Why Australian governments still treat Australia as terra nullius with invasive levels of mass migration

Amid Australia's growing conflict over population numbers and democratic planning, we need ideas based on historical and social research, rather than shallow logistics pushed by technocrats. Familiar with these dynamics, I see the challenge of joining this debate with the depth it needs. My original research has revealed key links between demography, policy, and self-determination, yet the connection between these ideas is avoided in official policy discussions. By publishing these conclusions and a glossary of terms from my recent book, I want to clarify these connections and help people understand how population dynamics shape our democratic processes. I hope this work will inform and inspire a wider dialogue about the future of planning and self-determination in Australia, which currently looks bleak.

The book the chapter below is extracted from asked the question: Why did France have a democratic and demographic revolution but Britain did not? What the book's research reveals is also why Australian governments and oppositions still treat Australia as if it were terra nullius by continuing mass migration at levels logistically guaranteed to overwhelm the local population - and the natural environment. In order to accomplish this, land-tenure has been taken over by authoritarian planners in every state.

I have not spelled out how to apply this analysis to Australia, but suggest that Australia's power-elites have the same role as the Church and State in the examples mentioned below.  They control information more and more severely, pushing concepts like 'disinformation, misinformation, fake news'. etc 

CONCLUSIONS ON WHY FRANCE HAD A DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION BUT BRITAIN DID NOT - Extract from Chapter 21 of Land-tenure and the Revolution in Democracy and Birth Control in France by Sheila Newman, Countershock Press, 2024

This book was unusual in that it supplied, then assembled, then presented, a large amount of data to document its assumptions, then forged its hypotheses and tested these. It also used multiple disciplines, in the spirit of consilience. There were, therefore, several different kinds of literature reviews: biological and social, including history, demography, and land-tenure and inheritance.

The use of multiple disciplines is unusual because most research literature builds on a narrower base of accepted theories in single disciplines and expects the reader to have some familiarity with the material.  This is a limitation of the academic environment and why this book was written outside an academic institution.

The unusually detailed material was supplied to the reader because much of the data had not been associated or assembled before. 

Quite a lot of the material was translated from the French.  Much of this material, including some of the theory, and the history, was little-known outside France.

Making this material accessible to the reader caused the book to be somewhat longer than it would otherwise have been, and partly explains why the book is in five parts.

An example of material not usually accessible outside France is French demographic historian, Jacques Dupȃquier’s theory, which argued that fertility itself is an endogenous variable and demographic regulator, where a viscous population requires candidates for marriage to be able to support themselves and their family, thus to wait for marriage until vacancies arise through deaths in that population.  Dupȃquier argues that vacancies, and therefore fertility opportunities, would be delayed by long lives and high fertility, and vacancies, and therefore fertility opportunities, would be accelerated by shorter lives and low fertility.

Jacques Dupȃquier’s theory bears similarities to my own ecological population theory, in the sense that it observed a form of automatic regulation of birth rates in pre-industrial viscous agricultural populations. This occurred through the effect of death rates on fertility opportunity in that death rates affected land vacancies, which were necessary for marriage. It differed from my theory in that it does not explicitly factor in incest avoidance rules, however it does implicitly.  It referred to land vacancies rather than to territorial vacancies and focused only on human populations, rather than on multiple species. 

This book has made an original contribution by using demographic patterns and land-tenure and inheritance systems to demonstrate causes for major differences between French and British society and politics.  This is possibly the first time that the problem of why France had a democratic revolution and Britain did not, has been examined via these fields.

The book also explored the fact that France began a demographic revolution simultaneously with its democratic one.  This fact is little-known in the Anglosphere.

It linked both demographic and democratic revolutions to the same causes, and as parts of the same thing, finding that democratic thinking was also expressed in the use of birth-control.

This work contrasted France with Britain and some other countries. It demonstrated that France had a much more viscous population than Britain.

It showed that populations controlled by pronatalist authorities had high fertility, but with the removal of the influence of those pronatalist authorities – the Church and the monarchy - individuals in viscous populations used birth-control to choose the family sizes they preferred.

France was the first to demonstrate this in early modern Europe.

French Canada and Ireland were presented as contrasts to the French mainland experience, with reference to the lack of change in their conditions before and after the French Revolution, with the persistent dominance of monarchy and Church.

The book showed that when the influence of the Church on most state institutions and policy was removed from French Canada and Ireland, in the late 20^th century, those two countries ultimately adopted birth-control, resulting in smaller families. This adoption was much later than in most other Anglosphere countries, such as England and British Canada.

Before the Revolution, the self-determination of France’s third estate population, despite its viscosity, was impeded by a similarly viscous upper caste, which controlled media, symbols, information, ideas, law and punishment, and self-expression.

In France, Renaissance ideas, especially of democracy, eroded the ideological power of an elite caste of secular and ecclesiastical nobility.

The Revolution severely interrupted this power and republicanism further depleted it. 

Increasing literacy, relatively cheaply produced printed material, enlightenment literature, satire of royalty and ecclesiastical authorities, and sexualised romantic literature, contributed to dechristianisation (undermining elite authority), to increasing use of birth-control, and to the democratic Revolution.

The research in this book suggested that, in France’s case:

• splintering of the power elite (both lay and Church), and
• fission between Church and nobility, over the dîme, plus
• small secret printing presses, which
• gave access to alternative literature
• where alternative political and sexual ideas were raised,
• permitted independent thinking to the third estate.I argued in this book that the inherent viscosity of French populations made it possible for movements within them to self-organise and act independently of the wishes of the oppressive elites.

I argued in this book that the inherent viscosity of French populations made it possible for movements within them to self-organise and act independently of the wishes of the oppressive elites.

• Evidence was in the ongoing revolutionary and republican activities from 1789 to 1871.
• An effect was the increasing use of contraception with smaller families and better life-expectancy, despite more marriage, from 1789.

The British case contrasted in many ways with France.

• Although it also had splintering among its elite (demonstrated in the civil war and other succession contests), secret printing presses, and exposure to Renaissance and Enlightenment literature,
• it lacked France’s population viscosity among the lower classes. Despite many attempts at revolt, these British classes were unable to effectively organise against the more viscous, and hence more organized, British elites, which included the rising bourgeoisie that took over parliament under Cromwell.
• Access to alternative political and contraceptive literature and information was effectively limited by the British elites, as were political meetings and discussions. 
• The British lower classes and ethnic minorities (like the Welsh workers and the non-Protestant Irish) could not manage to organise revolutionary or republican movements over the long-term because of their own atomization, which made them vulnerable to the well-organised government’s vast network of spies.
• The one unconventional organisation in Britain that survived the Unlawful Societies (Corresponding Societies) Act 1799 was Freemasonry, and it survived because it cultivated explicit policies of loyalty to government values and discouraged within itself anything that might indicate sympathy for the poor or republicanism or anti-religious ideas or anything else that might be associated with radicalism. (The use of Freemasonry by the Napoleonic establishment could have had a similar effect, but Napoleon’s fall would have contributed to French Freemasonry becoming an anti-establishment force.)

I used the prisoner’s dilemma and tit-for-tat strategy concepts to prepare my argument that high-viscosity populations would have higher trust than low-viscosity ones.  Because they had higher trust, and also because they shared territory and thus local interests, they would be more able to organise for self-determination than low-viscosity ones.

• There was more trust in France than in Britain because French populations were more viscous than British ones, especially in the case of the lower classes.
• The British lower classes were severely dispersed through the British land-tenure and inheritance system, through successive land-enclosures, and through territorial, dynastic, and religious wars, and then through massive industrialization, internal and external immigration and emigration, including transportation to penal colonies.
• The French population had land-tenure and inheritance laws that tended to favour population viscosity, and they had few territorial, dynastic or religious wars compared to Britain, and little industrialization, little internal or external immigration or emigration, and comparatively minor transportation numbers to penal colonies.
• The greater viscosity of the French population permitted it to fight a revolution over the several generations it took to achieve a lasting republic, as father handed on to son.
• Kinship networks of commoners (the third estate) could trust each other to hold to a common cause. Viscosity lessened anonymity and impunity.  Despite the fact that there was more population movement in French urban communities, that population movement was very slow compared to Britain’s, even in Paris, which was a major revolutionary hub. 
• Rural communities, although they were also viscous, were more likely to trust in Church and king and take the royalist side.  This was probably because they had less access to alternative social institutions and sources of information to counter the influence of the Church and its ideology. 

Conceptualising and operationalising birth-control use as an indicator of democratic self-determination:

My ecological population theory suggested that self-determined viscous populations would keep their populations within limits of carrying capacity, due to biofeedback from environmental fertility acting to select genetic algorithms for endogamy/exogamy and marriage rules.

French demographic historian, Jacques Dupȃquier’s theory of fertility itself as an endogenous variable and demographic regulator, carried similar implications, thus supported my own.

I also assumed that methods of birth-control have been used from time immemorial.

I hypothesized widespread contraceptive use as an indicator of democratic self-determination in the French, because they had experienced high birth rates and high infant mortality under the Old Regime, which discouraged birth-control, but they began to use contraception enthusiastically when domination by the monarchy and church diminished.

Using Kevin McQuillan’s tests for when religion influences fertility, I contrasted the case of post-Revolutionary France with French Canada, which, far away from the seat of the French Revolution, maintained high fertility and authoritarian church and government up to the 1960s. I also referred to Ireland as a similar and comparable case to French Canada.

I tested my hypothesis of widespread contraceptive use being an indicator of democratic self-determination, in my comparison of France with two countries where people wanted democratic revolutions – French Canada and Catholic Ireland – but which both failed to achieve these.

• The populations of both French Canada and Catholic Ireland were atomized.
• They were both controlled by dominant classes of state and Church.
• These conditions prevented self-determination in the wider population
• In both French Canada and Catholic Ireland, Church and State continued to cooperate in authoritarian government, controlling literature, education and symbols, banning and otherwise deterring use of contraceptives. 
• The situation in both cases fulfilled Kevin McQuillan’s three rules for when religion influences fertility.

The results of these comparisons supported my hypothesis that viscous populations are better able to organise politically for their own benefit than are dispersed populations, or, as in the case of pre-Revolutionary France, even otherwise viscous populations, where symbols, policies, laws, and literature, are controlled by an elite caste.

Transport and fertility opportunities:

I also theorised that new, or improved forms of travel, function as fertility opportunity-multiplying mechanisms.  I explored the coincidence of transport evolution – horses, canals, and rail – with population growth in France and England, in the section, “Transport technology and population numbers in France,” in “Chapter Seven: Evolution of the French population from the Old Regime to post-Revolution.” As expected, population growth increased with new transport forms and more connections in France, but increase in transport forms and connections was much greater in England, as was population growth.  

Freemasonry:

This book made French documents and research on Freemasonry available in English, some probably for the first time.

Freemasonry was an obvious phenomenon to look into as a possible provider of space for private discussion, in the form of lodges, in a social environment otherwise dominated by Church and state.

The Abbé Bunuel’s book, alleging a wholesale Freemason conspiracy behind the French Revolution, had made academic investigation of any role by Freemasonry a little risky. Hence, I precised that I was not asserting any institution-wide conspiracy.

My hypothesis about how the French Revolutionary and Republican activity were able to persist over generations, however, considered secret meetings - without a grand institutional conspiracy - as possible and probable ways of organizing counter-establishment thinking and activity.  Although this was an era of secret meetings and corresponding societies, Freemasonry stood out as an enduring international movement of size, and it was characterized by apparent secrecy and the presence of multiple lodges for meetings.

According to Jeanne Gilmore’s references, some Freemason lodges had been used as meeting places to start off Charbonnerie cells, which had seeded other secretive societies, changing their names and meeting places in order to keep ahead of the police, in a practice that endured for generations. 

On this basis, use of Freemason lodges seemed an obvious point of comparison, in my search for reasons why France was able to have a democratic revolution and Britain was not.

Despite a recent tendency to dismiss research into Freemason-lodge influences on modern history, as fringe-research, there is a growing body of work on the subject. 

This book used French and English documents to show that the evolution of the Freemasonry movement in France, like that of the Revolution, presents a stark contrast to its development within the Anglosphere. 

This book documented cross-pollination between neo-Malthusian and feminist activists, and Freemasonry, suggesting that, at the very least, Freemasonry in France developed into a willing harbour for the birth-control movement, which this thesis argued was a major vehicle for revolutionary counterculture.

In this book, the role of Freemasonry, or the use of Freemason lodges, in revolutionary activity, was examined for Ireland, Scotland, England and France.

• From this, Ireland seemed the most likely persistent user of Freemasonry lodges for revolutionary purposes.
• Scotland, influenced by Ireland, appeared to be a lesser contender for the same thing.
• Our investigations found that both Ireland and Scotland had historical dynastic, commercial (shipping, slaving, military-mercenary), and refugee, connections with France, independently of England.
• James Francis Edward Stuart (who also held the titles, from 1685-1688, of James II of England and Ireland, and of James VII of Scotland), later known as the Old Pretender, and his son, James Francis Edward Stuart, have both been described as Freemasons.
• Ireland had revolutionary and Freemasonry connections with France, the latter via a military brigade which transferred permanently to France.
• Freemasonry ultimately survived in Britain by cultivating explicit loyalty to the government and discouraging any sniff of radicalism within, eagerly to dissociate itself from French Freemasonry.

Although academic distrust of Freemasonry research also persists in France, the research available demonstrated that the movement itself was associated with Napoleon’s rise to power, and was empowered as a semi-official pillar of Napoleon’s empire. 

After Napoleon’s fall, French Freemasonry became increasingly republican and atheist, in contrast to the British experience.

Whilst British and Irish Freemasonry excluded female membership, French Freemasonry had female and mixed-sex lodges, before and after the Revolution.

There was evidence of leaders in the neo-Malthusian movement also being Freemasonry members in France, thus the possibility of their using lodges to network.

Leaders of the French Freemasonry movement were active in promoting legalization of abortion in 20^th century France.

Population dispersing forces in Britain (and Ireland notably) and French Canada, contrasting with France:

In testing our theory that viscous populations have greater self-determination, and therefore greater choice in family sizes, and greater capacity for revolution, “Part Four: Revolutionary Capacity,” demonstrated many population dispersing forces and trends that atomised the British lower classes, whilst the British power elites practised endogamy, homogamy, and sedentism, thus consolidating their position, property, and power. 

Nonetheless, the union of various kingdoms into the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland was difficult and protracted, compared to the relatively early consolidation of pre-Revolutionary France.

British elites were also disorganised in multiple religious and succession wars, interrupted by the rise of the bourgeoisie, led by Cromwell, followed by a constitutional monarchy and parliament. Industrialisation also upset the influence, wealth, and security, of the traditional agriculturally-based elite.

From Henry VIII’s time, England, Scotland, and Ireland, contained multiple religious dissenters and factions, especially in the lower classes, compared to quasi mono-religious France. In this book it was suggested that this situation would have partly redirected the energies of different lower-class demographics in Britain and Ireland under separate religious banners, rather than uniting them under a single political banner. British elites were, however, entwined with, and relatively united under, the Church of England. 

The situation in France was quite different.  The Roman Catholic Empire, to some degree the administrative successor of the Roman Empire, bolstered the ruling establishment of King and Church in France, in the face of the religious wars of the 16^th century, until the Revolution.

The resulting lack of religious diversity probably contributed to France approaching the day of the Revolution with more political unity within the different estates than in Britain: Although there were variations within these poles, with republicans and constitutional monarchists, in 1789, broadly speaking, one was either for or against King and Church.

This work demonstrated that both French Canada and Ireland, as well as being dominated by an elite duo of monarch and Church, were atomized by multiple factors:

• In French Canada, the exogamous phenomena of international migration and intermarriage with the Indian population, provided a distinct contrast with mainland-French viscosity.
• To this was later added the phenomenon of political cohabitation with a distinct anglophone population when French Canada came under British government.
• For Ireland, in addition to the atomizing effects of the British land-tenure and inheritance system, religious discrimination and colonizing wars had violently dispersed and displaced en masse the Catholic population, whilst promoting protestant immigration, in the presence of various religious dissenters.

An original contribution of this work, to the fields of theory of revolutions and political science, was my comparison between Quebec, France, and Ireland, before and after the French Revolution, regarding the uptake of birth-control, the qualities of viscosity and self-determination, and the ability to carry out a long-term revolution.

An original contribution of this work was that, in addition to arguing that the democratic revolution was enabled by the viscous nature of France’s populations, I suggested that France’s early ‘demographic revolution’ (without industrialisation), with the huge uptake of birth-control by so many individuals at all levels of the nation, was a measure of the spread of self-determination, a revolution in its own right, accompanying the democratic one. 

An original contribution of this work was to note how the widespread 19th century French working-class neo-Malthusian movement further indicated a deep level of uptake of demographic revolutionary values in France.

An original contribution of this work was the observation that the birth control movements in France and in Britain differed in a number of crucial ways. The birth control movement in France was a grass-roots one, accompanied by a new disrespect, indeed terminal violence, towards upper caste authority, in the context of a democratic revolution. Contrastingly, in Britain, the birth-control movement took place a century later, in a political context that favoured eugenicist theory, and contained no real threat to the political establishment, although this endogamous class did begin to worry about the genetics of cousin marriages. The movement seems to have been largely top-down, in part concerned with improving the lot of the lower classes by reducing their family sizes, but tainted by a branch seeking to improve society by reducing the lower-class genetic pool, according to flawed genetic science of the time. It is important to note that the more democratic 18^th century French movement seems to have lacked these classist and eugenicist taints.

A conclusion reached by this book is that removing a controlling upper caste of nobles and high ecclesiastics would have allowed the French to seek their own information and conduct their own lives for themselves.  But to achieve this, royalty and the Church had to be demystified. The booming contraband literature-trade throughout northern France, carried by pedlars, in defiance of the death penalty, signified the upsurge of a close-knit self-determining society, capable of organising secretly for its own benefit, on a massive scale, against a fractured ruling class, which was ultimately deposed.

A contrasting situation was identified where the colonial francophone population of Quebec continued to submit to a deeply networked and authoritarian secular and ecclesiastical elite. Investigation of this situation lent support to the idea that pronatalist elite authoritarian interference in a population can influence, not only self-determination, but also fertility trends, to the detriment of the affected population. The section on Catholic Ireland assisted this argument.

I suggested that the monarchy and Church dictatorship derived benefit from persistently politically engineering French families to have more children than they could comfortably keep. This was a way in which the upper caste might induce such desperation in the lower caste that they would have no choice but to work for the upper caste.  It was a means of subjugation. The fact that this reproductive behaviour modified spontaneously, after a democratic revolution, supported my hypothesis that birth-control use is an indicator of self-determination, and that the presence of an upper caste which prevents information about and access to birth-control, is an indicator of political disempowerment.

These observations could be important in considering why atomised populations in developing countries fail to access contraception, despite gross poverty, in the presence of Churches and government which deter the use of birth-control, control the media and education, and which also may inspire loyalty in an oppressed population, as per McQuillan’s theory. 

Similarly, where elites engineer population-growth via mass migration in apparently democratic countries, we should look at who controls the media, education, ideology, and symbols.

This book elaborated and confirmed many differences between the British and the French land-tenure and inheritance systems and their impact on demography, settlement, and political organisation.

It also showed how Britain, formed from separate and competing kingdoms, ethnicities, and religions, had a much more tumultuous and tardy consolidation than Old Regime France. This history, and the underlying structural fragility of the United Kingdom and [Northern] Ireland, were themselves atomising elements, in addition to the dispersing factors of their land-tenure and inheritance system.

An original contribution of this work was to add to knowledge about the differences between Freemasonry in France compared to Freemasonry in Britain and other parts of Europe. This involved contribution to knowledge about the role of Freemasonry in the French Revolution and the French Republican movement, and the possibility that it was involved in feminism and in the birth-control movement in France in the 19^th century, as well as later.

 

 

 

GLOSSARY for LAND-TENURE & THE REVOLUTION IN DEMOCRACY AND BIRTH CONTROL IN FRANCE by Sheila Newman

ATOMISATION: The demographic or social fragmentation of a society, depriving it of significant ties or communication with other atomized individuals. A social system that emphasizes individualism over collective or group identities. Break up into small units.

BRITISH ISLES (The): This term refers to the land masses made up of Ireland, Northern Island, Scotland, England and Wales. It is a convenient term to use because it is not affected by the many changes in political boundaries that have occurred over time.

BRITAIN AND IRELAND/ BRITISH AND IRISH: These terms refer to their current (2022) geographical area and are used except where the book deals more specifically with England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland, before the Republic of Ireland, or when the term ‘British Isles’ may be less anachronistic or more poetic. The use of these terms is partly a response to the fact that much published research and opinion tends to refer to England or Britain without distinguishing its components, neither explicitly nor implicitly including Ireland. Political boundaries have changed over time, and the situation or process I refer to may have uncertain boundaries, or may not be confined to one country or one time in the British Isles.

CHARBONNERIE (LA): Secret society organised in cells. Originating in Italy, it was imitated by revolutionaries in France.  In France members were called charbonniers. In Italy they were known as carbonari.

DISPERSAL: Travel or migration away from one’s birthplace in order to seek a living (territory) and/or a mate. Biological dispersal refers to both the movement of individuals (animals including humans, plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.) from their birth site to their breeding site ('natal dispersal'), as well as the movement from one breeding site to another ('breeding dispersal').

ENDOGAMY:  Marriage or mating within the local community, clan, or tribe.

EXOGAMY: Marriage or mating outside the local community, clan, or tribe.

GREAT BRITAIN is synonymous with Britain.

JACOBITES: A 17th- and 18th-century movement supporting the restoration of the senior line of the House of Stuart to the British throne.

JACOBINS: Members of the Society of Friends of the Constitution/ the Jacobin Club, originating with the representatives from Brittany at the General Estates meeting of 1789. Influential throughout France

PHILOPATRY: The tendency of an organism to stay in or habitually return to a particular area

POPULATION: The inhabitants of a location, such as a town, region or a country.  May also refer to clans, tribes and nations as a relatively distinct intermarrying group.

PRIMOGENITURE: Inheritance law or custom where the first-born is the principal or sole inheritor of the parental estate and title. In male primogeniture, everything is left to the first-born son. Male primogeniture was law in Britain from the time of William the Conqueror to the 1920s. In British primogeniture, women’s husbands could inherit through their wives if there was no-one left in the wife’s male line.

REVOLUTIONARY REPUBLICANISM.  My term for the period from 1789 to 1871 in France.

SEDENTISM: In cultural anthropology, the tendency for a family, clan, or tribe, to tend to remain in the same place or territory. The adjective is ‘sedentist.’

SELF-DETERMINATION: Self-determination is used in this book in two ways, firstly with regard to the individual, and secondly, with regard to a people. I have taken my definition of self-determination from Collins English Dictionary, 12th Edition, 2014:

1. the power or ability to make a decision for oneself without influence from outside

2. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) the right of a nation or people to determine its own form of government without influence from outside.

SOCIAL CAPITAL: The level of trust and cooperation in a population. 

SYNTHETIC GROUP: I mean ‘synthetic’ as opposed to ‘organic’, or viscous.  An organic group would be a clan, tribe, or village, inhabiting a particular territory for generations and networking in local political and economic activity.  A synthetic group would be one composed of individuals from different clans and places congregating in a new political or economic centre, such as a refugee camp, or a new mining or factory town.

UNITED KINGDOM, (The) does not include the Republic of Ireland (Southern Ireland), which separated in 1922.

VISCOSITY:  In populations having the qualities of sedentism and endogamy, or limited dispersal. That is, populations tending to remain on their natal territory and to marry within their clan, tribe, or village.  Usually there is some out- and in- migration (exogamy) but this is minor compared to the rate of endogamy. The genetic relatedness of such a population is thus high.

WESTERMARCK EFFECT: The tendency to a mutual lack of sexual attraction among people (and probably other species) who have been raised together during the early part of their lives, even though they are not related by blood. If they were related by blood, it would be called, “Incest avoidance.” (See Appendix One.)