It's impossible to keep up with the lobbying for population growth that goes on between Federal and State governments in this country and the groups representing property developers, but we like to keep you informed of what we can.
Here is just another instance of how much demographers frequent the growth-lobby milieu. Their projections based on trends are used as jumping off places for the growth lobby to beat up more population growth and then we are told that it is all inevitable. The future trends are simply based on a continuation of past trends, which have been manipulated upwards by successive governments in the service of big business, of which the Bracks/Brumby and Howard/Rudd governments are scandalous examples. Most abhorrent is the false impression purveyed with the help of a complicit media, that our rapid population growth is natural and inevitable and that we have no choice but to suffer the consequences.
Recently some of you will have heard professional growth lobbyist and ANU Professor of Demography, Peter McDonald, speaking on Australia Talks. McDonald did the demographic numbers for the "The Scanlon Report 30/50 - The Technological Implications of an Australian Population of 30 million by 2050."
Those numbers were used as a jumping off place to bring about more population growth, and we are now in the invidious position of growing much faster even than that Report was advocating.
Being a demographer these days carries a ridiculous amount of authority but little or no responsibility for the consequences. The rise of demography to undue prominence and the forecasting of trends as if they were mosaic tablets of destiny is the creation of a corporatised press and government to increase corporate profits from mass production and commodification of resources - at your and my expense.
We have become a society captive to high priests of arithmetic in a religion of material consumption in a giant Ponzi scheme.
If we allow this to continue there will be no end in sight to our collective suffering.
The only way to stop it is to demand that all Australian governments drastically reduce immigration and stop encouraging more births. Only then will we have any chance of restoring our natural surroundings and cherishing the creatures and the plants that make our world such a fantastic and nurturing place.
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