution and in terms of space and food production.”

He may say obvious things that nobody in his right mind can deny, - yet oddly, increasingly, most dare not speak - but then, it’s ok, because it comes from the mouth of one of the most respected and famous personalities worldwide, and that counts, for sure.

To have Sir David Attenborough as a spokesperson for the “thorny” (his own words) problem of overpopulation is a great idea, because he is a decent, intelligent, not extremist, all virtues that make him and his views non-threatening, acceptable and almost mainstream. Maybe a bit too much…

Attenborough comes from educated, middle class, English traditional background. He may be labelled as DWM (Dead White Male), but for the fact that he is still, well, alive. He sees life through a retrospective mirror, stuck bang in his childhood: “…idyllic, a time in the Thirties when you could just get on your bicycle and be out in the country in half an hour…”

Today, he implies, the artificial world in which our children are immersed is so far removed from that love-affair with the natural world, and the real tragedy lies in the fact that society as a whole is not aware of the abnormality of the situation, to which we have been adapting so fast and so well. It is the parable of the boiled frog. It has changed the way we live, the way we think, we dream, we make love. The way we see nature, which has become the “environment”, has become profane and banal.

Now, I do not think that nature, in the good old days, was not raped, plundered, ignored but for the things she could provide. The good old days are obviously frozen by a sort of foggy and misericordious memory, which gives us the illusion that there was a Golden Age, and that we have actually belonged to it. For some lucky individuals, like an English curious boy born into a privileged environment, of course, it was. But around him, if he tried to look up from the wildlife and see the human life, the occasions for relaxing and seeing nature were of necessity nil.

Anyway, in later life, Attenborough had more than a chance to see slums and poverty, and, though used to look with complete moral indifference, required by the scientific approach, at the brutal fight for survival of the non-human species, he couldn’t stand the scene of that equivalent horror that is human life. It was life that in a deep sense belonged to him. If he now finds culture to be more determining than evolution, he finds human behaviour morally intolerable although he is well aware that for nature it is quite normal.

Finally the refusal of procreation is an act of charity, a teleological mission, to stop the horror of the futility of millions of wretched existences.

I understand this feeling, I, too, am a white woman, the type of personality described with some humour by another white man, a certain Brendan O’Neill (see www.spiked-online.com, Wednesday 1 April 2009, Brendan O’Neill Mixing with Malthusians):

“spiked editor Brendan O’Neill ventured into a pit of population-controllers, and found himself holding his nose. Looking around the lecture hall of the Royal Statistical Society (A fitting venue for a conference that reduced everything to statistics), I was struck by the make-up of the audience: white-haired demographers; ladies-who-normally-lunch-but-who-today-were-discussing-the-coming apocalypse; comparatively young but equally posh Soil Association supporters.”

Etcetera etcetera.

I am not resentful of irony, it is healthy to look at oneself from somebody else’s perspective, but O’Neill misses the point. As I found out with some dismay, Sir David doesn’t agree to the credo of the OPT. The OPT propaganda hasn’t told the real story, as revealed in toto by the Sunday Time interview. At one moment, the interviewer asks more pertinent (or shall we say “impertinent”) questions. She wants to know, for example, what is the ideal figure for the human inhabitant’s of earth? Sir David is not sure, as I am not sure either, and I would like to challenge anybody to swear that he/she knows for sure. So far, so reasonable.

After a while Sir David stumbles on a rather big and unavoidable obstacle- or shall we say, he falls into an equally big hole ?
But let’s hear it from the lips of the Great Old White Man.

Distracted by the vision of a blue butterfly he slips unaided into a declaration on immigration:

“We have to keep our borders open it’s a worldwide problem… you want a free movement of people round the world because it’ the only way to stop wars …”

I won’t go on, out of embarrassment, but you are familiar with the refrain.

It is clear that the same ethically correct reasons that drove him to deny, in the name of an enlightened Western culture of which he is a brilliant example, the destructive life and death carousel, drives him to extend the liberty. that he himself enjoys to far away strangers.

Though these are noble views, they are dangerous in more than one way and smell of complacency and wishful thinking, They ignore the consequences which will be felt for generations to come, and ruin forever that earthly childhood Paradise which he nostalgically endorses while enabling its destruction.

In Canada, as well as in Australia, the Government has kept open the immigration floodgate in the midst of the recession. One supposed justification is that this is all necessary so that their economy can be ready to take off when the recession ends. In reality, this is a self-serving lie to allow the profits that the Canadian growth lobby gains at the expense of their fellow Canadians, the environment, and the Third World, to continue.

Original article by Dan Murray published on Immigration Watch Canada on 11 Apr 09.

As hundreds of thousands of Canadians lose their jobs, immigration advocates have desperately grasped to find new arguments to make for maintaining high immigration. The latest is that Canada should continue its high levels so that our economy can be ready to take off when the recession ends. Of all the absurd immigration statements that have ever been made, this one has to take top prize.

To explain why, let's ask one basic question: If we continue to allow around 250,000 immigrants to enter Canada every year, what are these 250,000 new arrivals going to do when they get here?

Since October, 2008, around 400,000 Canadians have lost their jobs. Canada now has around 1.5 million unemployed. The outlook is not good for many others.

If, as most would expect, the new immigrants try to find jobs, but the number of jobs continues to decrease, it is inevitable that these new people are going to compete with our own unemployed for the few jobs that exist. And, incredible as it may sound, some employers will be required by federal Employment Equity law to hire them, particularly if they are visible minorities. That means that Canadian-born will not even be considered for many jobs.

But what about the new arrivals who can't find any employment? Well, the obvious answer is that these people will have to be supported by social assistance. What sense does this make? Is this the Brave New World (otherwise known in the Metro Toronto area as "DIVERCITY") that many Metro Toronto politicians think of as an achievement?

What happens if the recession goes on for a few years? Does that mean Canadian-born face even greater competition for employment? How long will it take to pay off the bills accumulated by subsidizing people Canada never needed in the first place? Furthermore, instead of making Canada prepared for the recovery, won't the bills really slow down the arrival of any recovery? And what will happen to our unemployed when the recovery comes? Will they be further ignored so that attention can be paid to satisfying the needs and recognizing the credentials of a new immigration tsunami?

It seems that Canada has come to a crossroads. It is time to start a series of cross-country town hall meetings. Let's arrange to have all the politicians and immigration advocates, who want to maintain high immigration, meet our unemployed in those halls. Let's close the doors. The immigration advocates, who have insulated themselves from the unemployed, can have a brief time to tell the unemployed why high immigration must continue.

Then, the unemployed can tell them what they think. Most Canadians would say that the result won't be pretty for the high immigration advocates. But most would say that this kind of a result is long overdue.

Original article by Dan Murray published on Immigration Watch Canada on 11 Apr 09.

Originally published on www.CAPSweb.org in Apr 09.

No, You Can't!

Obama's promised drive for amnesty is going to fail

By Mark Cromer of Californians for Population Stabilization (http://www.CAPSweb.org)

Just five months ago, as Barack Obama became the president-elect and the economic slump began turning into an avalanche, the chances that the incoming president would make "immigration reform" a priority in his first year registered somewhere between zero and none.

Legalizing tens of millions of people who broke into the country and putting them on competitive par with the millions of jobless Americans desperately looking for work has about as much political pizzazz as proposing liquor stores be allowed to sell assault rifles with no waiting period-probably even less.

But a lot of hard-to-imagine things have come to pass since November, from the feds throwing a trillion dollars into the boiler rooms of the nation's sinking financial ships to Washington D.C.'s bureaucratic brain trust effectively taking over two-thirds of America's domestic auto industry. The nationalization of the healthcare system is more likely to happen now than ever before.

And it now seems almost certain that this year will also see President Obama endorse and aggressively push for the largest mass amnesty in the history of nations-fighting hard to legalize with the stroke of his pen as many as 30 million men, women and children who came to the United States illegally and put them on a path to citizenship.

Obama recently met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and vowed to fight for an amnesty plan this year, which must have been music to their ears. The ethnocentric caucus currently numbers 24 members out of 435 House seats, but a mass amnesty would quickly amount to an ethno-demographic freight train that would dramatically increase the caucus's electoral powerbase. Considering that 23 of the 24 caucus members are Democrats, their demand for amnesty comes with some partisan cover for the president-they're on the same team.

And if there is any doubt as to just how critical the Hispanic caucus believes amnesty is to its agenda; consider that its members acknowledged that they spent their entire meeting with Obama discussing only immigration reform. No discussion of the economy, no talk of the unemployment figures, no dialog over healthcare, and certainly no consideration of the deficit or the national debt-nope, just amnesty.

And if there is any doubt as to just how critical the Hispanic caucus believes amnesty is to its agenda; consider that its members acknowledged that they spent their entire meeting with Obama discussing only immigration reform. No discussion of the economy, no talk of the unemployment figures, no dialog over healthcare, and certainly no consideration of the deficit or the national debt-nope, just amnesty.

As surprising as this may seem given the collapsing economy and growing misery among the American public, it's for those very reasons that launching another frenzied campaign for amnesty this year makes sense. Quite simply, they see it as their last chance for a long time to come. And given the stakes, there is no question they intend to double-down and go for broke to put an amnesty bill on Obama's desk before the end of this year.

If amnesty seems counter-productive to businesses that gouge profits from cheap, illegal labor, then ask yourself why they have long supported it? The answer is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies know amnesty will trigger an even greater wave of illegal immigration; one that will explode the underground labor market and drive wages even lower.

The network of ethnocentric Latino groups, led by the National Council of La Raza, are expected to pour more than $18 million into the campaign for mass amnesty, a spending spree that is almost certainly going to be supplemented by millions more dollars from business interests determined to keep hungry Americans off their job sites. (If amnesty seems counter-productive to businesses that gouge profits from cheap, illegal labor, then ask yourself why they have long supported it? The answer is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies know amnesty will trigger an even greater wave of illegal immigration; one that will explode the underground labor market and drive wages even lower.)

Their new campaign will promote the same core messaging that their previous, failed drives for amnesty have featured: a) illegal immigrants are working jobs that lazy Americans refuse to do; and b) opponents of "immigration reform" are xenophobic, anti-Latino bigots that hate immigrants and enjoy hurting children. This year they may also claim that their opponents boil puppies and eat spiders, just for good measure.

The Obama administration will use the same claim in the fight for amnesty that it honed during its battle for the trillion-dollar stimulus package: insisting that "immigration reform" has to happen right now, that our economic recovery depends on it and that he won't brook a prolonged debate on the issue.

In short, he will try to ram it through the House and Senate as fast as he did the stimulus package, crossing his fingers that Congress won't read this bill before the vote either.

The national media will dutifully fall in behind amnesty-again-intoning dire warnings against Nativist impulses and nationalistic sentiments, warnings that they oddly failed to direct at the half-million people who poured through downtown Los Angeles three years ago this spring waving a sea of Mexican flags, shouting "Viva la Raza!" and chanting prophetically "Si se puede!"

The national media will dutifully fall in behind amnesty-again-intoning dire warnings against Nativist impulses and nationalistic sentiments, warnings that they oddly failed to direct at the half-million people who poured through downtown Los Angeles three years ago this spring waving a sea of Mexican flags, shouting "Viva la Raza!" and chanting prophetically "Sí se puede!"₁

So as Obama prepares to swing for the fences with another amnesty bill, and with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as his base coaches, the fate of any amnesty will come down to another congressional caucus-the Blue Dog Democrats. While amnesty proponents are again likely to find enough votes to get a bill through the Senate; a bulwark of House Republicans is likely to unify against it.

If the majority of the 51 conservative Democrats in the Blue Dog caucus join them, then the bill will die in the House.

The more palatable Obama and Pelosi attempt to make an amnesty to the Blue Dogs-by adding harsher enforcement measures-they risk losing key liberal votes that are already under pressure from labor. And if the bill seems dead in the House, then fewer senators will be willing to stick their necks out with a risky vote on a doomed bill.

This political maneuvering, most of which occurred behind closed doors during previous attempts at amnesty, is certain to reignite the prairie fire of opposition that is still smoldering across a country staggering from successive economic blows. The fire next time will burn even hotter for politicians that vote for amnesty--no matter how loud the McCarthyesque screams of 'Racism!' become.

It may be infuriating that Obama is preparing to push for amnesty with the country in this condition; but it's a pyrrhic victory for its supporters. It shows how desperate they are and how they understand their chances of success grow slimmer with each passing day.

As for Obama, ironically, it may prove to be a win-win proposition: If amnesty passes, he will be remembered as the president (along with Bush) that set the Democrats on path to a permanent majority.

But if he fails, he's done with it early enough to recover with Main Street voters and can tell the Latino lobby and their big business allies that he gave it his best but the American people finally told him "No, you can't."

Mark Cromer is a senior writing fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS).

Contact: Gretchen Pfaff
Director of Communications and Legislation
Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS)
1129 State Street, Suite 3D
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
(805) 564-6626
www.CAPSweb.org

See also: "Why U.S. immigration reformers can still remain hopeful" of 24 Nov 09 by Leon Kolankiewicz, "Is it game over for immigration reformers in America?" of 10 Nov 08 by Tim Murray, "An immigration policy bought and paid for?" of 24 Feb 08 by Tim Murray, "Is it reactionary to oppose Immigration?" of 17 Dec 07 by Tim Murray, "American Unions and their about-face on Immigration" of 30 Sep 07 by Tim Murray, "How illegal immigration into the US harms poor US Hispanic citizens" of 9 Oct 07.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Spanish for "Yes, it can be done!".

The wikipedia entry en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%AD_se_puede) has some interesting links, including to a biography of César Chávez (March 31, 1927 – April 23, 1993) the co-founder of the United Farm Workers. The author of this article, who appears to favour immigration, seems to have attempted to downplay an aspect of César Chávez's life that would prove embarrassing to the Hispanic caucus, that is is Chávez's part in fighting against immigration, both legal and illegal:

"The UFWA during Chávez's tenure was committed to restricting immigration. César Chávez and Dolores Huerta fought the Bracero Program that existed from 1942 to 1964. Their opposition stemmed from their belief that the program undermined U.S. workers and exploited the migrant workers. Their efforts contributed to Congress ending the Bracero Program in 1964. ...

"On a few occasions, concerns that undocumented migrant labor would undermine UFW strike campaigns led to a number of controversial events, which the UFW describes as anti-strikebreaking events, but which have also been interpreted as being anti-immigrant. In 1969, Chávez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valleys to the border of Mexico to protest growers' use of undocumented immigrants as strikebreakers. Joining him on the march were both Reverend Ralph Abernathy and U.S. Senator Walter Mondale. In its early years, Chávez and the UFW went so far as to report undocumented immigrants who served as strikebreaking replacement workers, as well as those who refused to unionize, to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"In 1973, the United Farm Workers set up a "wet line" along the United States-Mexico border to prevent Mexican immigrants from entering the United States illegally and potentially undermining the UFW's unionization efforts.[15] During one such event in which Chávez was not involved, some UFW members, under the guidance of Chávez's cousin Manuel, physically attacked the strikebreakers, after attempts to peacefully persuade them not to cross the border failed."

Note that the author tried to draw a distinction between on the opposing immigration which is considered 'controvresial' and fighting strike-breaking, which is not.

I omitted, from the first quoted paragraph above, sentences I found somewhat confusing:

"... In 1973, the UFW was one of the first labor unions to oppose proposed employer sanctions that would have prohibited hiring undocumented immigrants. ..."

Why would the UFW, having fought against illegal immigration, then turn around oppose measures that would have prevented employers from hiring ilegal immigrants? This is not explained in the article, nor in the Ikipedia article on the United Farm Workers.

The biography continues:

"... Later during the 1980s, while Chávez was still working alongside UFW president, Dolores Huerta, the cofounder of the UFW, was key in getting the amnesty provisions into the 1986 federal immigration act."

It is estimated that this amnesty provision allowed over 2.7 million individuals gain legal status.

The implication that the author seems to want the reader to draw from this is that, towards the end of his career, César Chávez was no longer as staunch in his opposition to immigration as he was earlier on. The fact that there appears to be no evidence that Chávez spoke up against Huerta's role in having amnesty provisions added to the 1986 immigration act would appear to lend weight to this.

However the US Congressional Hispanic Caucus should not be allowed to gloss over Chávez's staunch opposition to high immigration in the 1960's and 1970's.

The article below come from the Population Institute of Canada (www.populationinstituteofcanada.ca) although it has not yet been published on their website which is undergoing an upgrade. It has also been republished, with additional comments and introductions on the Ecological Crash blog (ecologicalcrash.blogspot.com). Footnotes, which may seem out of sequence in relation to the original source citations, and headings have been added - JS.

Canada's Policy of Mass Immigration: Hoary Myths and Unasked Questions

by Madeline Weld

Contents: Canada's record high immigration intake, The character lynching of Ontario's environment commisioner, Mass immigration supported by all national Canadian political parties, Population growth and immigration: myth and reality, 1. Human population growth and the environment: globally and in Canada, 2. Arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy, 3. Assessment of the arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy, Conclusion.

Canada's record high immigration intake

Per capita, Canada takes in more immigrants than any other Western country.₇ In 1990, Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government began to take in about 250,000 immigrants each year, regardless of economic conditions. This policy was continued by his successors, both Liberals and Conservatives. Canada has taken in over 4 million newcomers since it was initiated. It has had major impacts on our cities, on our society, and on our environment.

But try finding a good discussion about immigration. An actual discussion that is, where people assess immigration policies from different perspectives. The vast majority of media coverage treats our current policy of 'mass immigration' as morally unassailable or as something we just have to accept, like the Earth orbiting the sun.

But try finding a good discussion about immigration. An actual discussion that is, where people assess immigration policies from different perspectives. The vast majority of media coverage treats our current policy of "mass immigration" as morally unassailable or as something we just have to accept, like the Earth orbiting the sun. No national leader has ever questioned the policy. At the time of writing, with an election in the offing, the leaders of 3 of the 4 national political parties(Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats) are calling for an increase in levels of immigration. The Green Party essentially ignores the issue; its leader says the Alberta Tar Sands are a much more serious problem, and has previously said that immigration produces economic benefits and promotes diversity.

Let's crunch a few numbers. While our intake of immigrants and refugees has been a bit less than 1% of the population (now 33 million), that figure is often cited as a target. In fact, Liberal immigration critic Maurizio Bevilacqua is proposing to immediately increase intake to 330,000 a year. An intake of 1% of the population leads to a doubling time of 70 years. That means that Canada's population would be about 66 million in 2078 and 132 million in 2148. How would the infrastructure of our cities cope with such a population and what would be the environmental impact?

The character lynching of Ontario's environment commisioner

In our free and open society that prides itself on free speech, one shouldn't ask such questions. In his 2004-2005 annual report (released November 2005) and at a news conference relating to it, Ontario commissioner for the environment Gord Miller addressed the impact of 4 or 5 million more people in southern Ontario a few decades hence. "This is a vast number of people settling in an already stressed landscape. Will the resulting demands for water, sewer systems and roads leave our natural heritage areas intact? Will there be enough natural lands left over to support biodiversity?" his report asks. Miller was immediately accused of being anti-immigrant. He was asked by reporters whether he was calling for a curtailment of immigration. When the answer was no, he was asked whether he was saying that immigrants should move to northern Ontario (no), whether the era of the single family home is over and whether immigrants shouldn't dream of having their own house (no). Though he'd said earlier that it wasn't his job to dictate where people should go, after some hounding he told one reporter that immigrants could move to northern Ontario as a solution to the Greater Toronto Area's overcrowding. This clip was played multiple times on all local news channels. The CBC aired a response by city councillor Maria Augimeri calling for Miller's resignation. Said Miller, "If people actually read the report, [they'll find that] the only thing in it about immigration is that it's another element of population growth and that it's under federal control. That's it." ₁

The character lynching endured by Miller for daring to address the issue of rampant population growth in southern Ontario is revealing of the state of public discourse (if we can dignify it with that name) on immigration in Canada. First his accusers felt no obligation to offer a single fact-based refutation to the concerns he expressed. Second, he himself did not dare to suggest a reduction in immigration, although that would have been totally reasonable based on the environmental impacts of population growth described in his report. Third, if people from northern Ontario are leaving for economic reasons, does it make sense to send immigrants there? And fourth, if high population density has already caused extensive environmental damage in southern Ontario, is it a good idea to go down that route in northern Ontario which, based on climate and agricultural potential, is less able to support a large population?

Mass immigration supported by all national Canadian political parties

The subject of immigration to Canada is addressed from an almost completely ideological and emotional perspective with no serious analysis of the real benefits versus costs to Canadians. It is based on the paradigm of perpetual economic growth and all tied up with our official embrace of multiculturalism and diversity as well as our feelings of guilt for real and perceived wrongs toward immigrants in the past.

Because the policy of mass immigration to Canada ... has insinuated itself into our concept of ourselves as a tolerant society ... dots whose relationship to one another should be blindingly obvious remain unconnected in the media, in public discourse, and in government policies.

Because the policy of mass immigration to Canada, pursued or endorsed by all national parties, supports a veritable industry and because this misguided policy has insinuated itself into our concept of ourselves as a tolerant society such that those who challenge it do so at their own peril, dots whose relationship to one another should be blindingly obvious remain unconnected in the media, in public discourse, and in government policies.

It is not only political parties who can't connect the dot of bringing in over one million newcomers every four years to the dot of trying to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas production. The silence of environmental organizations on the relationship between population growth in Canada and greenhouse gas production and other environmental effects has been deafening.

It is not only political parties who can't connect the dot of bringing in over one million newcomers every four years to the dot of trying to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas production. The silence of environmental organizations on the relationship between population growth in Canada and greenhouse gas production and other environmental effects has been deafening. In their mail-out literature soliciting donations, environmental organizations either completely ignore population growth as the driver of urban sprawl, habitat loss, species extinction, water shortages, gridlock, and other problems they are allegedly concerned with, or treat it as something inevitable. I have never received a letter from any organization questioning the government policy of relentlessly promoting the growth of Canada's population through immigration.

Evidence for this cognitive dissonance is provided by the fact that environmental organizations nominated Mulroney as Canada's greenest prime minister for his efforts to reduce acid rain and greenhouse gases, and ignored the fact that he initiated the "tap wide open" immigration policy that has been pursued to this day and has put the rate of Canada's population growth on the fast track ₂. Because we live in what I call an age of hysteria, I feel compelled to emphasize that the aim of this article is to analyze Canada's policies on immigration. It doesn't mean that I am anti-immigrant, that I want to entirely shut the door on immigrants and refugees, or that I think people from other cultures and ethnic backgrounds are less worthy as human beings. I am saying that, for about two decades, Canada has been pursuing a policy of increasing its own population by something approaching 1% each year through immigration, that this policy is having a major impact on Canada's environment, economy, and society and that it should be subjected to public scrutiny and discussion. Boosterism, emotional appeal, human interest stories, and unsupported statements about our need for immigrants should not be allowed to sideline a factual analysis on the impact of continuous very high levels of immigration on Canada.

Population growth and immigration: myth and reality

What I propose to do with this analysis is to (1) briefly look at the global and Canadian realities in terms of the impact of human population growth on resources and the environment, (2) list the principal arguments used to justify Canada's current immigration policies, and (3) examine how those arguments hold up to scrutiny.

1. Human population growth and the environment: globally and in Canada

Something is amiss with the state of planet Earth. Human activity is bringing about the sixth great extinction of species, with the current rate of species extinction estimated to be 1000 times above background level. About 50% of the world's forests have been cleared and 25% of coral reefs have been destroyed. Over one billion people lack access to clean water, a number that is anticipated to rise steeply. All the world's fisheries are being fished at or beyond capacity and the number of large fish caught has declined by 90%. Despite the fact that much more land has been put to agricultural use in recent decades at the expense of wildland, the number of people that must be fed per hectare of arable land has risen from 4 in 1950 to 8 in 2000 and is anticipated to be 14 in 2050. Humans have in some way impacted about two-thirds of the global land surface outside of Antarctica (and one could say that it has been impacted by climate change) and 41% of the oceans' area have been strongly affected by human activities relating to climate change, fishing, pollution and shipping. Human activity through the use of fossil fuels is driving climate change. We are running out of said fossil fuels and there is no alternative energy source with the density and versatility of oil. Yet, much like immigration levels to Canada, the annual increase of about 80 million people and the projected human population of 9.2 billion are accepted as an inevitability.

Traditionally, Canada has thought of itself as "underpopulated." The idea that a country or area is underpopulated is primarily a reflection of human anthro-pocentrism. The perception of Canada as underpopulated persists despite the fact that Canada's population increased six-fold during the twentieth century (compared with "only" a four-fold increase in the world population). People still refer to Canada's "vast open spaces" as if the best thing that could happen to these vast open spaces would be to fill them with people. But putting humans there would require a great deal of energy to heat their houses and to transport their food -- as little could be grown locally and hunting can support only a small population. Furthermore, immigrants don't go to those mythic vast open spaces -- almost all settle in Canada's twelve largest urban centres, and in particular in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. The habitable parts of Canada are already experiencing serious problems associated with their rapid unplanned growth: urban sprawl, loss of inner city greenspace, garbage disposal problems, traffic congestion, and smog. The Ontario Medical Association estimates that there are close to 6,000 premature deaths and 17,000 hospital admissions in Ontario each year caused by smog. Energy sufficiency in that province is also a concern and future shortages are anticipated.

Environmentally, the trends in Canada are going in the same direction as those globally. The most recent appeal (August 8, 2008) sent to me by Nature Canada says that during the last 40 years, the populations of common terns, boreal chickadees, and evening grossbeaks have dropped by 71%, 70%, and 78%, respectively. The letter also says that of the 428 species of birds that regularly breed in Canada, 60 are at risk of extinction. Overall there are now close to 500 endangered species (plants, fish, reptiles, mammals, birds) in Canada. But we're not just paving over wildlife habitat, we're paving over our own food supply. The amount of class 1 farmland in Ontario converted to urban use increased from 6% in 1971 to 11% in 2001, the comparable numbers in Alberta are 2% and 6%. Furthermore Alberta, which is now destroying its environment at a breathtaking pace in the mad extraction of tar sands oil, might be facing much more severe drought conditions through global warming and may lose much of the glacial melt that currently irrigates its agricultural land. Water shortages on the prairies caused $5 billion in economic damage in 2001. The western pine beetle has devastated British Columbia's forests and has crossed the Rockies into Alberta. The east coast cod fishery collapsed and other fisheries (fish and crustacean) in Canada are showing signs of stress. Climate change is anticipated to affect all aspects of the Canadian economy but to have the greatest impact in the north, where its effects are already being felt most strongly.

From an environmental perspective ... there is absolutely no evidence that Canada is underpopulated.

From an environmental perspective--Canadian and global--there is absolutely no evidence that Canada is underpopulated. Canada is one of the highest per capita users of energy and producers of greenhouse gases in the world. Bringing people to Canada from almost anywhere else in the world increases their carbon footprint even if their relative standard of living in Canada is low.

Canada's leaders know, or ought to know, that the pursuit of growth is harming Canada. In 1998, I came across a newspaper clipping from 1991 describing a confidential government document which said that environmental degradation in the Third World was so severe that North-South conflict over the issue is virtually certain, that global warming would have devastating consequences globally and in Canada, and that Canada could expect to have increasing numbers of environmental refugees. The article said the document was prepared by the "Canadian Intelligence Committee" with input from Environment Canada, the Defence Department, and External Affairs. My quest to obtain the document is a story in itself. After months of futile enquiries at the departments named, I was directed to the Privy Council Office. My Access to Information request was rejected by the PCO.

Following a complaint with the Information Commissioner's office, I obtained a copy that was about one-third blanked out. Fortunately I had a diligent officer, and finally, in December 2000, he obtained a copy of the document that was only about 10% blanked out. The confidential document was called "The environment: marriage between Earth and mankind" ₃. The letterhead on the first page (deleted in the first release) indicated it was from the Intelligence Advisory Committee. As my Information Commission officer had predicted, the report, while blunt, contained very little information that an interested person would not be able to find from publicly available resources, including the Internet.

The report states that "Controlling population growth is crucial to addressing most environmental problems, including global warming" (p. 9). The report says that with the emergence of global environmental problems which threaten their own self-interest, developed countries will have to engage in policies in which resources are transferred to developing countries to promote environmentally sound development. "This can be seen as one aspect of paying the bill for our past environmental damage caused by rapid economic growth" (p. 11). With respect to Canada, the report says that "It is, because of its harsh climate and long distances, the most energy-intensive of the free-market industrialized nations. Canada is endowed with vast water resources, but with 90 percent of its population concentrated within a band up to 100 miles of the USA border, water resources in these areas are already being utilized to their fullest.

Polluted water has become an everyday concern. .. Although Canada's population is not large in world terms, its concentration in various areas has already put stress upon regional environments in many ways. Canada can expect to have increasing numbers of environmental refugees requesting immigration to Canada, while regional movements of the population at home, as from idle fishing areas, will add further to population stresses within the country." There are chapters painting a bleak picture of the environmental situation in different countries and regions of the world.

There is no way that a reasonable person could interpret the report as promoting population growth in Canada, through immigration or otherwise.

2. Arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy

The arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy are ultimately based on growth -- the sacred doctrine of our economic system. Like all sacred doctrines, the paradigm of perpetual growth which has guided Western economies for a few centuries is not receptive to challenges based on facts. So when in 1972 a document was published challenging the idea that there can be infinite growth on a finite planet, it was met with resistance, and ultimately sidelined. The document, commissioned by the Club of Rome, was called The Limits to Growth₄. Using computers (a novelty at the time), Limits to Growth (LTG) examined the evolution of the whole world's economy using a mathematical model that kept track of a large number of variables and their interactions as the system changed over time.

Based on a number of scenarios with different assumptions, LTG's authors concluded that, unless specific measures were taken, the world's economies would collapse within 100 years (i.e, by 2072). About 10 million copies of LTG in 30 languages were sold. Despite creating a big stir, LTG's message was ultimately ignored. According to an article by Bardi (2008), the Italian economist Giorgio Nebbia identified four primary sources of resistance: those who thought that the message threatened the growth of their businesses and industries; professional economists who saw LTG as a threat to their dominance in advising on economic matters; the Roman Catholic church; and the political left in the Western world, who saw LTG as a scam of the ruling class₅. The message of LTG was distorted and ridiculed. Conveniently for LTG's detractors, the oil crisis of the early 1970s, which helped get LTG's message across when it was first published, seemed to be over by 1980.

Canada's blind adherence to the growth doctrine is reflected in the fact that all administrations have ignored the findings and recommendations of the confidential document prepared for Mulroney's Privy Council. The denial of the concept of limits is reflected in the term "sustainable growth," a mutation of "sustainable development." One even hears the argument that the environment must be protected so that economic growth can continue. And one way to promote economic growth is with population growth. Since Canadian women are falling down on the job, producing on average only 1.5 babies, we are told that we have to turn to immigration.

The economic arguments for immigration are repeated often and emphatically and totally without analysis.

The economic arguments for immigration are repeated often and emphatically and totally without analysis. They seem to be meant to scare us into acquiescence. How can we question Canada's immigration policies when our country is facing a looming labour shortage (the alliteration itself has a fine ominous ring to it). We are warned that by 2011, a few short years hence, ALL (!!) labour force growth in Canada will be due to immigration. Nobody explains why it is essential for the Canadian labour force to keep growing--it seems to be taken as a given that it will be a disaster if it doesn't. Another favourite bugaboo is Canada's aging population--soon there will too many old people supported by too few working people. The buzz word here is the dependency ratio, the number of people not working (including children and retirees) over the number of people in the workforce.

3. Assessment of the arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy

The widespread perception that there would be no population growth in Canada without immigration is false. Women of the baby boomer generation have small families, but they constitute such a large cohort that population growth in Canada would continue until 2030 in the total absence of immigration. Of course, the rate of growth would be much lower. And that's not good enough for developers, bankers who like mortgages, and others who benefit from growth.

No one says specifically that more people would benefit the environment. When our alleged need for immigrants is being promoted, the arguments given are always economic ones or fuzzy ones, like promoting diversity. The economic arguments implicitly assume that the economy is separate from the environment. In fact, as pointed out by economist Herman Daly, it is a "wholly owned subsidiary of the environment." But if we go along, for the moment, with the fiction that we can "save the environment" in the face of continuing population and economic growth, how do the economic arguments stack up on their own merits?

I think that nobody would deny that the Fraser Institute, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, is focused on the economy. It may therefore come as a surprise that some of the best arguments demolishing the reasons usually offered to justify Canada's very high intake of immigrants have come from the Fraser Institute. Fraser Institute Fellow Martin Collacott has written a number of papers on Canada's immigration policy, including "Canada's immigration policy: the need for major reform" (2002) and "Is there really a looming labour shortage in Canada, and if there is, can increased immigration fill the gap" (2003). (Papers from the Fraser Institute can be found by following the links at www.fraserinsitute.org.)

The following are some of the relevant pieces of information assembled by Collacott in his papers:

• a 1991 study by the Economics Council of Canada found that in the past century, the fastest growth in real per capita income occurred at times when net migration was zero or even negative;
• a 1989 report issued by Health and Welfare Canada called Charting Canada's Future noted that, according to the OECD, there was no correlation whatsoever between population growth and economic growth in its 22-member community;
• a 2000 United Nations study concluded that immigration can only serve as a tool to arrest the aging of the population if carried out at levels that are unacceptably high and ever-increasing;
• Statistics Canada released 2001 census data in July of 2002 showing that the population was aging and that immigration, even at very high levels, would have little impact on the average age of the population;
• a 2002 survey by the Canadian Labour and Business Centre found that only a very small percentage of managers and labour leaders in the public and private sectors regard the hiring of foreign-trained workers as very important in resolving the problem of a specific shortage of skills from time to time, instead they looked overwhelmingly to solutions involving the existing workforce, such as upgrading the skills of current employees, hiring young labour market entrants, and phasing in retirement policies.

Things have not changed since the above studies were published. According to Statistics Canada's analysis of the 2006 census, the median earnings of Canadians (in inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars) have increased by 0.1% since 1980₈. Not only that, but the earnings of the poorest fifth fell dramatically in that time, by 20.6%, while the top 20% of earners saw their incomes rise by 16.4%.

The finding that population growth through immigration does not translate into economic benefits was also made by a cross-party committee of the British House of Lords (Lords Economic Affairs Committee), which published its findings in March 2008. The House of Lords' panel said that the British government's claim that immigrants were boosting the economy was a misleading measure, and that a better one would be the impact on income per head of resident population. The Committee said that some groups, including the low-paid, young people seeking jobs and some ethnic minorities may have suffered because of competition for work from immigrants willing to accept low wages and poor working conditions (which is in agreement with US economist George Borjas, who estimated that immigration reduced US workers' salaries by 5% in 2006). The House of Lords Committee also predicted that a continuation of the high rate of immigration would result in a 10% increase of house prices over what they would have been without immigration by 2028.₉

In June of this year, I attended a one and one-half day conference on immigration held in Montreal by the Fraser Institute. Virtually every paper presented challenged the Canadian government's immigration policy. Several speakers presented data showing that overall immigrants receive in services and benefits far more than they pay in taxes. (Milton Friedman's remark "Mass immigration and the welfare state are incompatible" was cited by at least 2 presenters.) Economist Herb Grubel of Simon Fraser University and a Fraser Institute fellow calculated that the 2.9 million immigrants who came to Canada between 1990 and the end of 2002 received $18.3 billion more in government services and benefits in 2002 than they paid in taxes. Other presentations addressed the fact that, despite the government's economic arguments, only 20% of immigrants are selected on the basis of their skills₁₀, the remainder are family class, refugees and humanitarian cases. Six million offspring of the boomer generation will soon be entering the labour market and may be facing stiff competition for jobs. In big city ridings, members of parliament spend most of their time dealing with immigration questions.

To keep the dependency ratio at 0.2 (retirees/workers), one would need to raise the population to 165 million by 2050, or take in 7 million immigrants each year. Productivity will only increase if immigrants are more productive than the existing population, but recent immigrants have been less productive. The performance of recent immigrants has been deteriorating according to the 2006 census and recent cohorts of immigrants haven't been catching up to native born Canadians in their earnings. This could lead to the creation of an economic underclass.

Conclusion

One question that we should be asking is: Is all this growth really improving the lives of Canadians? The economic arguments used to justify Canada's immigration policy are contradicted by every major study and by census data. A large percentage of immigrants from recent decades have not succeeded economically. Only 20% of immigrants are selected on the basis of their skills (most are family class and the definition of family is very extensive indeed). Nevertheless, by seeking to attract the most educated people from developing countries, we deprive those countries of the people that could best promote development and in whom they may have invested many resources (eg. by subsidizing their education). Canada's immigration policy has an adverse impact on the environment, not only from the paving over of wildland and farmland in Canada but from the net increase in global greenhouse gas production caused by moving people to Canada, because in Canada, their greenhouse gas production will almost always increase.

It is clear that Canada's immigration policies are not designed for the benefit of ordinary Canadians, who are not even considered to be "stakeholders" by the government.

It is clear that Canada's immigration policies are not designed for the benefit of ordinary Canadians, who are not even considered to be "stakeholders" by the government. Canada's immigration policies are beholden to the growth₁₁ and immigration industries and designed to get the immigrant or visible minority vote in swing ridings in urban areas. There is also credible evidence that our immigration policy is influenced by organized crime. Donna Jacobs of the Ottawa Citizen describes the struggles of diplomat Brian McAdam to expose infiltration and corruption at the Canadian consulate in Hong Kong in the early 1990s ₆. The consulate was far too cosy with members of organized crime gangs connected to the Chinese Communist party, the Triads, who were buying visas and smuggling their members to Canada. McAdam's reports to Foreign Affairs were ignored, and he was eventually called back to Canada and eased out of his job. A joint CSIS and RCMP investigation into Chinese criminals and the Communist government's program of acquisition, espionage and political influence, called Operation Sidewinder, was launched in 1995. It supported McAdam's allegations. A few days after Sidewinder's final report was sent to CSIS in 1997, Sidewinder was shut down. CSIS disbanded the team and directed the investigators to destroy every document. The Sidewinder team destroyed hundreds of pages of McAdam's research, his books and his reports. The Sidewinder team leader was demoted after submitting the report and resigned.

So far, immigration has never been a major issue in Canada. Despite the evident environmental impact of Canada's immigration policy, the lack of economic success of many newcomers, and the appearance of what might be called an economic underclass, Canadians have not yet begun to ask serious questions of their politicians nor to demand a more intelligent and objective coverage from their media. It is time they woke up.

See also: "How skills migration has denied careers to Canadian engineering graduates" of 8 Feb 09, www.immigrationwatchcanada.org, and Immigration Watch Canada articles on this web site.

.

Madeline Weld is a toxicologist evaluator at Health Canada (Food Directorate). She is president of the Population Institute of Canada, an organization that seeks to raise awareness of the impact of human population growth on Earth and promotes the development of ethical policies for population stabilization and reduction (www.populationinstituteofcanada.ca).

References :

(1) ↑ Gord Miller, Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, 2004-2005 Annual Report, Planning our Landscape. The media reaction was described by Andrew Athanasiu (Gord Miller says GTA can't take more folks; why is he getting trashed?) in News This Week, vol. 25, no. 11, 28 November 2005.

(2) ↑ CTV Mednews Express. 2006. Mulroney praised for his green record as PM. (April 20). CTV.ca

(3) ↑ Intelligence Advisory Committee (Government of Canada). 1991. The Environment: Marriage between Earth and Mankind. CIE [Canadian Intelligence Estimate] Chapter 11, May 1991. (This CIE comprises a series of papers previously issued individually by the IAC.) The article that describes it is by Paul Mooney, "The polluted third world," The Ottawa Citizen, 24 June 1991.

(4) ↑ Meadows, D.H, D.L. Meadows, J. Randers, and W.W. Behrens III. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books.

(5) ↑ Nebbia, G. 1997. Futuribili, New Series, Gorizia (Italy) 4(3): 149-182. Cited by Ugo Bardi, in "Cassandra's curse: how 'The limits to growth' was demonized", posted online 9 March 2008 on The Oil Drum: Europe (europe.theoildrum.com/node/3551).

(6) ↑ Jacobs, D. 2008. "The price of fighting for what you think is right" (18 August, p. A2) and "One man's China crusade" (25 August, p. A4). The
Ottawa Citizen.

Footnotes (added to original document on 11 Apr 09)

(7) ↑ Possibly this dubious honour may now be held by Australia, and not Canada. This would be a result of Labor Immigration Minister Chris Evans having, in May 2008, ramped up immigration to levels even higher than the record levels reached by the former Howard Government. In spite of a much ballyhooed reduction of skilled immigration by 18,500 places on 15 Mar 09 immigration levels have been left at record levels as noted by Andrew Bolt ("What cut in immigration?" of Monday 16 Mar 09).

(8) ↑ I would personally even dispute that there was a 0.1% per capita growth in income. These figures are based on two clearly wrong assumptions: (1) that all monetary transactions (e.g. to pay for an alarm system to protect from burglary) are necessarily indications of greater material prosperity and (2) that only activities that result in monetary transactions are necessarily beneficial.

This is addressed by Geoff Davies in Economia (2004) p23 where he discusses the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measure devised by Simon Kuznets in the 1930's for use by the administration of the US President Roosevelt . Kuznets, himself, subsequently complained that the GDP was misused by economists for the reasons mentioned above. In reality, if we discard those assumptions, and come up with more accurate measures of human prosperity then we will most likely find that the prosperity of Canadians on average, let alone for poorer Canadians has declined. If, to the contrary, it can still be shown that true average prosperity has coincided with population growth, it will almost certainly have been as a consequence of the accelerated destruction of our natural capital and, hence, will be paid for by future generations. See also article "Living standards and our material prosperity" of 6 Sep 07 by James Sinnamon in Online Opinion. - JS

(9) ↑ See House of lords tells UK government to limit immigration of 11 Apr 08, House of Lords' immigration report "forgets environment" of 2 Apr 08 based on British Optimum Population Trust media release of 1 Apr 08. The second, whilst acknowledging the value of the House of Lords report, is still critical of the report's shortcomings in its treatment of the environment.

(10) ↑ Of course, this argument can cut both ways. As acknowledged further on in this article, the goals amongst immigration proponents can be mutually contradictory, or at least appear to be. Some are able to profit at the expense of the rest of society regardless of the qualities of the immigrants, whilst others attempt to use skilled immigration as a means of shifting the costs of training onto other countries, often poor third world countries.

An example of the latter is the Queensland state Government which infamously poaches qualified professionals, particularly medical professionals, from other countries. This was referred to in "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future".

An example of the former thinking is to be found in the transcript of "Paying to be permanent" the episode of 17 Aug 08 of the ABC Radio National's Background Briefing. In this program, Polish born immigration proponent, Sev Osdowski, acknowledged that he considered the mismatch between skills and immigrants irrelevant. He said:

"We are really talking about the size of the population of Australia, whether it should be around 10-million as some people close to environment movements have suggested, or 20-million as it's about now, or maybe 50-million as some people are proposing. So all the other battles are really proxy battles. The focus is about the size of Australia's population for the future."

(11) ↑ See also "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future" of 24 Jan 09, republished on Online Opinion.

This article originated as a comment to the article "Exposing Queensland Government population growth duplicity" of 1 Apr&nbsp09.

Australia's unsustainable reactive policy of coping with immigration is failing Australians, Australia's environment and Australia's cultural way of life.

The naive open flood gate policy does just that - floods thousands of new people onto an existing society, existing land use, existing resources, existing infrastructure and existing services. The federal policy has no sense of ownership of the impacts of immigration, it just issues the visas, savours its sense of international cred, but handballs the consequential problems to states, who don't know what's hit em.

Something has to crack. Sydney has cracked in many ways - housing affordability is shot, rail is rundown and overcongested, roads are at gridlock, health is technically insolvent, and every state government service is overstretched. Then we see the Cronulla riots and the drive by ethic shootings in Sydney's outer south west. Ethnic ghettos plague Sydney and the cost of crime and NSW jails has further burdened the community.

The problem is the skin deep immigration policy and the systemic absence of population planning. The Australian federal government or decades has been internationally irresponsible both to its existing population mix but also to new arrivals. Neither deserve its institutional neglect and the Australian government must be internationally held to account. It's time for an holistic total lifecycle approach that looks at all the needs, costs, issues and desired outcomes of immigration on Australia's society.

Clearly the Sydney ghetto model is a recipe for civil unrest.
So perhaps a best practice approach should involve taking a look at one of Australia's existing examples of a healthy regional community model in Australia in toto. Identify the region's use and needs in terms of its land use, resources, infrastructure and services. Fully cost those for that region and then apportion this to the healthly population size that region supports.

Let's suggest the Mackay Region in North Queensland. Go to the website:

www.mackayregion.com/rtn2/index.cfm?BA14AED7-A13A-3282-ABDD-0D8C8B170794

"The region as a whole, is home to 143,000 friendly and welcoming people and the relaxed tropical city of Mackay has a population in excess of 80,000. It is no wonder the region can offer such an abundant range of services and facilities. Our vibrant developing community can proudly boast being a City where people can pursue a wide range of interests and lifestyles in a secure environment."

OK, so let's assume this is as good as an Australian region gets. So let's evaluate this as a regional population standard. Then for every 143,000 immigrants into Australia, the equivalent full complement of community landscape, resources, infrastructure and services that blesses the Mackay Region is made available and constructed up front by the federal government. No compromise.

Perhaps the federal Government will then start to wake up to the true holistic cost of integrated immigration.

Despite figures showing economic growth in some states, per capita GDP has fallen in every state in Australia, according to Sustainable Population Australia Inc (SPA).

Dr John Coulter, National President of SPA, says residents of those states in which gross GDP has risen have had their apparent advantage wiped away by population growth.

December quarter per capita economic decline in every state

'Most economic commentators assume that changes in GDP are proxy measures for changes in human welfare,' says Dr Coulter. 'Accepting for the moment that this is the case, then change in GDP per person, rather than gross GDP, is actually a better measure of welfare.

'If we look at per capita rather than gross GDP, then all states show negative growth for the December quarter.'

Tasmanians did better than all other states.

Dr Coulter notes that Tasmania, with the lowest rate of population growth, showed the least negative economic growth with only a 0.1% fall per capita. Western Australia, which had the highest rate of population growth, shows the second largest fall in per capita GDP at almost 2%.

'Queensland is in a similar position,' he says, 'sharing with the Northern Territory the second highest rate of population growth but having the third largest fall in per capita GDP. South Australia has the biggest drop in GDP, a high rate of population growth relative to the economy and the largest decline in per capita GDP at 2.5%.'

The figures indicate no economic or welfare advantage from a growing population

Dr Coulter says the figures indicate no economic or welfare advantage from a growing population.

'They confirm calculations I have made over many years comparing OECD countries. These calculations repeatedly show no statistically significant correlation between population growth and growth of per capita GDP. They parallel the conclusion of the Productivity Commission report which showed that, despite excluding many of the environmental costs of a larger population, there was no demonstrable link between increase in immigration and per capita economic growth.'

With respect to tackling climate change, Dr Coulter notes that the Rudd Government clearly accepts that there are considerable environmental costs from a growing population.

'In fact, there are a host of other environmental costs from population growth,' he says.

'It is long past the time for all Australian Governments to adopt population policies aimed at environmental sustainability, rather than the mirage of economic and welfare benefits from a growing population.'

For further comment or information:
Dr John Coulter 08/8388 2153

From a media release
5 March 2009

Kicking the immigration-fix

The ABC reports that
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has rejected a push for a big cut in Australia's migration intake (20 February 2009), despite "Research from Monash University demographer Bob Birrell [which] says the Government's economic rescue package will not save jobs unless the migration intake is cut by two-thirds."

The ABC describes Ms Gillard as having rejected the research, saying there is still a need for skilled migrants.

"We've made some recent changes so that we are taking skilled migrants who have jobs," she claimed, insisting that, "(...) even in today's economic circumstances there are still some parts of our nation where people are crying out for skilled labour, and we have the migration system to assist with that."

Let's see, Gillard believes that there are still some parts of the nation that desperately need skilled labour. Maybe so, but do they "still" need (as if they ever really did), an imported labor force and all its family members coming in annually at a higher rate than ever before, equivalent to the population of a small, rapidly growing city each year? And what do we do with the newly unemployed when these immigrant-demanding businesses go bust?

Politically addicted to unsustainable immigration; any excuse will do

I'm afraid that Ms Gillard sounds to me as if she is more interested in satisfying the demands of the property development and finance industry (which have driven our economy and democracy into the ground) than in serving her constituents (the broad population of Australia) and looking after our long-term welfare.

As candobetter commentator, Greg Wood, rails, "Can someone get Gillard to specify where the skills shortage is now that the resources industry and construction industry are beginning to majorly shed jobs?

Who pays for this costly habit?

While they are at it, can they also ask how increasingly unemployed and under-employed Australians are going to pay the pressure-cooked urban rentals that her lackey Government seems intent upon trying to prop up?"

Update: Immigration Minister Chris Evans 'expects' skilled immigration numbers to drop 'next year' due to the global economic crisis. See "Australia to cut skilled immigration" in the Age of 23 Feb 09