We need a population policy
Iemma defies Labor conference, unions and public in push to privatise NSW electricity
The arrogant contempt in which democracy is held by many of Australia's political and business leaders and much of the newsmedia could not have been made more clear by the determination of the New South Wales Government of Morris Iemma to proceed with its plans to sell off publicly owned electricity assets. This is being done against undertakings made to the union movement immediately prior to the 2007 state elections#main-fn1">1 and in the face of uproar from the NSW public two thirds of whom oppose privatisation#main-fn2">2.
Last Saturday, 4 May, the conference of the NSW Labor Party reaffirmed its opposition to privatisation with a resounding 702 votes to 107. Just like Iemma's previously aborted plan to flog off the NSW government's stake in the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric scheme, privatisation of electricity has never been put to the people of NSW in an election. Indeed, only in 1999, the Labor Party won a resounding election victory against the Coalition which promised to fully privatise electricity. Ironically, then Labor Premier Bob Carr had previously tried to privatise electricity as Iemma is doing now, but had backed down following the repudiation of the policy by the 1997 NSW Labor Party state conference and subsequently by the NSW trade union movement.#main-fn3">3. Carr and the Labor Party campaigned on a platform precisely against the policy that Carr had previously tried to impose on the Labor Party and won. Following its defeat the NSW Liberal Party accepted the repudiation of privatisation by the NSW electorate and dropped this policy #main-fn4">4.
On the day following the conference, in brazen defiance of that conference's decision, Iemma announced that he intended to push on with privatisation, regardless#main-fn5">5.
Labor backbenchers opposed to the sale have vowed to vote in support of the conference decision of what decision is reached int NSW Labor Caucus meeting scheduled for Tuesday 6 May. In April, the NSW Labor Party president Bernie Riordan confirmed protection for any Labor MP who crossed the floor to uphold party policy. He said they would not be expelled or lose their endorsement#main-fn6">6.
However, the NSW Labor Party needs to go much further than protecting state MPs who chose to uphold the conference decision. Any state MP who votes, whether in Labor caucus or on the floor of Parliament, for privatisation, starting with Iemma and Costa, should be expelled immediately from the party and disendorsed and new candidates, willing to abide by decisions of the Labor Party conference, be endorsed in their places. If the Labor Party fails to do this, then democracy will be a dead letter in their organisation.
If they act with determination to clean out the Labor Party, there may be still hope that NSW electors could be persuaded to give their vote to a renovated state Labor party, answerable to ordinary members rather than powerful business lobbies, at the next state elections. Indeed, given the extremely poor standing of Iemma in the polls, and given the barely concealed indifference to the electoral fate of the Labor Party by the likes of Costa, who clearly is looking to a future career in the finance sector, such a measure would appear to be essential, in any case, if NSW Labor is to stand any hope of electoral survival.
However, the NSW Labor Party machine cannot be depended upon to do this unless rank and file Labor Party members, unionists and minor parties and community activists opposed to the sale must continue with their energetic campaign against privatisation.
#RoguesGallery" id="RoguesGallery">Appendix 1: A rogues' gallery of backers of NSW electricity privatisation
- Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
- Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan
- Labor state Premiers
- Jeff Kennett, former Liberal Premier of Victoria
- Former NSW Labor Premiers Bob Carr, Barrie Unsworth and Neville Wran
- Paul Keating, former Labor Prime Minister
- the NSW Business Chamber.
- Rupert Murdoch's Australian Newspaper
- The Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party
- Energy Users Association of Australia
Footnotes
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. Watkins denies govt broke power promise, SMH 30 Apr 08; Not privatising, just giving control to private companies to run as they see fit for a century by Tim Dunlop, 30 Apr 08; Iemma told unions he would not privatise power sector, Daily Telegraph, 30 Apr 08#main-txt1">[back]
#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. Citation need. I read this in an online newspaper. #main-txt2">[back]
#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. Premier's power play, SMH 19 Apr 08 www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2008/04/19/1208025491879.html#main-txt3">[back]
#main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4. Citation needed. The Liberal Party, has not unexpectedly, become ambivalent on this question. However, if it does remain true to its past words, privatisation can be blocked in the NSW upper house with the support of minor parties and independents.#main-txt4">[back]
#main-fn5" id="main-fn5">5. Bad sell but I'm pushing ahead: Iemma, SMH, 5 May 08 #main-txt5">[back]
#main-fn6" id="main-fn6">6. Hunter MPs threaten power sell-off revolt, Newcastle Herald, 5 May 08; Iemma facing party revolt over power sell-off, ABC News, 5 May 08; #main-txt6">[back]
See also: NSW electricity links
The challenges of powering down
Markets are the most inefficient way of doing anything. It's free markets that got us into this mess in the first place, because when supply far far exceeds demand, commodities are so cheap they are squandered. This is exactly what happened to oil. And water. And farming land.
Now, and quite suddenly, population pressures are exposing all the cracks. We no longer have this super abundance, and the market's way of dealing with this is to increase prices, the idea being to decrease demand. Unfortunately, the high demand is no longer caused by over abundance, it's caused by [per capita] shortages, and the market does not know how to cope with this. It simply does not compute, growth is sacrosanct. Now I realise we 'need' growth merely to pay the interest on the accruing debts the market needs to create more 'stuff', it is fast becoming evident that growth must stop. It will stop. Growth simply cannot go on forever in a closed system [like Planet Earth]. It's immaterial whether we want to end growth or not, it simply will, just like a cancer dies when it kills its host.
Humans did not evolve in markets and money. Money and markets are not in our genes. Money and markets are social constructions.
No a-priori reason exists why people must work to live. Without money, markets or the requirement to work, we would not need banks, insurance companies or most of the institutions we have today.
The market economises "money", not natural resources. Ninety percent of the natural resources used in this country are wasted on the overhead because people are required to work in order to live. I reckon 10% of the population could do all the essential work that actually needs to be done.
Australians' diets require something like 3,500 food calories each day, yet in our idiotic Rube Goldberg social system we are actually consuming, when all energy is taken into consideration, something like 200,000 calories every day! [see below]. Clearly, the "market economy" is the most inefficient organization in the history of the world!
The only technical way to reduce natural resource consumption by at least 90% is to put everyone except those with critical jobs on welfare. Forgive debt. Almost everyone would stay home and practice birth control and Permaculture. See SOCIETY OF SLOTH: A Thought Experiment
By Jay Hanson, spring, 1999 at www.warsocialism.com/unnecessary.htm.
See also Mike Stasse interviewed on U-tube, John Quiggin's failure to grasp the resources shortage crisis
Economists talks about direct connection between overseas immigration and economic growth
On the 1st May 2008, ABC Radio's PM program had a story about the latest slump in building approvals.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2233081.htm
Negative building figures continue
PM - Thursday, 1 May , 2008 18:14:00
JASON ANDERSON: This is a shocking situation and one that unfortunately by the time the real depth of the impact in terms of lower middle income households becomes apparent, it's going to take two or three years even if we get some policy response.
You know we put a lot of emphasis in terms of the contributions, say the infrastructure investment to the economy, but there's scant attention payed to housing which unless we start to address that, we will run into a position where it's going to start having negative feedbacks in terms of what we can sustain in terms of employment growth.
We know that a large proportion of our employment growth at the moment is being sustained by rising overseas migration and that's adding very substantially to rental demand. But we're at a point where we've almost exhausted the existing stock.
Unless we get some very substantial improvement in terms of the rate of supply, this is going to have feedback effects on the potential employment growth not in the next year or two but over the next five years.
Jason Anderson is an economic forecaster specializing in the building industry. He has come out openly to say that employment growth is being sustained by the increase in overseas immigration. Interestingly the way I interpret his remarks is that he has described the situation as a pyramid scheme that needs increasing growth to sustain itself. But we may have now may have reached the point where a combination of high interest rates, massive debt burdens, the credit crunch and past population growth may have ended the virtuous cycle of growth and could instead reverse itself without drastic action, and surprise surprise, Kevin Rudd has chimed in from the same song book:
from:
http://www.news.com.au/business/money/story/0,25479,23634094-5013951,00.html
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd says Australia needs one million new homes over the next six years to keep up with estimated population growth.
Mr Rudd spoke today at a Housing Industry Association (HIA) conference, where he also released a paper detailing his Government's new rental affordability scheme.
"Based on these numbers from the HIA, over the next six years or so this country is going to have to build an additional one million new homes,'' Mr Rudd said.
"It won't solve housing affordability, but it will make something of a difference.''
Mr Rudd said Australia was in a housing deficit which had led to rising house prices and an increasingly tight rental market.
"In the last 12 years, the median house price in Australia has risen by 200 per cent,'' he said.
"Home ownership for many these days is as much stress as it is security.''
Mr Rudd released the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) technical discussion paper, which is now available for public comment.
The scheme offers payment or tax offsets to property owners who lease out new homes at 20 per cent below market rates.
It only applies to new properties, to encourage the construction of new and cheaper homes for rent.
Participating landlords would receive a $6000 federal grant or tax offset plus a $2,000 State Government contribution every year for 10 years.
The paper says the scheme would aim to provide funding for 50,000 homes between now and June 2012.
so far the government has not offered anything beyond tinkering at the edges to increase supply and will continue to pump the demand side with increases in the skilled immigration program.
Centro Properties Group Ex-chairman didn't see 'debt bombshell' coming
Centro Properties Group owes banks nearly $4 billion - Ex-chairman didn't see 'debt bombshell' coming.
The Australian Financial Review (Thursday May 1st 2008) saw fit to feature the perilous circumstances of Centro on its front page, with a follow up on page 47, captioned, "Lolling like a beached whale in a receding tide" - the tide being financial investment and customers. How, you may wonder, could someone in charge of borrowing billions from banks, to deploy energy and resources for billion dollar developments, be apparently so energy and resources naive that they could fail to see the fossil-fuel related "debt bombshell coming"?
Yet, this is ex-Centro CEO, Brian Healey's explanation for beaching the Centro Shopping Centre Group colossus.
What struck this writer is that Centro is in charge of moving enormous quantities of materials all round the world, in order to build its many massive shopping centres. Surely someone in this commercial colossus would have noticed the rising cost of making concrete and transporting rocks and wood and glass, and running the bulldozers and cranes and tools on construction sites?
How many people in charge of government, how many economists, CEO's and even engineers, are either incapable of applying energy-resources theory to reality or still believe fairy-tales about man's ingenuity excepting modern economies from thermodynamic limits?
It seems that an awful lot of people in the global society of the 'developed world' really believe that our economies have literally 'dematerialised', i.e. are relying on less and less fuel and materials. What must such ‘cornucopians’ make of some other features in the same edition of the Fin Review? A long article about food shortages feeding conflict, another about the incompetent assessment and management of Australia’s food basket, the Murray Darling Basin, and one about how all the signs point to ours being the era of petroleum depletion.
"For the record, supply constraints keep oil prices moving in one direction." This article (from the New York Times) cites Fatih Birol, the chief economist with the International Energy Agency, saying, "'According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects'. 'They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time."
And the article goes on to explain what many people not distracted by consumerism and with normal powers of observation have been increasingly aware of for the past 15 years. Oil discoveries are diminishing in size and in quality or accessibility, whilst economic growth, based on population growth, is being encouraged in the third world and in the English speaking first world, by growth economics ideologues in government and big business. The Centro business, to such observers, is indicative, in its reliance on land-speculation and population growth, of a kind of blindness to reality and a faith in an economic illusion.
It is as mysterious as the recurrent drive of pods of whales to beach themselves.
The financial media is full of gruesome stories lately. Centro's predicament may well symbolise much of the investment and development world's predicament. Not just business, but governments and whole economies, may also find themselves high and dry like beached whales. Whales need water to swim in, humans need air and food to survive, and our modern economies need oil. The Fin Rev quotes CIBC World Markets analyst, Jeff Rubin: 'The outlook for oil supplies signals a period of unprecedented scarcity.'"
The day after payment was due, new CEO, Glenn Rufrano, was still trying to finalise an extension from the numerous banks involved in funding Centro’s debt, all of them dealing with companies in similar trouble, in a system of circular financing.
In a world where the US and other governments subsidise farmers to grow corn for biofuels with precious fossil-fuel based fertilisers, causing famines, and nations go to war for oil, and mortgages rise due to engineered population growth and land speculation by multinational developers, how could you just expect people to go on shopping?
Exhibition documents erosion of childhood by overdevelopment and overpopulation
The Play and folklore exhibition at the Victorian State Museum is a really interesting one because it testifies to the disappearance of accessible natural places for children, without consciously linking this to overpopulation and development, currently rampant in Victoria.
Ironically it uses photographs by Jim Quirk, the father of SPA Victoria President, population activist, Jill Quirk. The photographs are of his children, whose play he minutely and lovingly documented during the 1950s in Victoria.
These pictures will seem incredibly familiar, perhaps achingly familiar, to many people who grew up during that time in Australia. Jill's father, Jim Quirk, was a bank manager who loved wildlife and, like his daughter, worried greatly about the impact of overpopulation on natural spaces and freedom. He was also an expert colour photographer.
A photograph of Jill and her sister - where, I wonder?
Here is a worthwhile quote from a part of the exhibition:
"Not only do children have less freedom than they once did, but there are also fewer natural spaces available to children to play. Robert Pyle, an American naturalist and writer, explained that a sense of place is gained through intimate contact with natural landscapes, emphasising the importance of the ‘presence of special places and the liberty to encounter them at will’. He argued that as children’s actions are limited by regulations in genuinely wild areas such as national parks, we should be protecting small pockets of unofficial countryside – such as overgrown vacant lots or abandoned buildings – where children can play and explore freely.5"
The exhibition is by museum curator, Carla Pascoe.
ABC at it again!
ABC Breakfast Show host, Ross Solly, gives Property Council of Australia 20 minutes-plus free advertising at tax-payer expense to market industry hobby-horse.
Since when did our taxes go to fund the ABC as a national real-estate agent or an arm of the PCA?
Why was there no counter-argument?
These publicly privileged views come from a professional lobby-group which markets population growth on behalf of commercial property developers, yet they were put without any counter argument, as if they emanated from a disinterested scientific or analytic body, like the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
"Ms Carter says the Territory's sluggish population growth is also a threat to economic well being." "A good size for a medium size city, we think that kind of population target is one to aim for," she said.
Ms Carter opined, on behalf of the PCA, that Canberra's economic fortunes should be pinned on population growth at "1.75 per cent" or "5,200 people per annum."
For Canberra, 500,000 people over the next 20 years would average at something like an increase of 7,500 people a year, and on a divider of four, about 2,000 new dwellings a year, or 40,000 over the Council's defined period.
In fact there are many reasons, not just to question such a promotion of population growth for Canberra, but to severely filter it out of the national public medium, because Canberra's land, water, housing, schools, hospitals, roads and transport are not coping with the current population and neither are similar services all over Australia.
To advocate artificially increasing population growth anywhere, when the world faces a petroleum supply and price wall, and widespread famine related to the unwise diversion of agriculture for biofuels seems like arrogant and dangerous folly.
The percentile growth rate of 1.75% per annum is the same one promoted by the Scanlon Report (written by the populationist Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), which is part of Australia's development lobby). [See also Scanlon Report on this site.]
.
The rationale for this figure was to prolong and expand the population of working age as if our economy will continue forever in the mass production factory mode of last century, for the benefit of big business. If you read between the lines of the Property Council's press release, you will realise that their concern is labour for construction sites. Their agenda is to get the local, state and federal governments to grow populations through immigration and higher birth rates. Thus it is hoped to continue to stimulate the already over-stimulated demand for building materials, new houses, roads, water technology, and raise, not only interest rates, but the price of land-holdings, agricultural produce and water itself.
Among other methods, Ms Carter is pushing for the integration of "programs like the ‘Live in Canberra’ campaign and the Skilled and Business Migration Program." Growthist lobby groups seem undeterred by the fact that,according to Dr Bob Birrell of the Monash Centre for Population Research, less than one third of skilled immigrants are working in their field; most are merely cogs in the engineering of population pressure and housing demand.
Of little or no concern to big-population-lobbyists, apparently, is the increase in the cost of living which results from this aggressive promotion of land-speculation, the rising numbers of homeless and indebted, and the short-term nature of this kind of employment and industrial activity. The risk for Australians of starvation and disease from population pressure on food supply and water, present already in many parts of the world, is never mentioned.
For those of you who may resent the spending of public funds to promote commercial ventures which will rely on increasing Australia's population and who fear the resultant social and environmental stresses, you may make your complaint to the ABC
Skilled migrants causing problems
Shared accommodation a necessity and no longer a choice for many in Brisbane
One of many reports about the ongoing and worsening rental crisis in Brisbane, is the article "Wanted: a Room to rent" on page 27 of Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper of 29 April 2008. The article reports trends where both co-tenancy and room-by-room tenancy is increasing. In the latter case, the room is directly rented by each individual tenant from the landlord. This situation is predicted to grow here in the same way that it grew in the UK between 1996 and 2000.
It is hard to fathom whether the intention of the journalist Paddy Hintz is to objectively report this indicator of worsening quality of life for many Queenslanders or to promote acceptance of it. According to the article, "Rental experts are now predicting that &emdash; for good or for bad &emdash; room-by-room renting will continue its stellar rise," as if this trend could possibly be 'good' for anyone other than slumlords, real estate agents and property speculators.
Alex Poulsen, manager of the University of Queensland accommodation services, was quoted:
“I think what is really interesting is the number of professional people in their 20s and 30s who are now sharing.
“It’s that weird 10-year period where you can’t really afford to live in your own home but you don’t want to live at home either.
“People who live in share houses are getting older, people are getting married later and women are waiting longer to have babies.“
Alex Poulsen tried to portray shared accommodation in a somewhat positive light, when he pointed out that this kind of renting can be a great way to meet people, particularly if want to build a portfolio of contacts.
Of course, this is one of many reasons why people have chosen to live in shared accommodation in the past, but it was more a choice than a necessity, and those who did so could expect to save considerably on rental costs in return for having their personal space encroached upon by strangers with whom they may not necessarily have been compatible. These days it is no longer a choice for many, because of skyrocketing rents.
For those who do grasp the nettle of living with strangers under the same roof, the choices may still be limited. Between AU$155-AU$160 per week seems to be the average for shared accommodation which is proving to be a hurdle for many young people seeking shared accommodation in Brisbane according to Don Foster, accommodation manager of the Queensland University of Technology.
The high rents which are forcing many more than previously would have had to have lived together are the direct result of increased demand for rental properties, caused by population growth that has been directly lobbied for by land speculators. Indeed, in May 2004 whilst listening to an "Australia Talks Back" (now called "Australia Talks") talkback program on ABC's Radio National, I was astonished to hear an economist working for the Real Estate Institute of Australia (or possibly the Property Council of Australia) actually state that they were looking towards an increase in immigration to revive the slump in the property market. They have since got their wish of course, with the help of the Courier Mail newspaper, itself a relentless promoter of population growth#main-fn1">1 and the rest of us are paying the price.
See also: "Rent gouging threatens Brisbane inner city retail community"
Footnotes:
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. See The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth. #main-txt1">[back]
Australian Conservation Foundation says Port Phillip Bay in trouble
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) claims sediment plumes from bay dredging in Victoria may be worse than predicted. See their satellite images (in PDF format).
The conservation foundation has launched its own independent water quality tests off Sorrento in Victoria, claiming it doesn't trust the official monitor.
They say pictures obtained from satellite images suggest plumes are too big.
'There are certain boundary limits on those particular dredge plumes, looking at the satellite photograph it looks very much like the plume is going well beyond that boundary,' said Conservation Foundation's Chris Smyth. Results from the tests are expected to come through next month, with the official independent monitor happy to consider them.
'I'm not here to judge the motives of others but we are here to look at the information they can bring to the table,' said Independent Monitor Mick Bourke.
Conservation Foundation officials concede even if their tests find turbidity levels are acceptable that will not change their opposition to dredging.
'The project is inappropriate for Port Phillip Bay, we think the risk of Port Phillip Bay is too great,' said Mr Smyth. (Skynews Report)
And from the ACF website:
New satellite images of Port Phillip Bay suggest the size of the plume from the dredging vessel may be breaching the limits set by the Victorian Government.
“These satellite images suggest the plume has spread further than was predicted in the State Government’s environmental management plan,” said ACF’s Marine Campaign Coordinator Chris Smyth.
“We are concerned there has been no public comment by the Port of Melbourne or the government officials acting as the project’s environmental monitor on this possible breach of the environmental management plan.
“Satellite images cannot tell the full story. That’s why it’s so important to get out on the water and do thorough, scientifically-accurate monitoring,” he said.
Monash University scientists are conducting independent scientific monitoring as part of ACF’s BayMonitor program , following widespread concern about the adequacy of the dredging project’s official monitoring program.
Mr Smyth said the scientists were currently testing the turbidity (cloudiness) of the water at locations around Port Phillip Bay.
“Our aim is to conduct solid, independent testing, to shine some light on the Port’s monitoring program and alert the community to the environmental consequences of the channel deepening.
“At present the BayMonitor program is being funded by the Shire of Mornington Peninsula, with some philanthropic support, but if it is going to continue for the duration of the dredging we will need more financial help,” Mr Smyth said.
Friends or Currawong need your help to save historic holiday camp
See also Historic NSW holiday retreat for workers' children threatened by developers
Dear Bushwalkers ,Greens and Conservationists
Friends of Currawong share the view of many heritage and environmental commentators, that the entire Currawong site-all of it-should be placed on the State Heritage Register.
Currawong's future is now in Frank Sartor's hands. Under the Part 3A process the Minister may ignore the Heritage Office, which is the consent authority for State Listed items. Professional bodies, councils or committees can inform the Minister but have no authority. But the show must go on. To win we need your help.
The Heritage Council of New South Wales says the entire Currawong site should be listed. The Heritage Council says Currawong meets an exceptionally high five out of seven of the criteria required for listing. An item need only meet one to be successfully listed.
To get their sub-division the developers want a re-zoning of the 20 hectare site. Currently 16 hectares is zoned Community Open Space. The acquisition authority is the State Government. That is why Friends of Currawong believe the State should acquire the entire site for National Park.
How you can Help
The Minister of Planning's panel is holding a public hearing on Wednesday 4 June 2008. The hearing will be at Mona Vale Surf Lifesaving Club, Mona Vale Beach. It is open to the public.
You can make a submission - in writing or in person - to the Department of Planning. Deadline for submissions and bookings is 23 May 2008.
To present to the Panel, call Paula Poon, the Panel Secretariat, on (02) 9228 6516 or email paula.poon@planning.nsw.gov.au before 4PM Friday, 23 May 2008. Better still do both.
Your letter is important in the fight to Save Currawong. An excellent template letter is below written by Jan Roberts.
Following last month's overflowing public meeting at Avalon Community Centre a more formal committee structure has been set up. (Friends of Currawong North).
As always, thanks for your fighting spirit over these years.
Jo Holder and Shane Withington
Co-convenors, Friends of Currawong
Ken Hughes
Treasurer, Friends of Currawong
38 Loblay Cresent, Bilgola Plateau, 2107
Please make cheques payable to Friends of Currawong
#TemplateLetter" id="TemplateLetter">An excellent template letter: add your own observations about Currawong, Pittwater and the National Park.
The Director
Strategic Assessments
Department of Planning
GPO Box 39, Sydney NSW 2001
Dear Sir/madam
Re project no MP 070117 - Currawong Beach - 19.77 ha on the western foreshores of Pittwater
We wish to lodge our strong opposition to Development proposal MP 070117. I am writing on behalf of four generations of a Pittwater family. Led by a war damaged ex-serviceman, we moved to what was then remote Avalon Beach for peace and quiet immediately after the war. Our family has never needed to use Currawong but has always valued what it represents to others.
The battle to preserve this historic and sensitive workers holiday village from the predations of developers has been waged for many years, so many it is a small miracle that the valiant band of opponents has not withered away. Such is the strength of their altruistic work. Is anyone out there in State Planning and the Labor Party listening to the voices of respected people like architect Richard le Pastrier, the local Pittwater branch of the Labor Party, environmentalists, conservationists and heritage experts in the National Trust, not to mention the Friends of Currawong? Most of these people are Labor supporters who value what the party's post-war reconstruction leaders achieved for its members. To destroy their gift and sell it off for the benefit of a few millionaires is really sinful; and I do not use that strong word lightly.
We have a once in a lifetime opportunity now to merge the land with Ku-ring-gai National Park and use the cottages in new ways, for example for holidays for indigenous families, residential workshops for troubled adolescents and meditation retreats for cancer sufferers and others. If trade union members no longer use the place, our society has many needy people who would benefit from a holiday in Currawong. It is a unique and healing place.
Please listen to the many, many voices who want Currawong to remain in public hands. The land was home to aborigines who have long gone but their spirits are there too. Let us continue the visionary work of the original union leaders and save Currawong for the people to use in ways appropriate for the 21st century.
Yours faithfully
Dr Jan Roberts, historian
Compendium of futility: Sierra Club brags of inconsequential achievements
Stephen Hazell,
Executive Director
Sierra Club of Canada
April 28/08
Mr. Hazell,
In your latest solicitation you enumerate the number of results that Sierra Club volunteers and staff have achieved this year owing to my support. You mention postponing the Kearl tar sands mine pending environmental impact assessment (climate change). You mention stopping the Digby Neck mega-quarry in Nova Scotia that would have proved harmful to right whales. You say you convinced the federal government to develop a new water strategy. You kept global warming at the top of the agenda by advocating "strong" action at Bali and providing needed criticism and analysis of the Harper governments (non) actions following this up. And then you successfully urged the Ontario government to "Grow the Greenbelt" and protect millions of acres of "environmentally sensitive" and "agricultural land" in Southern Ontario.
It sounds like, Mr. Hazell, that you and your team have been busy. Busy like a hyperactive janitor mopping a floor but ignoring that the tap is left wide open to continuously pour water over your work.
Do you remember the IPAT equation? Probably not, I suspect you were not even born in 1970 when the Sierra Club and the whole mainstream environmental movement accepted it as conventional wisdom. "I" (Environmental Impact) equals "P" (Population level) times A (Affluence or per capita consumption) times "T" (technology). Still makes sense to me. But no longer to the politically correct, who have taken the "P" right out to render environmental degradation incomprehensible.
Let's illustrate. We will have to cut global GHG emissions 60% just to make up for the increased emissions brought about by population increases globally in the next four decades. In Australia the population increased 30% from 1990-2006 and its GHG emissions increased by exactly the same number during that same period. In the United States, the population increased 43% from 1970 to 2004 and its GHG emissions increased 43% during that same period. The correlation is clear, is it not? Yet Sierra Club "analysts" in commenting on the governments emissions targets failed to even note Canada's immigrant-driven G-8 leading runaway population growth of 1.08%. Just as they were completely silent following the release of the March 07 census report. A stunning omission for an "environmental" organization.
Environment Minister Gordon Miller said that Southern Ontario can expect to have to jam another 6 million people into its agricultural region in the next 25 years if immigration rates are not curbed. And you want to "Grow the Greenbelt". How? "Smart Growth?" (Smart growth, Smart clear-cuts, Smart extinctions etc.) Check out what is happening to British Greenbelts, once 14% of the UK, now crumbling under development pressure. If Portland Oregon went down, anything will. There is no sanctuary from relentless population and economic growth. Renewable technologies? The energy produced by the 900 wind farm at Sarnia will be erased by the energy demands of 23 days of immigration. BC Hydro claims that if every British Columbian household turned their lights off for one hour it would provide enough power for 4000 households for a year. But the population growth rate in BC is such that in just one year everyone would have turn their lights off for 6 hours a day to power those 4000 households and in four years time everyone would have to leave their lights off permanently. Recycling is also futile. A British study revealed that one new citizen via the maternity ward or the airport wipes out 80 years of responsible re-cycling. I could go on. You get the point Mr. Hazell.
No, no. The point is not to quit recycling. Or to abandon the search for more efficient technologies. Or not to make more efficient and rational land use decisions. Etc. Etc. Rather, it is to point out that without population stabilization all of those worthy goals are pointless. That is why the Sierra Club of the United States was committed to it for most of its recent history and why one third of its current membership are trying to restore that commitment, led by a group of Sierrans called SUSPS (Sierrans for US Population Stabilization).
But I doubt, if you are a typical Canadian like me, that you will be interested in rocking the boat.
So get back to your mop and whistle your happy tune. Who knows, maybe Walt Disney was right, if you wish something to be true and avoid nasty thoughts and phrases like "over-population", "immigration", "limited carrying capacity" and "over-shoot" your Al Gore fantasy just might come true. By living greener lifestyles and vesting our hopes in renewable technologies, you might wish away the fact that there are twice as many Canadians here now as when I was born and pretend that doesn't make a whit of difference to the habitat they're destroying. Just whisper the magic words, “Aba-ka-dabra, Smart Growth!”, and presto! Done!
PS. Is there a technological fix for an extinct species?
Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC.
How to end the Queensland economy's addiction to population growth?
On 22 April 2007 Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, then Deputy Premier, rejected calls for ending Queensland's population growth, claiming that it "would have a very serious impact on the construction industry that a lot people rely on for jobs."#main-fn1">1.
A year later, on 25 April 2008 as reported#main-fn2">2 in the Sunshine coast daily, town planning lawyer, Andrew Davis, similarly objected to the plans of newly elected Sunshine Coast Mayor, Bob Abbot, to cap the coast's population growth at 400,000 from the current population of 300,000#main-fn3">3. Davis claimed that Abbot's initial plan to reduce annual population growth from 3.5% to 2% would result in the loss of 8,500 of the region's 20,000 construction jobs. He also claimed that there would be further job losses in the transport, property and business service sector, with flow-ons to other sectors of the economy like retail, tourism, manufacturing.
Indeed, in a manner uncharacteristic for property developers' advocates, even Andrew Davis implicitly acknowledged that such a transition would be necessary when he said, “Turning off the tap of growth, without first achieving success in creating sustainable business, will cause enormous pain for everyone, whether you work in growth industries or not.”
Given that the region does not have adequate water resources, transport infrastructure, electricity generation, or health and education services to meet the needs of the existing population, many argue that it is urgently necessary to end growth now rather than to increase the number of people who will become dependent, for their employment, upon further growth. At the very least, a plan to end the region's dependence upon growth must be adopted without further delay. Sunshine Coast residents should not hold their breath waiting for Davis and the Sunshine Coast developers to devise a plan for a sustainable economy for the region.
Putting back the date for the necessary transition from a growth-addicted economy to a stable steady state economy will only make the eventual adjustment more traumatic.
At least Bob Abbot's plans for a cap are a step in the right direction. As far as it goes, he can rightly claim a popular mandate for his stance, having won the election for Mayor against pro-developer candidate Joe Natoli, with over 70% of the vote#main-fn4">4.
Comments posted to the web-site of the Sunshine coast Daily News, in response to the story, also confirm the overwhelming popular support enjoyed by Abbot. (See #CommentsSupportingBobAbbott">Appendix 1 below).
Saturday's Sunshine Coast Daily in the story Coast told to grow up and diversify#main-fn5">5 of 26 April reported that Sunshine Coast business leaders supported Abbot and called for the diversification of the economy away from dependence upon tourism, retail and the property industry.
Sunshine Coast Business Council chair Paul Pettigrew said, "Reliance on the mainstays of tourism, retail and property development industries must be reduced. The growth of the knowledge, creative, research and innovation, manufacturing and other such skills-based industries will create a larger total economic base that is better positioned for the region’s social and economic future."
Sunshine Coast Environment Council manager Ian Christesen said the time was right to have a debate about growth#main-fn5b">5.
“The time is right, the people have spoken at the elections, so let’s get on with rational discussion,” he said.
“The rhetoric the state government has been going on about for some time is ‘we’re managing growth’. Everyone realises that’s not the case, growth is managing us.
“We have to diversify our economy. We can’t rely on the vagaries of construction and development to underpin our economy.
“We need to move on and develop something a bit smarter.”
However, as former State Labor MP, Cate Molloy, warned (see #DictatorialStateGovernmentPowers">Appendix 2) Sunshine Coast residents may see their expressed wishes to curb the demands of the developers frustrated. State Labor Government's supposedly independent assessment panel, has powers to over-rule planning decisions of the Sunshine Coast Council and other local governments.
Already in 2007, at the behest of the Property Council of Australia (PCA), the State Government forcibly amalgamated a number of local governments, against the wishes of the residents served by these councils#main-fn6">6. The Property Council viewed the abolished Noosa and Douglas Shire Councils and many other councils, as impediments to its agenda for unrestrained development.
However, the Property Council and the State Government's plans suffered a setback when anti-development candidates in a number of key local government areas including the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Cairns, and Redland City overcame the additional difficulties caused by the amalgamations and defeated candidates heavily financed by developers#main-fn7">7.
In response to this democratic resistance, the Queensland State Government, encouraged by pro-developer Murdoch Newsmedia, set up the independent assessment panel, of which Molloy warned.
Clearly, if Queensland is to be saved from overdevelopment and overpopulation, then anti-development councils, together with their grass roots supporters, will have to show at least as much determination as the developers and their government stooges.
Footnotes
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. Qld govt rejects population cap in the Age of 22 April 2007.#main-txt1">[back]
#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. Curbing growth 'would cost jobs' by Jane Gardner in the Sunshine Coast Daily News of 25 April 2008 #main-txt2">[back]
#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. Sunshine Coast plan to cap population on Radio National's PM of 24 April 2008 #main-txt3">[back]
#main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4. See Electoral Commission of Queensland's results for the Sunshine Coast Mayoral elections. #main-txt4">[back]
#main-fn5" id="main-fn5">5. Coast told to grow up and diversify by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily News of 26 April 2008 #main-txt5">[back] #main-txt5b">[back]
#main-fn6" id="main-fn6">6. Cate Molloy : Forced council amalgamations planned by Property Council of Australia of 7 Sep 2007 #main-txt6">[back]
#main-fn7" id="main-fn7">7. The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections of 29 March 2008 #main-txt7">[back]
#CommentsSupportingBobAbbott" id="CommentsSupportingBobAbbott">Appendix 1: Some comments in support of Mayor Abbot's population cap
Comments were posted in response to Sunshine Coast Daily article Curbing growth 'would cost jobs' of 25 April 2008.
"The coast cannot cope with the current growth. ..."
"Growth on the coast needs stemming. At present there are subdivisions without supporting services. The building quality is less than desired, but maximum price is called for by the developers. All in the name of greed."
"It is ignorant for anybody to suggest that we need "Growth" to sustain a economy, most problems in the world are caused by growth, sure there may be "some" job loss for a while, but this will naturally adjust after a while.
"Nothing is gained without pain.
"It's good to see somebody like Mr Abbot standing up to the development industry."
"There are so many examples across the coast of where we are playing 'catch-up' because growth has not been carefully monitored. I invite any Coast residents to try getting around the Sippy Downs / education precinct between 8am - 9am and again from 3pm - 5pm. I sat in traffic there yesterday for 35 minutes - to move only a couple of hundred metres. We're all waiting for the new Dixon Interchange to open and look forward to a reduction in congestion. I'm sure the residents of Maroochy North Shore are also looking forward to the Maroochy River Bridge project completion.
"What Mayor Abbot is suggesting is reasonable, and shows an interest in the long-term livability of the Coast region. I think his vision proves that we have elected the right man for the job - someone who looks at the big picture and doesn't play into the hands of developers and their dollars."
"We don't have a infrastructure now to cope with the people we have here, Look at the most important stuff like the poor state of hospitals,the lack of public transport, the traffic nightmare."
"I don't see why we have to concentrate so many people into one place changing the entire coast into a rat race, ..."
"Enough is enough.Overdevelopment only puts money into the pockets of large developers who are not domiciled on the coast. They are only here to make fast easy money at the ultimate expense of residents. ...
"We can't afford any further development on the Sunshine Coast that only puts money into the developers pockets and leaves the rest of us to pick up the bill. More strength to Bob Abbot and his plans. And an end to the Natoli 'sleep with the enemy' policy.
"From the story and the comments all I can say is, Good for you BOB!"
"The increase is being driven by the federal government via immigration, due to the failure of various other ridiculous schemes to maintain the human plague i.e 'baby bonus'.
"Since 2003, our immigration rate has doubled. This is short term economics; selling state forest, water supply, and sacrificing entire species for a quick-buck. This is a threat to our future far worse than terrorism."
"Perhaps Mayor Abbott's proposed growth rate will help alleviate the difficulties house buyers are having getting their homes completed due to a shortage of tradespeople. (see Saturday's Daily)."
#DictatorialStateGovernmentPowers" id="DictatorialStateGovernmentPowers">Appendix 2: Cate Molloy warns of threat of dictatorial use of State Government's planning powers.
This comment by Cate Molloy, former Labor state member of Parliament who was expelled from the Labor Party for opposing the Traveston Dam was also posted in response to the abovementioned Sunshine Coast Daily article Curbing growth 'would cost jobs' of 25 April 2008.
The current Minister for Infrastructure and Planning Paul Lucas has stated a five member independent assessment panel would be given the first right of refusal on all Noosa development applications so that means they also have first right of approval, of those applications not just the ones in conflict with the planning scheme.
We now have this Famous Five who are about to duplicate the work not only done in council but also that which is referred to the State government for review- a call in- how can any council operate effectively if the responsibility to plan and approve is removed from their hands.
OK so Noosa is only one part of the cake but this kind of eroding of democracy smacks of arrogance.
Noosa got much of its planning done well with a great deal of community input, that is now being removed not only from the mayor but also all the councillors.
We can address this by pressuring the mayor and those councillors who enjoy close relationships with both federal and state government ministers to reinstate our democratic rights.
There is a specific tactic of turning the heat up on our elected representatives to stand up for us on this important issue and not simply roll over, making a few noises about how they hope the process is thorough enough and the state government doesn't select poorly.
I would like to see those councillors who have used state and federal politicians to advance their campaigns to now actually do something with that endorsement.
Vivien Griffin and Glen Elmes have openly declared they want to work together that's great so now Viv and Glen you have to take these issues to state parliament and report back to us the people what you have both achieved.
Debbie Blumel has represented as a labor candidate at least 4 times with endorsements from Wayne Swan and a tinny full of state pollies so now come on Debbie, you can get down to Brisbane get Wayne Swan to go with you, to see Minister Lucas.
You then can report back to us on what you have achieved to get Minister Lucas to rescind this ridiculous Famous Five duplication and removal of our democracy.
Russell Green has mates in State Government and has even turned up at a State Labor retreat. This level of friendship surely must allow you Russell to put forward our case.
Of course we have other councillors who also have close ties in government but lets start with this small but highly and well connected group to really start using their connections as they have so implied they would do.
My grandfather and the Light Horse
by Edward Cranswick 25 April 2008 ANZAC Day
Edward Cranswick reflects upon the significance of his grandfather's death at Beersheeba on 31 October 2007 where Australian soldiers on horseback charged Turkish position in the struggle for oil which was to destroy the culture of the horse in the 20th century.
#AttendanceAtMemorialService" id="AttendanceAtMemorialService">Attendance at memorial service for 90th anniversary of Beersheba charge
While drinking coffee in a local Adelaide cafe one afternoon last year, 31 October 2007, I read in the local paper, The Advertiser, that there was to be a memorial service that evening for the 90th anniversary of
the successful attack of the Australian Light Horse on the Turkish Army in Beersheba, Palestine, on 31 October 1917 during WWI. My maternal grandfather, Thomas Roydon Hogarth, 3rd Light Horse Regiment, was a stretcher bearer who died there at the age of 35 from wounds sustained whilst carrying wounded from the battlefield, and he was posthumously awarded the Military Medal -- consequently, I have always had an interest in the history of conflict in this region. Furthermore, my mother, Mrs. Isobel Hilary Cranswick, née Hogarth, had died six weeks before, leaving me living in her home, the walls of which are covered with photographs of family members or other people I cannot identify. One of the few photographs I know well is that the head and shoulders of my grandfather in half-profile dressed in his Light Horse uniform wearing a Digger hat. The whole question of my family roots has become increasingly important to me since I have learned of and met my Aboriginal cousins on my grandfather's side of the family, and it has become particularly acute with my mother's death, leaving all sorts of unresolved questions related to her birth in 1915 and growing up with her sister and mother and no father. It occurred to me that the memorial service might provide insight into some of these family matters, and
hence, I decided to attend.
I originally went to the memorial service only to listen, but I changed my mind when I encountered about fifty people standing around the War Horse Memorial Trough and Obelisk at the north end of East Terrace, at least half of whom were either wearing military uniforms or wearing medals pinned on to civilian clothes. As I listened to the military chaplain assure us that God had been and was on the side of the Australian troops, I decided I had to say something about my family history and its relationship to the current crisis in the Middle East. Having decided that I would speak, I became nervous and tense at the prospect of doing so. I was standing about five meters (15 feet) away from the chaplain, and at the conclusion of the playing of the pipes and bugle, I loudly said something to the effect:
"My grandfather, Thomas Hogarth, was killed at Beersheba with the Light Horse fighting Muslims for oil. He died then for the King, and now young Australian soldiers are dying for George Bush. Stop the War! Get the Australian troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq!"
Everyone seemed initially surprised by this outburst because there was no response at all for about five seconds, but then three or four men came up to me, one of whom said something about bashing me. Another quite calmly but firmly tried to lead me away, saying that I'd had the opportunity to speak and express my thoughts and that now my presence was no longer needed there. I told him that I had left my bicycle locked up near the monument and so he accompanied me to it -- I suppose he was concerned that the ceremony run smoothly, and hence, he wanted to shield me from participants who might want to confront me. I unlocked my bike and walked off towards Rundle Street, and one of the men said, "Fuckwit" as I walked by, but I repressed my first reaction and said nothing.
I felt very shaken by the whole experience, and walking down Rundle Street, I felt like an outcast from the "tribe". The strength of the tribal feeling that I sensed in the participants in the ceremony was matched by my not feeling a part of it. The archetypal confrontation between the self and society reminded me of the tribalism of the Old Testament. And this triggered my customary paranoia and insecurity about my right to inhabit this land, my right to live in Adelaide, my right to membership in the tribe. But as I thought further about this -- my grandfather was one of 73 men killed or mortally wounded at Beersheba, my parents met whilst both were serving in the Australian Army in New Guinea during WWII -- it became clear to me that whether I like it or not, I am largely a product of the Australian Army.
#ArmenianEarthquake" id="ArmenianEarthquake">1988 Armenian Earthquake and Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915
I worked as a seismologist for the US Geological Survey (USGS) for 22 years, and in 1988, I was a member of the team of seismologists and seismic engineers that was requested by the Soviet Union to assist in the investigation of the 1988 Armenian Earthquake -- 25,000-50,000 people died there, about 1% of the Armenia population -- the first time the USSR had requested assistance from the US government since WWII. At the time there was a conflict going on between the Soviet republic of Christian Armenia and the adjacent Soviet republic of Muslim Azerbaijan to the west. In particular, Soviet citizens of Armenian descent living in Azerbaijan were being persecuted by some Soviet citizens of Azerbaijani descent, and a few months before the earthquake many of these Armenians had sought refuge with their relatives living in Armenia. This ethnic conflict had some of the elements of the Armenian genocide conducted by the Turks in 1915 during WWI and just prior to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It is estimated that more than a million Armenians died in the genocide with the result that the Armenian population of Turkey is now only about 40,000. When I told my Armenian colleagues how my grandfather had died fighting the Turks, they said, "You are our brother!"
#TurkishEarthquake" id="TurkishEarthquake">1999 earthquake in Turkey
A decade later, there was a similarly devastating earthquake in Turkey in 1999, and I went there with the USGS to investigate it. I worked with a Turkish seismologist, and one day when we were talking about our families, I told her that my grandfather had died fighting the Turks. She responded, "It is his fault he was killed! Why was he in Turkey? If he had stayed in Australia, he would not have been killed." Certainly that made me think -- the Turks did not come over the hill and shoot him on the property he managed in South Australia.
Later, she and I spent a night at a tent camp that had been established to house people whose homes had either collapsed in the earthquake or might collapse in an aftershock. That evening about ten of us congregated in a tent for a dinner of cheese, olives, bread, tea and raki, and afterwards we listened to a man play a saz (Turkish guitar-like musical instrument) and sing traditional Turkish folksongs. One song was about a young Turkish woman in Istanbul who laments the death of her young Turkish fiancé -- he had joined the Turkish army and had died fighting the British and the Arabs in Palestine.
#AboriginalDispossession" id="AboriginalDispossession">Dishonouring of British promises to Arabs and Aboriginal dispossession in Australia
It was actually the Arabs, the Palestinians, who were fighting for their native land -- the Turks and the British were both invaders who competed to control Palestine. The British -- as represented by T. E. Lawrence, a.k.a., Lawrence of Arabia -- had recruited the Arabs as allies with the promise that the British would liberate the Arabs fromTurkish rule, but at the same time the British also promised the same land to the Zionists. Three decades later, almost a million Palestinians were dispossessed of their native land by Europeans of Jewish descent who occupied it and built upon it the state of Israel.
My grandfather had two brothers, and they also served and in the Australian Army during WWI (all three listed their occupations as "Station Manager" when they enlisted), but the brothers survived. However, my grandfather's first cousin, Francis Dunbar Warren, did not serve -- he stayed on "his" station property of Finniss Springs near Marree with his Arabuna wife, their children, and her other Aboriginal relatives. Her family had already been dispossessed of their land -- it was not necessary to go to Palestine to dispossess other native people of their land.
My grandfather's family were members of the Hogarth-Warren business partnership that began with the marriage of his aunt, Margaret Hogarth, to John Warren in 1865, and it became one of the largest pastoralist enterprises in South Australia in the late 1800's -- Anna Creek, SA, now the world's largest working cattle station, occupying an area greater than that of Israel, was just one of their properties. The success of the family business was based on the presence and labour of hundreds of Aboriginal people, mostly Arabuna, who worked on the station, starting with the many Aboriginal stockmen who mustered the thousands of cattle and sheep; reciprocally, the Aboriginal people became dependent upon the rations provided by the pastoralists of European descent because the overgrazed land could no longer sustain the native food supply. This mixing of fortunes of the two peoples inevitably led to the mixing of blood, and I have met many of my cousins of Aboriginal descent whose grandfather was Francis Dunbar Warren, a pastoralist who had married the Arabuna mother of his children as formally as was then possible for a black and white to marry in that day. Francis acted to live the best life with those with whom he shared life -- their example is a light from the past that beckons us into the future.
#StruggleForPetroleum" id="StruggleForPetroleum">The Beersheba charge and the struggle for petroleum
The charge of the Light Horse at Beersheba was one of the last horse races in the race for the oil that destroyed the culture of the horse. Oil abruptly became the most strategic resource in the British Empire just prior to WWI after Churchill realized that ships fuelled by oil could travel significantly faster and more efficiently than those fuelled by coal -- the supremacy of the British Empire was based on the strategic superiority of the Royal Navy. To ensure the critical supply of oil, the British government bought a controlling interest in the company producing oil in Iran, Anglo-Persian Oil (later renamed the British Petroleum Company, i.e., BP), and largely controlled Iran for the next 40 years.The British also took Mesopotamia from the Turks during WWI -- the British army first invaded Baghdad in 1917, and they waged a war of occupation against the Iraqis over the next decade. The British competed with the Russians to control the region between the Mediterranean and India for a century -- a British army of 16,000 was completely obliterated in Kabul by the Afghanistan resistance in 1842.
As British imperial power declined throughout the world after WWII, particularly in the Middle East, it was replaced with American influence. This also includes Australia where America has dispossessed Aboriginal people of their land to build US military bases such as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap outside of Alice Springs, a satellite-war-fighting base where much of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan is being waged by American nerds who use satellite imagery to target weapons strikes on men, women, and children. In 2003, George Bush sent the US Army into Iraq to subdue its native population and take control of its mineral resources -- last year, John Howard sent the Australian Army into the Northern Territory for similar reasons.
So if we want to honour and lament our fallen dead, we should be honest in admitting that many died to further European domination of the world, and in doing so, some participated in the genocide of native peoples to steal the land and mineral resources that are the basis of modern industrial society -- a way of life that poisons the health of the Earth. If by some warp of space-time the Australian veterans of WWI were to return directly from their foreign battlefields of last century to the devastated land and drying/dying River Murray of present-day Australia, they might think that some enemy had ravaged the land whilst they were away at war. And with the inexorable process of climate change that we have set in motion, soon they might think that they had come to Hell.
#ReturnOfTheHorse" id="ReturnOfTheHorse">Will exhaustion of oil resources lead to the return of the culture of the horse?
The developing global oil shortage, i.e., Peak Oil, might signal the return of the Light Horse -- we may soon be returning to the ways of transport that existed before fossil fuels raised their ugly heads in human life. Thousands of Aboriginal stockmen on horseback have lost their jobs and their life on their own land as they were replaced by a few men on motor bikes or driving utes and four-wheel-drives who were in turn were replaced by a very few flying small planes around vast properties.
My mother and her older sister, Betty, grew up in Hawthorn, an old suburb of Adelaide, and they shared the one pony they kept in the paddock in the back. Betty was a proficient rider and once tried to teach her younger sister how to jump a horse. After the third time my mother lost her nerve at the last minute and pulled the horse up just before the jump, her sister, sitting on the fence, shouted at her, "Hilary, you'll ruin the horse -- I'll have to take him over the jump myself." Not long after that, upon finishing her nursing certificate, my mother left to travel to Britain where one could read books instead of having to jump horses -- she arrived shortly before the outbreak of WWII and was in London during the bombing of the 1940 Blitz. Betty stayed in Australia, was nearly killed in a fall while out fox hunting on horseback, she was in coma for 8 days, she later worked in the Land Army during the War when women replaced the men on the land, and after she married a man who had a sheep station in the Outback -- they had no children.
I am my mother's only child, and to the best of my knowledge, I am my grandfather's the only surviving issue (I've heard some reports up in the bush about an Aboriginal man called "Tom's son", son of Tom Hogarth -- but that's another story). My grandfather left Australia with the 3rd Light Horse because he was a proficient horseman -- but because he did not want to kill, he walked and carried a stretcher instead of a gun. Thinking of him, perhaps it is time for us to begin to repair the damage we have done.
Taxpayers have power to force better accounting of public expenditure in Bay Dredging operation
· Cost of around $1 billion, · Project valuation over 10 years with a terminal value · 12% discount rate not the 6% used by PoMC · Conservative estimate of future shipping fleet compositionOn these figures, this is a dis-benefit to Victorians. Clearly the project is already unjustifiable, even before any more costs blow-outs occur. I also have grave concerns about the Alliance between PoMC and Boskalis. During the SEES Inquiry Boskalis executives said they are now very aware of their responsibilities and had never breached any standards, claiming “zero incidents with environmental impact”. Boskalis failed to mention incidents where standards MUST have been breached, such as the sinking of a Boskalis dredge in Ponte Noir, Republic of Congo in 2006, where 3 people lost their lives, and the collision of Boskalis dredge Fairway in the port of Tianjin China in March 2007, resulting in the dredge being written off. Boskalis is also a joint venture partner in the controversial Jurong Islands project where sand has been illegally taken from Indonesia for land reclamation projects in Singapore. The secrecy surrounding the Alliance between Boskalis and PoMC must be investigated, otherwise Victorian taxpayers may be exposed to unlimited loss and our priceless Bay may be damaged irretrievably. It is noteworthy that both Boskalis and James Hardy Industries have their headquarters in The Netherlands, so in the event of any compensation claims against Boskalis, like the asbestos victims, many Victorians may face insurmountable difficulties in obtaining justice. The public, especially Victorians, can demonstrate their desire for accountability by cutting and pasting this article and emailing it, headed, "Re Port Phillip Bay Channel Deepening", to the following address:[email protected], (The Secretary, Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration, Legislative Council, Parliament of Victoria, Spring St. Melbourne 3000) From a Blue Wedges press release
Scanlon report underpins threat to Australian democracy
What organisation has only 24 members of which the first ten comprise the current Prime Minister and nine past and present Australian Prime Ministers or Prime Ministerial contenders? And why would they be so dedicated to an organisation with a focus so antithetical to democracy and Australians? Read on.
See also: "Nuclear power, totalitarian spin and overpopulation in Australia", "Bernard Salt on the Population 'debate'> and "Ziggy Switkowski, Population Numbers and Nuclear in the Australian" and "Normalising endless immigration and coupling it to nuclear power in Oz"
The document below probably furnished the blueprint for the Australian government to plan to transform Australian society in a manner which will displace and disenfranchise the bulk of its current population.
The Scanlon Report 30/50 - The Technological Implications of an Australian Population of 30 million by 2050
Note - this link no longer functions - see "Notes" [1]
Here is a new link: https://www.atse.org.au/Documents/reports/30-50-technological-implications-australia-population-2050-report.pdf. (Date last visited was 8 June 2018).
In the 150 pages the word 'democracy' is not mentioned once, although every aspect of Australians' lives and governance is dealt with here.
This is a 'peak oil' document, but it advocates a route whereby any choice Australians might have of reorganizing, locally, to adapt to declining availability of cheap energy, is being abrogated by the Scanlon Foundation’s grand plan to increase Australia’s immigration intake by 1.5% per annum to achieve a population of 30 million by 2050.
Australian politicians have apparently accepted the Scanlon prescription for continued economic growth through social and infrastructure engineering, and social indoctrination at the expense of democracy.
Immigration to increase by 1.5% of total population per year
To cater for our 'aging population' and 'economic growth', with immigration to increase by 1.5% of population every year, based on a recipe worked out by ANU demography, with demographer Peter McDonald, we are to have imposed upon us an unwanted and unsought massive population increase to accompany, service and pay for massive engineering works. Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, the report is the result of a study carried out by The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering with money from the Scanlon Foundation. The Scanlon Foundation was, until 2001, the Brencorp Foundation, and the child of Peter Scanlon, of IXL and Patrick/Corrigan fame, currently marketing credit cards to Asia.
The Australian Multicultural Foundation and the Institute for Global Movements
In 2006, the Scanlon Foundation recently made “one of the biggest private sector donations for social sciences” to the Monash University Institute for Global Movements and the Australian Multicultural Foundation,[1] in the words of Professor Nieuwenhuysen (formerly Director of the Bureau of Immigration Research), now director of the Australian Multicultural Foundation and of the Institute for Global Movements.
The study in question seems to have been a project investigating ways to get Australians to accept a massive immigration program, draconian changes to their way of life, and loss of the natural amenities and space they grew up with, in the context of huge engineering works and infrastructure expansion proposed by the abovementioned Scanlon Report. Nieuwenhuysen commented in 2006, when the Monash University study began, that "The results of these studies are destined to generate much interest from government, academia and the wider community, both in Australia and internationally."
Membership list of this exclusive club
Indeed, if you look at the 24 person strong membership list of the Australian Multicultural Foundation, you might consider this a foregone conclusion. Here are the first 10 members:
The Hon Kevin Rudd MP (Prime Minister of Australia), Mr John Howard, The Hon Mr Simon Crean MP, The Hon. Mr Alexander Downer MP, Mr Robert Hawke AC, Dr J. R. Hewson, Mr Paul Keating, Mr Mark Latham, Mr Kim Beazley, andMr Andrew Peacock AC.
This must be the most exclusive club in Australia. I cannot help but wonder, what's in it for the members? Maybe this is how you get a crack at being the titular head of the country, by selling out your constituents to big business.
At any rate, any illusion some naive people may have been clinging to, that the Australia 2020 conference really meant to consult with Australians, rather than get them to do the bidding of engineers and industries which benefit from rapid population growth, should now be dispelled, along with the illusion that we are still living in some kind of democracy, or that the future is safe in the hands of our politicians.
[1] "Monash University > News and Events > Monash Memo
$600K for study on social cohesion
22 February 2006
The Monash Institute for the Study of Global Movements has received $600,000 from the Scanlon Research Foundation to study social cohesion in Australian and international societies.
The research program for the Social Cohesion Project will be undertaken in partnership with the Australian Multicultural Foundation.
The grant will fund major interrelated studies on social cohesion: analysing and measuring the components of social cohesion; how to constructively attain social cohesion in Australia; and a study on minorities in Australian and international society.
The research will be led by academics from Monash's Faculty of Arts, including School of Political and Social Inquiry senior lecturers Dr Nick Economou and Dr David Wright-Neville, lecturer in sociology Dr Michael Ure, and Professor Andrew Markus, Director of the Jewish Civilisation department within the School of Historical Studies.
The research will be undertaken in cooperation with scholars at Chatham House in London, the Australian National University and Macquarie University.
The institute's Director, Professor John Nieuwenhuysen, is managing the project in association with Multicultural Foundation Director Mr Hass Dellal.
"This is one of the biggest private sector donations for social sciences," Professor Nieuwenhuysen said. "The Scanlon Foundation is genuinely interested in research and public policy issues and is greatly impressed by the calibre of research staff at Monash.
"The Social Cohesion Project is of central importance to the future of Australia and the international community and is a significant event for the institute.
"The results of these studies are destined to generate much interest from government, academia and the wider community, both in Australia and internationally."
The findings from each study will be presented at the 12th International Metropolis Conference to be held in Melbourne in October 2007. The conference, to be co-hosted by Monash, is the world's largest annual conference on international migration and settlement issues. It is the first time it will be held outside North America and Europe.
The Scanlon (formerly Brencorp) Foundation was established by the Brencorp Group in Victoria in 2001. The foundation's current focus is population and cultural diversity in Australia."
NOTES
(Added to article on 2 April 2010.)
[1] The URL for "The technological implications of Australia at 30 million in 2030" was a href="http://www.atse.org.au/index.php?sectionid=128 but the file is no longer listed there. I have copied and pasted the Address by Peter Scanlon below, to document the launching of the document. This address is quite interesting because it gives us an economic belief context and even admiringly cites a chapter written by Harvard economist, Benjamin M. Friedman, written with the notorious Milton Friedman: Benjamin M. Friedman, Milton Friedman, A. W. Clausen, "Postwar Changes in the American Financial Markets," in Martin Feldstein, ed., The American Economy in Transition," University of Chicago Press, 1980.
If anyone wants an electronic copy of the 2007 ATTSE Report itself, "The technological implications of Australia at 30 million in 2030," contact me through candobetter.org and I will send one to you.
"ADDRESS BY
FOUNDATION CHAIRMAN, PETER SCANLON
TO ATSE REPORT LAUNCH
18th April 07
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ladies and Gentlemen:
The Honourable Robert Smith MLC, President of the Legislative Assembly.
The Honorable Jenny Lindell MP. Speaker of the Legislative Assembly and Parliamentarians;
Mr. Peter Laver, Vice president of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering
Mr. Vaughan Beck
Distinguished guests.
The Scanlon Foundation is committed to the belief that Australia needs to continue to grow and that this growth will require a substantial and increasing role for migration. As a consequence we see social cohesion as critical to both migration and Australia’s growth.
In that context and separately from the study by ATSE The Scanlon Foundation’s Social Cohesion Research Program incorporates six (6) individual projects, managed by the Monash Institute for the Study of Global Movements and the Australian Multicultural Foundation.
One of these projects is the innovative benchmark survey throughout Australia measuring the current status of social cohesion in Australia. This survey has been commissioned and field interviews will commence in May. We anticipate results in July ready for analysis and preparation for release at Metropolis 2007.
However, the study released today by ATSE, and although very much part of our program, has different origins. In the early days of our work on social cohesion it was clear to us that there are a number of people in Australia across a broad spectrum who queried the underlying principal of growth because they worried whether the country was able to accommodate more people. In essence they asked “can we have a population of 30 million people by the year 2050 without creating substantial infrastructure and environmental issues”.
It was to deal with this perception, this question that led the Foundation to commission this study. That is why it is specific both as to numbers and Australia. That is why we went to ATSE as the independent expert with its 750 eminent Fellows.
Clearly the study says we can accommodate 30 million people by 2050. However it does say there are issues and that these are legitimate issues that need to be discussed and dealt with. ATSE concludes in fact they need to be dealt with irrespective to 30/50.
However I ask that as you reflect on this study that you do not do so in isolation. There is a flip side to the debate. That is the consequences of Growth. Too often growth is mistakenly seen to be only about material outcomes.
In his book “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth” Benjamin Friedman demonstrates why the elements, held out by the Enlightenment thinkers so central to Western philosophy, of openness, opportunity, tolerance, economic and social mobility, fairness and democracy are all enhanced by growth.
Freidman explains that growth, rather than simply creating a higher standard of living, is the key to effecting political and social liberalization in the third world. He shows that even the wealthiest of nations puts its democratic values at risk when growth stops. Merely being wealthy is no protection against a turn toward rigidity and intolerance when a country’s citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead.
Post war we had the growth of economic socialism which tried to deal with the imbalance of material well being by relying on redistribution rather than creation. It failed miserably.
Today, to me, in many ways there seems to be a populous move to a form of environmental socialism in that there is a concentration on regulating and redistributing what we have as was the case with economic socialism. It won’t be the answer. Separately from mans proven record of ingenuity and adaptation we need to get back to planning and doing. This will be the answer.
That we need to manage better is without doubt. The ATSE report is very clear about this. The short period of elected governments, our system of Federation together with upper and lower houses, the politicisation of the public service and so on has left us with ineffective long term planning. And this when there has never been a better time to set these priorities with our prosperity and surplus investment capital which is searching the world trying to find a home.
If Social Cohesion was not the Foundations main game I think we would have tackled this issue. Pressure and knowledge needs to be focused on our infrastructure and environmental planning. The current situation is a disgrace. We probably need for the want of a better title a Reserve Bank of Infrastructure.
However right now that’s not for us other than to support ATSE’s call for leadership and planning.
In conclusion the Foundation expresses it appreciation to ATSE. In particular my thanks to Vaughan Beck, Ian Duncan, Ian Rae and of course many talented authors and contributors to the 30/50 study.
We at the Foundation look forward to pursuing our ongoing work on social cohesion and positive migration strategies for the future prosperity of Australia.
Thank you"
Working man's vegetable plot under attack again
Towards the end of the 20th Century economists and demographers were promoted to ranks of public importance previously held by the church, as long as they fulfilled the church’s role, which is to prop up governments. All that demographers and economists did was crunch numbers and facilitate the passage of money by encouraging population growth, but, because of the prominence they were afforded by the corporate press, the public came to the misunderstanding that these were wise men.
Demographer Bernard Salt was an Australia 2020 Summit delegate in the Population, Water, Climate Change and Cities stream in 18-29 April 2008. (1)
This is what he calls a ‘big idea’:
He wants to ‘alter Australians’ concept of beauty from a verdant back yard to a desert rockery, so as to enable a population twice Australia’s current size.
Of course he doesn’t mention that this is the way he and his colleagues became rich and could become richer, and the reason that so many of the rest of us pay more for food, water, goods and housing already. Nor that more of the same will mean worsening conditions for the rest of us.
He presents this idea as one involving changing Australians’ perception of beauty. Although the sheer effrontery of engineering our perception, as if we were so many children and Mr Salt were an adult towering over us, is appalling in itself, it is what it conceals and removes from debate that is important.
Changing the national taste in what surrounds a house, would be a strange ambition if there were no reason for it. In fact there is a reason, but it won't benefit the average Australian. Mr Salt is working for people who want to fit another 20 or so million people into Australia in the next 50 years, and, for that, he must change the way we perceive value – or change the way that we are told we will perceive value, whether we like it or not.
He achieves this by simply downgrading the value of fertile soil to a flimsy aesthetic fashion statement, which he relegates to a symbol of the past with a questionable statement.
"Our values were forged in Surrey 220 years go and they have not changed."
He does not acknowledge the obvious, which is that verdant green will grow food and support livestock, hence ensuring at least a degree of independence for a family, as the cost of food and fuel spiral. Because he makes his statements from a position marketed as authorative, it becomes very hard for anyone on the receiving end to contradict them, silly as they are.
Reducing population growth and conserving such values would probably save Australians’ lives in the next 20 years.
But, to a politician looking for an idea to market to the electorate which will also please big business, swapping a vegetable garden and some fruit trees and a place for children and pets to play, for a couple of rocks and a cactus, seems smart. We know that the newspapers will support such an idea, because they are also in the land-speculation business.
Consider this ‘wisdom’:
[Salt writes:] “Two years ago, while driving through the suburbs of the desert city of Phoenix in the US, I immediately understood why it was possible for this city to have evolved from 250,000 residents to 4 million over 60 years.
The concept of suburban beauty is different in Phoenix.”
"They see an earth-toned adobe dwelling surrounded by a rock, scoria and cactus garden as beautiful, whereas we define suburban beauty as a separate house surrounded by a green lawn and verdant foliage. The Phoenicians have adopted values that reflect their environment; we haven't."
"If we could alter Australians' concept of suburban beauty, we could radically reduce our use of water …”(1), he writes. He might have added, but didn't, "...and bankers and developers could make a lot more money out of land whilst packing the rest of you in like chickens into batteries and charging the earth for rent and water."
Worse, in 2006, before the cost of oil went up so much, there was probably a big car parked outside those phonecian desert residences, indicating a little wealth besides their infertile plots, and a job to go to. Picture this in Australia in ten years, but without the car or the job.
I thought we elected government to protect us from this sort of predation.
In the words of King Crimson, “The fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools."
(1)Bernard Salt, “Nurturing big, better ideas for 2020”, the Australian, April 17, 2008
US environmental groups polish furniture whilst house burns down
Sierra Club Ignores the Smoke of Rampant Growth
My somewhat caustic approach can be attributed in part to a sense of urgency that most environmentalists apparently don't share. I believe we are almost out of time, and I have lost patience with dissemblers.
When I am in a house that has caught fire I am not apt to say "Gee, I think perhaps we should maybe call the Fire Department, don't ya think?". I am more inclined to shout "Call 911 you Sierra Club idiots!" Anything to stop them from continuing to robotically polish the wood furniture and calling that valuable work while the smoke envelopes us.
It was the late great David Brower, three time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Sierra Club pioneer who said that overpopulation was the major cause of America's environmental ruin, and that since immigration was the main factor in overpopulation, "it had to be addressed". Even in North America. Even in the politically correct community where I live. Somebody has to mention the nasty "I" word. Somebody has to call the Fire Department. And somebody has to tell them to stop pissing around with the furniture polish, get the hell out and start fighting the fire of runaway population growth! This role is not the role of a politician or a salesman. It is the role of someone who must wear the mantle of unpopularity.
Examples of "polishing the furniture":
Investing great time and hope in Sustainable Energy options. The Jevons Paradox dashes all of these hopes. Technological efficiencies liberate cash, and this cash is spent on yet more consumption. When the efficiency of air conditioners improved by 17% consumers bought 36% more air conditioners. When the fuel economy of the average car improved 30% American drivers responded by driving bigger vehicles greater distances. And thanks to population growth there are 130 million more cars on the road. Fuel efficiency in aircraft improved by more than 40% since 1978 but over all fuel consumption rose by 150% since then because of the explosive growth in air traffic encouraged by cheaper transportation costs. Energy use per unit of US GNP has fallen 50% since 1975 after enormous efficiencies were effected after the Arab Oil Embargo. Yet total US energy consumption rose by 40% The name of the game is to reduce total consumption, not improve technological efficiencies. And without stabilizing population, all benefits from efficiencies are erased. The 900 solar farm in Sarnia will produce only enough energy to satisfy 23 days of BAU immigration. Energy gains from renewable technologies are erased by economic growth (population times per capita consumption)
Nature reserves and much vaunted park dedications. None are secure from p pulation and economic growth. Even Yosemite was invaded by logging and mining interests by the stroke of a Congressional pen. A protected park in Costa Rica was similarly violated. Nature Conservancy admits having to take people to court for trepass etc etc. There are no sanctuaries from population and development pressure. And it must be remembered that in the US 40% of all listed mammals are not even found in refuges, and it is in these unprotected lands that 40% of all housing units will be found in the United States by 2030.
Good works. The typical Sierran is like a singing janitor who keeps mopping the floor---doing good works---but blissfully and willfully ignoring the fact that the tap (population growth) is on and water is pouring across it. Then there is the happy fool of a cabin maid on the Titanic as the ship is badly listing, whistlling as she tidies things up. She feels good about her environmentalism, because she is removing anything that isn't recyclable from the cabin. Criminal negligence, the deliberate neglect and avoidance of population growth by environmental organizations despite its obvious correlation to GHG emissions and biodiversity loss, cannot be forgiven by their inconsequential involvement with "good works". The Moonies do "good works". The BDM (Hitler Youth) did good works building trails and doing conservation work. Capone did charity work too. Sorry. You can't buy salvation with good works.
Sustainable Living Practices. Of course it was Al Gore in his Inconvenient Truth who made the absurd statement that we could through the individual choices we make as consumers in the things we buy, the electricity we use or the cars we drive for example that we could reduce our carbon emissions to zero. But Gore did not appreciate that green consumers can never reduce their consumption to zero, and that an increase in the number of the greenest consumers is going to increase total consumption. GHG emissions will have to be cut 60% just to keep pace with population increases in the next half century. And in the UK it was discovered that one new citizen, born or admitted as an immigrant erased 80 lifetimes of responsible recycling.
Polishing the furniture while the house is burning down. Welcome to the Green Fantasy World, where feeling good about yourself is more important than actually addressing the root cause of the problem---over-population, just as Jacques Cousteau said.
It's over-population stupid!
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
Who owns Port Phillip Bay?
"Who owns Port Phillip Bay?"
Martin Pakula (martin.pakula @ parliament vic gov au) is a lawyer and a member of the Victorian Parliament. He works for Roads and Ports Minister, Tim Pallas (tim.pallas @ parliament vic gov au). Tim Pallas has been the Victorian Minister for Roads and Ports since December 2006. These elected persons have responsibility for the Channel Deepening project and are theoretically answerable to the public.
On Friday, 18 April, 2008, in the Australian Newspaper, journalist Rick Wallace, reported comments Mr Pakula had made to Parliament about the dredging of Port Phillip Bay, which seemed to show that Mr Pakula has a poor understanding of the ideals and responsibility of democracy - at least in this instance.
"The views of absolutely minor participants have been portrayed and elevated, so long as they oppose the project,"' Mr Pakula is reported by Wallace to have said.
Apparently Mr Pakula gave as an example of what had irritated him, an Age story which described the mother of a person in a level-crossing accident as having inaccurately accused the Victorian State Government of spending $1 billion on channel dredging, when the government claims to be supplementing the port users’ costs by ‘only’ $150 million. The road-crossing victim’s mother had reportedly gone on to compare the port expenditure with $32 million spent on railway crossings.
I would like to know why Mr Paluka would view such a citizen as a ‘minor participant’, especially when, to my knowledge, her views are typical of those of many Victorian citizens, indeed, of citizens all around the country. It also seems inappropriate to me that the Victorian Government should spend ANY money propping up this project of which I heartily disapprove myself for environmental and democratic reasons. The democratic reasons are that the Bay is ours; it is our precious natural asset. It does not belong to a few men who will be in parliament for a few years before they join other mortals as pieces of dust, to modify in a manner which could destroy it forever. And it seems entirely appropriate to me that the mother in question complained about Roads and Ports spending any money at all on a widely despised engineering project, when apparently she perceived a failure to adequately maintain safety on Victoria’s level crossings, which Mr Pakula also has responsibility for.
Mr Pakula had previously described the Age’s reporting of Channel Deepening matters as a campaign of “unrelenting negative headlines and stories”.
Journalist Wallace recorded that The Age and its Chief Editor, Andrew Jaspan, had received “complaints from the Premier, corporate chiefs and top bureaucrats, including Prime Minister and Cabinet chief Terry Moran…about the paper's stance on the project.”
Wallace also referred to “unrest among reporters” in this matter.
I usually can the Fairfax press and all the other mainstream media. I would be amazed if the Age or the Australian or the Courier Mail, or any other property dot com associated media were to give sustained fair and democratic coverage of any matter which would encourage population growth and property speculation. The owners and directors of The Age would presumably be in favour of the Channel Deepening project simply because it is a tool of a corporate body that embraces population growth and widget multiplication. That the Channel Deepening project is being pushed through by government in a manner that is antithetical to democracy would presumably not trouble mass media moguls.
I have, however, not been following Channel Deepening comment in the mainstream press - the Age or elsewhere. For all I know, there may be some reason that The Age is actually against what seems to strike many as the raping of Port Phillip Bay for alleged profit. Or maybe the journalists at The Age are so alarmed by the dredging themselves that they are insisting on persistently reporting the widespread opposition to it.
What I can say with some confidence is that the message that Murdoch media journalist, Rick Wallace, carries from the Victorian Parliament, would scare Age journalists. It would scare any journalist. It scares me. It would scare Age journalists because it could be used as a lever by The Age Editors or The Age directors, to pressurize Age journalists to lay off reporting the deep and important public dismay at the dredging of Port Phillip Bay. I can see that it must be very hard to be a professional mainstream media journalist who is really concerned with representing public opinion, rather than marketing corporate projects to change laws and landscapes for corporate profit. I can also say that I think this message should scare other Australians, particularly those in Victoria.
Why should we all be scared? We should be scared because our representatives in Government who are responsible for the imposition of Channel Deepening are either unaware of the extent to which the public is dismayed by the high-handed and grossly disrespectful manner in which their Bay is being treated by those elected to care for it, or they do not care. Or it may be that Paluka et al are true believers in economic growthism and simply believe that the dredge-dissenting public lacks faith and must be led into the heaven of endless growth by its high priest parliamentarians. Or it may be that they are experiencing irresistable pressure from financial and other interests in the Port of Melbourne dredging project.
In fact, I do not know what motivates Mr Pallas, Mr Paluka, Mr Brumby, or what motivated Mr Bracks, Mr Thwaites, and Mr Kennett, to inflict raw capitalism, metal tooth and iron claw, on Victoria and its inhabitants. All I know is that, from the professional divers of Port Phillip Bay to the millions of other Australians who love it, from Catani Gardens’ possums, to Mornington Peninsula’s and Somerton's Kangaroos, from Malvern East’s proudly gentrified wooden houses, to Frankston’s sprawling backyards, and from the dead gardens of Bendigo and Ballarat and similar country towns targeted by the New Army of developers and water barons, to the farmers round Culgoa who formed PipeRight Incorporated to stop the government giving their water to big business in the riverina, people and other animals are hurting badly. Ruled over by a mad government, we are in despair.
We need proper representation from our government and journalists need absolute freedom to report. Time to turn off the Corporate Machine. Time to stop Mr Brumby's New Army of developers. Time to slow the monster down, Mr Brumby, Mr Paluka, Mr Pallas. Time to listen, not dictate.
Channel 7 markets unlivable Melbourne to a helpless audience
A couple of years ago there was a long fight against a proposed development on the corner of Royston Ave. and Tooronga Rd. East Malvern to replace a modest sized Edwardian house on a medium sized block with large trees ( habitat for birds and possibly some native wildlife and a bit of breathing space along a busy road.)
The fight was obviously lost by the opponents and I attach recent photos of what has been done to the block. Unfortunately I do not have a "before" photo.
As can be seen, there is complete disrespect and disregard for land as an entity in itself. The block has been treated simply as a space to be filled. It will obviously have underground parking for many cars whereas before only one or 2 cars would have been accommodated. One big concern I have with such developments is that as permeability of blocks is dramatically decreased, street trees will have less water and eventually we will lose these as well as the private gardens from which we all benefited.
The proposed changes to the residential zones are of course like many things the State government does- a complete disregard for residents and constituents and a removal of democracy.
Melbourne 2030 is the plan to fit in a million more people by 2030 (from about 2002) Melbourne will have even more than this 1 million increase by 2030. The State Government encourages and pushes for population growth. This is totally detrimental and undemocratic social engineering. Our city will be ruined and our children and grandchildren unfortunately will have far less than we did. This is the last thing we would wish for them but it is happening every day. Each old house for sale whether in my area or not, wears a stamp of vulnerability and I wait to see the debris from the destroyed trees and garden and the empty block looking like a wasteland as it lies in wait for exploitation by a greedy developer as yet more tasteless oversized, overcrowded housing is placed on it. There is an "army" of developers at the ready to descend on these properties, denying the ordinary person a chance to have a bit of space in a modest house in the suburbs and capitalising on the State Government's policies of continual and rapid population growth with planning to match.
Post script
On the Channel 7 Today Tonight program 16 April 2008 the audience was told that by 2030 Melbourne would be "unrecognisable" and that owning a house and garden would a "thing of the past."
Editor's comment:
Channel 7 Today Tonight might have chosen not to make these statements, or it might have chosen to have made them whilst pointing out their unreasonableness and urging Melburnians to fight them. That Channel 7 apparently promoted this outrageous attitude as an unquestionable given puts Channel 7 squarely in the propaganda field. Channel 7 is part of a corporate group with many investments in property development and the lifestyle commodities that go with the package.
It seems obvious to us here at candobetter that no group should be granted a commercial broadcasting license to market dystopia.
Article by Jill QuirkA couple of years ago there was a long fight against a proposed development on the corner of Royston Ave. and Tooronga Rd. East Malvern to replace a modest sized Edwardian house on a medium sized block with large trees ( habitat for birds and possibly some native wildlife and a bit of breathing space along a busy road.)
The fight was obviously lost by the opponents and I attach recent photos of what has been done to the block. Unfortunately I do not have a "before" photo.
As can be seen, there is complete disrespect and disregard for land as an entity in itself. The block has been treated simply as a space to be filled. It will obviously have underground parking for many cars whereas before only one or 2 cars would have been accommodated. One big concern I have with such developments is that as permeability of blocks is dramatically decreased, street trees will have less water and eventually we will lose these as well as the private gardens from which we all benefited.
The proposed changes to the residential zones are of course like many things the State government does- a complete disregard for residents and constituents and a removal of democracy.
Melbourne 2030 is the plan to fit in a million more people by 2030 (from about 2002) Melbourne will have even more than this 1 million increase by 2030. The State Government encourages and pushes for population growth. This is totally detrimental and undemocratic social engineering. Our city will be ruined and our children and grandchildren unfortunately will have far less than we did. This is the last thing we would wish for them but it is happening every day. Each old house for sale whether in my area or not, wears a stamp of vulnerability and I wait to see the debris from the destroyed trees and garden and the empty block looking like a wasteland as it lies in wait for exploitation by a greedy developer as yet more tasteless oversized, overcrowded housing is placed on it. There is an "army" of developers at the ready to descend on these properties, denying the ordinary person a chance to have a bit of space in a modest house in the suburbs and capitalising on the State Government's policies of continual and rapid population growth with planning to match.
Post script
On the Channel 7 Today Tonight program 16 April 2008 the audience was told that by 2030 Melbourne would be "unrecognisable" and that owning a house and garden would a "thing of the past."
Editor's comment:
Channel 7 Today Tonight might have chosen not to make these statements, or it might have chosen to have made them whilst pointing out their unreasonableness and urging Melburnians to fight them. That Channel 7 apparently promoted this outrageous attitude as an unquestionable given puts Channel 7 squarely in the propaganda field. Channel 7 is part of a corporate group with many investments in property development and the lifestyle commodities that go with the package.
It seems obvious to us here at candobetter that no group should be granted a commercial broadcasting license to market dystopia.
Article by Jill Quirk
Submission to Australia 2020 Summit says we cannot afford more population growth
Property market propagandist, Wendell Cox, on ABC Counterpoint (again)
This story was written by Michael Lardelli.
ABC's Counterpoint did another Wendell Cox interview on Tuesday.
This time Cox is blaming the subprime crisis on urban consolidation! (LOL!) Have a listen and a good laugh. It is minutes 21-33 of the mp3 file).
Presenters Michael Duffy and Paul Comrie-Thomson's attempts at contrarianism are becoming so lame that they are beginning to look like self-parody! Quoting Donald Rumsfeld? Give me a break!
The program directors must have a shortage of ideas to have trotted out Wendell Cox, yet again, to push the "I love suburbia" theme. Now Wendell is blaming the US mortgage crisis on urban consolidation!
What I am wondering is how high the price of oil will have to rise to ensure that Wendell will not be able to board a plane to Australia again and we can be spared his Property Council style nonsense.
Wendell says, "There's no reason why expansion could not continue." (Over and over again like someone flogging another slimming device on late night TV).
The one word he never mentioned was OIL. The Counterpoint presenters didn't mention it either but then I understand that they may be naively waiting for the high oil price to stimulate new discoveries (or a new energy- efficient technology that will save the world) so that the remorseless growth in consumption and population can continue.
Here's an appropriate newsflash fresh from www.energybulletin.net:
"Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah said he had ordered some new oil discoveries left untapped to preserve oil wealth in the world's top exporter for future generations".
Yes, the Saudi's don't want to increase production to preserve the high-consumption lifestyles of drowning-in-debt Australians (or Americans for that matter). As the limited nature of the world's resources begins to become evident (yes Michael there ARE "Limits to Growth" after all - even the Wall Street Journal published recently on this) then nations are beginning to conserve their resources instead of digging them out of the ground as fast as they can. They know the resources will be worth more in the future, but that price will fall if they raise production now.
Looks like the only way to solve the housing crisis (without exacerbating the water crisis and other looming resource limitations) is to stop population growth!
In a way I feel a little sorry for Michael and Paul, because it will soon become apparent, even to them, just how ridiculous some of their ideas are (especially suburban expansion) as the oil crisis accelerates.
They will not recognise the world in 10 years time.
I have downloaded the mp3 file of the 15 April Counterpoint and I will seek the program announcers out, Chaser-style, in 10 years time, set up loudspeakers in front of their houses (or lean-to, or cardboard box or wherever they will be trying to survive) and replay their programme for all to hear. It should provide a few moments of comic relief for their neighbours, if not for Paul and Michael!
David Brower: An authentic environmentalist (1912-2000) Why the Earth Day co-founder quit the Sierra Club
People and the Environment: Can the two co-exist?
Academics debate What Population Australia and Our Region can Sustainably Support
Article below is based on a report by Australia’s Olympic Poet, Mark O'Connor :
Demographer, Peter McDonald, is famous for presenting extreme projections of population implosion. His contributions to a debate at ANU on April 1 were predictable and are now on line. (The PPT versions are the easier ones to read). Peter's ideas suit big business and corporatised government and have thus become very influential. The criticisms and analysis below are therefore very important, since the Murdoch and Fairfax media, and sadly, even the ABC, market these attitudes uncritically and approvingly. Sheila Newman
Peter McDonald's piece, "Australia’s future population: planning for reality," is unlikely to impress environmentalists, according to Mark O'Connor.
In case you haven't time to scan it on line, here are some exerpts, organised and analysed by Mark O'Connor around 5 keywords that McDonald uses:
McDonald's Five Keywords:
Environment
Growth
Labour
Fatalism
"Realism"
"Social cohesion"
Those last two concepts probably really do need to be in inverted commas. The first 3 concepts are mixed together as follows:
The first sheet of his presentation summarises his line on environment:
"Environment and economy
• Australia will achieve a better result in relation to its own
environment and its contribution to the reduction of global
greenhouse gas emissions if it has a strong economy.
• A strong economy will provide the capital that is necessary
to invest in improvement of environmental infrastructure,
repair of degraded environments, and a shift to alternative
sources of energy that are not fossil-fuel based."
The next sheet proclaims:
"Capacity constraints are Australia’s biggest economic problem
• Much of the infrastructure required to support a strong and
productive economy is in short supply in Australia at
present.
• This includes water, transport for people, transport for
goods, ports, energy supply, housing and office space, and
state-of-the-art communications.
• These shortages may be artificially reduced in the short
term by increasing interest rates to slow demand.
• However, we do not want to live in a continued forced
recession. So, higher interest rates are not a long-term
solution. In the long term, the capacity constraints must be."
Notice that this, like most of PMD's talk, is not demography, but growth economics.
Next sheet:
"The requirements for new infrastructure
• New infrastructure involves technology, capital, good
planning and commitment, and labour.
• The technology is available now in most instances and
more will come on line.
• Capital also is in relatively good supply.
• Planning is improving, commitment is stronger.
• Shortage of labour is the problem."
"Why we need labour
• Conservation is highly desirable as far as it goes, but we
shall only solve our water, energy and environmental
problems in the long run through construction of new
infrastructure.
• If we want solar or wind energy, then the solar panels and
windmills have to be made and constructed.
• If we want secure urban water supplies then whatever
policy mix we use to do this involves construction.
• If we want to ease the housing crisis, we need more
houses.
• If we want the economy to run productively and
competitively, we need better transportation of goods and
people, better ports, and better communications
infrastructure."
Which leads, as you've guessed to:
"Why we need labour (continued)
• Conservation is highly desirable as far as it goes, but we
shall only solve our water, energy and environmental
problems in the long run through construction of new
infrastructure.
• If we want solar or wind energy, then the solar panels and
windmills have to be made and constructed.
• If we want secure urban water supplies then whatever
policy mix we use to do this involves construction."
In short, according to Peter McDonald, we need vast population growth in order to provide more labor, so we can have more energy efficiency. Oh, and more mining (presumably solar powered mining).
Well it was April Fool's Day, but Peter didn't seem to be joking:
"Labour demand
• Almost right across the Australian economy, workers are
short supply.
• This is especially the case in the construction industries
(15,000 builders from the USA?).
• The mining industry is desperately seeking workers to
commence new projects (Chinese work gangs?). Note,
revenue from mining is the source of much of our public
capital for environmental and social development."
Next we get a dubious graph showing labor falling:
"NOM = Net Overseas Migration
Note: Assumes fertility constant at 1.8 births per woman and labour force"
participation constant at July 2007 levels
Except that labor, in McDonald's own projection, is actually rising. It is only the rate of increase of labor ("Labour force annual growth rate") that is falling. (If you can't say a figure is falling, you can always go to its first or even its second differential to find a function that is falling.)
What about automation, computerisation, machines? Why do we need so very much labor?
Well, you see, there is a multiplier effect:
• If we had all of these [mining and construction] workers, they will demand more
services and hence more workers in retail, hospitality and
personal services. There is a multiplier effect (foreign
students and working holiday makers?).
The nations of the world will soon be competing fiercely for labor, and hence for immigrants.
Hence we must be fatalistic:
"Inevitable population growth for Australia
• We can improve our productivity and we can raise labour
force participation rates somewhat, but it is inevitable that
overseas migration to Australia will remain high and the
population will grow by 2050 to something in excess of 30
million people.
• In comparative terms, this will be much lower than the
population of California and the population of the USA will
be around 440 million. Canada’s population will be over 50
million."
Apart from economic growthism and a strong streak of fatalism, Peter McDonald now shows a new emphasis on "realism", cf. his paper's subtitle:
"Australia’s future population: planning for reality"
The subtitle seems borrowed from business lobbies like APOP, The Australian Property Council, and the Scanlon Foundation (the latter which funded his recent paper with Glenn Withers). Such groups emphasise "realistic" (= fatalistic) planning on population. i.e. accept that huge growth is coming, and plan for it. (In debate Mark O'Connor called this a bully's argument: "Since we're going to put you in the stocks anyway, why don't you co-operate and then we'll do it more nicely.")
Hence Peter's line: what we have to fear is not population growth but our failure to plan for it.
Hence Peter McDonald's concluding "overhead" runs:
"Conclusion
• Australia will be a better country in its economic,
environmental and social dimensions if we accept the
inevitable and plan for it.
• Not planning properly for future population growth is part
the Australian way of mucking things up."
• The present Australian Government seems to have accepted this message. It has set up an infrastructure council and my educated bet is that it will increase the official migrant intake in the May budget."
cf. APOP's "opinions" page: http://www.apop.com.au/opinions.html
• A recent expert study concluded that there are no insurmountable engineering, scientific or environmental barriers to reaching an Australian population of 30 million in 2050, assuming that thorough analysis and planning occur and that leadership is exercised, especially by governments.
• Long-term planning is imperative to ensure timely and orderly provision of needed infrastructure, and leadership from governments is essential in setting clear policy directions.
--
One other element in Peter McDonald's thinking is worth noting.
Both APOP and Scanlon may be worried that lack of social cohesion might force a halt to such rapid immigration, because they are promoting the need for certain kinds of social cohesion. (Hence the conference that Scanlon Foundation funded recently, with Jupp, Nieuwenhysen, and frequent flyers at such immigration-growth-promoting events.)
As APOP puts it:
"The future prosperity of Australia, underpinned by population growth, will depend on our ability to maintain Social Cohesion in a society with even more cultural diversity than we have successfully accommodated historically."
"Since overpopulation tends to destroy social cohesion (e.g. food riots, water riots, road rage) this line is probably what is known in marketing circles as "advertising against the perceived weakness of the product" --i.e. trying to present your weakness as your strength."
Mark O'Connor
Peter McDonald now styles himself:
"Peter McDonald, Director, Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, ANU"
and remarked at one point "Mark presents me as an economist, but I think of myself more as a sociologist." Wishful thinking, perhaps. Peter seems like someone who would offer little resistance to the APOP line on social "reality".
Courier-Mail beats up on public for complaining about cost of 'progress'
Murdoch's Queensland Courier Mail has long been in the business of marketing unacceptable development, but the April 9 2008 editorial read more like a medieval sermon on the benefits of floggings.
“Full story needed on big projects” began with some newspeak and then descended into arguments so crude that one suspected that lack of internal conviction was snarling up logical expression.
The editorialist started off by conflating ‘growth’ with ‘progress’, thus giving the concrete entombment of Brisbane a positive spin. Towards the end, in a kind of third-word medical metaphor for torture, s/he crudely compared undemocratic development with medicine and going to the doctor for an abdominal operation. We were not expected to like what we are told is going to happen, but it is clear that we must accept it. To object to being slashed open in order to …what?... would be unreasonable, apparently.
“Progress will sometimes hurt, but like an unpleasant visit to the doctor, it will hurt less if you are warned in advance of what to expect, rather than having a line drawn through your torso and told this is where the operation will happen.”
Shock treatment without a muscle relaxant would seem a little more congruent to the situation than abdominal surgery. Unless this is some kind of medieval operation to remove our persistent ‘bile’.
The writer (or the mad doctor) tells us that ‘We’ all want progress. It isn’t too clear what progress is, from the editorial, and the doctor seems to be hedging about the outcome of the operation, or its reason. Nonetheless, we must suffer for this abstract thing.
If, like most of us, you don’t want to suffer, and you aren’t sure what progress is anymore, you might feel that you are the only person in Brisbane who feels this way and you probably won’t dare raise your voice to protest.
The journalist-social psychiatrist hits potential protesters against the operation for progress with, not just NIMBYism, which isolates with the charge of selfish the person fighting to defend their territory, but with the dreaded “BANANA” acronym. (See 'Damn 'em all', 23 May Courier Mail, Brisbane, Australia.)
BANANA is even worse than ‘selfish’; it means Totally Unreasonable, maybe even certifyably insane; certainly indefensible. BANANA stands for, “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.”
The charge is that Queenslanders are objecting to nearly every development that goes up.
Well, Mr Editor-doctor, the fact is that Queensland is very densely populated and developed, so it is pretty difficult to find a place to develop which isn’t close to something else. And, with all this development, why should ‘we’ need, let alone ‘want’ more? We don’t like it, so we are protesting.
Brisbane has far less green space left than Sydney and Melbourne. It is obviously overdeveloped and overpopulated:
“ o•ver•pop•u•la•tion (vr-ppy-lshn) n.
Excessive population of an area to the point of overcrowding, depletion of natural resources, or environmental deterioration.”We are suffering all three of these symptoms in Brisbane. Why can't we admit we have a problem and stop the cause rather than just trying to manage the effects! (Jennie Epstein in Victoria, slightly paraphrased.)
The editorialist-doctor sympathetically admits: “No one wants a freeway, chemical plant or a new power station at their back door …“but,” (s/he concludes harshly informing us that we cannot escape the symptoms of the progressive disease, or curse) “… these things are a fact of life if we are to cater for the needs of a rapidly growing state.”
The dishonest implication, from the main newspaper, the Murdoch voice of authority in Brisbane, is that Queensland’s extreme population growth is some kind of irresistible Brisbanite fate, like Sysiphus’s was to push a stone up a hill every day, except that, in Queensland, that stone gets bigger every day, and so does the propaganda we have to swallow.
What must Queenslanders have done to the Gods to provoke such punishment as
“freeways, chemical plants and new powerstations at their back door; transport corridors and dams which endanger the environment and destroy local communities ...”
... which the editorialist identifies as our inescapable fate?
The editorialist tells us moreover that many of us may be economically inconvenienced or have airports expanded on our “comfortable backyards.” (This was only to be expected, apparently, and we should have moved somewhere else if we didn’t want our surroundings to degenerate into overpopulated slums. Quite a few of us should perhaps have enquired more carefully before being born here.)
Incredibly, the editorialist equates these sufferings with “our very comfortable 21st century lifestyle.”
And that is not the end of our sufferings: No, we must endure dispossession if we are to avoid dying of thirst in the short term. Nevermind the long term.
Our water security is threatened by population growth, which for some reason we cannot question. That population growth was brought upon us by the developer-serving Queensland Government, which advertised far and wide for it, interstate and overseas. Now we have to put up with the ‘solutions’ for water security which the government that made our water insecure tells us it must foist on us.
For stealing fire from the Gods and giving it to men, Prometheus was chained to a rock. Every day an eagle came and tore his liver out and ate it. During the night it would grow back, only to be torn out again.
Was that the operation?
How bad must it get? It could get a lot worse if our progress takes on the shape of India’s or Africa’s or Chile’s. But, as that dear old man, Augustus Pinochet once said, “Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood.”
We can be sure that we will be told that it is good for us when that happens.
Peak Oil avoided at Rudd's Summit on the Future
Last week Martin Ferguson, the federal Resources and Energy minister, told the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association conference in Perth,
"With only about a decade of known oil resources remaining at today's production rates, Australia is looking down the barrel of a $25bn trade deficit in petroleum products by 2015".
One might therefore expect this to be a hot topic at the summit, but there is not a hint of it in the discussion papers that will frame the debates.
There are only a couple of people on the delegate list with any known background in the area of future oil availability.
Although it is clear that the Rudd government is very concerned about future oil supplies for Australia, bizarrely, all discussion at the summit will be based on the false assumption of ready future availability.
Group calls for re-building of Australian manufacturing
The Tariff Restoration Bloc has called for protective tariffs to be re-established to make possible the rebuilding of Australia's manufacturing sector.
Australian manufacturing has largely been destroyed in the past three decades as a result of competition against slave-wage economies in a race-to-the-bottom globalised economy.
If the proponents of tariff reduction were correct, Australia today would have become a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse with this country retaining high-paid skilled employment. Instead, this country has become unsustainably dependant upon mining and immigration-fueled land speculation#main-fn1">1.
See also, discussion forum on Online Opinion in response to Senator Kim Carr's article "Securing the future of Australian manufacturing" of 11 Apr 08
For further information | |
email: | oziz4oz |AT| gmail com |
phone: | (07) 54 754 009 |
snail mail: | PO Box 1786, Sunshine Coast Qld 4558 |
See also: forum, www.oziz4oziz.com
Footnotes
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. As reported in the Melbourne Age on 22 April 2007, Anna Bligh who is now Queensland Premier refused to contemplate halting popuation growth in order to allow Queensland to fix its water shortages crisis other urgent environmental problems. She argued:
"The only way we could really do that is to put a fence up at the (Queensland) border, or to cancel or freeze all new home building approvals," she said.
"That would have a very serious impact on the construction industry that a lot people rely on for jobs."
See also: "Stop the Queensland growth treadmill!" of 24 June 07#main-txt1">[back].
Food Riots, coming to a place near you
People are going to start worrying about food right here in Australia. They already look worried in the supermarkets. Now is the time to point out to them that the government is responsible for this and that population growth must be restrained, through downsizing our huge immigration program and cutting off this supply of ready customers to our incredibly greedy property development and finance industry.
On the subject of 'mortgage delinquencies': Rate of Mortgage delinquencies rises, by Ruth Simon, Market Watch, http://www.marketwatch.com/, 4/10/2008 12:01:00 AM
"The latest increases in delinquencies are being driven in part by falling home prices and rising unemployment. The U.S. economy lost 80,000 jobs last month, according to the Labor Department, the biggest drop in five years. Meanwhile, some
8.8 million borrowers had mortgages that exceeded the value of their homes in the first quarter, with the number expected to increase to 10.6 million in the second quarter, according to Moody's Economy.com."
On the subject of food riots:
Global Food Crisis, In some countries, food inflation is turning violent, with Divya Reddy, Eurasia Group; Victor Lespinasse, GrainAnalyst.com; and CNBC's Erin Burnett., http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=707473516&play=1
Note the contrast between the ads that precede this program and the program's contents.
"High food prices, a nuisance in America ... It may amaze Americans who are upset at high food prices to see the pictures... peoples' lives at stake ...As food prices, rice prices have increased dramatically over the last month ... 40% of the population in Egypt lives at or below the poverty line ... governments saying they won't export wheat or rice because they are worried about shortages at home ... This is increasing the prices of those commodities globally and making it worse for importing countries..."
This is exactly what Malthus warned about in his second essay on the Corn Laws, on the danger of importing staples. He said that if cheap food were imported, farmers would lose the incentive to produce food. (Of course no-one was trying to grow ethanol in England at the time he wrote.) He also pointed out that if a country were at war, or its currency was low-value, it would not be able to purchase food on the world market. All these situations are prevailing around the world right now.
The comments from some of the market commentators are pitifully naive.
"I think for the time being prices are likely still headed higher .. [but] if we have normal weather ... I think that a year from now they could be considerably lower... Farmers will respond the way they always do to high prices... they will increase production sharply..."
Note the faith an economic commentator on the show places in higher prices causing more food to be grown - if we have normal weather!
"There is some speculative interest in the market because they are just going where the market is trending higher... not just grains but energy... all the commodities are doing well... and finally they've got ... biofuel, which is using a lot of grain which in the past would have been for food..."
High prices are causing major exporters like the US to grow corn for ethanol! And the poor don't have any money to buy from farmers who have to make huge profits.
You can see here how Marie-Antoinette was able from her cocoon of comfort to suggest that starving Parisiens eat cake if they did not have bread.
The religious faith these traders have in the stock market is pitiful. And the complacency of some commentators on discomfort in the US (and France, and Australia ...) about high food prices. They really don't get it; that quite a lot of the 'richworld' populations are not very far from the breadline - and therefore from rioting - either.
State Premiers and the Prime Minister must cut the property lobby (mainstream media and finance are part of it) loose from the public purse. Their grip on the press is threatening democracy. Their industry is causing huge inflation of vital resources - food, water, land, shelter - in our own and other exporting countries, like Canada, Brazil, and the USA. Affecting us at home and those we export to abroad. People cannot be expected to starve in order to keep the property and finance marketeers rich.
In Australia the property, finance and mainstream media, who are made up of related corporate institutions, is becoming like some monstrous bloated leech, draining our society of resources in order to provide for the customers it insists we import in greater and greater numbers to an economy riding on a massive, fragile, high-tension housing and engineering development bubble. And it gets worse every day. Right at this moment, at extraordinary expense, Port Phillip Bay is being dredged in anticipation of an economy four times as large! Four times as many houses! Four times as many widgets! Four times as many mouths to feed! Yet we are running out of water, food, and oil!
One way to end the real-estate parasite economy would be to simply give people the houses they cannot pay for and put the marketeers on the dole. Does anyone have a better suggestion?
Time to take back democracy. Time to make our votes mean something. Time to make our voices heard by our economically deluded 'leaders', including Rudd with his description of Australia as a 'robust democracy'. Yeah, where we can say anything, but we won't get heard unless we are rich. Time to contact your local member of parliament, and take a few neighbours with you.
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