Victorian Planning Minister Matthew Guy is setting up a website http://www.planmelbourne.vic.gov.au asking for residents' feedback on the sort of Melbourne we want in the future. These kinds of websites, however, make it hard to say what you really think. It is probably better to send the Minister a submission re Plan Melbourne saying what you really think, in your own words, rather than responding to the website questionnaire. Email it to Matthew.Guy[AT]parliament.vic.gov.au . As a guide, we suggest that any plan must first have a policy to limit the population growth. To ignore this issue and try to plan for greater growth, would be self defeating.

Humanity has struggled to survive through the millennia in terms of balancing population size with food supply. The same is true now, but population numbers have been soaring for over a century. The limiting factor has been hidden, but this factor -- oil and natural gas, or petroleum -- is close to or beyond its peak extraction. Without ample, free-flowing petroleum, it will not be possible to support a population of several billion for long.

Originally posted on Culture Change on 2 March 2010. Re-posted here by author Peter Goodchild.

GrowthBusters is showing this Wednesday in Melbourne (then Brisbane on Friday, then around Australia). Water shortages, hunger, peak oil, species extinction, and even increasing depression are all symptoms of a deeper problem – addiction to unending growth in a world that has limits.

Mark O'Connor (famous co-author of Overloading Australia) asks, should environmentalists resist Big Australia - and the densification of Melbourne? "In the long run, unless we can stop the endless growth of population and consumption, all environmental battles will be lost. Yet powerful vested interests distort our news and media to make us think growth is inevitable, and that we should live in ever more crowded cities. Mark O'Connor discusses how environmentalists can identify and defeat these forces." Feb 17th 2012 Sustainable Living Festival, 4 pm Look for the Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian Branch) stall there as well - all weekend and Friday.

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

Martin Collacott from the Fraser Institute looks at whether meaningful immigration reform is finally coming to Canada - video newslink.

Global economic turbulence and the prospect of deep recession as we move towards an energy crisis, presents huge challenge. There has been little forewarning and planning. Every local and national authority needs to start now to address these challenges seriously, yet still we carry on with our head in the sands, wasting resources on an epic scale.

Melbourne's environment is steadily deteriorating as rapid population growth continues but some are insulated by wealth against the effects of this. Article first published January 1, 2012 but republished after site damage on January 6, 2012. I had over 100 reads when it was lost.

Santa is feeling the pressure of increased work as population and density of housing in cities increases. He sympathises with the nurses.

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

Stable Population Party Australia has finalised its core values and posted them to their website. In 2012 they say that they will be calling for new policy suggestions that align with these party values. Take a look...

Mary Drost of Planning Backlash and the Marvellous Melbourne website has picked up Matthew Guy's 'challenge' on population growth and comes back with the figures and this statement. We look forward to Matthew Guy's response.

Why have many academicians apparently been rendered dumbstruck during my lifetime by what is all-too-obvious? Absolute global human population numbers can be clearly seen skyrocketing since the end of World War II. When I was born, 2.3 billion human beings lived on Earth. In a single lifetime of threescore and ten years (1945 – 2015) human population numbers are projected and fully expected to increase by 5+/- billion people. How can so many economists and demographers not see what is happening?
by Steven Earl Salmony (SESALMONY AT aol.com)

No sooner did Madeline Weld finish her CBC interview about human overpopulation, when the Green-Left brigade swung into action trying to douse the flames ignited by truth. But this time they were too late. The truth got out.

On October 29, CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks featured two guests to discuss the world at 7 billion people, Robert Engelman, President of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington and Madeline Weld, President of the Population Institute of Canada. See inside article for podcast.

According to WWF UK and most other environmental organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, it is demand from wealthy nations that is the real problem and the world’s unsustainable population growth is not a fundamental concern, merely something to ignore, because it is an ‘inconvenient truth’.

Population analyst, Brian McGavin, writes about the silent crisis in our midst, of overpopulation. "Today there is a ‘Silent Crisis’ in our midst. The crisis, still largely unrecognised, is potentially greater than all the other problems that transfix our policy makers. For many decades now there has been a willful blindness in recognising that relentless human population growth is one of the pre-eminent problems we face. Rather than providing solutions and leadership, "More and more developed countries offering new ‘baby bonuses’ make it even less likely that we will achieve the lower figures being quoted in the media."

There is a poll in the Age for 17th-18th October which asks your opinion on the question, "Can climate change be solved without population control?"

Most objections to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's Carbon Tax are founded on the apparent belief that it is possible for human society to continue its wasteful consumption of non-renewable natural resources and destruction of our natural environment without posing any risk to the life support system which exists in this tiny corner of a Universe, mostly barren of life.

However, compared to what can be done and what must be done if human civilisation is to hope to further endure for a period which even remotely approaches the 32,000 years since our ancestors left evidence of intelligence probably equaling our own in the in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave of the Ardèche department of southern France, the proposed Carbon Tax is a joke in extremely poor taste.

This article was adapted from a comment I made in response to A long time coming … an article by Professor John Quiggin written on 13 October. It has yet to draw a response there. If any visitors to candobetter.net decide that this article is more worthy of a response than visitors to johnquiggin.com have so far indicated, comments, whether critical or supportive, are most welcome.

Few political groups and individuals who wear the label 'Marxist' (including this one) in 2011 are not working to serve the same ruling elites they claim to oppose or are not duped by those who are, but this was not always so.

This is a response to Sheila Newman's comment Marxism is the other side of Capitalism

In a brilliant new paper released this morning, Labor MP Kelvin Thomson has proposed his "Witches' Hats" theory of government -- a theory that places central importance on rates of population growth.

There has been another sizable drop in employment. Greedy employers continue to put out claims that there is a terrible shortage of labour in Australia, because they know that the larger the pool of unemployed the less the market rate for labour will be. (Also, by pushing up immigration on the false plea that we are short of labour, they hope for more customers, more extreme house prices, and other changes by which the big fish benefit over the small.)

Take a look at the One Child Policy nonsense at the Australian Democracy Museum site! Today Candobetter.net received a communication from the Australian Museum of Democracy. At first we thought that a bunch of Australian revolutionaries with a sense of humour had contacted us and we immediately went to their website, as they advised us to, to comment. We were disappointed to realize that this is just another face of Australian government propaganda and the Growth Lobby is well-ensconced. The website belongs to the Australian Museum of Democracy, which is owned and financed by taxpayers, but controlled by the government. So, what do you find when you go and make that visit to the website to “have your say” about democracy as encouraged? Update 5 Aug 2011: My comment now published on democracy site and modifications made for the record to this article on that score.

Is it easier to tackle a vast global population problem than it is to save a suburb from overpopulation or a city from population induced water shortages?

Melbourne people can hear MP Hon. Kelvin Thomson speak at the A.G.M. of Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian branch) on July 16th at 2.00p.m. The topic will be, "The population issue in Australia - post Population Strategy." The title refers to Minister Burke's recent "Population Strategy." In this article we talk about why this meeting is so important for Victorians and Australians and discuss events leading up to it, from Barry Jones's Australia's Population Carrying Capacity Inquiry (1994), through the Bracks Population Summit (2002) and Tony Burke's "Population Strategy" (2011). We at http://candobetter.net hope that subsequent events in Victoria will maintain and support SPA Vic's promotion of a better population policy for Australia. (Inside: Link to Steve Vizard's surprisingly good program contrasting Jones Report with Burke Report.)

Jon Faine's Conversation Hour featured a debate between growthist Bernard Salt of KPMG and Australian businessman and author Dick Smith, who argues against growth. The only possibility of commenting was by SMS. There was no phone-in. My own experience of debating population growth on the conversation hour with ex-Premier Steve Bracks was that people later tried to make comments on the internet page associated with that debate, but the page was dysfunctional and quickly fell into total disrepair. I am therefore creating this page in the hope of getting some representation of public opinion on this matter.
You can access the debate here, immediately, and here on ABC, eventually.

Australia's population is now rising by a million every three years. It used to grow by only 200,000 a year. The increase has not been driven by natural increase, refugees or family reunions. It has been driven by an increase in skilled migration from 24,000 in 1996 to over 100,000 now. (Kelvin Thomson - Member for Wills electorate, Victoria, Australia)

Inside also link to Kelvin Thomson's blog response to Government's Population Strategy (Have your Say).

In the TV debate of April 12, 2011, the leaders of Canada's four parties with parliamentary seats demonstrated that beneath the phony left-right dichotomies, parliament is ideologically monolithic in the most important sense. All of them believe in the necessity, desirability and possibility of continuing economic growth, and that immigration-driven population growth is its necessary concomitant and driver. But how could it be otherwise? Politicians do not effect change, they respond to it. And the environmental movement---and its political arm in the NDP and the Green Party, has done nothing to create a constituency of awareness that population growth in Canada is unsustainable, an awareness that if widely shared, would compel political parties and their leaders to address it. Most culpable is David Suzuki, who could move mountains if he would publicly say what he has said of Australia: that in relation to our resources, we are in serious population overshoot.