You may have been wondering when and who would point out the silver lining in the current situation, where the interruption of decades of mass immigration has seen employment prospects and living standards for many ordinary people looking good in Australia for the first time in decades. If so, you will be very pleased to catch the following interview between 2GB's Michael McLaren and the Sustainable Australia Party's William Bourke, on this very issue. We are living through fascinating times.

On 10 May 2021, Michael Mclaren (2GB radio) was joined by William Bourke, President of the Sustainable Australia Party, to comment on the RBA’s report that suggests that the pause in immigration due to the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to higher living standards in Australia and could spark wage rises in some regions and industries - even though the economy will be smaller than previously expected. In its quarterly statement on monetary policy the preceding week, the RBA noted, “The Australian economy is transitioning from recovery to ­expansion phase earlier and with more momentum than anticipated.”

Transcript

[Candobetter editor: Note that this was done via automatic transcript then corrected by a human editor. Please let us know if you find any mistakes.]

MICHAEL : Well, there has been a lot of side-effects from the Cornona Virus … we’re probably all sick to death of talking about it but, one that probably hasn’t been mentioned is that it has done a couple of people probably out of a job – at the very least, it has proved them right – I’m talking about the team behind the Sustainable Australia Party – because, if nothing else, COVID has closed the borders. There are now no real prospects of masses of migrants coming in to work or to fill job vacancies, or whatever the story was, prior to the pandemic.

However, as I said, I think it has proved the point, because, for many years, William Bourke and the whole team behind him at Sustainable Australia and people like Dick Smith, who’ve supported them, have been banging the drum of logic, saying that Australia does not need unsustainable levels of growth in the population to remain wealthy, to remain prosperous, indeed to grow.

And, sure enough, they have now got an ally, I don’t know if they meant to or not, in the form of the Reserve Bank. In their quarterly statement, on monetary policy – it was released on Friday - most people don’t read it of course – but they made the point that the level of GDP – Gross Domestic Product – is expected to remain a little below forecast before the pandemic – mostly due to the lower population growth – however, in per capita terms, GDP is expected to be on a higher trajectory, supported by higher per capita household income and a strong contribution from public demand. In other words, the pause to Big Australia will lead to higher living standards and could spark wage-rises in some regions and some industries according to the Reserve Bank.

Now, the Big Australia advocates said this was impossible. Many of us said they were wrong all along and motivated by greed.

Well, William Bourke is the President of the Sustainable Australia Party and on the line. William, nice to talk with you again.

WILLIAM BOURKE: Good to be with you, Michael.

MICHAEL: Sadly, I suppose, COVID has done you out of a gig. The borders are closed. The population will flatline for a while, and the experiment that you’ve called for will happen, for no other reason than medical science has demanded it happens. I suppose, if you are proved right, you will go out a happy man, won’t you?

WILLIAM BOURKE: Well Michael, obviously population growth is something we’ve been concerned about, since we’ve been going – probably a decade or so. We’ve got some other issues we do stand for, overdevelopment and environmental issues, but yes, absolutely, it’s amazing that COVID has revealed, once and for all, that high immigration is notnecessary to either keep the economy growing, or to create jobs.

So, it’s great to see the RBA coming to their senses. And many other mainstream economists are also saying things like, ‘Lower immigration is equalling higher wages.’ So there’s a great lot of things that are coming out of this unfortunate COVID pandemic.

MICHAEL MCLAREN: And it’s logical, is it not, because, when you flood the economy with workers, obviously the whiphand is that of the bosses. They can say to Bob, well, if you don’t want to work for that amount of money, I’ll go over there to Frank. He’ll do it. But when the number of people available for jobs is smaller, Bob and Frank both start, all of a sudden, to have a bit of bargaining power, don’t they!

WILLIAM BOURKE: Indeed, and obviously, when you bring in highly exploitable people, who really don’t have a lot of bargaining power, who aren’t part of … I guess, unions and so forth, then you can beat down wages. And we’ve seen a lot of – you know – probably the lowest growth in wages over the last decade in the last century.

These things are now starting to see a pick-up in wages, and that’s a good thing for the average Australian.

MICHAEL MCLAREN: They are. I saw that Tom Dusevic of the Australian said, and I quote,

”During recent years, when population growth averaged a rich, world-leading, one and a half per cent a year [...]"

- which is just madness -

“with two thirds of it due to net-overseas migration, per capita incomes fell, even though national output was expanding at a fast clip, compared to our peers.”

In other words, the nation was getting wealthier – that’s National GDP, the individuals that make up the nation, that do the work, were actually going backwards.

WILLIAM BOURKE: Exactly, and the point there being that GDP per capita is really the proxy for living standards. So, the aggregate growth in GDP really doesn’t matter, if all of us are going backwards on average. And we know that there has been a lot of discussion about, you know, this 20 plus year run of ‘no recessions’ and so forth, but if you look at it on a GDP per capita basis, there were three recessions over the last 25 or so years, where GDP per capita went backwards, two quarters in a row. So, there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and we really need to look at the per capita of GDP, not the aggregate level.

MICHAEL MCLAREN: Yep. Now, none of this is to gloat. There are some sections of the economy which are doing it particularly difficult. The business model was heavily reliant on the migrant labour workforce. Hospitality, for example, their business model has been disrupted. A lot of people are doing it tough, but on a per capita basis, the average Australian looks like they may come out in front. And, of course, again, to be completely up-front, a huge amount of stimulus from the Federal Government also helps in that respect, and to remove that might have created a different story, but it just goes to prove the point, does it not, William, that you don’t need record levels of migration to continue economic growth?

WILLIAM BOURKE: That’s exactly the point. There’s a lot of studies out there about the impact of immigration on the economy, but a lot of it is based on, you know, assumptions. This is empirical evidence. This is very very very clear now, that where there is no immigration, we are still growing our economy and we are still creating jobs, and we have actually reduced the unemployment rate. So we’ve gone from seven odd per cent down to about five and a half per cent, and we look like going down to around four and a half per cent. That’s because a lot of people who have been long-term unemployed are now getting an opportunity to get a job. And isn't that a great thing?

MICHAEL MCLAREN: Well, it is and the tighter labor market Also pushes an important extra emphasis on behalf of government, and even business, on the issue of skills or re-skilling the Australian population, including those that are unemployed.

Most unemployed people want to work. They take they take no pride in not having a job but they may not have the skills to do it, so, you know, it's great. We've got the budget, of course tomorrow night. There may be something in there about this too, but there is a greater emphasis on business and government to say, well, look, you're not going to get the fresh blood in anytime soon. There is a bit floating around here though that needs a gig. Train them up, get them in a job.

WILLIAM BOURKE: There's a much greater focus on training and education as you say Michael and I'm sure that Treasurer Josh will be mentioning much more investment in training and education in the budget, and I've seen, you know, some media reports to that extent. So that's it. That's a really encouraging thing, because at the end of the day, we do have the labour here in Australia. We do need to continue to evolve our economy and evolve our skills. And that's what's happening right now, and it's a good thing.

MICHAEL MCLAREN: And, Will, to add to all of this, the re-emphasis, or the newly emerged emphasis, on needing to be more self resilient, more independent, instead of relying on international supply chains and there. And, there again, all of a sudden, you are incentivising people to re-establish, or freshly establish, sovereign industries in this country, particularly manufacturing-oriented industries, which – again - will help mop up a percentage of the unemployed.

WILLIAM BOURKE: Exactly right. And, at the moment, you're probably aware, the Upper Hunter by-election is on in New South Wales. We've got a candidate running there and he works on the railways. 

He's an engineer working on railway maintenance and, you know, we built the Tangara trains in Newcastle, you know, the Hunter area and now we're importing them from South Korea. So we need to turn back to making our own trains. And manufacturing, you know, our medical supplies. All of those issues that we thought we can just outsource overseas. I think we're now realizing finally that that's not a sustainable way to run an economy.

WILLIAM MCLAREN: Why then for so many years, we mention those record levels of immigration, despite the average Australian not wanting it. People are in favor of some immigration, sure, a bit of fresh blood doesn't hurt, but there's sort of nonsense of one-and-a-half percent growth per year. It was just a disaster on the property , on traffic – everything. Services. Why did it persist for so long? I mean, I'm a bit ignorant, I suppose, but I thought that democracy was basically the elected officials representing the will of the people, but on that issue, it couldn't have been more opposite. So, why did it persist for so long? 

WILLIAM BOURKE: So, I think Michael there are some groups in our society, in our economy, in our political environment, they have a little bit more power than the average person. And obviously, you know, the property industry, you know, big business and so forth. You know, they have a fair bit of sway. They've been complaining, even very lately about skills shortages and, Immigration Minister Alex Hawk, has just allowed a doubling of the hours of foreign students from 20 to 40 hours a week. So they're having a lot of influence, you know, because of political donations and other aspects of the body politic. And I guess that it would be nice if we did have a plebiscite or a referendum. Do we want to grow our population at this extreme rate of 1.5 plus percent when the developed world really should grow at, you know 0.2 per cent at the most.

MICHAEL MCLAREN: I was a little facetious early when I said that covid had probably done you out of a gig. Sustainable Australia, as you quite rightly said, stands for more than just a population issue. Just talk us through a little of what else it is that interests your party.

WILLIAM BOURKE: Well, we're a fairly centrist party Michael. So, you know, we talk about the big picture issues that matter. Obviously sustainable is about protecting our environment, and we really do want to make sure that, you know, we're not sprawling our suburbs, over our agricultural farm land. For example, we really want to stop overdevelopment and return planning powers to local communities.

I'm running in the North Sydney council elections in a couple of months. So, you know, making sure that local people have a say on the character of and the heritage values of their neighborhood. So those are some of the issues.

Corruption is an increasingly big issue that we're focusing on and I think there's a bit of corruption in this Big Australia, where vested interests are influencing our politicians rather than the public interest being put first. So that's just a couple of things that we stand for.
MICHAEL MCLAREN: A lot of common sense. Always good to talk to you. We’ll speak again, soon, William. Thank you so much for all that time.

WILLIAM BOURKE: Thanks for having me. Michael.

MICHAEL MCLAREN: That's my pleasure William Burke. As I said the President of the Sustainable Australia Party 

You probably would have noticed the media attention given to the Australian economies historic 26 year reign of economic growth which has been claimed is breaking that held by the Netherlands. Apart from being incorrect, (The Netherlands’ real GDP declined by 0.3% in the June quarter of 2003, and by 0.01% in the September quarter of that year) that record should go to Japan. In fact, if Japanese GDP data were available on a quarterly basis earlier than 1960, it’s likely that this run of continuous economic growth would have been even longer, perhaps as long as 38 years, inferring from annual data available back to 1955. Not bad for a nation mocked for its decision to abandon population growth and actually reduce its population.

Our current reliance on GDP as an economic indicator harkens back to a war-time measure where it was considered necessary to measure production (of war material) in order to fight the war. After the war finished it seems logical to continue to use GDP in order to create the materials necessary to repair shattered infrastructure, a situation that is no longer logical when we should be caring for the economic casualties of this process.

The weakness of GDP as an indicator has been pointed out by many, none better than US senator Robert Kennedy who said "GDP measures everything but tells us nothing," and it certainly does not show growth was achieved or even if it was beneficial. Switching to non-sustainable resource dependency was certainly not to our long term benefit and while the total value of goods and services has increased due to population increases so has income inequality, poverty, homelessness, mortgage stress and many more unpleasantness including government corruption. Perhaps more importantly all this growth in GDP came at the expense of a government debt of $551b and a household of about $2t - the third highest in the world - leaving us vulnerable to a housing bubble implosion. Then there has also been a welter of public asset sales - now called recycling - often used for re-occurring expenses just to keep governments functioning. Many of these sales, like our gold reserves that were flogged off by Peter Costello or the GPO which went for a paltry $150m, indicate that we are not getting good value for our assets, despite the $3.5b that went to financial advisers in order to facilitate these sales.

Scarcely a recommendation for good governance.

For the past ten years Australians have been subjected to an exceptionally high level of population growth and now they are losing patience. (Article first published on June 13, 2016 at the Australian Population Research Institute. Republished here for the second time owing to recent data loss from site.)

The graph shows the steep increase in numbers since 2006 (data from here). If this continues the population will grow from 24 million today to around 41 million in 2061 (see the 2013 ABS projection series 29 and 41).

In November 2015 a survey commissioned by Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) found that 51% of voters thought Australia did not need more people. Then in May this year a survey done for SBS TV found that 59% of people thought that the level of immigration over the last 10 years had been too high.

The SPA survey asked respondents to give reasons for their opinion. Many of those who thought we did not need more people said our cites were overcrowded (with too much traffic)—consequences of rapid growth all too apparent to urbanites. Others spoke of job competition. And many worried about the effects of growth on Australia’s fragile environment. Concern about too much cultural diversity and migrant enclaves was also high on the list.

The SBS survey focused on immigration and found that dissatisfaction with immigration was even higher than with growth in general. It asked about multiculturalism and 46% of respondents said that this had failed. It had brought social division and religious extremism to Australia (43% of those who were immigrants themselves agreed).

It was reasonable for SBS to focus on immigration because this accounts for the major part of the current population boom — around 58%.

Immigration is a product of government policy. It’s the outcome of decisions made by political elites, prompted by lobbyists for property developers, employers, and other businesses that profit from population growth. The two surveys show that the electorate is fed up with the unwanted growth that this power elite has wished upon them.

The record numbers of migrants in the 2000s were partly justified by the push to keep affordable skills coming during the investment phase of the resources boom. But since 2012 that justification has evaporated and economic growth has slowed. Despite this, Governments, both Labor and Coalition, have kept immigration high. Now the motivation is to keep the housing and development interests happy. They continue to profit from a stream of new customers, a stream which also keeps the construction industry going and creates the appearance of a busy economy. But this strategy has not increased per capita income. Quite the reverse.

It’s not just that forced population growth leads to clogged infrastructure, cultural disruption and environmental deterioration, it is also comes with financial stress.

Leith Van Onselen writes that:

While headline GDP growth across Australia has held-up reasonably well over the past decade, thanks to high immigration, per capita real GDP is trending down so sharply that it has fallen to levels not seen since the early-1980s recession. … #_edn5" name="_ednref5" id="_ednref5">

While real GDP has been rising since December 2011, net disposable income (NDI) per capita has been falling. See graph below. (NDI is explained here.)

Urban voters are also angry about the level of densification forced on them by undemocratic planning authorities determined to accommodate developers. Groups such as Planning Backlash,#_edn9" name="_ednref9" id="_ednref9"> BRAG (Boroondara Residents Action Group),#_edn10" name="_ednref10" id="_ednref10"> Save our Suburbs, RAGE (Residents against Greedy Enterprise) and the Carlton Residents Association all express deep frustration about over-development, loss of heritage and declining quality of life.

So far the growth lobby has been able to keep on profiting from ballooning numbers, partly because few voters fully understand what is being done to them. They know that conditions are getting worse but they don’t fully understand the key role played by population growth.

The SPA survey tested respondents’ knowledge of demographic change. The minority (16%) who had a good understanding were the most likely to say that Australia does not need more people. But 82% knew very little. Though they were unhappy about time-devouring traffic jams and ugly new high-rise apartments, they didn’t always know why these miseries were being wished upon them, or why they felt so powerless.

But their unhappiness has political effects, effects which can explain why governments have been toppling so fast. Kelvin Thomson calls this the witches hat theory of why governments fail. Mark O’Connor summarises it thus:

[S]taying in power, and keeping the electorate happy is a little like an advanced driving course, one in which a government is required to thread a kind of slalom course between a series of witches’ hats — meaning the orange inverted cones that mark out the course. These hats, which the government, like the driver, needs to avoid knocking over, include such things as keeping electricity and water costs down, reducing hospital queues, keeping housing affordable, preserving the environment, providing full employment, restricting inflation, etc.
And the faster a country’s population is rising, the harder it is to do this… It’s like trying to negotiate the course at double speed.

As Thomson himself puts it:
[W]hen politicians … look in the mirror and ask ‘Why don’t they like me?’, the answer might well be that they are driving the car too fast and knocking over those witches’ hats. They should slow the car down and focus on solving people’s real-life problems.

It is not surprising that Dick Smith, outspoken critic of mindless population growth, is now the most trusted public figure in Australia. Or that mainstream politicians are among the least trusted.

Update: See new article, "AWPC Wildlife Planning Officer says, "Don't cull roos; Plan wildlife corridors!"" A wildlife “consultant” has called for a radical new plan to cull kangaroos along Melbourne’s urban fringe before there is any more housing development.  What’s “radical” about this solution to wildlife?  Due to lack of vision, foresight and planning, it means killing them!

This new “plan” is about caving into the whims of property developers, and the plans of our State government to blow out our urban fringe for more growth-gluttony  and housing.

First published on Australian Wildlife Protection Council website here: http://awpc.org.au/kangaroos-must-be-culled-for-urban-sprawl/

Thanks to Melbourne’s obesity, urban sprawl keeps stretching out north, causing problems for residents and wildlife. There are more fences, road and houses, causing chaos and causing kangaroos to become trapped in factories, rooftops and school yards.  Their habitat is being impinged upon and eaten away by infrastructure and choked by human population growth.

Instead of addressing the problem, and implementing any real plans for the city, the waist-line of Melbourne keeps expanding as 100,000 new people per year keep it engorged.

Wildlife Victoria has received about 6,500 emergency calls about kangaroos this year, double the number they received three years ago.

DELWP, the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, is meant to administer the Wildlife Act, and enforce the protection of our native species, is also the State government department responsible for Planning! There are massive and blatant conflicts of interests here. 

According to DELWP’s own website, they have control over our population growth!  By 2051, there will be a projected 10 million people in Victoria, a “natural increase” of 1.7 million, and a whopping 2.8 million due to net migration.

Wildlife Victoria spokeswoman Amy Amato said “It’s definitely not an increase in the number of kangaroos in Melbourne….we’re just seeing the number of incidents in human conflict with kangaroos rising.”  In fact, our government does not know how many kangaroos there are in Victoria.

(image: The True Cost of Sprawl)

Victoria’s Department of Environment has engaged independent wildlife management consultant Ian Temby to review the situation.  His solution is to kill the kangaroos before development goes ahead, arguing kangaroos are being slowly culled by cars anyway!  So, their deaths are inevitable, and shooters don’t kill will be finished off by cars.   Then, the housing industry won’t be hampered by obstructed by native animals.

Author Ian Temby, in the past, recommended learning to live humanely with wildlife.  Known to Wildlife Victoria members as a long time as wildlife advocate with over 30 years in the DSE.

He claimed that “action to resolve conflicts with wildlife does not have to be lethal. Exclusion, repellents, changing human practices and habitat modification are all examples of non-lethal actions”.  And, “rather than killing wildlife, our real challenge is to develop and apply methods of problem resolution that are proactive, anticipating where problems may occur and taking action to prevent them from actually happening”. 

Now, his solution is CULL, CULL, the easy and lazy way of removing the problem.

There are no interconnecting wildlife corridors in Victoria, so whatever “Planning” happens doesn’t include the fate of our native species. [Candobetter.net Ed.: See here for concerted attempts to create such corridors by the AWPC: /taxonomy/term/73.]

For too long our capitalistic economy has gorged on “growth”, and worshipped the real estate industry, caving into it’s whims for resources.  Already our infrastructure is choked and overloaded, and congestion is impeding productivity.   We are falling into an abyss of infrastructure deficit.

What values are we promoting and what benefits are there from our city’s explosive growth- except for property developers and real estate investors?

The high immigration that was beneficial in the 1950s, and 60s is now causing our cities to be over-crowded and overpopulated. Our governments are addicted to growth, and our economy is on thin ice if it depends on rising house prices and population growth.  It’s admission of being bereft of ideas, innovation, and enlightenment. It’s lazy economics, to just turn up the immigration tap to boost our economy, and expect the public to finance the retro-fitting of our city, endure a crumbling housing market, and all the deprivations of perpetual growth imposed on us!

The lack of innovation and diversity in our economy means that there’s an over-reliance on housing and population growth.  It’s a lethal and self-destructive Ponzi scheme, and will not only have a deadly impact on our wildlife, biodiversity and environment, but eventually cause impoverishment, deprivation, eroded living standards, congestion, and spiralling costs of living for human inhabitants.

Republished from the Australian investigative program, 4Corners: Slaving Away By Caro Meldrum-Hanna and Ali Russell, a program about slavery in Australia today. Although the program focuses on the abuse of backpackers on 457 visas and tourists working illegally in the fruit picking and chicken meat packaging industry, this is just the tip of an iceberg of exploitation that has arisen in Australia with massive increases in immigration at the same time as our industrial law protection has been wrecked. At the same time, cheap imports have made it impossible for many honest and worthwhile businesses to survive, whilst the loss of industrial protection has created an opportunity for corporations to exploit people to the max. The program also reflects another effect of globalisation and mass immigration - the high cost of housing. The enslaved temporary or illegal immigrants in this documentary are usually packed into unsavory premises for which they pay rent. Some might argue that since these people are paid wages - albeit slave wages - they are not slaves. However when you do not actually get paid on time and are kept in debt to your employer for rent and other charges, and when you do not speak English and have no idea where you are, and so cannot begin to extricate yourself - this amounts not only to slavery, but to illegal detention. Apparently Australian authorities claimed that it was too difficult to find these abusive enterprises, yet 4Corners was easily able to uncover this frightening industry, with the cooperation of the exploited and trapped workers. It looks like government is complicit at all levels.

Updated May 4, 2015 22:47:00

Slaving Away

Monday 4th May 2015

Slaving away: The dirty secrets behind Australia's fresh food.

It's in your fridge and on your table: the fresh food that we take for granted.

But there's a dirty secret behind it.

Much of it is picked and packed by a hidden army of migrant workers who are ruthlessly exploited.

"There is slave labour in this country." - Queensland grower

A Four Corners investigation has uncovered gangs of black market workers run by unscrupulous labour hire contractors operating on farms and in factories around the country.

The produce they supply ends up in our major supermarkets and fast food chains.

"Almost every fresh product that you pick up... will have passed through the hands of workers who have been fundamentally exploited." - Union official

These labour hire contractors prey upon highly vulnerable young foreigners, many with very limited English, who have come to Australia with dreams of working in a fair country.

They're subjected to brutal working hours, degrading living conditions and the massive underpayment of wages.

Reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna has obtained undercover footage and on-camera accounts of this dark world. One migrant worker told her:

"I felt like we were going back in time... the way we were being treated was inhumane."

And another:

"It made me question Australia as a country."

Female workers are particularly at risk with women coming forward to make allegations of harassment and assault.

From farmers' fields to factory floors, the program tells the story of those workers who slave away to produce the food we buy and eat on a daily basis.

SLAVING AWAY, reported by Caro Meldrum-Hanna and presented by Kerry O'Brien, goes to air on Monday 4th May at 8.30pm. It is replayed on Tuesday 5th May at 10.00am and Wednesday 6th at midnight. It can also be seen on ABC News 24 on Saturday at 8.00pm, ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4corners.

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community-and-society, human-interest, rural, australia

First posted May 4, 2015 16:51:00

The Federal hospital funding system, based presently on growth in demand and costs, will change under the Abbott government. This "change" is actually about slashing and downgrading what each States receive, to make the system "more efficient".

This "change" is an $57 billion attack on our nation's health care system.

In two years, over $50 billion will be stripped from hospital funding. So despite Australia's population growing faster than any other developed nation, funding will be savaged and more people will be "cared for" with less!

The Abbott government is set to change the hospital funding system introduced by Labor, which was based on growth in demand and costs, with one that ties federal funding increases to inflation and population growth. So, under this "change", funding will be on a whim, and what's begrudgingly available, not on population growth or needs!

“On top of this, the Government scrapped the National Partnership Agreement funding to the States, which rewarded performance in meeting waiting time targets for emergency departments and elective surgery. The enormity of the ongoing cuts was starkly highlighted when the Treasury advised the Senate Economics Committee that Commonwealth funding for public hospitals from 2017-18 to 2024-25 would be reduced by $57 billion" says AMA President,AMA President, A/Prof Brian Owler

Treasury figures show the commonwealth savings from cutting funding to the states for hospitals and schools will escalate rapidly, rising from $1bn in 2017-18 to $3bn in 2018-19 and $7bn the following year. By 2020-21, it will be $10bn. So, as our population continues to blow out, there will be more and more "savings" on hospitals and schools - a formula for a third world nation?

Australian Medical Association (AMA) said the system was not coping with the demands and warned the situation would worsen with less funding, and hospitals have already been hit by a $1.8 billion cut in last year's budget. The AMA has also warned of a possible ‘perfect storm’ in Australia’s public hospital system as Commonwealth funding shrinks, performance benchmarks are not being met, and prices for hospital services under activity-based funding decline.

Governments love, sponge off and delight in population growth, but they not only fail to maintain funding, it's being shrunk, piece by piece! Health care is not an optional extra, or a luxury that puts icing on the budget "cake", but something very basic that's part of our human welfare and an essential service! After more than 2 decades of "economic growth", ironically we are becoming more impoverished and worse off? Who actually benefits from this economic system? Clearly not the majority!

How can economic rationalism justify risking people's well-being, and even lives? How is our health care system to become "better", and provide more with less? It's unsustainable, cruel and potentially catastrophic.

Victoria's biggest hospitals each stand to lose out on more than $1 billion in federal funding over the next decade, according to a state government analysis. The State stands to lose $13.6 billion in funding, which according to Health Minister Jill Hennessy, was equivalent to losing 2.3 million elective surgeries or 11.6 million chemotherapy treatments. Of course, denying people surgery, and chemotherapy, will make the system more "efficient"! Nature will take its course, and people will suffer and die on the waiting lists, and thus eliminate excessive demands!

The massive shortfall in federal funding for hospitals will lead to even longer waiting times for elective surgery, prompting higher morbidity rates, with the smaller states and regional Australia worst hit. People's health care should be locked in, and set to increase incrementally with population growth- not be set as a political bargaining chip, and people made victims of poor economic management!

It's pure and cruel neo-liberalism - of caring for The Economy as the expense of the people it's meant to serve.

If Treasury is failing our present population with the provision of basic public service funding, how can it be trusted with the future, and expect the public to have confidence in the integrity of the latest Intergenerational Report?

ANMF Campaign - Take Action

Victoria's royal commission into family violence will focus on improving a system that is struggling to cope with the sheer volume of people who need help, the inquiry's head says.

Commissioner Marcia Neave said the year-long inquiry would examine how to better protect people, prevent violence and hold perpetrators to account.

Domestic violence is not the only thing in Victoria struggling with the "sheer volume of people" that need services.

(image:"20081123120727-violencia-de-genero" by Concha García Hernández - Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

At nearly 2% of population growth, this massive increase of over 100,000 new people each year is causing clashing waves and tremors, disruption a once dignified city, and peaceful State.

Victoria's Premier, Daniel Andrews, has vowed to jail family violence thugs, make intervention orders easier to get and enforce tough new laws to make women and children safe. These are bold words, and chest-thumping promises, but he will be hard-pressed in light of Victoria's pressure-cooker environment.

The dystopia of unemployment, the uselessness of searching for non-existent jobs, pressure on house prices and mortgages, cuts to education, and the stresses of having to cope with many changes and impacts of course causes violence and crime! There's no predictability, stability, assurances of a future, and pressures on individuals and families for survival.

Our population has grown from 4.4 million people (1994) to over 5.7 million by 2014, yet the numbers of people who deliver services on behalf of the Government has dropped from 48,359 to 29,568 over that 20 years. Thanks to heavy cutbacks by the Napthine government, there are now fewer workers servicing more Victorians!

People under pressure explode, or resort to drugs or alcohol to ease the pressure. The population of women who are homeless because of domestic and family violence is increasingly becoming a group with complex and multiple needs due to drug and alcohol dependency, mental health issues and disability.

Overloaded prisons and correctional services

The prison population in Victoria grew by more than 14 per cent between December 2012 and December 2013 and rose every month. The recidivism rate is based on the number of prisoners who return to jail, under sentence, within two years of release. Unpublished state government figures obtained by The Saturday Age reveal the recidivism rate for 2013-2014 is at a 10-year high of 40 per cent, up from a low of 34 per cent four years ago. Prisoner numbers have grown almost 40 per cent from 4350 in June 2009 to 6454 on January 16. The government's forecast prison population for June 2015 is 7169.

Urban sprawl and housing challenges

Melbourne's rapid expansion, and urban sprawl, means that families are separated by a gulf of distances, due to limited affordable housing. Instead of being able to settle close to family support, in the suburbs where people grew up, they are forced either to rent, or buy in far flung urban fringes, with little infrastructure, support services, and away from access to family connections.
People could be forced into rental properties, in transience, and nomadic existence due to rent costs and job availability. It's crumbles a sense of permanence and stability that fosters long term relationships.

Added to the mix is the "diversity" of peoples, with various values proportioned to women, and children. The rising number of homeless, of families and women, is the tip of the iceberg of those who are falling between the safety cracks in our society - based on greed for growth, at all costs.

The epic migration of shorebirds from Australia to their Arctic breeding grounds is said to be in imminent danger of collapse.
Birds are disappearing by the tens of thousands on their globe-spanning flights, mainly because of the loss of all-important "refuelling" habitat, scientists warn.
Around 36 Australian bird species use the East Asian-Australasian Flyway for the mass migration which sends them north to food-rich Arctic summer nesting habitat, then south to capitalise on the austral summer.
This article is reprinted from the Australian Wildlife Protection Council website

Great Shorebird Migration is under threat

Over just 25 years of #10;http://www.birdlife.org.au/projects/shorebirds-2020/research-and-shorebird-conservation">monitoring migratory shorbirds in Australia some species such as the Curlew Sandpiper have decreased by 50-80%. In 2007 alone up to 150,000 shorebirds went missing as a result of destruction of a single tidal ecosystem in the Yellow Sea. Here, the most pressing threat is the fast pace of coastal land reclamation (defined as conversion of natural wetland into dry land and artificial wetland by mechanical means). It requires international cooperation to maintain the habitats from Siberia to Australia that they rely on to survive.

(image: Curlew Sandpiper)

Our largest shorebird, the Eastern Curlew, has seen a population crash of almost 50 per cent in the same period, since the 1980s.

Threats to the Yellow Sea ecosystem are many. The presence of 10% of the world's human population in the basins that drain into the Sea is leading to significant habitat loss and degradation, serious pollution problems and unsustainable use of natural resources. The deadliest threat of course is human population growth, causing massive species extinctions!

(image: Eastern Curlew)

Yet Australia is doing very little at home and abroad to stop their slide towards extinction. Millions of migratory birds that fly tens of thousands of kilometres between their homes in Australia and Siberia are facing annihilation as development destroys the vital feeding grounds they rely on during their epic journeys, a Deakin University avian expert has warned. "Some fly as many as 10,000km non-stop in an incredible feat of endurance and some wing vast distances over a lifetime equivalent to flying to the moon.'' says researcher and Director of Deakin University's Centre for Integrative Ecology Professor Marcel Klaassen.

Professor Klaassen said the birds were being threatened by massive development, particularly around the Yellow Sea and on tidal flats and wetlands they have traditionally relied on for food to refuel for their fantastic, long flights.

Australia participates in important agreements, including bilateral migratory bird agreements with Japan (JAMBA), China (CAMBA) and the Republic of Korea (ROKAMBA), the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (Bonn Convention), the Ramsar Convention on Welands, the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), and through the East Asian - Australasian Flyway Partnership.

Wetland habitat loss and degradation is a significant threat to migratory waterbirds, and the conservation of important sites both within Australia and along their migration routes is essential to their survival. Many pressures are contributing to this degradation, of which population growth and associated coastal development are of particular concern.

The Federal Government has now released a new draft Wildlife Conservation Plan for Migratory Shorebirds (WCP). According to Birdlife Australia, it has some major flaws:

It's too late now for public comments on the draft plan. The previous Wildlife Conservation Plan for Migratory Shorebirds came into effect in February 2006, and was the first wildlife conservation plan developed under the Act. This Plan must be reviewed every five years.

However, according to #10;http://birdlife.org.au/sos-save-our-shorebirds">BirdLife Australia:

-It makes no commitment to zero net loss of important habitat. This is unacceptable; it means that the Government will still allow important shorebird habit to be developed or degraded without adequate compensation (if and where this is even possible).

-It fails to take into account cumulative losses – i.e. the collective impacts of multiple threats to our shorebirds. We don’t even have a register of what is being lost.

It ignores the urgent need for updated migratory population estimates -and identification of important sites. Decisions are not based on accurate information.

-It will not sufficiently increase international cooperation to protect migratory shorebird habitat. Existing international efforts have been inadequate in addressing the rapid destruction of critical staging areas like the Yellow Sea.

These “major flaws” surely is surely an understatement! There's no limits to developments, a register of loss habitats, identification of important sites, and not enough international cooperation. It's easy to have these “Conservation Plans” but they are no more than empty words unless there are actual plans to implement!

Although nearly a thousand Little Curlew have been banded in North West Australia in recent years, and several hundred flagged, the only recaptures and resightings of flagged birds have been within the North West Australia region. There have been no overseas reports at all of marked birds.

(image: Little Curlew)

Petition to Environment Minister Greg Hunt:
SaveTheBirds
Also,
SOS:Save our Shorebirds

Almost half of Australia's terrestrial ecosystems are threatened, 85 per cent of its rivers have been modified and twice as many Australians die from air pollution annually than road accidents, according to a report on the state of the country's environment.

42 environmental growth have cooperated to bring us this damning report, and hopefully will be a wake-up call that we are living beyond our means, and must change.

SMH: Australia's environment is going backwards

Places you Love . One cannot ignore the irony of the title of the report, that we "love" these unique Australian places, that many of us hold dear to us from childhood, holidays and where we live, but also destroy with wanton cruelty and reckless haste.

The introduction to this report states that:
More than 85% of rivers in Australia have been modified due to irrigation, dams other development pressures.
Of the sixty-eight zones of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s most significant agricultural region, only one zone is rated in good health. Thirty-eight zones are rated in poor health and twenty-one in very poor health.

Ongoing impacts of development and disturbance and the projected impacts of climate change will result in further decline of freshwater resources. Almost one-third of the 851 nationally important wetlands in Australia do not have adequate water supply or flow to maintain their health.

It's an abysmal state of affairs, similar to the wreckage and mess left by the punters and party-goers after Melbourne Cup day at Flemington!
The party is over, and there's few people cleaning up the "mess" of environmental devastation!

Places You Love is landmark survey of Australia’s environment – our rivers, energy, climate, food, forests, waste and pollution, land management, oceans and reefs.

Climate change

We will likely see four degrees of warming by the end of this century.
Two degrees of climate warming will likely mean the loss of most coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef, 80% of freshwater wetlands from Kakadu National Park, and Queensland’s tropical forests.

Air Pollution

More than 3,000 Australians die each year from air-pollution-related illness, nearly twice the national road toll.
Each Australian family contributes enough rubbish each year to fill a three-bedroom house from floor to ceiling, and the total amount of waste generated in the future is projected to increase.

Oceans

Since 1985 more than half of the coral cover of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost. Remaining coral cover is predicted to be lost with two degrees warming through climate change. Ocean acidification, a consequence of rising anthropogenic CO2 emissions, is poised to change marine ecosystems profoundly by increasing dissolved CO2 and decreasing ocean pH, carbonate ion concentration, and calcium carbonate mineral saturation state worldwide.

Feral animals and plants

Invasive species have significantly contributed to extinctions in most regions of Australia,including more than 40 native mammals, birds and frogs.

Habitat Change

We cleared an average of 1 million hectares of native vegetation per year between 2000 and 2010. At least 50% of all wetlands in Australia have been drained, filled or destroyed.
1259 plants, 396 animals and 67 ecological communities are listed as threatened by the Australian Government.

Destruction and fragmentation of habitats are major factors in the global decline of species, the modification of native plant and animal communities and the alteration of ecosystem functions. We are a leading nation when it comes to extinction, and our unique species that have had millions of years to adapt to our fragile existence on a variable and harsh landscape are being wiped out in record levels.

(image: CSIRO - soil erosion)

Forests

Of an original 235 million hectares of Australia’s forests and woodlands, 44% or about 104 million hectares have been cleared since European settlement. 36% was cleared before 1972 and 5% after 1972 – representing 85.7 million and 11.5 million hectares respectively
The clearing has been offset by the regrowth of 2.9% of the original cleared area.

In the absence of clearing, forest and woodland losses are presumed to be due to causes such as fire, drought or disease like die-back. Non-clearing losses have accounted for 5% of the area changed in the last 20 years.

Of the 50.5% of forests and woodlands that have not been cleared or lost due to non-clearing events, 20.5% were converted to non-forest at some point after 1972 and are therefore in disturbed condition.

Humans in Australia

By 2100, Australian population is projected to be between 42 and 70 million people. Total consumption per person in Australia is one of the highest in the world, and is projected to increase by up to 27% by 2030, with far-reaching impacts on nature including biodiversity, land use, climate and water.

By 2050, energy consumption in Australia is projected to increase by around 21%, with only 14% coming from renewable sources.

As you read through the data you will see our natural world is struggling to sustain itself. Nature is in decline and the natural beauty of Australia is under threat.

Firstly, in Australia we have neither a comprehensive picture of the health of nature, nor a complete understanding of the impacts of any decline in nature on our own wellbeing. We may be intellectually and technologically the most "advanced" and highly evolved species on the planet, but we must be the most retarded species when it comes to being aware of our own impacts on our life-supporting habitats for ourselves, and other species in our ecosystems.

Second, our institutions, globally and in Australia, are not optimized to address the increasingly complex and and the importance of adopting broader definitions of integrated challenges arising at the interface of social, sustainable wellbeing as a frame for effectively valuing
economic, technological and environmental concerns5. and protecting nature.

Human intellect remains myopic and shallow when it comes to the health of the environment, and our own spaceship Earth! Our governments' and institutions' tunnel-vision, based on short-term greed and economic benefits rather than long term strategies for living sustainably, and within Nature's limits.

Third, our understanding and definition of human wellbeing may be far too narrow. Some people and groups may be doing extraordinary things for nature, inspiring us all to better value and protect what we have, but they remain voices in the wilderness, on the peripheral, not in the mainstream. Animal species may impact on their environment, but not so that it can't spring back and recover! Humans, on the other hand, seem to incapable of limiting their desire to take more than they can, and it's justified by "economic growth", greed, traditions and culture!

Finally, the term ‘sustainability’ is used far too loosely in regard to humanity’s impact on nature. Depending on the context, it is often not measured, is poor. The word is too subjective, vague, and has been over-used and has become an oxymoron. The word has been stuck on almost any implementation or institution, including human growth, and thus a contradiction!

Population growth

"The most influential driving forces on nature are population growth and developments in the needs and activities of individuals, as expressed through material extraction and consumption. Population is projected to grow up to 42-70 million by 2100.”
So, our dying ecosystems, and diminishing natural resources, will be deliberately further stretched by governments tweaking our population growth through high and unsustainable rates of immigration! It expecting a moribund body, in the throes of death, forced to keep breaking stones and climb mountains!

Our population is projected to increase to between 36.8 million and 48.3 million in 2061, and reach between 42.4 million and 70.1 million in 2101 (Figure 3)33. The projected development of infrastructure (e.g. housing, transport, water supply, energy, communications) strongly correlates with anticipated population growth, reflecting the longstanding pattern of association among these variables. Of course, the report does not mention that our population growth is not due to natural growth, of births over deaths, but due to a bipartisan policy of "big Australia", high rates of net overseas immigration, and housing - a major industry in Australia!

To add to the slow death of our environment, the pain will be exacerbated by Australia consuming more resources per person than most
other nations on Earth. We consume about 35 tonnes per person per year. By contrast, an emerging nation like India consumes about 5 tonnes per person, while the US and 2.5 Japan consume about 28 tonnes.

The report concludes that while there is currently no long-term plan for the future sustainable development of Australian society, there is a growing movement of passionate and active communities across Australia, taking action to ensure their own futures.
These actions are collaborative, innovative and proactive, and gathering momentum by the day.

However, these groups passionate for change and for our nation's environment are usually sidelined, or marginalized, due to our limited democratic system, and an economic model based on capitalistic growth, and short-term gain at the cost of the welfare of future generations of all species. The "party" is over, and Australia's growth-based economy based on increasing consumerism must end - or we wreck the land that gives us food, water, sustenance, functioning ecosystems, and all that we "love" about our country!

(image: CSIRO Salinity affected land )

Glen Klatovsky – Director was National Campaigner for The Wilderness Society, leading the campaign to stop a gas hub at James Price Point. Glen was the Carbon Business Manager for Greening Australia. He was also Director, Advocacy for WWF-Australia.

Victorian voters could on Saturday 29 November begin to take back their state Parliament from the vested interests that are now running Victoria. If presented with open, informed discussion there is every reason to hope that a far larger proportion of Victorians than in previous years will vote for good independent or small party candidates and not for either of the two major parties.

The policies listed below are much of what I would like to see from the new Victorian government after 29 November. I believe that, if presented with the policies listed below, most Victorians would support them or, if not at first, would after open debate and discussion. So this document is intended to be guide to Victorians as to which of the candidates to vote for on 29 November, depending on the candidates' response to my survey, which I intend to publish here in coming days._{#fnVElec1" id="txtVElec1"> 1}

If you support these policies, and you know of a candidate in your electorate who also supports these polices, please consider offering to help him/her. Alternatively, if there is no candidate who supports these policies standing in your electorate or upper house region, the why not consider nominating yourself?_{#fnVElec2" id="txtVElec2"> 2}

The policies

More government participation in the economy

#VicElecPolicy1" id="VicElecPolicy1">1. No privatisation of any asset in which large numbers of Victorians have a stake, for example the Port of Melbourne._{#fnVElec3" id="txtVElec3"> 3} No privatisation of public buildings and public land. As the means to do so become available, reverse privatisations which have occurred since the time of the Kirner Labor Government in the early 1990's. Conduct a pubic audit of these privatisations.

#VicElecPolicy2" id="VicElecPolicy2">2. Expand the size of state government work force. The goal is for each Victorian who needs work to be offered work in a occupation which provides useful services to the community and which matches his/her interests and has on-the-job training and career structure. Private employers to be encouraged to do likewise.

#VicElecPolicy3" id="VicElecPolicy3">3. Public Bank of Victoria to be established. It is to be run like the Bank of North Dakota in accordance with the principles of the United States Public Banking Institute._{#fnVElec4" id="txtVElec4"> 4}

Full employment in secure and fulfilling occupations

#VicElecPolicy4" id="VicElecPolicy4">4. Oppose high immigration and dismantle the Live in Victoria website._{#fnVElec5" id="txtVElec5"> 5}

#VicElecPolicy5" id="VicElecPolicy5">5. No section 457 visas where there are local tradespersons. Employers must prove that they have attempted to train local workers before they are allowed to import new workers with 457 visas.

#VicElecPolicy6" id="VicElecPolicy6">6. Abolish sweat-shops in which illegal foreign workers are exploited. Employers found to have illegally exploited foreign workers in such factories to be prosecuted and jailed. Any public officer found to have been complicit in these sweatshops to also be prosecuted and jailed.

#VicElecPolicy7" id="VicElecPolicy7">7. Immediate reduction of working hours to 35 hours_{#fnVElec6" id="txtVElec6"> 6} with further reductions in the near future.

#VicElecPolicy8" id="VicElecPolicy8">8. Flexible part-time working hours to be offered to government workers who wish to work less than a full week's work._{#fnVElec7" id="txtVElec7"> 7} Private employers to be encouraged to do likewise.

#VicElecPolicy9" id="VicElecPolicy9">9. Create government enterprises to compete with private business. This will provide incentives for privately owned business better services and charge less._{#fnVElec8" id="txtVElec8"> 8} Government enterprises to include: real estate, funerals, car dealerships, equipment hire and land development.

#VicElecPolicy10" id="VicElecPolicy10">10. Re-build Australian manufacturing in Victoria._{#fnVElec9" id="txtVElec9"> 9} The government to plan the rebuilding of manufacturing with the private sector. Protective tariffs to be imposed to protect manufactured items as agreed to in the plan.

Effective town planning

#VicElecPolicy11" id="VicElecPolicy11">11. Reduction of commute times through better town planning and better public transport._{#fnVElec10" id="txtVElec10">10}

#VicElecPolicy12" id="VicElecPolicy12">12. End approval for high rise apartments._{#fnVElec11" id="txtVElec11">11} At most, allow medium density housing of heights of no more than 3 stories close to parkland, bushland, shops, schools and other amenities.

#VicElecPolicy13" id="VicElecPolicy13">13. Preserve spaces for community activities._{#fnVElec12" id="txtVElec12">12} Re-establish community spaces where they don't exist.

#VicElecPolicy14" id="VicElecPolicy14">14. Public liability insurance funding to be established for community events as done in NSW.

#VicElecPolicy15" id="VicElecPolicy15">15. Secure shelter to be provided as a right._{#fnVElec13" id="txtVElec13">13}

Reduce waste, make Victoria sustainable

#VicElecPolicy16" id="VicElecPolicy16">16. No over-packaging, demand effective recycling._{#fnVElec14" id="txtVElec14">14}

Computers, information technology and the Internet

#VicElecPolicy17" id="VicElecPolicy17">17. Free open source software_{#fnVElec15" id="txtVElec15">15} to be used in all government departments, statuary authorities, TAFE colleges and schools. Private companies and institutions to be encouraged to do likewise. The Victorian government to make generous financial contributions to the providers of open-source software.

#VicElecPolicy18" id="VicElecPolicy18">18. Establish a free social network on the Internet as an alternative to Facebook, Google and Twitter. That social network is to respect the privacy of its users and be free, transparently run and without commercial advertising._{#fnVElec16" id="txtVElec16">16}

Open Government

#VicElecPolicy19" id="VicElecPolicy19">19. End government secrecy._{#fnVElec17" id="txtVElec17">17}

#VicElecPolicy20" id="VicElecPolicy20">20. No "commercial in confidence" contracts_{#fnVElec18" id="txtVElec18">18}.

Consumer rights

#VicElecPolicy21" id="VicElecPolicy21">21. Outlaw built-in obsolescence. Manufacturers and importers of products with built-in obsolescence to be prosecuted._{#fnVElec19" id="txtVElec19">19}

#VicElecPolicy22" id="VicElecPolicy22">22. Encourage food self-sufficiency. Wherever possible, make land available to local communities so that they can emulate extant local initiatives such as Down's Estate at Seaford Wetlands. Available members of the Down's Estate group and others with expertise to be hired by the government to instruct other communities.

Biodiversity protection and respect for other species

#VicElecPolicy23" id="VicElecPolicy23">23. Preserve remaining native flora and fauna. Re-vegetate urban areas to provide additional living space for endangered wildlife.

#VicElecPolicy24" id="VicElecPolicy24">24. Avoid disturbance of established wildlife populations so that their social organisation and local biofeedback is preserved since this will tend to regulate their population in line with territorial and migratory rules

#VicElecPolicy25" id="VicElecPolicy25">25. Outlaw the harassment of possums, such as the banding of palm trees with bands of steel by the St Kilda Council to prevent possums being able to climb the trees.

#VicElecPolicy26" id="VicElecPolicy26">26. Protect wildlife with strategic underpasses and overpasses on freeways. To protect wildlife, these are to be mandatory on all new roads and retrofitted to older roads within 10 km of green spaces in order to maintain migratory pathways.

Improving the health of Ordinary Victorians

#VicElecPolicy27" id="VicElecPolicy27">27. Fund research to determine if processed food
bought from food retailers is harmful to our health_{#fnVElec20" id="txtVElec20">20}

#VicElecPolicy28" id="VicElecPolicy28">28. Government employees to share office duties with outside manual workers to remove health hazards caused by long hours of physical inactivity_{#fnVElec21" id="txtVElec21">21}, Private employers to be encouraged to do the same for their workers.

Protection of civil liberties, freedom of speech

#VicElecPolicy29" id="VicElecPolicy29">29. Outlaw indiscriminate telecommunications surveillance_{#fnVElec22" id="txtVElec22">22} of Victorians as revealed by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and others.

#VicElecPolicy30" id="VicElecPolicy30">30. Acknowledge the debt of gratitude that the Victorian people owe to fellow Victorian Julian Assange and protect him from unjust persecution._{#fnVElec23" id="txtVElec23">23}

#VicElecPolicy31" id="VicElecPolicy31">31. Acknowledge the debt of gratitude that the Victorian people owe to Edward Snowden._{#fnVElec24" id="txtVElec24">24}

About the author

I stood in the 2009 Queensland state treasurer in the seat of Mount Coot-tha against then Treasurer Andrew Fraser. (prior to that on 15 March 2008, I had also stood against the current Queensland Premier Campbell Newman for Lord Mayor of Brisbane.) Articles about that election and my campaign can be found here. The reason I stood was I wanted to stop the further privatisation of Queensland's public assets which had started under the previous premier Peter Beattie. Amongst other assests Beattie privatised the State Government Insurance (SGIO - as it was then know, it is now known as 'Suncorp') and the Golden Casket lottery corpration, neither with any electoral mandate. I feared that then Premier Anna Bligh planned to privatise more public assets and that no other candidate was going to raise the issue. Sadly, I was right about both concerns (although one member of the Queensland, Dorothy Pratt, the independent member for Nanango until she retired in 2012 spoke, in Parliament against privatisation).

Whilst the Greens had stated their opposition to privatisation, they did not raise that issue during the election campaign as far as I was aware. Had they done so, they would almost certainly have a received a much better vote and considerably improved the prospects for success of the subsequent campaign against privatisation.

After the election Queensland Premier Anna Bligh claimed that she had suddenly discovered that debts owed by the Queensland Government and that necessary public expenditure on government programs made privatisation of a number of assets necessary. These assets included:

• Queensland Motorways Limited (Operating the Gateway Bridge and Logan Motorway tolling systems);
• The Port of Brisbane Authority;
• Forestry Plantations Queensland;
• Abbot Point Coal Terminal; and
• Coal carrying rail lines, currently owned by Queensland Rail (QR Passenger services will remain nationalised).

Sadly, I had been injured almost fatally on 10 May 2010, when a four wheel drive ran into me on my bicycle on my way to work. I was lucky not to be killed. My brain was concussed and I suffered #js">diffuse axonal brain damage. Consequently I am not able to work as effectively as I once could (although people tell me that my intellect, if not my memory, coordination and stamina, is about as good as it was before my injury).

Because I was disabled, I was not able to stand in the Australian Federal Elections of 21 August 2010 and the Queensland state elections of 24 March 2012. If I had, I would surely have got a much higher vote in both.

As a result of public outrage at Premier Bligh's asset sell-off, the Labor Party was routed by Liberal/National leader Campbell Newman in the 2012 state elections. Since then, contrary to the clear wishes of Queenslanders, Queensland Premier Campbell Newman is now proceeding with his own program of yet more privatisations.

This sad experience demonstrates that neither of the major parties offer any real alternative to voters, who will have to find an alternative elsewhere.

Footnotes

(image: cleared land of what used to be Haig Street Primary School, Heidelberg Heights - sold for $16 m for multi-storey developments)

The price of local children gaining access to public education within walking distance from their homes in Heidelberg Heights just got sold for a price tag of $16,000,000.

One hundred and eighteen new double story dwellings will attract families with children who will require access to schools. Due to the nature of "planning" in Victoria, students will be forced to travel further, and enrol in mega-schools, so that "surplus" land can be supplied for housing and massive population growth!

Reopen Our Schools: Banyule

Banyule City Council, at a cost of $26 million to the rate payers of Banyule, purchased the three closed schools sites from the Napthine State Government in September 2013. Since then

Council has demolished the three schools. Consequently, Council plans to develop those sites for medium and high density housing.

Reopen Our Schools letter-boxed local residents calling on Council to halt the development of the school sites in the lead up to the State election. Council has heard residents' concerns on this issue. Council has agreed to mark time on two of the three school sites and are advocating to both State Government and the Opposition to address the educational needs of kids in the Municipality of Banyule. Whilst we welcome Council's decision to mark time of two of the sites, Reopen Our Schools calls for the three schools to be reopened. Demographic data in the local area supports the need for the return of the two primary schools and a secondary school.

Other development proposals in neighbouring Darebin

Darebin Council is also considering a massive redevelopment of the Northland precinct.

This will potentially include multiple story and high density unit development occurring along that stretch right up to Northlands shopping centre. Darebin Council acknowledge that by 2030 they will need 10,000 new homes in their municipality to cater for growing population demand. For details about the Northland Structure Plan click here. Additionally, Darebin Council report there are 800 children already on the waiting list for child care in their municipality (pg 33).

Growth and development in Banyule

Ad into the mix the Ivanhoe Structure plan and the State Government’s Olympia Housing initiative which is designed to replace old public housing stock with new homes - a result where there is massive population density planned across the two municipalities is a certainty, which in turn creates a higher demand on services and infrastructure. A shortage of preschool and child care places has at times been an issue in Banyule as well.

· The successful purchaser of the Haig Street site is a syndicate led by interests associated with Metricon Homes (Metricon syndicate).

· Contracts of sale have now been executed and the final sale price is $16,000,000 subject to conditions being met.

· The proposed development is for 118 two-storey homes and based on the attached concept site consistent with Development Guidelines established by Council. The height and number of dwellings proposed is within the guidance provided by Council of 80-140.

· The Expression of Interest (“EOI”) for the Ivanhoe redevelopment site closed on 19 June 2013. Submissions are now being assessed.

· Council is continuing to advocate an education site opportunity at 230 Banksia Street, Bellfield, to the state government and opposition - other wise this site will likely be another land grab by developers!

Population Density

Population density in Banyule is set, or "projected", to rise rapidly across 3081, 3079 and 3084.

By the year 2030 increases in population for the 0-17 age bracket are forecast as follows; Heidelberg 57%, Heidelberg Heights 38.5%, West Heidelberg/Bellfield 48% and Ivanhoe 48%. These are massive increases in the amount of young people in our municipality, and these children will need access to schools amongst other services. This growth will overwhelmingly be from overseas and interstate migration, not natural growth!

The question remains whether these latest forecasts take into account the massive development plans on foot in neighbouring Darebin which will have flow on effects in Banyule.

What is needed is a whole of Government approach to planning and to ensure that public schools are accessible and within walking distance to homes.

Reopen Our Schools will attend Council’s meeting on Monday night to speak about this latest development. What can be seen from the above is that there is a need for more schools. Where will local children go to school? The State government prefers to pander to the rapacious greed of property developers, and big population growth, than provide high quality and local education for the kids in Banyule.

Email: [email protected]
Web: Reopen Our Schools
Twitter: @SkyeMooster
Facebook: Reopen Our Schools.
Mobile: 0404 885 734.

Join us at Banyule Council's meeting - 7.30pm Monday 7 July 2014. We hope to see you there.

SIGN THE PETITION:
Change.org: to the Victorian State government re open Bellfield, Haig Street and Banksia Secondary College school sites

The Hon Kelvin Thomson MP Federal Member for Wills Tuesday 20th May 2014 MEDIA RELEASE Melbourne's Skyrocketing Population It is astonishing that the Victorian Government's latest Plan Melbourne now says Melbourne' s population will grow from 4.3 million now to 7.7 million by 2051.

A draft of this plan only seven months ago forecast a rise from 4.3 million to 6.5 million. That 50 per cent rise would be difficult enough to cope with, but 7.7 million is over 75 per cent . In any event, the fact that the projection has altered so radically is further
evidence that estimates of Melbourne's future population are totally unreliable.

Indeed Melbourne's population growth in recent years has far outpaced previous Government estimates.

The consequences of a 7.7 million population for Melbourne will be dramatic. Traffic congestion will be horrific. Housing prices will continue to skyrocket, leaving home ownership out of reach for young people. People will not be able to afford anything other than an apartment or a unit, and gardens and backyards will increasingly
become a thing of the past.

Grey infrastructure (freeways, drainage and sewerage systems etc) will proliferate, at the expense of green infrastructure (public open space and trees and shrubs on private land) and blue infrastructure (creeks, rivers, and beaches). Melbourne will become hotter as climate change is reinforced by the urban heat island effect.

According to Plan Melbourne a 7.7 million population would require over one and a half million more dwellings, of which 960,000 would occur in "established" areas, and 610,000 will occur in "growth" areas. In other words Melbourne will continue to grow both upwards and outwards, continuing its path to becoming an obese, hardened artery parody of its former self. By 2031, in the next 17 years, we will see 470,000 more people in the northern suburbs, 430,000 more in the west, 480,000 more in the south, 200,000 more in the east, and 280,000 more in Central Melbourne.

Accomplishing this will inevitably involve trampling over the rights of residents, who have time and time again indicated that they do not want their neighbourhoods and communities to change in this way.

#10;https://www.facebook.com/01victoria">Victoria First was formed as a non-government organisation last year to campaign against this kind of population growth. We believe that returning Australia's migration levels to those of the 1980s and 1990s will stop this rapid population growth and help us protect and pass on the things about Melbourne that make it a great place to live.

Anyone interested in joining Victoria First can contact the Secretary, Julianne Bell,

on (M) 0408 022 408.
Contact: Kelvin Thomson MP (M) 0458 750 700

NB: in fact, since this recent Media Release, the population of Victoria has been revised again and will now be "projected" at missile speed towards 10 million by 2050!

The term ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ was coined in 1973 after a bank robbery and hostage situation caused hostages to bond with their captors and helped them fight off those who were there to rescue them. Ironically, there is a new brand of the syndrome in the country where it originated – Sweden. Only, it doesn’t involve a few hostages and hostage-takers.

The Australian Immigration Department has been left behind by other federal government operations in its monitoring of Australia's social media chatter.

Immigration was accused of ''spying on citizens'' and monitoring online political dissent after an internet row with a pro-asylum seeker activist last week, allegations the department denies.

Could we end up being gagged about immigration, as in Sweden?

People are complying with the destructive culture to avoid punitive action being taken against them. They are being held hostage not by empathy and sympathy, but by political correctness and laws against free speech.

In total, 115,845 immigrants arrived in Sweden in 2013, many from Syria and Somalia. The figure is the highest Sweden has ever had in a one-year period. The Swedish Parliament and Government aim to have a migration policy that protects the right to asylum, facilitates freedom of movement across borders within the framework of regulated immigration, and promotes needs-based labour immigration.

Citizens of the EU/EEA and Switzerland are entitled to live and work in Sweden without acquiring a work or residence permit.

Schools, law enforcement, jobs/unemployment, welfare and healthcare are being impacted by a heavily disproportionate number of immigrants causing problems and rising costs. It will mean the destruction of the welfare system in Sweden if this goes on. It's come to the point where the police refuse to respond to calls from certain areas, areas which incidentally happens to be filled with immigrants.

As a refugee you don't have to prove anything. This gives you the right to free healthcare, an apartment and free benefits for as long as you wish for and you don’t even have to learn how to speak the language. Nobody’s flooding Africa with Non-Africans and giving them free health care, affirmative action and special privileges.

(Paraphrase of the film)
When President Obama visited Sweden last year, he expressed admiration for the "Swedish model". This should make Americans, and the Western world too, nervous. A UN report says that in about 15 years, Sweden will be a third world nation, below Libya and Bulgaria. Swedes believe their country is "racing into the future" but critics warn that it's "racing to the bottom".

Sweden has been a laboratory of social experiments. They believe they are building a perfect society. They have been compared to other countries that have tried to build perfect societies, such as North Korea and the Soviet Union. If you don't like the way it's being done, you won't be shot like in North Korea, but your life could become very unpleasant very quickly.

A journalist visited the home of a professor who thought he made anonymous comments about immigration. Left wing hackers helped the newspapers track him down, and others like him. He was then exposed to the whole nation as being "racist". Another man, a manager was fired for views critical of immigration.

A cornerstone of their society is "multiculturalism". They have mass immigration from some of the poorest and most backward nations on Earth. Swedes who disagree with this plan, you are labelled "racist", "fascist" or even "Nazi". You must be "friendly" towards foreigners, and immigration. Once you are "proven" to be hostile to immigration, you are out of the game!

It doesn't matter that the model is failing, crime is increasing and standards in schools are plummeting. Jews are living in fear in some areas, and some migrants are fearful, but Swedes are supposed to learn from immigrants, not the other way around!

Assimilation is completely out of the question! "Assimilation" is a Nazi word in Sweden. Many Swedes have their opinions stifled in fear of being called a "racist". You could lose your job, no career, you might lose your family, There was a new newspaper to cover these issues, but Swedes were too intimated to have the newspaper "Despatch International" delivered to their homes. What if the neighbours saw it? They could think your were a racist, or hate Muslims! "Despatch International" now hangs on through donations.

Sweden has become a nation in which some newspapers are too dangerous to read. Parents warn their children not to participate in public discussions, not to express "radical" ideas about this or that, because they are afraid it will harm them. You can't solve problems because you can't mention the problems!

Sweden was a good, rich country, but while it won't become a third world country overnight, there's a risk that it will!

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In 2012, the World Economic Forum ranked Sweden as the fourth-most competitive country in the world. There is an image of Sweden as tolerant and liberal and a nation that take freedoms seriously, and appreciates the importance of liberty.

“In Denmark as in Sweden, says social editor Kaj Schueler, “it is sometimes argued that there are only certain things that should be said, thought, and debated when it comes to topics like feminism, Islam, immigrants, cultural differences, crime, and multiculturalism. If you do not take a politically correct stance on these questions, it is said, you are excluded from the media.”

The Death of Free Speech in Sweden

The right to express and receive thoughts, opinions and feelings is an important right. And it is also important that it has been enshrined in Sweden’s constitution.

Sweden has long had a law against ‘objectionable or offensive behaviour’ ( ‘förargelseväckande beteende’). This law, which still exists today, was applied to anti-Semitic propagandists before the hets mot folksgrupp.

Hate speech in Sweden is now defined as speech that publicly and intentionally threatens or expresses disrespect or contempt for ethnic or other such groups by alluding to race, colour, national origin, ethnic origin, creed or sexual orientation.
Hate-speech laws, wherever they exist, are invariably justified in the name of protecting people. But what this means is that the state begins regulating peoples’ everyday verbal interactions.

Assar Lindbeck has been Sweden’s most influential economist during the post-war era, and is often referred to as “The Nestor of Economics in Sweden”. Lindbeck was a leading member of the Nobel Prize committee 1969-1994. Assar Lindbeck points out that it is “clear” that Sweden cannot have open borders, since the welfare state cannot afford the strain of unlimited immigration. asylum seekers are ill-equipped for life in the high-tech Swedish society. Employment statistics show that over 60 percent of the new arrivals and their relatives have a very “rudimentary education”, which means that many of them are actual or practical illiterates.

Two women in their thirties accused Assange of rape and sexual molestation during a high profile visit he made to Stockholm in 2010 – at the height of his website’s revelations of US military attacks on civilians in Iraq. The WikiLeaks founder has long argued that the Swedish investigation is politically motivated and backed by Washington as a way to speed his eventual extradition to the U.S., where he says he would be tried for publishing thousands of classified U.S. government documents - using "rape" as a smokescreen similarly in the way they use "racism" for any criticism of immigration!

The South Australian Greens have given their first preferences at next Saturday’s 15th March state election to the Stop Population Growth Now party.

In an enlightened move for the Greens, the party in SA is actually acknowledging the strong and obvious link between living standards, environmental conservation and climate change – something that shouldn't be so obscure for the rest of the party with an environmental focus!

Mark Parnell MLC is the current sitting Greens member in the Legislative Council, and supports the protection of the environment and everyone's right to live in a just, humane and healthy world. Policies dominated by the vested interests of property developers, and corporations that feed of population growth, are contrary to these aims.

The South Australian Greens’ policy also appears at odds with that of the federal Greens, which states that “an Australian population policy must consider the geographical distribution of human settlements rather than just concentrate upon population size”.

The Australian: Greens preference fringe group pushing zero population growth This article is "premium content" behind a Murdoch media paywall. If asked to pay or provide personal details to view this diatribe, we recommend you don't. - Ed

The “geographical distribution” of our human settlements is largely in our coastal cities, our “green belt”, fringing the world's driest continent. Avoiding the population size in the debate has been characteristic of the Green's population policy – which is more an apology rather than something they can actually implement.

The SA Greens say “part of reducing our ecological footprint requires reducing the rate of population growth”. While the Greens, and most other “green” groups, concentrate on the footprints of individuals, and living sustainably, they ignore the absolute overall growth in the number of feet! It's a convenient diversion, and intellectual dishonesty to stay politically correct.

“The Greens will aim to stabilise South Australia’s population within a generation,” is a policy platform says. Thanks to years of high growth rates, slowing down the momentum takes time, but at least there should be a stable population if we start now, with this generation. We owe it to future generations that the nation, the planet, we hand down to them is largely intact, and there is room for move for innovation, quality lifestyles, conservation and existing ecosystems, - and that they are not crushed by the greed of this generation's pro-growthists!

Mark Parnell, an upper house MP and leader of the Greens in South Australia, said “zero population growth on this planet is absolutely inevitable”. However, the ABS reveals that South Australia's fertility levels are below the other states, at 1.89, compared to other States of over 2.0 in Tasmania.

The desired “growth” will be from net overseas immigration levels, running at 60% of our population growth nationally, not from the number of children being born. It's artificial growth, socially engineered by Federal and State governments.

The SA Green's population policy says that: South Australia, even with its relatively small population, has a disproportionately large ecological footprint. In fact, if everyone in the world were to live like us, we would need more than three planet Earths to provide us with the all the resources we consume and deal with all the waste we produce....In South Australia, both the number of people and the per-person consumption are increasing, intensifying our unsustainable impact. Improvements in technology may help reduce our impact, but we also need to stabilise our population and deal with overconsumption and waste.

We need a new approach to prosperity that challenges the underlying assumptions of growth and consumption.

Parnell recognises that his policy on population are at odds with the Greens at national level. Stabilising our popualtion needs to be a national target, and a good start is at State level.
Once land is subdivided, planning laws are made maleable and flexible, and “growth” becomes ingrained into the culture and texture of the economy, it becomes inevitable.

SPGN

The executive of the SPGN is comprised of former members of the Australian Democrats, scientists, accountants and IT professionals. With the demise of the Democrats, they have morphed in to a millennial ‘save the earth’ party. The SPNG’s aim is to “Reduce Australia's rate of population growth to zero as rapidly as possible. If the resulting stable population is still environmentally unsustainable then work to reduce the size of the population until we achieve environmental sustainability.”

For too long, our nation's demographic patterns causing record-breaking rates of growth have been artificially manipulated, without public debate, and democratic reference.

How Stop Population Growth Now will seek to implement its zero population growth policy:
1.Reduce immigration. Australia's present very high rate of immigration has been foisted on the Australian public without any chance to vote on this issue. -
2.Strongly discourage  families of more than 2 children, whilst continuing to welcome 1 or 2 child families. “We do not favour any coercive strategies for family planning such as the Chinese one-child policy but we do not believe that couples should be encouraged or rewarded to have families of more than 2 children through baby bonuses or other benefits”.

The so-called “population control” agenda has been corrupted by the mainsteam media to assert that the party will malignantly “control” the number of children families will be allowed to have. It's hardly any vision of humans being invasive vermin like rats, ravaging the Earth! Most of our population growth is due to government immigration policies, (running at 60% of our population growth) to propagate the housing industry, and not based on Australia's fragile landscape of increasingly hostile weather patterns, declining living standards, ecological damage from urban expansion, rising fuel prices and declining jobs.

In place of urban sprawl, urban consolidation is supposed to reduce our environmental footprint, by compacting housing for less car usage, more “affordable housing”, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. On the contrary, it tends to have the opposite effect.

Trees, which provide shade and act as natural air conditioners, play an important role in helping to create cities that are more resilient to extreme temperatures as the climate warms. But, trees are being cleared for the cluttering of cookie-cutter, generic concrete multi-unit blocks, instead of the garden-surrounded an identifiable single houses of a few years ago.

The "heat island effect" results from hard surfaces absorbing and then radiating heat, thus capturing hot city temperatures.    Experts say this phenomenon is expected to become more prevalent with increasing urbanisation and will exacerbate climate change impacts.

ANU research shows that some of Canberra’s inner-city suburbs are the most heat-vulnerable in the territory, despite the benefits of their leafy tree-lined streets. It showed Canberra’s mostly-treeless outer suburbs were likely to be up to seven degrees hotter in summer than those with more established trees - such as those inner suburbs.

In that study of 21 Canberra suburbs, researchers found temperatures could vary by as much as 7.5 degrees between treeless postcodes and those with more trees.

Canberra Times: Canberra's heat vulnerable suburbs revealed

ANU Researcher Dr Liz Hanna said: "If we have planning designs and housing designs where there's insufficient front and backyard to plant a tree, and if street trees are not shade trees, we think that's foolish”. We agree it's “foolish”, but with high rates of population growth and increasing urban density, backyards and traditional housing with gardens and trees, are disappearing.

Power outages

Up to 100,000 Victorian premises were threatened to lose power during the January heatwave as demand crippled the state's electricity grid.

Melbourne is following the lead of Asian cities such as Hong Kong for extreme housing density, with more people living in apartments. The housing affordability squeeze, and the marketing of thousands of tiny apartments to investors, is threatening to undermine Melbourne’s liveability.

Mr Tony Arnel, Victorian Building Commissioner, suggests that buildings above three storeys begin to use more energy due to the need for lighting in common areas, lifts, security and the lifestyle of residents. The Victorian Building Commission has found there is “no conclusive evidence that vertical living was more sustainable than conventional homes.”

A NSW Energy Australia study found that high-rise apartments use 30 per cent more power than a typical detached house. The use of air-conditioners is a mandatory part of the lifestyle.

Climate change is predicted to increase the number and intensity of heatwaves experienced in Melbourne. Along with the densification of our city, and a population that's projected to double by 2060, it means the converging effects of more power being soaked up by a growing number of apartment dwellers, more power outages, higher utility and health costs - and the compounding factor of higher greenhouse gas emissions.

Loss of Vegetation to make way to mobilize more people

To build the East West Link tunnel under Royal Park, the Melbourne City Council estimates that some 5,000 trees, many very old, would be lost. The remnant bushland in West Royal Park, the only area of this kind of vegetation left in Melbourne, would be dug up. By actively cooling the urban landscape, vegetation helps reduce energy use and carbon dioxide emissions, and ultimately lessens the risk of residents suffering heat stress, heatstroke or even death…

Wetlands from storm water, which supplies water for Melbourne's parks and street trees plus the Royal Park Golf course,  will be completely destroyed.

The East West Link/tunnel will increase temperatures in Melbourne, and the nibbling away of Green Wedges for urbanisation will compound the problems of power demands, infrastructure break-downs, anti-social behaviours, and deaths/illness from heat stress.

Privatisation woes

The SEC provided cheap and reliable power to Victoria for 70 years. Selling off Victoria's power supplies and raised some revenue in the short term but in the long term it has resulted in a huge financial burden on the entire population through rapidly increasing prices. Now, unplanned overloads and outages are placing extra stress on the power grid, one that's fine-tuned for profits rather than service.

Privatising state owned assets is a strategy is to reduce employees, and  increase remuneration to share holders and owners. 

Population growth driven by heavy economic reliance on property development

The population of major Australian cities is expected to double in the next four to five decades, thanks to high rates of net overseas immigration.

The government powers-that-be in Canberra view the economic growth meta-statistics and see our economy is “growing”, without considering democracy, the costs of growth, and the human-environmental fallouts. They simply open up the draw-bridge of our borders and allow the new-comers to flow in from oversea! Planned increases in urban density are likely to result in the removal of a significant number of trees from urban areas.

Canberra’s population could increase to 904,000 by 2061 according to new projections released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This growth means significant challenges for governments and ACT infrastructure. There's no diplomatic, administrative or public service increases to justify this growth, except general population overflow.

Melbourne’s population is swelling by 2 per cent a year, or at a doubling rate of 35 years.   The power infrastructure must not only be routinely maintained and upgraded or replaced every 50 years, but must keep expanding at 2% each year - and also cope with outages and heat-waves.   

We need a u-turn in our economy from a growth-based, road-dependent, high resource and energy-consuming one that's trapping us in islands of heat - to an alternative model that's bio-centric and human-friendly,  and relevant to an age of extreme weather patterns, and the hostilities of climate change.

Whittling away of green wedge in Frankston threatens wildlife

As a wildlife rescuer I am expressing my concerns that of the rezoning of 42 hectares from the green wedge at Stotts Lane. These concerns are for the welfare of the local wildlife and the added pressure placed on voluntary wildlife groups who have provided the Frankston city council a free service for over 25 years.

Habitat clearance is the greatest threat that faces our wildlife today and the land in question would further deplete what was a significant bio-link between the listed RAMSAR Seaford wetlands and the listed RAMSAR Westernport wetlands.

This land is an important habitat corridor for Koalas. Every spring male koalas migrate from Cranbourne Botanical gardens to mate with the female population that lives in Frankston South. Since the opening of Peninsula link there has been two male koalas killed on the freeway, and if this vital link was lost the South Frankston Koala population would be locally extinct in a number of years.

With the continual loss of habitat in this area especially due to the new freeway, and with very little to no offsets found in the city of Frankston. There is increased competition for habitat amongst wildlife, and as such more vulnerable species such as sugar gliders and woodland birds especially the likes of the eastern yellow robin will also become locally extinct.

With the loss of habitat and increased volume of traffic and increased number of domestic animals for such housing on green wedge land, local wildlife shelters are faced with a number of problems:

1 An increase of wildlife that needs care
2 Less habitat to release rehabilitated wildlife

This means:
1 We need to find more volunteers to help run our shelters
2 We need find more funds to rehabilitate and feed wildlife
3 If we are unable to meet those needs we have limit our services which obviously causes stress to both us and the community member we are unable to help.
4. If we are unable to find suitable habitat to release wildlife we have to look at other areas for releasing wildlife reducing genetic viability and biodiversity of an area.

Kind regards
Craig Thomson
Secretary Animalia Wildlife Shelter
PO Box 4002 Frankston Heights
Victoria 3199

NB: Stotts Lane was part of the Mornington Peninsula Shire. There has also been a lot of work on this as well by Barry Ross and the Frankston Environmental Friends Network. This story has massive implications for the green wedges of Melbourne and of course the future survival of Koalas in sth Frankston. This issue should become the focal point of it instead of a housing development and benefit a greedy developer who lives in Toorak.

The site forms part of the Mornington Peninsula Green Wedge and lies outside the UGB. Frankston City Council’s Environment Department have concerns about changes to the UGB (urban growth boundary) generally, and more specifically in the Stotts Lane area because of potential impacts on a habitat link along the Peninsula Link corridor.

Coincidently, Planning Minister recently claimed that Melbourne has 25 years for more housing expansion, at the expense of native habitats, food bowls and wildlife.

“We now have a complete picture for Victoria. It’s clear that there is plenty of land for future development and plans to maintain supply. It is critical that we continue to identify land to drive industry, jobs and housing growth in regional centres,” Mr Guy said.

Premier Victoria media release: Melbourne leads the nation in catering for population growth

Perhaps our Premier and Planning minister Matthew Guy should spend a day rescuing wildlife hit on the roads, feeding them and trying to do the unenviable task of finding land to release native animals being squeezed off their territories by predatory urbanisation!

The world’s reliance on soy to feed factory farmed animals is having a devastating impact in Argentina.
RAW: Raw Truth of Factory farming and the destruction of lands and lives in Argentina

Factory farming is one of the biggest causes of animal cruelty on the planet. But it’s arguably one of the biggest causes of harm to us and the natural world too.

It’s why Compassion in World Farming created the Raw campaign – to expose this raw truth.

Their investigation tracks this harm from the factory farm to the soy fields of Argentina.

‘Big Soy’ production in Argentina is dirty and dangerous.

At the root of it is not the soy itself the problem but explosive human numbers all still demanding livestock products, such as eggs and meat.

This protein-rich bean – grown in fields as far as the eye can see – is destroying the health of Argentineans and their communities. All so that the beans can be shipped out to fatten up cows, pigs and chickens, mostly in factory farms.

Argentinean soy fields are in a toxic tale. Lands are being grabbed, people getting sick or dying, and there's intimidation and violence.

Around 10-12% of the original forests remain. It's been evastating. Some locals say they don't want the money, just healthy lives for their children.

Everywhere you go you see the shadow of the soy industry. The soy isn't being eaten by the people but being shipped thousands of miles around the world to fill the bellies of animals such as cows, pigs and chickens, mostly in factory farms. In this green gold rush, lands are being grabbed, people thrown off their land and displaced, and lives are being destroyed. There's little space left for locals' own animals.

Traditions of land care and heritage are being destroyed. Communal lands were shared for generations, thousands of hectares, are being swallowed up. Protesters are being rounded up and imprisoned. They are resisting the bulldozers razing the land and trees that provide oxygen and food.

Residues are in above the ground, and in the ground. The only thing that grows is soy beans, and then what's left is desserts. The catastrophic effect has been the clearing of land and mono-cultures. A large proportion of native forests have gone. It's gone on for 30 years now, and Argentina has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.

These massive fields of mono-cultures use pesticides on and in the ground, killing everything except the soy beans. Most of the soy is sprayed with a cocktail of chemicals. The real cost is borne by the communities and those who live near the crops.

Initially the green crops look deceptively assuring, but they started to see medical problems emerge: Cancer, leukaemia, lupus, rashes and birth deformities.

International researchers have shown that people get sick and suffer diseases when exposed to pesticides.

In 2010 doctors from the University of Cordoba came to see what was happening to respond to peoples' complaints. They agreed that exposure causes birth defects and illnesses. Intensive care units are full of people with deformities.

There are massive environmental, and social costs. People are afraid. It's all about big businesses and profits.

Factory farming isn't just an animal welfare issue. Intensive farming means intensive environmental destruction. We must end our addiction to soy, and meat that's not produced naturally. Exports from developing countries don't lift them from poverty. It just fills the pockets of the businesses and corporations. Large land owners are collaborating with corporations to feed the factory farms, and we need to reverse that trend.

Food production needs to be supported locally, by local governments and peasants. The land belongs to the people, not governments. 97% of soy is fed to animals, most of them factory farmed.

“Challenge” of population growth

Feeding the growing global population is a huge challenge and we can't rely on tackling this problem alone. We currently give a third of the world's cereal harvest to our livestock, and the animals use up much of the energy from the feed. If more plant crops were eaten directly by people, rather than feeding them to our farm animals, many more people could be fed.

Livestock's Long Shadow - FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS Rome, 2006 PDF file

Our planet holds 7 billion people, but nearly one billion people are currently hungry. Factory farming is not the answer to feeding the world; in fact the grain feeding of confined animals uses more food than it produces. (UNFAO, 2010, World Livestock 2011: Livestock in Food Security - ( See more )

Several kilograms of feed crops are needed for every kilogram of meat. (UNEP, 2011, World Food Supply: read more )

A much more sustainable, common-sense approach is for a higher proportion of plant crops to be eaten directly by people and for animals to be put back on the land.

ABS: Rising “challenge” of population growth

Australia’s resident population is estimated to increase to 35.5 million by the year 2056, based on current trends in fertility, life expectancy at birth and net overseas migration (Population Projections, Australia, 2006 to 2101, 3222.0).

The world’s population continues to grow at a rapid rate and in late 2011 was estimated at just under 7 billion. By 2050, it is projected that there will be 9.3 billion people on our planet, with nearly all of the population growth occurring in developing countries, including sub-Saharan Africa and India (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2011). With a third more mouths to feed than there are today, FAO has estimated that by 2050, food production worldwide will need to increase by 70% (FAO, 2009b).

Australian Bureau of Statistics

It's considered a fait accompli that world populations will continue to soar in ecological overshoot, and that the our planet Earth has an obligation to lift it's game and increase food outputs by 70% to meet human demands. Native animals die off, become extinct and are “culled” due to starvation, but even intelligent economists and governments seem to think in terms of an anthropocentric, benevolent Mother Nature, or excessive human powers of manipulation, to overcome any mere natural limits and “challenges” of human overpopulation. We can't possibly cross the social, religious and political limits of suggestion a global plan to stabilise, and then reduce, human numbers through family planning!

Factory farms are the mass exploitation of sentient creatures, who must endure drastically cut life-spans, and perpetual deprivation, to feed masses of peoples in global markets. The costs of mono-cultures, pesticides, diseases, reproductive deformities, land grabs, deaths, land clearing, loss of biodiversity and sustainable farming are all part of the mere “challenges” of feeding swelling and uncontrolled human populations.

Booming Australian Population Needs Booming Housing Supply!

This article responds to a coy media release by Urban Taskforce, which pretends to be surprised that population growth is causing a demand for more housing.
Great news for the housing industry, but hardly unexpected, thanks to the lobbying power of the growth industry!
Urban Taskforce, part of the growth-lobby, have had a wonderful Christmas windfall! Good fortune has landed in their laps, thanks to our socially-engineered population growth. MORE HOUSES will need to be constructed, than previously assumed! Business is booming, and housing is a guaranteed necessity, an essential human need.

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) report on population growth shows an even higher population growth than previously announced and this will require that more houses are constructed than previously assumed says the Urban Taskforce.

“Every few months we seem to see even higher projections for Australia’s population growth announced by the ABS.” says Urban Taskforce CEO Chris Johnson. “ While there has been some uplift in housing production over the last year it is clear that significantly higher numbers of new houses and apartments are urgently needed.”

“The NSW population has grown by 102,000 in the last year but we are still not providing sufficient housing to meet demand. In Sydney we build 10,000 less homes than needed each year. The NSW growth rate represents a 1.4% increase but this is still well behind growth in Victoria at 1.9%, Queensland at 2.0% and Western Australia at 3.3%.”

“If NSW was to match the 2% growth of other states then we will need even more housing. This will also require a review of the Metropolitan Strategy for Sydney to ensure that the higher population projections are factored in to targets for housing and jobs.

“The big message from Australia’s accelerating population growth to the NSW planning system is that more housing is required in inner city and fringe locations. While the NSW government has helped lift housing supply through infrastructure funding and grants there is still a long way to go. With the planning reforms in limbo the government will need to establish an interim pro growth strategy to help house those families finding it difficult to find somewhere to live.

Media Release: Booming Australian population needs booming housing supply - a windfall for the growth lobby

How magnanimous of the Urban Taskforce that they will have to find a place for all these new people to live in! It's a self-fulfilling prophesy that our record rate of population growth will mean the demand for housing will increase! This is a success story on how effective and powerful the growth lobby really is - especially at a time of massive costs of living, unaffordable housing and rising unemployment!

This is hardly unexpected news that at least the housing industry is thriving, while Australians are facing increasing costs of living, homelessness and austerity measures due to government cut-backs. The growthists seem to be a protected species, thanks to healthy, record levels of immigration.

By Brian McGavin, UK-based writer and analyst. 2013

Burning the candle at both ends
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 wilful blindness in recognising that relentless human population growth is one of the pre-eminent problems we face. A problem that is driving the astonishing growth of fossil fuel use and its depletion, climate warming, bio-diversity loss, the growing shortage of fresh water to meet human needs - and as a consequence of these changes - the prospect that agriculture will be unable to produce enough food to feed us.

Our children our facing a hugely challenging future. We are already feeling the changes – declining real wages, soaring commodity and energy prices, growing infra-structure pressures and overcrowding, driven by unsustainable population growth. Add to this a now faltering global economy based on the impossibility of endless growth and debt, with politicians throwing billions in taxpayers' money around to feed ‘business as usual’. This will need to be radically rethought to keep our complex society functioning.

In most countries today existing populations are not living environmentally sustainably, yet even if the UN’s assumption of birth-rate decline in developing countries happens, global population will rise to over 9.6 billion by 2050. Less reported is that if current birth rates persist, the United Nations Population Division warned in October 2011, that the world's population could more than double to over 15 billion in the lifetime of many people alive today.

In Africa, the UN admits that it won’t meet key Millennium Development Goals. Many countries in Africa already have massive unemployment and not enough food. How will they provide all the schools, jobs, hospitals and food to sustain populations that are set to more than double and in some cases triple in size in less than 40 years?

Governments will be struggling with millions of unemployed and hungry people attracted to violence and extremism. Look at the problems already in our news in countries like Haiti, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Yemen, Egypt and Afghanistan – all countries on food aid, with exploding populations and increasingly scarce resources, who export surplus people to North America, Europe and Australia – yet population growth is barely mentioned!

In a few years, we face major oil energy decline as global demand outstrips supply.

A huge problem is most alternative energy sources are poor net energy performers.

Professor John Beddington, former UK Chief Scientist, warned in March 2009 that: “Our food reserves are at a 50-year low, but by 2030 we need to be producing 50% more food, we will need 50% more energy, and 30% more fresh water. They are dramatic problems, and they are all intimately connected.”

You can try reducing consumption all you want, but when you keep adding 100 million and another 100 million, you simply drive every human to a lower and lower standard of living. You cannot escape that reality.

Saving the planet and greenwash

Most environmental organisations tell us that ‘if only we each reduced our environmental demand, population growth would not be a problem’. But our economic system based on growth is driving us in the opposite direction. Even if all the efficiency and renewable alternatives could be implemented the savings would be quickly wasted if populations continue to grow.

Demographic impacts were discussed sensibly back in the 1970s but since then a combination of political blindness and political correctness, an alliance of ill-informed religious dogmatists and an economic doctrine of 'out with limits', has undermined common sense and political backbone.

Climate change is heard, but many people, not least politicians, are in profound ignorance of the huge challenges we now face, nearly all linked to the relentless rise in human numbers and diminishing resources. Aiding and abetting this is a celebrity and sport obsessed media that cheers endless growth to prosperity and drowns out wider coverage on key issues impacting on our future.

Why would we think it better to create energy shortages, resource shortages, lowered quality of life, a housing crisis, lowered standard of living, more air pollution, grid-locked traffic, bio-diversity loss, and many more calamities caused by ever increasing population pressures?

If governments won’t talk population, then they are not serious about cutting emissions, managing the water supply, managing food supplies, and a secure quality of life for our people.

It is not a question of ‘either or’ and who needs to act. We are in this together. Rich nations are consuming too much and populations continue to rise. Legitimate aspirations to raise living standards in high population countries like China and India are consuming ever-more resources. In many developing countries with acute water and food shortages, populations are projected to double or triple in size within 40 years – driving social unrest and migration on a massive scale.

There are several key challenges we have to talk about and face. In particular, ensuring development aid from donor countries delivers fully accessible and properly funded reproductive health care for all, along with equal access to education for girls and women. In many countries there are still barriers to this. We also have to start incentivising welfare systems to encourage fewer births rather than more and aim for balanced migration.

Moral values?

Some people believe they have a right to have as many children as they want, whether they can look after them or not and fail to understand or just ignore the consequences of growing populations. Many commentators wilfully promote an ever-larger population in the name of freedom of choice and growth. There will be precious little choice left if we go on multiplying with no thought for the future.

Others claim their religion for actions that impact on others: Have large families "in the name of God" ; Over-consuming resources? "God will provide” - so we don't need to think about the consequences; and when the day of reckoning and collapse arrives - "It is God's will" – an opt-out from moral responsibility.

We have higher intellect to understand the consequences of our actions. Do we plan for a secure and better life or do we carry on blindly toward a minefield of lethal limits?

Rights come with responsibilities. Society has a right to expect its citizens to act in ways that do not endanger others. We still have a choice. The world badly needs a grown-up, rational discussion on population - without blame, abuse and hysteria.

Our children will not thank us for being driven to an abyss.

Premier Denis Napthine and Planning Minister Matthew Guy, on Wednesday 9th October, launched the much anticipated planning and transport blueprint, Plan Melbourne, which according to the press release, will shape how Melbournians live and work over the next 40 years.

Despite many worthy motherhood statements of intent in the document, the blueprint will largely be determined by the development industry and property interests, rather than residents. It ignores the fact that hospitals, schools, public transport, roads are already stretched to the limit. The "jobs" is about ramping up opportunities for property developers, and the mortgage industries.

As part of the strategy to be announced by Premier Denis Napthine and Minister for Planning Matthew Guy, the towns of Bacchus Marsh, Ballan, Broadford, Kilmore, Warragul-Drouin and Wonthaggi are designated as new major population and employment towns for growth.

Any balanced sense of professional and holistic planning is being discarded to fast-track high density suburbs, to promote growth.

"With Victoria?s population projected to rise to 8.4 million by 2050, regional cities and towns are well-placed to take a greater share of population growth. A key initiative of Plan Melbourne is to unlock the growth potential of these cities – so they can accommodate a
greater proportion of the state?s future growth – and provide good transport connections between them and Melbourne. This will create a 'State of Cities' where there are greater choices for people about where to live, work or start a business,” Mr Guy said.

The more houses and apartments are built, the more the growth will continue. It's self-fulfilling prophesy! Residents in growth areas will be denied the right to object to multi-storey developments in their area. This is about "streamlining" permits for property developers, and fast-tracking growth!

"Victoria's population has increased by 15 per cent in the last decade, but 86 per cent of this growth has occurred in Melbourne. Under Plan Melbourne, by providing opportunities for decentralized population and employment growth in regional cities, we can increase their size and ability to function independently. We're providing Victorians with more choices about where they live and work.”

One million additional homes will be needed in Melbourne by 2050 when the population is expected to reach 6.5 million.

Several key infrastructure projects also form part of the plan, including East West Link, the Melbourne Metro Rail project and the north east link, which will connect the Metropolitan Ring Road and Eastlink.

Planning academic Michael Buxton, professor of Planning at RMIT, commented that the document fails to deliver on major issues facing a rapidly growing Melbourne including, with no allocated spending on necessary public transport infrastructure to deal with outer urban growth corridors. He also notes urban growth boundaries have already been expanded by 43,000 ha.

This 40 year plan is not a grass-roots one, with democratic input, created with long-term considerations of costs, of jobs growth failing to keep abreast with population growth, the loss of soils and biodiversity, entrenched debts, the multiplying demand on natural resources such our forests, and the cost of utilities such as water and power. The 13 year drought Victoria suffered is lost in political memory! There's no concession to climate change, and the fact that more people will need to rely on air-conditioning and power, as inevitable in high density housing.

The "new" Plan Melbourne strategy aims to curb the city’s suburban sprawl by establishing a permanent metropolitan urban boundary and distributing future population growth to other regions. How many times have we heard this? The urban boundary is nothing more than an imaginary, fictional line that keeps expanding with Melbourne's population obesity!

Shifting population growth to regional towns is simply diverting Melbourne's growth problems, but not solving it. It will mean they share more of our woes, including infrastructure overload, increasing costs of living and spreading unaffordable housing.

Since the beginning of 2000, the city’s population grew by a whopping 27%, or more than 900,000 people. If growth continues at that pace – 2% per annum – then Melbourne’s population would surpass 5 million by 2025, overtake Sydney by 2037, and hit 8 million by 2049.

Why should Melbourne's population, hurtling towards more than 8.5 million by 2050, be considered inevitable? As a consequence, we must deregulate and streamline planning to accommodate it!

Other State and Federal government policies are criticized, dissected, evaluated, supported or rejected - as is our democratic right. When it comes to our politically-engineered population growth, why is it a taboo subject?

The ABS reveals that natural increase and net overseas migration contributed 40% and 60% respectively to Australia's total population growth for the year ended 31 March 2013. It's politically-engineered growth, and assumed as natural, inevitable, desirable, achievable, affordable or sustainable. Nothing about the environment is mentioned, or the native vegetation and agricultural land that will be buried under housing!

With little innovation, imagination, strengthening of education and skills-training, and research into future-proofing our energy sources and mitigating against climate change, "growth" has become an economic industry itself! It's one that must keep being perpetuated. despite the fact that we are hurdling towards the multiple "challenges" of mid-21st century. This is head-in-the-sand mentality of "growth is good" and "business as usual".

Governments are creating a great fear of an "ageing population" and population decline.  While asylum seekers are shunted off to PNG, there are over 1000 people legally imported into Australia each day - as skilled migrants or under the family reunion scheme – to alleviate our “ageing population”.

Our cities and infrastructure are buckling under the heavy weight of population growth, to alleviate our "ageing population"! We have constant "shortages", cut backs and austerity measures due to population pressures.  Young people are at risk from being lost to unemployment, and debt, as our economy lags behind population growth.
Mug shot of Charles Ponzi (March 3, 1882 – January 18, 1949). Charles Ponzi was born in Italy and became known as a swindler for his money scheme.

Increasing spending on welfare

With total government spending at $485 billion, spending on the welfare state accounted for a majority share—or 65% of the total. It is astounding that of the $316 billion that the government spent on welfare, approximately half, or $158 billion, was due to tax-welfare churn (The process of levying taxes on people and then returning those taxes to the same people in the form of income support payments and welfare services simultaneously or over the course of an individual’s lifetime).

When combined with the fiscal pressures of an ageing population and expected lower tax revenue growth, it is clear the Australian welfare state is unsustainable on current trends.

Australia is facing a welfare state-driven financial crisis like that which exists in Europe today. (CIS report: Target 30)

Target30 propose that superannuation be used to buy annuities, pension assets tests should include the family home, and aged pension and preservation ages be raised and aligned.

Social security and welfare spending accounted for A$138 billion in the latest budget, a rise of nearly 14% per year over the past decade. Assistance to the aged has risen to almost A$55 billion, a rise of 22% per year since 2003-04. In 2003-04 A$26 billion were payments to the aged, while families with children received A$21 billion.

Health expenditure expected to nearly double as a proportion of GDP over the next 40 years and aged-care spending projected to increase as a proportion of GDP from 0.8 per cent in 2010 to about 1.8 per cent in 2050.

The aged pension is predicted to cost $37 billion this year rising rapidly to $45 billion by 2015-16. It is estimated another 220,000 older Australians will start drawing down an aged pension in the coming four years.The greatest risk to prosperity come from sustained increases in spending, especially in health. Over the past decade health expenditure rose by over $40 billion in real terms. According to a Grattan Report the ageing population was not the prime cause. Rather, people of any age saw doctors more often, had more tests and operations and took more prescription drugs.

After welfare, the second biggest chunk of the federal budget is healthcare. This is "burdened" by the ageing population. The health budget is set to escalate to $71 billion by 2015-16.

In third place in the budget comes education spending at almost $30 billion a year, including funding for universities, non-government schools and some funding for public schools (although states still pick up most of the tab for public schools).

News.com: Where does all the money go

No doubt the best solution would be to ensure that older people were eliminated, by voluntary euthanasia, after they finished contributing economically to our society.

Ageing migrants

Despite many older people living long and healthy lives, and being financially self-sufficient, they are are being exaggerated as a threat. Migrants are ageing too. Professor Graeme Hugo AO, Director of the Australian Population and Migration Research Centre at the University of Adelaide, says the issue of ageing migrants is important to a range of policy areas in Australia. The last Census showed that 32,000 aged pensions are being paid every year direct to Greece and Italy to migrants who formerly came to Australia over the decades in the 20th century, and have now retired.

It's assumed that young migrants are the "silver bullet" to our ageing workforce, but migrants age too!

We need to end the stigma and discrimination of the aged in the work force and tap into their wisdom and experience. Japan has an ageing population, and still their economy is strong and growing - due to production and skills.

Importing young migrants only temporarily keeps our population "young" anyway, as everyone ages at the same rate. Rather than a constant flow of foreigners, many of whom are now facing higher rates of unemployment than Australian born, employers need to be flexible to allow part-time work, and tap into the experience and abilities of older workers.

Immigration only temporarily relieves ageing population

NSW Treasury Long-Term Fiscal Pressures Report answer to the fiscal ‘challenge’ of Australia’s ageing population is to increase immigration, restrain public sector pay, and – the quote here is direct – through “lowering community expectations” of services. There’s no Get Up! outrage over humdrum issues like 10 year-long queues for public housing, or ballooning hospital waiting times, or the fact that only 2% of rents in Sydney-Illawara are affordable for very low income workers. Deniers avert our attention to asylum seekers and gay marriage,"McMansions", big cars and over-consumption.

Population growth is also the lazy way to grow GDP (as opposed to GDP per capita) and make Treasurers look good. If this wasn’t enough, big business also has enormous influence on our major political parties through donations.

Young people remain longer in education before they take on full-time jobs in an economy increasingly based on knowledge and skills, and older people may often experience difficulty in finding employment. In 2011, 36% of Australia's older people were not born in Australia, a substantially higher proportion than the 24% of people under 65 years who were overseas-born.

It's not just "baby boomers" who are ageing!

In the Productivity Commission 2010 report titled Population and Migration: Understanding the Numbers, the Commission concluded that "Realistic changes in migration levels also make little difference to the age structure of the population in the future, with any effect being temporary, since immigrants themselves age."

Where does population growth end? We might be able to temporarily dilute, by a fraction, the proportion of people aged over 65, but in the long term the next generation will inherit a bigger "ageing population" to compensate for - but how?

“Realistic changes in fertility can have little impact on the age structure of the population in the short to medium term. While they have a greater effect in the longer term, they cannot stem the ageing of Australia’s population. Realistic changes to fertility could have some effect in the long term, but the proportion of older Australians will still grow from current levels. ”

End to the Age of Entitlements

The nation's peak welfare body has backed Joe Hockey's call for an end to the age of entitlement, arguing that people have "learned to expect new things from government" and tax reform is needed to transform the system. Australian Council of Social Service senior policy officer on tax and economics Peter Davidson said slowing growth and an ageing population meant the tax and welfare system was unsustainable.

The Australian: Joe Hockey call for an end to the age of Entitlement

Baby Bonus, Schoolkids Bonus and a Seniors Bonus are all "wasteful". Acoss says that taxes should be as simple, transparent and predictable as possible.

The Age of Entitlement is over. We should not take this as cause for despair. It is our market based economies which have forced this change on unwilling participants. Government spending on a range of social programs including education, health, housing, subsidised transport, social safety nets and retirement benefits has reached extraordinary levels as a percentage of GDP, and in an age of slowing growth and ageing population, are simply unsustainable.
It's an admission that our "growth" will inevitably lower our standards of living, and we will be less for our taxes. It's pure Ponzi economics!

Two decades of economic growth and we are being strangled economically.

“The reality is that despite more than two decades of strong economic growth, fault lines are emerging in our economic and social foundations that we simply cannot continue to ignore.

“There are major holes in our social safety net that the next government will have to address – in affordable housing, education, disability, mental and dental health, and community controlled services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples..." In reality, 22 years of "economic growth" has left us worse off, and poverty is increasing with 2.2 million people living below the poverty line.

ACOSS outlines proposals for first 100 days of new government (They never suggest limiting growth!)

Australia has long been one of the countries which has most enthusiastically pursued growth through immigration. But as the fertility rate fell – it has been below replacement rate for more than 30 years – that Big Australia goal became ever more reliant on imported people.

With no policies on slowing immigration levels, the flow of migrants to the western suburbs will hardly slow at all.

Lower fertility rates mean older, less innovative and productive workforces. More importantly to the Ponzi economic order, older, stable or declining populations consume less. So growth requires either importing people, or exporting stuff, or a combination of the two. Orthodox economics simply can’t cope otherwise.

“Economic growth” Ponzi economics

The Economy is meant to serve us, not “grow” to detrimental levels and deny its very purpose – to care for our health, education, children and seniors, and be a safety-net when emergencies strike.

“We’re certainly operating a Ponzi scheme in Australia,” says Dr Bob Birrell, an economist and migration expert from Monash University.

“Our growth is predicated on extra numbers… [and] more of our activity is going into city building and people servicing, which do not directly produce many goods that can be traded in overseas markets".

There are limits to growth, and Ponzi pyramid growth schemes always collapse and leave the participants worse off - except for the capital owners at the summit. What we need is a circuit-breaker to the growth/ageing population/"economic growth" mentality that is destroying our environment, vilifying older people, and causing hardship and increasing budgetary austerity.

There are a record number of 54 political parties represented in the Senate in these elections.
There are obviously glaring "gaps" in concerns and policies not being addressed by the mainstream parties, the ALP and the Coalition.
Each party below, and the list is not exhaustive, was searched for policies on:
wildlife
environment
population growth/immigration
animal rights
asylum seekers
(if any are absent it's because no policy was found)

Animals Justice Party

Animal Justice Party website
Environment
Foster sustainable animal habitats through upholding healthy ecosystems via revegetation and animal-friendly land practices.

Wildlife
Put in place the absolute opposite to institutional, commercial and recreational killing of innocent wildlife.

Animal rights
The Animal Justice Party will actively campaign at a government policy level against animal cruelty atrocities relating to wildlife destruction; factory farming; animal transportation; companion and domestic animals, pet animals and the use of animals for sport and entertainment.
We’ll advocate the toughening of animal protection laws; an increase in penalties for convicted animal abusers; the regulation and restriction in the sale and use of pets, and enhance education in greater awareness and appreciation of the needs of animals.

Population/immigration
A land use and population settlement structure, one that's sustainable for its inhabitants and ecosystems.

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Australia First Party (NSW) Incorporated

Australia First Party website

Population/immigration
Reduce and Limit Immigration. Immigration mistakes can be big long term mistakes. Immigration policy must take into account social cohesion, employment opportunities, urbanisation and environmental issues.

Abolish Multiculturalism. End the divisive, government funded and institutionalised policy of multiculturalism.

Asylum seekers
The boat-people and refugee intrusions began long ago, over 30 years ago, creating enclaves in Australian cities, no-go areas, crime. It resurfaced again in the late Eighties and in the early Nineties – and it has been a constant ever since. From a past emphasis on Asian ‘refugees’ (sic) it has become Moslem Middle Easterners and Central Asians, Tamils, Africans.
But the pace is quickening, towards a great noon, a flood. I call it nothing less than that. Masses of humanity are on the move.

There are today some 14,000,000 official refugees in the world. I use that term both in its accurate and scam aspects; but the numbers of economic refugees are limitless. The bright lights of European capitalism beckon to those ruined by poverty.

Warfare, some of it symbolised by the criminal wars in and in which participates, fuels it all. And what of the civil war in between the elites and the Communist Party of India (Maoist)?

If the latter wins the war, the escaping Indian rich-class is enough to drown your country. But the problem of refugee numbers goes deeper.
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Australian Christians

Australian Christians website
Environment
Australian Christians believes that environmental issues are important because the environment is God-given and sustains life. Humans have an obligation to responsibly manage the environment and to mitigate, where feasible, environmental change and pollution. Land use management which enhances environmentally sustainable development.

Wildlife
We believe in protecting natural biodiversity and areas of significance.

Asylum seekers
Regarding stopping dangerous boat journeys, we believe the Australia Government should investigate opening a refugee processing facility, in conjunction with Indonesia and under the governance of the UNHCR in Indonesia. This could be staffed by Indonesians, providing employment for the locals, under the management of Australia personnel, and jointly funded by Australia, UNHCR and Indonesia. 

Regarding refugee intake in general, we believe Australia should re-balance the refugee intake to reduce the number of Muslim refugees and take more persecuted Christians form various African countries.

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Australian Democrats

Australian Democrats website

Environment
Policies on:
-Agriculture Policy
-Biodiversity
-Biosecurity
-Coasts_and_Oceans
-Farm_Management
-Fishing and Aquaculture
-Global Climate
-Invasive Species
-Population
-Rural Land Use and Management
-Salinity Soil Conservation and Land Clearing Policy
(Ironically, the one on Population is significantly missing!)

Wildlife
To ensure planetary biological diversity by restoring damaged ecosystems to health wherever possible; anticipating, preventing and stopping processes that threaten biodiversity; fostering greater ecological awareness and progressively addressing the underlying economic, institutional and social causes of the ecological crisis.

Animal rights
Yo ensure the sustainability of natural fishing resources and aquaculture industries by means of adequate research, management and enforcement with a mind to supporting a viable industry as well as conserving the environment. Research and development of organic farming will be encouraged.

Population/immigration
The Australian Democrats believe in a non discriminatory immigration program which gives priority to refugees and family reunion, the total number of which, when included with overall population trends will not impede sustainability of the nation's natural resources.

Asylum seekers

The Australian Democrats Queensland Lead Senate Candidate for the forthcoming election has commended the Prime Minister for his actions to save the lives of refugees on the high seas, but contends Mr. Rudd’s solution is in itself an exercise in “People Trading”.

Mr. Stevenson has called for a debate on the merits of Home Detention and integration as the way forward for refugee management in Australia.  “There are more than enough compassionate Australian families willing to take refugees into their homes, care for them and integrate them into the Australian way of life, as contributing citizens.” 
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Australian Greens

Australian Greens website
Environment
Good economic management means taking care of our earth — not treating our most precious resources like a giant business in liquidation: ‘everything must go!’.  The levels of pollution in our atmosphere mean that business-as-usual will no longer work if we want to avoid dangerous climate change. The future for Australia can still be a prosperous one if we build our economy on green principles rather than short-term self-interest.

Wildlife
The Greens' plan proposes a national grants program of $5 million per annum to support volunteer wildlife carers. The program would help subsidise food and medical expenses for sick and injured wildlife and assist with purchase of wildlife care equipment.
We would support training programs for our wildlife carers.
We would fund increased knowledge about successful wildlife care and rehabilitation.
The funding would support other activities such as 24-hour wildlife care advice hotlines and community education.

Recognition of the essential role played by mature forest ecosystems in wildlife habitat, carbon storage and water supply. Australia is recognised globally as "mega-diverse” - over 80% of our mammals, reptiles and flowering plants exist only in Australia. But Australia’s wildlife is facing an extinction crisis. Many of our famous and important animals and plants are classified as in danger of becoming extinct.

Fund comprehensive studies to identify and map important habitat nationally (including protected ecological communities, areas of critical habitat for threatened species and important wildlife corridors);

The Greens have a long track record of fighting for better protection for Australia’s wildlife and precious places. In this term of parliament, we secured the $1 billion Biodiversity Fund, a grants fund supporting local and regional groups to rehabilitate degraded habitat and restore wildlife corridors and ecosystem health.

Animal rights
The Australian Greens believe that:
1.Animals have intrinsic value, separate from the needs of humans, who have a responsibility to ensure that animals’ rights and welfare are respected.
2.Humans have a duty of care to minimise physical and psychological suffering of animals resulting from human activity.
3.Strong animal welfare standards are necessary.
4.Native animals and their habitats are at particular risk and require stringent protections.

Population/immigration
The Australian Greens believe that:
1.The current level of population, population growth and the way we consume are outstripping environmental capacity. Australia must contribute to achieving a globally sustainable population and encourage and support other nations to do the same.

2.Our environmental impact and ecological footprint is not determined by population numbers alone, but by a range of factors including per capita consumption patterns and levels, distribution of resources, agricultural practices for domestic consumption and export, levels and types of industrial activity, urban design and transport options.

3.Australia's population policy should be determined by its commitment to:
-ecological sustainability;
-global and domestic social justice and equity, including women's rights;
-intergenerational equity;
-multiculturalism;
-international human rights obligations; and
-decent wages and conditions for all workers.

4.Population policy should not be primarily driven by economic goals or to counter the effects of an ageing population.

5.An Australian population policy must consider the geographical distribution of human settlements rather than just concentrate upon population size at the national level.

6.Australia has an obligation to accept humanitarian migration including that resulting from climate change.

7.The continuing rapid increase in the human population has the potential to adversely affect national or international outcomes in environmental sustainability, human health and welfare, and other areas. Current rates of resource use are not sustainable and are compounded by inequitable distribution of wealth and power.

Asylum seekers

Only the Greens are a voice for compassion in this debate.
In their rush to the right, both old parties have committed to sending refugees into danger instead of giving them safer pathways to a new home where they can rebuild their lives.

Punishing refugees with deportations, detention and military responses doesn’t work. Asylum seekers had enough intimidation, enough fear and enough danger already — and cruel camps like Manus are no place for vulnerable people and their children. It’s time to shut the camps down.
The only way to help refugees is to make sure they don’t feel the need to board a dangerous boat in the first place — and that means setting up safe, official ways for them to seek asylum in countries like Australia.
We can do that today by:
funding safe UN assessment centres to quickly process claims in Indonesia
urgently resettling more refugees once their claims are approved
then building a regional solution like Malcolm Fraser’s government did.

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Australian Independents

Australian Independents

Environment
The Australian Independents are for lifting the “Renewable Energy Target” to above 30% by 2020 and 75% by 2030.
The Australian Independents are for net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.
The Australian Independents are for renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, hydropower and biomass.
The Australian Independents are for significant investment in the renewables industry.
The Australian I­ndependents are against Coal Seam Gas mining and are for an immediate ban on coal seam gas mining in Australia.
The Australian Independents are for banning gas-fired power stations, fuelled by CSG.
The Australian Independents are for outlawing uranium, its transportation and export trade.
The Australian Independents are for protecting residents from toxic waste.

Wildlife
The Australian Independents are for creative ways of dealing with bothersome native animals (i.e. kangaroos in Canberra), as opposed to mass culls.
The Australian Independents are committed to outlawing whaling, including whaling for "scientific" purposes.

Animal rights

The Australian Independents are for banning puppies and kittens being sold in pet shops (as most end up being abandoned).
The Australian Independents are against "puppy farming" and are for puppies and kittens only being sold by licenced, regulated breeders and animal rescue organisations.
The Australian Independents are pushing for the caging of large birds such as lorikeets and cockatoos to be outlawed.
The Australian Independents will advocate for educational programs to highlight the consequences of, and damage that can be done by, allowing predator pets to roam after dark.
The Australian Independents will push for programs to teach Australians about the importance of vaccinations and fertility control for pets.
The Australian Independents are for reducing oceanic noise pollution to prevent whales from becoming disorientated, stressed and beached.
The Australian Independents are for minimising human cruelty towards animals.

Asylum seekers
The Australlian Indpendents are for all refugees being processed in or near their own countries. The Australian Independents are for increasing the refugee intake to 50,000 per year. The Australian Independents are for asylum seekers boosting populations of small towns in rural and regional areas of Australia.

The Australian Indpendents are for asylum seekers securing employment in rural and regional areas of Australia (currently there are over 100,000 jobs that urgently need filling in outback Australia).

The Australian Independents are for all asylum seekers who arrive by boat to be transported back to their own countries by plane, for processing
The Australian Independents are for a wide-spread awareness raising campaign to inform asylum seekers of the locations of the processing centres in their own countries.

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Australian Protectionist Party

Australian Protectionist Party
Environment
Save Australia from the ravages of over-population, which is causing environmental ruin, and instead create a sustainable future for our land. Introduce measures to develop ecological sustainability. Immigration must be reduced until the completion of scientific research that will determine the “environmental footprint” of our population.

Population/immigration
Implement a zero-net immigration policy, on a “one in, one out” basis. To have sensible immigration programmes that will be geared towards accepting into our country only those people who will readily fit into our society, primarily from culturally compatible countries. To seek a homogeneous society where we can all live in harmony, free from the ethnic and racial strife caused by social-engineering experiments. End Third World immigration and Muslim immigration, and offer economic assistance to those who wish to be reunited with their people’s homeland.

We recognize that a population’s impact upon the environment is caused not just from the water they drink, the food they consume, the roads they drive on, or the products they buy – an enormous environmental impact is necessarily caused by the very creation of all the consumables that those people use, whether this occurs on farms, in factories, or in shops.

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Australian Stable Population Party

Australian Stable Population Party website
Environment
Australia should progress economically and socially using resources in ecologically sustainable ways to protect the environment and the natural world. The aim is wellbeing for all Australians, present and future, and to preserve the biodiversity of our ecosystems, with enough space and resources to live well and in balance with each other. A sustainable Australia starts with a stable population.

Population/immigration
The Stable Population Party is made up of Australians from all backgrounds who support an ongoing, balanced and flexible migration program. We also reject government interference in decisions regarding family size, including offering 'bonus' cash incentives to have large families. Responsible population policies are urgently required for Australia, in order to avoid draconian policies in the future.

Stabilising as soon as practicably possible will deliver us an optimum population target of around 23-26 million through to 2050. Australia's fertility rate, currently around two children per woman, and average life expectancy would largely determine the exact number. Population growth in Australia is a big problem but it is easy to solve, if our politicians have the courage.

Asylum seekers
Asylum seekers arriving by boat (recent annual average around 10,000-20,000 p/a) make up around 10 per cent of our immigration and around 5 per cent of Australia's annual population growth of around 350,000-400,000 people.

Stable Population Party supports an annual total refugee intake of around 14,000-20,000 - the highest per capita resettlement in the world

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Christian Democratic Party (Fred Nile Group)

Christian Democrat Party website

Wildlife
The Rev Hon Fred Nile MLC, Leader of the Christian Democratic Party, has supported the 'National Parks and Wildlife (Adjustment of Areas) Bill 2010' in the NSW Legislative Council.

The Christian Democratic Party supports the National Parks and Wildlife (Adjustment of Areas) Bill 2010. Once land is reserved under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 it cannot be revoked unless by an Act of Parliament. The passing of this bill will allow the revocation of land, which is sometimes necessary to address boundary errors and encroachments or to enable the development of public infrastructure that is not permissible under the National Parks and Wildlife Act.

Animal rights
"Without getting into a debate about the ideology of The Greens, they always seem to have great concern about protecting the life of animals, even unborn animals—I do not oppose that—but a lack of concern for the lives of human beings".

The Christian Democratic Party respects the advice and leadership of the Shooters and Fishers Party in the area of game and feral animal control. They have expert knowledge—far exceeding the knowledge of The Greens on this issue. The Shooters and Fishers Party are part of the self-regulation of this whole area of game management licences and that is why there have been so many improvements to the area of game and feral animal control in this State.

Live exports: The animals' throats were cut and allowed to bleed, under Islamic law. they regard it as retrograde, but the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils regards it as a positive step by the Federal Labor Government to promote sharia finance law and the introduction of halal food into Australia. However, the federation is not simply promoting that; it wants a whole system of certification that companies have to apply. Apparently the companies pay a fee that goes to the Islamic body.

Population/immigration
That the root causes of hunger, poverty and environmental decay are the breakdown of the natural family and political and economic failures, not human “overpopulation”;

We are pleased that the emphasis is on Australian schools. There has been a shortage of skilled workers in Australia, which is why hundreds of workers have been brought in from overseas on special visas to work in our industries. Ideally, we should be providing those skills from our own population and education system. The fact that we need to import hundreds of individuals from overseas on special visas highlights that our education system is not producing sufficient numbers of people with the skills needed to work in various Australian industries. As with the regulation of overseas students, we must ensure that we have the quality in our own education system to meet those needs.

Asylum seekers
CDP affirms that it is the sovereign right of any nation to determine who may enter its borders for temporary or permanent stay and that the operations of people smugglers should continue to be disrupted and frustrated.

CDP considers that Australia should continue to meet its international obligations to treat unauthorised arrivals humanely and expediently consider any claims they make for refugee status.  Persons who arrive illegally and make claims for protection that are proven false should be removed from Australia as soon as practicable.  Mandatory detention should continue for all persons without authority to be in Australia, although provisions for supervised release into the community for families with children should be considered.

Australia should continue to be a world leader in being a generous haven for genuine refugees through internationally supervised and orderly refugee resettlement programs.  Priority should be given to refugee applicants who are most likely to readily integrate into the Australian way of life, including those who are being persecuted for their Christian faith.
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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia website

Environment

“The ACF seeks to destroy Australia’s productive industries, and stop infrastructure development, because it is those things that support our human population,” Mr Isherwood pointed out.

“For example, it’s the ACF that has led the charge to shut down the Murray-Darling Basin, because it is our nation’s food-bowl.”

The green issue and climate change is a “fraud”. There is absolutely no scientific rationale behind Environment Minister Tony Burke’s opposition to letting starving cattle into national parks to feed.

As the Citizens Electoral Council exposed in its 2012 video ‘Ecosystems’: A Genocidal Fraud, the idea of the delicately-balanced ecosystem is a myth. Letting the cattle into the national parks to feed is no threat to nature; it is only a threat to the agenda of green fascism.

All Australians should demand that Tony Burke stop blocking this sensible approach to alleviating the present drought crisis.

“Who will save the farmers?” Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood demanded to know, following the Gillard government’s suspension of live cattle exports to Indonesia for up to six months.
“This whole issue is Green/media bulldust,” he declared. “The government’s decision doesn’t suddenly ensure animal welfare. It doesn’t suddenly change the practices of small-time abattoir operations in Indonesia. As Four Corners admitted, Indonesians don’t have enough refrigeration, so they rely on the live export trade to allow them to buy their beef fresh. By denying them the trade, the Indonesian people are being denied precious protein which enables them to live longer and stronger".

Population/immigration
We must establish generous immigration quotas, for the same reason which the Labor Party welcomed the "new Australians" after World War II—to help build our nation. From the very beginning, Australia has been a nation of hope and opportunity for people of many nationalities and religious backgrounds. While the CEC is opposed to the pious fraud known as "multiculturalism", because it pits one group against another, we warmly welcome those coming here to make a better life for themselves and their families. They will help build Australia (which will suffer a severe labor shortage as the rest of this platform is implemented), just as other generations of immigrants have done.

Ehrlich expressed his pessimism about avoiding disaster and called, like the Royal Society report, for a massive redistribution of resources from the rich to the poor—a grand Second Law of Thermodynamics leveling that will lead to even more rapid genocide.

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Country Alliance

Country Alliance website
Environment

Country Alliance believes that Government must state its commitment to addressing the actions and consequences of extremist environmental protesters, such as those affecting the forestry industry and others.
Government must clearly and concisely state what actions protestors can lawfully engage in, what actions or activities are illegal and proscribe specific and appropriate penalties for those activities. Due to the 'serial' nature of some protests, prescribed penalties should be compounded with each subsequent offence.

Country Alliance opposes the creation of more national and marine parks until the management of existing management parks is assessed as adequate.

Wildlife
The creation of a statutory authority in all states to manage and oversee the management of hunting of both pest animal species and game. The amendment of current legislation to permit the consumption or use of any animal or waterfowl, whether native or introduced, that is legally taken under a pest mitigation program.

The exclusion of ducks from current provisions in existing legislation is a contradiction and should be removed.

Country Alliance supports the continuation of recreational use of four wheel drive vehicles, rodeos, recreational fishing, recreational shooting and hunting and the opening up of public lands to public access.

Population/immigration/asylum seekers
The Country Alliance is not in Government and not concerned with matters outside it's area of interest and influence.
The Country Alliance prides itself on being a local party focussing on local issues which matter most to people in regional Victoria - issues like access to basic services and fair treatment.

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Democratic Labour Party (DLP)

DLP website

Wildlife
The DLP will continue to support programs and organisations that operate to protect endangered species of Australian wildlife.

Population/immigration
Concentrated excessive growth and density in urban centres puts a great strain on the environment. To limit this, we must decentralise a large proportion of the projected growth from the major cities to provincial centres. As a general principle, whenever an area of native bush land is cleared for development, another equivalent area should be protected or created.

The need to protect native plants and natural beauty must be considered before any action taken toward development.

Asylum seekers
We must focus on what we can do to help the plight of asylum seekers in a balanced, dignified, safe and compassionate way. Rather than spending billions of dollars every year on keeping asylum seekers detained offshore, we should be spending this money within our domestic economy through an onshore processing solution. This will create jobs for Australian workers while treating asylum seekers with dignity. It will save lives and strengthen our economy.

We must work more closely with our regional neighbours, particularly Indonesia, to ensure our ability to help 30,000 refugees each year in an orderly and sustainable fashion and maintaining secure borders is not undermined.

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Future Party

Future Party website
Environment
The preservation of the environment is necessary for a variety of reasons, such as to preserve our clean water, air and food sources, to avoid extinction of species and preserve genetic diversity, and to ensure that the world remains an enjoyable and comfortable habitat. The Future Party acknowledges, however, that humans have advanced by manipulating and controlling the environment and life around us. The Future Party believes that the existence of humans requires some impact on the environment we live in. It is important, however, that when a decision affecting the environment is made, options that minimise the impact on the environment should be given precedence where it is feasible to do so.
Policy: The Future Party believes that native forest logging should end.

Wildlife
Clearing of native forests threaten biodiversity and increase the chances of extinction of species. Land clearing also reduces the carbon stores of land, which add to the greenhouse effect. The Future Party sees native forest logging as being of low value to the economy, while having significant impact on the environment. Hence the Future Party is against the logging of native forests. The Future Party sees the future of the Australian timber industry being primarily based on farmed forests.

Population/immigration
The Future Party currently has no formal stance on how to prevent refugee deaths at sea. However, we do intend to increase refugee immigration intake significantly, regardless of policy with regards to irregular arrivals. We consider ourselves to be the most pro-immigration party in Australia.
James Jansson, party leader and Senate candidate, said “There is no evidence at all that the program is being exploited at the expense of Australian workers. The Government is attempting to rush through legislation for a problem that isn’t even real, let alone urgent. This is purely about acting tough on migrants for political gain.”

The Government’s own report on 457 visas shows that applications have remained steady at around 6000 applications per month since 2011. The visa grant rates appear to have actually reduced slightly in recent times, with only 5150 applications granted in April 2013. The rule will do little to change employment conditions in Australia. Many of those who obtain 457 visas go on to obtain permanent residency, becoming long-term members of our society.

The Future Party prides itself on its uniquely pro-immigration stance.  

Asylum seekers
As with increases in any form of migration, consideration must be given to the stresses that increases in population put on housing supply and infrastructure, and policies should be implemented that increase housing supply and infrastructure to ensure that migrants aren’t scapegoated for the failure of governments to plan ahead for increasing populations.

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Katter's Australian Party

Katter's Australian Party website
Environment
Katter: “These national parks have been grazed by cattle throughout almost all of their entire history – indeed some wild ‘scrubby’ beasts still remain – so there will be no difference to the flora and fauna from allowing them temporary access to greener pastures. In point of fact, national parks in North Qld have actually become ‘nurseries’ for feral animals and weeds since being locked  up by governments who are obsessed with pandering to the greenie monster.

Wildlife
Mr Katter blamed governments’ “pandering to the greenie vote at the expense of human lives and safety” for the increasing populations of dangerous, destructive and disease-carrying animals such as feral pigs, flying foxes and crocodiles encroaching on human territory. Mr Katter said licensed shooters were far more effective and preferable to baiting, which was indiscriminate to species such as native carrion birds, or trapping, which captured young cassowaries.

Animal rights
Mr Katter said no one had accepted responsibility or been punished for the animal welfare breaches and suspension of trade, except the cattle men in Northern Australia and millions of Indonesians who were potentially going hungry. Federal Independent MPs Katter and Wilkie also want training for abattoir workers and the upgrading of abattoirs to ensure humane slaughtering of Australian live-stock is maintained to Australian standards, while working with Indonesian authorities.

Within seven days, they also want the government to deploy 60 stun guns, knocking boxes and video cameras with appropriate training measures.

Population/immigration
Australia's sovereignty and independence as a nation requires Australia to have a sufficient population and for that population to be so distributed as to demonstrate occupation, control and utilisation of our land, water and other resources. Australia needs to increase its population to achieve acceptable levels of economic, scientific, strategic and personal development. Government must develop immigration and birth rate policies consistent with these principles. In addition, the population growth needs to be distributed widely throughout Australia and especially into northern Australia.

Federal Queensland MP Bob Katter declared war on mining magnates lobbying for unskilled foreign workers to be flown in to fill job shortages in Queensland. Mr Katter said the move would take jobs from Australians and undermine the nation's wage structure.
Mr Katter slammed the Federal Government for considering the plan.

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Liberal Democratic Party

Liberal Democratic Party website
Environment
Although some people view humans and the environment as distinct and separate, in reality humans rely on the environment in the same way as any other species. All animals and plants utilise what they need to survive and flourish, adapting to the environment and making it adapt to them. Inevitably, the environment changes as a consequence.

There is nothing inherently superior about the "natural" environment, a term that simply refers to that part of the environment man has not extensively modified, nor anything inferior about the man-made environment. The elevation by some people of the natural environment to semi-religious status is no more than a reflection of their personal beliefs and values. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) aims for a more balanced perspective.

Some people simply prefer the look of them and, because they have been here longer, many native species are also more practical because they are better adapted to Australian conditions. However, a lot of species introduced by Europeans are far more useful to humans. Indeed, Australia would not be able to support a fraction of its current population were it not for exotic species. 

The LDP supports a vigorous, sustainable forestry industry. However, we regard governments as unsuitable providers of forestry services, incapable of achieving the goals of forestry more efficiently than private owners. Moreover, public funding of government forestry bureaucracies has contributed to waste and poor resource utilisation for decades.

Population/immigration
The LDP would increase opportunities to live and work in Australia while carefully guarding access to welfare and citizenship. The LDP believes the free movement of people, within and between countries, generally contributes to greater prosperity.

 It believes immigrants contribute a net social and economic benefit to Australia and advocates expanding opportunities to live, study and work in Australia while carefully guarding access to welfare and citizenship.
 
The LDP also supports “Free Immigration Agreements” with certain countries similar to the existing agreement with New Zealand.
 
Asylum seekers
It is important that Australia provides a sanctuary for people who are fleeing political oppression and persecution, both on compassionate grounds and to demonstrate to the rest of the world the attractions of a free and democratic society. Such people can also become fierce advocates of freedom in Australia, having experienced its loss.

After paying the immigration fee a migrant will become a Permanent Resident. PRs will have the same rights to live and work as citizens except they cannot vote, they do not receive an Australian passport, they are not entitled to welfare income payments (though they may still use public health, education and infrastructure) and they may be deported if they commit crimes of a serious nature or are unable to support themselves.
 
Migrants will be free to remain in Australia permanently as PRs without ever applying for citizenship or returning to their home country at any time. The maintenance of a significant non-citizen population is common in many countries including Singapore, Switzerland, Dubai, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan.

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National Party of Australia

National Party of Australia website

Population/immigration
“By 2050, Australia’s population will balloon to 40 million mouths to feed. At the same time, the world population will explode to over 9 billion. And half of these people will live in the Asia-Pacific region, literally on our northern doorstep.

“The world is entering an era of food shortage and shrinking farm production as water and farmland are eaten up by urban sprawl. Australia must ensure we can meet our future domestic needs but also capitalise on ever-growing world food needs. Their solution is to build and settle the north of Australia".

Asylum seekers
If elected, a Coalition government will establish a military-led response to combat people smuggling and to protect our borders – Operation Sovereign Borders.

An incoming Coalition government will treat the border protection crisis as a national emergency and tackle it with the focus and energy that an emergency demands.

The scale of this problem requires the discipline and focus of a targeted military operation, placed under a single operational and ministerial command and drawing together all the necessary resources and deployments of government agencies.
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One Nation

One Nation website

Population/immigration
One Nation believes in balanced, zero net immigration (subject to review depending on economic conditions) and that coming to Australia is a privilege that must not be undervalued. We reserve the right of discretion in protecting our economy, social cohesion and cultural heritage.
This does NOT mean zero immigration.

The justification for our policy of not exceeding zero net immigration is that environmentally, Australia is near her carrying capacity. Economically, immigration is unsustainable and socially, if continued as is, will lead to a further ethnically divided Australia. Current policy is encouraging large numbers of illegal migrants and it is time Australia, while recognising the contribution made by migrants in the past, sends to the world the message that mass immigration has passed its “use by date.” 

Asylum seekers
We are losing control of our borders, and it is costing the Australian taxpayer billions of dollars. Australians wanting help with housing, health and services are pushed to the back of the queue because the illegals are more important. Remember we are on the world stage and Rudd and Gillard had to present themselves as leaders of a caring and compassionate country with regards to refugees in the eyes of the world.  

What we have here is someone coming into your home telling you they like your house better than theirs and they are going to live with you. You have to feed, cloth, care, and educate them while looking after their needs. Your children now have to share a room and you have to make the dollars stretch further to provide for them. They don’t have to work you are providing for them. If you don’t give them what they want they will complain and you will be forced to answer why you are so inhumane not to have them live in your home, that you worked hard for. 

A clear message from Australians is 'stop the boats'. Now we see Rudd and his Labor puppeteers, Bob Carr and Tony Bourke, espousing that they are economic refugees and have no right to come to Australia, after all these years and 46,000 boat people later. What a backflip and do they think Australians are that gullible?

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Palmer United Party

Palmer United Party website

Animal rights
Mr Palmer said that large sectors of the rural economy had been disrupted as a result of Labor’s inability to handle the issue of live cattle exports.
“They’ve abandoned the country because they are more concerned with their own internal politics and factions,” Mr Palmer said.
“This issue has been around for so long but nothing has been fixed – it’s a disgrace.”

Population/immigration
Over the last half century, in particular, Australia’s political, economic, social and cultural development has been expanded and accelerated by the migration of people from all parts of the world.
The success of modern Australia has been its ability to accommodate in harmony such diversity of backgrounds, and to find in that diversity not division but strength in the common acknowledgement of an Australian nationhood, its meaning and importance.

Asylum seekers
Revising the current Australian Government’s Refugee Policy to ensure Australia is protected and refugees are given opportunities for a better future and lifestyle. We spend Billions of dollars each year trying to deal with illegal entry into Australia. Our Navy is deployed at great cost and does
not now do what it should do and defend Australia. People are attracted to this country by many financial and other benefits that the government offers. Families of new arrivals are separated and kept in camps at the taxpayers’ expense and many people lose their lives while people smugglers make a fortune. While all this is going on the Australian People continue to suffer. We need to change things. It is the Australian government that creates the market for people smugglers to prosper.

If a person seeking entry into Australia was allowed to board a plane for $800 to fly to one of our airports such as Sydney or Brisbane they wouldn’t need to pay the People Smugglers up to $20,000 for illegal entry to Australia.

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Rise Up Australia Party

Rise Up Australia Party website

Environment
To ensure that Australia’s natural resources (forestry, minerals, fisheries, agriculture, water, biodiversity etc) and unique environments are managed wisely in accord with rational science and not by ideological environmental mantras; we therefore advocate expansion of scientific research by Australians on such areas as the marine environment, ecosystems, timber, agriculture etc.

We believe in “climate change” – for thousands of years the climate has been changing and it will continue to change; the notion that anthropogenic emissions of the plant-food carbon dioxide have affected, or will affect, the macro-climatic changes that would have occurred anyway as part of nature (e.g. volcanoes, solar variations etc) is a quasi-religious hypothesis unproven by objective scientific facts. Computer modelling always involves subjectivity and should not be used as the sole basis for policies;

Population/immigration
To promote harmony, freedom and tolerance among Australians; specifically we oppose multiculturalism; we rejoice that Australia is multi-ethnic, and that people who come here are free to celebrate (at their own, not taxpayers’ expense) their own diverse backgrounds, while respecting Australian culture and complying with Australian laws;

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Socialist Alliance

Socialist Alliance website
Environment
Capitalist globalisation is destroying the earth. We live under the reign of a class willing to jeopardise our lives and those of future generations for quick cash.

Capitalism destroys habitat and renders species extinct, yet the survival of animal and plant life is essential for human progress and should not be counterposed to so-called "development". We are bombarded with chemicals in our food, water and air. We are assailed by poisons at work, at home and in our communities. In our hands, technology will be used for human progress; in the hands of capitalists, it is used to plunder our world. The destruction of the once-mighty Murray-Darling river system, the mobilisation of megatonnes of salt which threatens not only agriculture but many rural towns (and, in time, cities); the lunacy of open-cut and acid leaching uranium mines; the huge volume of asbestos released from decaying cement sheeting and insulation - these are disasters which may take centuries to rectify, even in a socialist Australia.

"Capitalism" and "sustainability" are mutually exclusive concepts. Only socialism is sustainable

Animal rights
While supplementing and eventually replacing live animal exports for meat production with Australian frozen processed meat exports, subsidising the creation of a market for feral animal products within Australian and internationally, including non-meat production live camel etc exports.

Population/immigration
The fear that immigrants will be used as cheap labour should be countered by recruiting them to unions and insisting that they be paid the same as other workers doing the same job.

In recent years, with the rise of the environmental movement, there has been a rise of environmental arguments for limiting immigration. Those who put forward these views argue that population growth is the main cause of environmental problems. Hence they say that limiting population growth is the key to saving Australia's environment. Immigration restrictions will supposedly enable Australians to have a good environment, even if the environment deteriorates in the rest of the world.

Those advocating these views want Australians to have a relatively privileged environment compared to the rest of the world.
Some environmental problems (e.g. global warming) can only be solved on a world scale. Limiting immigration to Australia won't help with these problems.

Other problems occur on a national scale (e.g. water shortage). But this does not mean that population control is the only or the best solution.
Australia's problems with water have little to do with population. Most water is used in agriculture. And since most agricultural products are sold on the world market, Australia's population has very little effect on the amount of water used.

A lot of water is wasted in irrigated agriculture. Water evaporates or soaks into the soil from open channels before it reaches the crops. These channels should be replaced with pipes.

Rice and cotton production in semi-desert areas uses enormous amounts of water. Production of these crops should be cut back and replaced by more suitable crops.

Asylum seekers
End the Liberal and Labor bipartisan policy of keeping refugees out of under the guise of attacking “people smuggling” and “border security”. Ending this policy would include the following measures:
a.Abolish the concept of a “safe third country” which is used to screen out those who would otherwise be assessed as refugees;
b.Return Christmas Island, Ashmore and Cartier islands and Cocos (Keeling) islands to Australia's migration zone, thus enabling asylum seekers arriving on these Australian territories to have the same rights as asylum seekers who arrive on the Australian mainland;
c.Immediately resettle all UNHCR-assessed refugees stranded in Indonesia and Malaysia, neither of which is a signatory to the UN refugee convention;
d.End the deals with the Indonesian, Malaysian and Sri Lankan governments to stop refugees coming to Australia under the guise of “stopping people smuggling”. End the practice of giving financial aid to the Sri Lankan navy to stop Tamil asylum seekers leaving Sri Lanka.
e.Abolish the legislation that criminalises people smuggling.
f.End offshore processing

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The Wikileaks Party

The Wikileaks Party website

Asylum seekers
In the Senate, the WikiLeaks Party will:
-Demand full access to asylum seekers held in detention for media, NGOs, and human rights organisations and agencies.
-Demand government accountability over treatment of asylum seekers, including support for:
Reversal of the Rudd Government’s PNG arrangement.
Processing of asylum seekers arriving in Australia by the Australian government.

A cap of 45 days in immigration detention for any asylum seeker, for initial health and security checks, with any extension requiring judicial approval.
Requiring the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) to report to Parliament every 6 months on its case load, processes, results, and the health of detainees.

Repeal of the excision of Australian territories from the migration zone.
-Demand accountability in the assessment of asylum claims, including:
Opposing any legislative change to restrict or obfuscate the legal definition of a refugee.

Ensuring the Refugee Review Tribunal is respected and adequately resourced as a judicial body, able to assess facts independently and free from executive influence.

Supporting measures to subject ASIO security assessments to comprehensive and expedient judicial review, including rights of appeal for asylum seekers.

-Support measures to stem the flow of asylum seekers at the source, by working towards a foreign policy based on human rights and international law, averting conflict from the outset.

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While our government is condemned as being heartless and lacking compassion for asylum seekers, it must be considered in a national and global context.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’. People leave their countries and seek asylum for many reasons—political persecution, ethnic persecution and gender-based violence. Overpopulation isn't one of them! (Originally published 30 July 2013, 11:23:16 +1000)

When the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established in 1951, there were approximately 1.5 million refugees internationally.    At the end of 2012 there were 15.4 million refugees.

According to the latest figures there were 28.8 million IDPs (Internally Displaced Peoples) around the world, and global number has steadily increased from a total of around 17 million in 1997.

The annual UNHCR global trends in displacement report highlights that last year 7.6 million people were newly displaced due to conflict or persecution, with a total of 45.2 million people around the world in situations of displacement, meaning that more people are refugees or internally displaced than at any point since 1994.

On an average day in 2012, 23,000 people were forced to flee their homes around the world, which is more than total number of people claiming asylum in Australia for the entire year.

Global population has swollen from just over 2.5 billion in 1951, to now 7 billion - and growing. There are no new frontiers to settle in.

Growth in numbers of refugees since Vietnam

The Vietnam War ended in 1975 but their troubles did not, and over two million people in Indo-China became refugees in the 1970s.

Over the next five years from 1976 there were 2059 Vietnamese boat arrivals with the last arriving in August 1981. From 1989  boats arrived at the rate of about 300 people per annum for the next 9 years—mostly from Cambodia, Vietnam and southern China. 

The number of asylum seekers seeking refuge in all countries, including Australia, began to rise again in 2006. This was due to the state of emergency that was declared in Sri Lanka in 2005 and the US troop surge in Iraq in 2007. Afghanistan remained the main country of origin of asylum-seekers (36,600 claims versus 36,200 in 2011). Syria was the second largest, the conflict there reflected in a jump from 15th place in 2011 and a 191 per cent increase in asylum claims to 24,800.

Atrocious conditions in Somalia and Sudan have generated huge refugee flows, but number of East African "irregular entrants" known to be in Indonesia is tiny by comparison with South Asians and Middle East people. The scope and range of refugee sources is widening.

The majority of asylum seekers arriving in Australia irregularly by boat in recent years have been from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sri Lanka.
Forced displacement has become a defining characteristic of sub-Saharan Africa, obliging people to abandon their homes and seek refuge elsewhere, often at the price of serious threats to their welfare and rights. The African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa, known as the Kampala Convention, breaks new ground in articulating the rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs), and the responsibilities of states, regional organizations, and other actors to uphold them.

With almost ten million people internally displaced across twenty-one sub-Saharan African states, the continent is home to one third of the world’s IDPs.
Kampala Convention

Australia's population growth

Australia's population in 1951 was nearing 8.5 million, and in 1975, Australia's population was less than 13.5 million people. Australia's current population growth of 1.8% is higher than that of the Philippines, Malaysia or India. 

Due to the tight regulation on asylum seekers, Australia receives relatively less refugees compared to other countries. As the world’s sixth largest country, in 2009, Australia only accepted 0.6% of asylum seekers in the world.
This must be inconsideration to our environmental resources, and high domestic population growth.

Australia is a small nation on a large landscape.  The allusion of having large frontiers, of boundless plains to share, and capable of inhabiting millions more people is attractive, but unrealistic.

The cost of supporting more than 40,000 asylum seekers expected to be in Australia next financial year is set to average more than $70,000 each person.

This is at a time our cities already are struggling with infrastructure short-falls. Lobby groups claim that the government needs to fund $500 billion debt for infrastructure needed due to population growth.

Papua New Guinea solution

The move to settle asylum seekers in PNG  is likely to see a significant part of the cost of the asylum seeker problem carried in the foreign aid budget. Australia has agreed to a significant increase in direct assistance to PNG as well as carrying the cost of resettling asylum seekers there. 

Mr Rudd said the policy was likely to be expensive in its early stages but would ultimately reduce the budget cost of asylum seekers over time as he anticipated it would lead to a drop in arrivals.

The capacity of the Manus Island detention centre will increase from 600 people to 3000 people. Mr Rudd signalled further facilities will be established in PNG, saying there would be
“no cap on the number of people who can be transferred to Papua New Guinea”.

2.3 percent population growth is a comfortable sounding figure but what this really means is that Papua New Guineans produce over two hundred and seventy thousand babies every year. It’s the equivalent of the entire population of the Chimbu Province. 

Papua New Guinea faces many challenges in resettling refugees given many of its people already struggle to find jobs and housing.

The Asian Development Bank estimates only 5 per cent of PNG's population is engaged in formal sector employment. Approximately 85 per cent of the population live in rural areas, where they live a subsistence lifestyle or participate in the informal economy.

The causes of displacement

When all a nation's agricultural land and natural resources are used up, and there are more people than there are jobs, water, food and resources, there are only three choices:
a) live in life-threatening poverty,
b) leave for greener pastures,
c) force others to leave. This last is 'persecution'.

Refugees aren't just fleeing intolerance in a vacuum. They are fleeing overpopulation, plus the greed of corporations and developed nations' predation for dwindling natural wealth.

The refugee convention is hopelessly out of date now, based as it is on 1950's world outlook following World War when there were thousands of genuine refugees after that appalling war. We are living through only the beginning of what will degenerate into a world debacle of people 'gatecrashing' countries where life may hold a better future.

Skilled visas accounted for 68 per cent of the 2007-08 migration program, and family reunion 31 per cent. We should be taking more proven genuine refugees, not making them into a political football with random arrivals! Our population growth is a political decision, not inevitable!

Stable Population Australia say:

    “Rather than aiming to resettle ever-increasing numbers of people, our policy aim should be to relieve the pressures that force migration in the first place, and help people live in peace and harmony in their homeland.”

Kevin Rudd recently observed that the world has changed since the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention was created.

Then, potential refugee flows numbered only tens of thousands; now they are tens of millions.

Growing poverty in Australia – a political inconvenience

While Australia is viewed as a choice destination for asylum seekers, our cities are under considerable stress from being under resourced. According to ACOSS ,(Australian Council of Social Services )   Last year 2,265,000 Australians (12.8% of all people) are living below the poverty line after taking account of their housing costs.

Community groups decry the state of housing affordability and availability across the country. In Victoria, over 36,000 people are on the public housing waiting list. A report from Australians for Affordable Housing shows that Victoria has some of the least affordable housing in the country and highlights yet again the crippling impact that high housing costs are having on our community.

For the year ending December 2012, net overseas migration was 235,900. (not including the temporary migrants).   

Family Planning initiatives

Last year the Government of the United Kingdom and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with UNFPA and other partners, pledged $2.6 billion to make family planning available to 120 million women in developing countries by 2020.

Human displacement caused by conflicts from competition for dwindling resources can be avoided through sensible, global family planning.  Overpopulation denies people the living standards they need, and the ability to live in harmony with others.

Adam Creighton and Oliver Marc Hartwich
Centre for Independent Studies: 2011

The report is about local councils being at the coalface of population growth. Their ability to adequately provide basic infrastructure for more people will affect how Australians perceive the costs and benefits of population growth.

See also: Stop beating about the bush and talk about Big Australia in Sydney Morning Herald of 4 Aug 2010. Includes broadcast talk by Ross Gittins on Julia Gillard's election promise to reduce immigration

Australia's Angry Mayors: How Population Growth Frustrates Local Councils

Population growth affects a council’s budget. It usually results in extra revenue from charges and rates, but it also requires extra investment in infrastructure and increased spending on services. If we want to find out how local government is predisposed to dealing with population increases, we need to understand how extra revenue and extra costs play out in practice.

A report in the local Leader newspaper, Wednesday 17th July:
RATE RISES HIT HOME HARD

Homeowners will soon receive their council rates notices and the news won't be good.
No council across Melbourne has managed to hold its rates increases at the 2.5 percent inflation mark.
In contrast, several shires in regional Victoria say they will achieve a rates increase at or below inflation.
Across Melbourne, the hardest hit ratepayers are in Nillumbik. They will pay an extra 9.95%, an average rise of $210.
Budgets will also be stretched in Banyule, where rates will rise 7.95 per cent, or $110, and Casey rate are going up 7.5per cent, or $114.
Moreland is the best performer and has managed its lowest rise in a decade - 2.9 per cent, or $41. Others to get the tick of homeowners approval are Bayside and Glen Eira (both up 3.5 per cent) and Whitehorse at 3.9 per cent, or an average of $49.
Maroondah is to be commended for chopping its expected rise from 5.6 to 4.9 per cent, acknowledging that its residents were doing it tough.
As rates and household bill continue to to rise faster than inflation, councils must do more to explore hardships and relief programs.

Researchers conducted an online survey of all 558 local governments in Australia (mayors and chief executives). The survey comprised 18 questions. Four key findings emerged from the 120 valid responses (or 21.5% of the entire sample):

• Local governments have been raising property rates to meet the costs of population growth.
These rises are more likely in more populous and rapidly growing communities.

• Almost one-third of respondents, particularly larger councils, said population growth was damaging their bottom line, and that they were concerned about upgrading infrastructure.

•About 80% of respondents use developer levies to help pay for the costs of population growth.
Levies are used more widely by larger councils, and particularly in NSW and Queensland.

•Only a fraction of respondents thought their existing revenue mechanisms were wholly adequate. Indeed, more than half of the respondents in NSW and Queensland said the current setup was not satisfactory. Overwhelmingly, local councils think better access to ongoing revenue streams would alleviate some of the pressures of accommodating extra population.

Former US Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once famously said, ‘all politics is local.’
No sector exemplifies this better than population growth. As population grows, people require new houses, schools, health services, roads, and waste management facilities. A growing population in Playford has to be addressed in Playford. If Queanbeyan needs a new school, there is no use building one in Mount Barker.

Alexis De Tocqueville, the great French liberal writer, observed with envious approval the success of local governments in New England in the United States when he toured there. He wrote in the 1830s:
The strength of free peoples resides in the local community. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it.

Council Rates

Local governments obtain much of their revenue from rates, a form of land tax levied on the unimproved value of land within the local government jurisdiction paid directly by landowners. About 80% of local government revenues come from rates, fines and user charges for use of local services. The easiest way for councils to collect taxes is to base them on land value.

Despite the economic boom in Western Australia and Wanneroo, the city does not generate enough revenue to build extra infrastructure for its growing population. Residents are already dealing with more traffic, loss of amenities, and crowding of public services—and yet they are being asked to pay for accommodating more people. The local council raised its rates by 6.9% in its 2010–11 budget.

Altogether, a majority of councils increased rates to deal with population growth. There were, however, some variations among states.

Unsurprisingly, the degree of population growth influenced the use of rate hikes. The stronger the population growth, the more likely rates were increased to cope with it. Larger councils were more likely to increase rates, while smaller councils were more reluctant.

Population growth’s bottom line effect

The financial effects of population growth on a council’s bottom line are ambiguous. Councils face higher costs associated with providing infrastructure and services for extra residents, but earn more revenue through increased rates and additional grants from state and federal governments.

More than half the survey respondents believed that population growth had a positive net effect on their council’s bottom line, citing the long-term benefits of population growth over the significant short- to medium-term funding shortfalls.

Smaller councils believed that the positive financial effect of population growth outweighed the costs of development. With bigger councils it was the reverse.

There is no perfect solution to the concerns that local governments have about their ability to finance the costs of population growth. Government, of whatever size, will always desire more funds. Council rate revenue, however, comes after new population, and is not sufficient to cover larger upfront capital costs that a surge of new residents requires. Moreover, rates may not increase very much if the new population is housed in higher density residential apartments
and rates are levied solely on the value of land.

Their results indicate that mayors and senior management of local governments believe financial constraints are impeding their ability to manage the inflow of people. Almost one-third of our survey respondents believe additional migration is a net cost to their budget.

As a result, councils are increasing their rates, penalising existing residents—hardly an inducement to embrace change—or using developer levies, which push the cost of new development wholly onto developers and potential residents.

Australia’s Angry Mayors: How Population Growth Frustrates Local Councils

Wills-Parliamentary Secretary for Trade, Kelvin Thomson, condemns the East West link. There is indeed a transport congestion issue for Melbourne, and we are presently growing by 200 people a day: 1,500 people a week, 75,000 people a year. It is said that we already have 2 million cars in Melbourne, but by, I think, 2036—20-odd years away—we will have an extra one million cars.

SPEECH
Date
Monday, 27 May 2013 Source House

Speaker
Thomson, Kelvin,

Mr KELVIN THOMSON
(Wills—Parliamentary Secretary for Trade) (13:00): There is indeed a transport congestion issue for Melbourne, and we are presently growing by 200 people a day: 1,500 people a week, 75,000 people a year. It is said that we already have 2 million cars in Melbourne, but by, I think, 2036—20-odd years away—we will have an extra one million cars.

That is truly mind-boggling. So there is certainly a transport congestion issue.

But there are better transport projects than this. The member for McEwen pointed out the proposal for rail to Mernda and there are projects that would be much better for the member for Aston's own constituents, like the rail to Doncaster link, a public transport link to the Monash University and the Melbourne Metro.

I have supported road projects over the years. I have supported the Western Ring Road, I have supported CityLink,

I have supported EastLink and I have supported the Craigieburn bypass. But there is always one more road to build; the problems are never solved in this way.

By contrast, federal Labor's plan to keep Melbourne moving involves investing in both its road and rail infrastructure. That is why we have been working on the Melbourne Metro project. It was, after all, $40 million in funding from the federal government which enabled the Victorian government to get this project shovel ready.

The Melbourne Metro project will untangle the inner core of the rail network and open it up for the future.

The recent budget allocated $3 billion for the Melbourne Metro, and the Victorian transport minister recently said: It is our No. 1 transport priority.

The fact is that it will improve existing services and allow for more and longer trains to move across the network.

It will make sure an extra 20,000 people an hour can travel on the Melbourne rail network. And, as Melbourne grows, the Melbourne Metro is the core that is needed before you can start building new spurs, like a future Doncaster railway line, a new link to the Melbourne airport or the Avalon rail link.

By contrast, if the Leader of the Opposition were elected he has made it clear in recent weeks that there would be no federal funding for any public transport infrastructure project, not just in Victoria but nationwide. Regrettably, such an unbalanced, roads-only approach will lead to more gridlock, worsening congestion and a poorer quality of life in our cities.

Furthermore, it is a con job. The amount of money being proposed by the opposition is way short of what would actually be required in order for the East-West Link road tunnel to be completed.

The opposition leader talks about $1½ billion towards construction of the tunnel. However, estimates of the tunnel talk about $5 billion, $6 billion or even $8 billion. Just as Tom Cruise said in Jerry Maguire the question here is, 'show me the money'.

At present it is a con job.

The question for motorists is: how exactly will the Victorian government fund this proposal? They have talked about tolling the proposed tunnel. Adam Carey reported in The Age on 15 May that a study by University College in London found that the tolls on the planned East-West Link would have been three times the current cost of an average trip on CityLink for the project's investors to make a profit. So, given that an average trip on CityLink costs $3.50, tolls would need to start at around $10.50 for a car trip of a couple of metres.

There have also been reports that the Victorian government would consider selling off, tolling or privatising existing roads, such as the Eastern Freeway or the Westgate Bridge, to pay for the East-West Link tunnel. I think these are ludicrous proposals, but the coalition needs to rule them out. The public should not have to be paying tolls on roads that have been public property for decades.

There is also a mountain of evidence and community feedback casting serious doubts over the viability of the proposed tunnel. Josh Gordon reported in The Age very recently that the Hoddle Street traffic nightmare would still remain, or even possibly worsen, after this tunnel was completed. We have heard concerns expressed from residents in Flemington and Travancore about how it is going to affect them.

We have had the spokesperson for the Protectors of Public Lands Victoria, Julianne Bell, raising serious concerns about the tunnel's potential impact on places like Royal Park, Princes Park and Parkville. The bottom line is that the coalition stands for more gridlock, more congestion and a poorer quality of life. By contrast, Labor stands for better, more accessible public transport and more livable cities.

Debate adjourned.

A study by researchers at Rockefeller University in New York that found we're using more agriculture now than we ever still claims there's going to be fewer of us at some point. It's just not a lack of available farmland or food that's going to kill us. Jesse Ausebel explains that while the common perception is that meeting humanity’s food needs is the task of farmers, there are many other players, including those of us who can choose what to eat and how many children to have. It's a denial of Malthus' warnings.

See also: USDA agricultural census program is a covert surveillance operation to compile government database of food and farm assets of 27 March 2013 - Ed

A study by researchers at Rockefeller University in New York that found we're using more agriculture now than we ever still claims there's going to be fewer of us at some point. It's just not a lack of available farmland or food that's going to kill us. Jesse Ausebel explains that while the common perception is that meeting humanity’s food needs is the task of farmers, there are many other players, including those of us who can choose what to eat and how many children to have. It's a denial of Malthus' warnings.

Earth has hit 'peak farmland,' new study says.

Researchers at Rockefeller University say crops will need less room to grow by 2060. But they leave out climate change and the debate over genetically modified food.

A study by researchers at Rockefeller University in New York that found we're using more agriculture now than we ever will still says there's going to be fewer of us at some point. It's just not a lack of available farmland or food that's going to kill us.

Jesse Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, told Reuters that declining population growth and increased crop production will decrease the amount of necessary farmland by 10% and return an area of land 2 1/2 times the size of France to its natural state by 2060. On the contrary, a June 2012 report by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), says that an extra net 70 million hectares of land worldwide would have to be cultivated in 2050 compared to now: "Land and water resources are now much more stressed than in the past and are becoming scarcer," it says, referring to factors such as soil degradation and salinisation.

"We believe that humanity has reached peak farmland, and that a large net global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," Ausubel wrote in the journal Population and Development Review. "Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers."

Ausubel and his co-authors optimistically see a reasonable prospect for conserving, and restoring, forests and other stressed terrestrial ecosystems even as humanity exerts an ever greater influence on the planet.

He explains that while the common perception is that meeting humanity’s food needs is the task of farmers, there are many other players, including those of us who can choose what to eat and how many children to have:

[T]he main actors are parents changing population, workers changing affluence, consumers changing the diet (more or less calories, more or less meat) and also the portion of crops entering the food supply (corn can fuel people or cars), and farmers changing the crop production per hectare of cropland (yield).

Scientists see promise for people and nature in peak farmland

It's said that changing diets is harder than changing religion! It assumes that more will be created from less. Nature has natural limits and can't be manipulated.

Slowing population growth?

A slowing down of population growth is being confused with declining human numbers. On the contrary, it has reached staggering levels in recent years—the number of people on the planet has doubled from 3.5 billion to seven billion in just a half century. global fertility rate still hovers around 2.5 children per woman. At that rate, population will grow to 11 billion by 2050 and nearly 27 billion by 2100. Human population numbers are predicted to trend downward around the world within a few generations as shown in developed countries. This is not the same as population decline! The United Nations Population Fund predicts that population “may” peak in the late 21st century and then begin to shrink.

Ausubel's study said the global arable land and permanent crop areas rose from 3.38 billion acres in 1961 to 3.78 billion acres in 2009. His belief is that it will fall to 3.41 billion acres in 2060. Meanwhile, it also projects that crop growth would outpace food supply by 0.4% a year until 2060, up from 0.24% a year from 1961-2010.

After decades of rapidly growing global agricultural output, #10;http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n12/full/ncomms2296.html">production of four of the world’s most important crops could be stagnating or even slowing in some regions, according to a new study published in Nature, a top scientific journal. there have been scattered reports of yield stagnation in the world’s major cereal crops, including maize, rice and wheat.

While the planet faces many "peaks" of natural resources, it's converging with increasing demands. While population growth may be “slowing down” , the number of people living on the planet has never been higher, and our levels of consumption are unprecedented. It's causing vast changes in the environment, and threats of scarcity of essential resources. Governments continue to ignore the problem in favour of economic growth.

The implications are heavy, not just for humans, but for wildlife. As David Attenborough says, human population growth is one of the greatest threats to our planet. Expanding human numbers will compromise natural habitats as more resources are needed to feed people.

Malthusian Catastrophe

A Malthusian catastrophe is a situation in which a society returns to a subsistence level of existence as a result of overtaxing its available agricultural resources. The idea of a Malthusian catastrophe was put forward by Thomas Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 . Malthus pointed out that human populations tend to grow exponentially, while the capabilities of agricultural resources tend to grow arithmetically.

What is the Malthusian Catastrophe

The solution is in our hands. Excessive human behaviors must end, not just to preserve polar bears, gorillas, lions and other fauna, but to avoid a Malthusian crisis of food production failing to meet the growing number mouths to feed. While it's evident that animals can overshoot their habitats, it's foolishly assumed that humans can multiply and enjoy a continuous abundance of Nature's goodness and provision, without limits.

World populations are still growing. So is the global middle class, members of which tend to consume more meat and dairy per person, which means more crops per person. Being on top of the food chain, and human dominance, exacerbates the crisis as livestock products mean the consumption of more crops, land and resources. More crops for use as biofuels and a shift towards more meat consumption in emerging economies such as China or India - demanding more cropland to feed livestock - would not offset a fall from the peak driven by improved yields, it calculated.

It also doesn't address the potential effects of climate change in the least, as a United Nations farming study did in June. That research found that the world will need an extra 173 million acres of farmland by 2050 to compensate for degraded and polluted soil and land inundated by rising ocean salt water.

Ausubel also makes the fairly broad assumption that the world is perfectly OK with just how crop production has increased and how it's affected the world's food supply. Already, China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, India, Chile and countries within the European Union have laws requiring genetically modified foods to be labeled as such. A ballot measure that would have required similar labeling in California failed after food companies including Monsanto (MON -0.46%) and Hershey (HSY -0.59%) spent $44 million to oppose it.

Jesse Ausubel writes that “projections for the 21st century based on the historical patterns I find suggest that many of the usual specters of shortage and fallout are phantoms. Instead, I see a society learning to use resources efficiently and cleanly. Keys described along the way include market substitution, precision agriculture, dematerialization, decarbonization, and industrial ecology”. In other words, he adheres to the cornucopia ideal.

With all the technology, and “isms”, there 's no limits to the planet.

Not only this, but Ausubel claims that
world GDP itself would rise from about $25 to $200 trillion, giving 10 billion people $20,000 each in 2100. Population growth and more knowledge will continue to bring prosperity!

Also, “during the next 100 years the human economy will clear most of the carbon from its system and move, via natural gas, to a hydrogen metabolism, Hydrogen, fortunately, is the immaterial material. It can be manufactured from something abundant, namely water, it can substitute for most solid, liquid and gaseous fuels in use, and the product of its combustion, water vapor, does not pollute. The next decades will see a vigorous growth in the hydrogen industry...”

Ausubel assumes that “If dynamics continue as usual, farmers will grow 8 tons per hectare around 2060, at the end of the decade in which the United Nations projects population to reach 10 billion. From the Great Plains of America to the Great Plains of China, reversion of farms and ranches to woods and grasses will be a spreading, major environmental feature of the next decades, and beyond. And governments will avidly seek rationales to subsidize agriculture to keep it from contracting more rapidly than culture will allow.”

The past can't be a model for the future. Despite the decline of soils, phosphorus and climate change, Mother Nature will ensure that crops become more efficient, so much so, that land will be released back to woodlands and grasslands!

Thomas Malthus

“The power of population is so superior to the power of earth to produce subsistence (food) to humanity that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” Thomas Malthus 1798

Population expert David M. Delaney said that Malthus was an optimist because he didn’t understand “overshoot” or humans’ ability to grow at fantastic rates of speed to overwhelm food resources—so they crash suddenly. 

3rd Annual Malthus Lecture, May 2012 Washington DC, concluded that “Today, approximately 1 billion people are chronically malnourished, even as our agricultural systems are degrading land, water, biodiversity, and climate on a global scale...”

To meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs, global food production must grow substantially while, at the same time, agriculture’s environmental footprint must shrink dramatically.

It seems that soils must become more efficient, Nature must be tweaked to produce more with less, and that technology must be further fine-tuned to be more effective, with less energy, but human reproduction rates are untouchable!

Video:
Third Annual Malthus Lecture" – How can we feed a growing world and still sustain the planet.

New Population theory Book! Demography, Territory & Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations (see link). Forensic biologist, Hans Brunner writes of it: "This book takes us to a completely new paradigm in multiple species population science. It shows how little we understand, and how much we need to know, of the sexual reactions when closed colonies with an orderly reproduction system are destroyed, be it people or animals." Two chapters are on multi-species demography, the rest apply the theory to non-industrial societies and the author comes up with a completely new test for the collapse model of Easter Island, which will stun those who thought they knew all about it.

Fire taxes and people taxes - Are we seeing the genesis of what could well be the next tax imposition for the people of Victoria to pay for the population growth that the state forces on us?

It’s been clear for many years that population growth is costing us all big time in Australia and that’s just the money side of it. I’ll set aside the impact of population growth on the environment, the welfare of other animals, our amenity and livability for another discussion.

About 10 years ago, it dawned on the people I know that population growth was not just something that happened on the outer fringes of the capital cities where we never go but that it was pushing its way into the established suburbs. At first, relatively unnoticed but as the rate and volume increased, we all watched in dismay as neigbouring suburban gardens disappeared, houses were demolished for larger, bulkier edifices and our familiar mix of built and un-built environment was transformed into something that would be unrecognizable to anyone who had been absent for a decade. The word “infrastructure” then insidiously crept into our media lexicon ad nauseum. Services such as sewerage and roads and provision of power that we took for granted as being provided by various arms of government suddenly seemed to be in a crisis of ageing and inadequacy. We all knew that there was a cost to this, ultimately payable by tax payers, but most people I spoke to saw this as being long into the future to the point they did not need to worry about it.

Dr Jane O’Sullivan http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10137 in March 2010, highlighted and quantified the inevitability of this burden with a reasonable assumption that the average lifespan of infrastructure would be conservatively 50 years so that on an annual basis this would amount to no more than 2%. If population growth is 2%, as it had been around the time she wrote the article, then the infrastructure capacity must be doubled! This is the position our growth obsessed governments are putting Australian citizens in.
The last growth figures (to March 2012 on the ABS website show a national growth rate of 1.5%) but this is still very high for a developed country. Victoria had the largest numerical increase in population in that year of any state- 82,500

So, the next blow to Victorians is that a planning academic called Roz Hansen has suggested to the state government that they impose a levy based on the value of people’s properties (and therefore adding to house price inflation) to pay for the additional infrastructure necessitated by population growth. This might be OK for someone like Roz Hansen, who we might reasonably assume has a hansome salary as planning adviser to the Baillieu government, but for people on retirement incomes living in ordinary suburbs, it could well mean not being able to afford to stay in their homes!

The Premier is in the clear so far, having said “no” to this idea. It is now on the agenda, however!

The Municipal Association of Victoria does not want the collection of such a tax to be imposed on councils and points out that people do not have unlimited resources. Victorians will also be paying a fire levy from July 2013 and the government proposes doubling the population of bushfire prone townships such as Warrandyte and urban suburbs by allowing 2 houses per residential lot.

Any tax based on the price of a property can become unaffordable to the resident as population growth drives up the price of housing without creating any more real wealth. Although the Georgists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism advocate a tax to property owners based on land value, in a “Geoist” world there is no income tax on wages. Hansen’s suggestion is Geoism without the benefits, although I doubt that this would be a conscious all encompassing tax philosophy on her part. She would still expect us to pay income tax with land-tax a new and additional impost.

What is frightening is that the population growth that drives such draconian potential policies is inflicted upon Victorians against their will, but our political system seems to provide us with no means to stop what over 70% of Victorians manifestly do not want. If a related new tax or charge is imposed, we also have almost no chance of stopping it, since such things tend these days to be decided in parliament, between elections and never to be submitted as items on political platforms at election time. And who can keep up with the sophistry? Isn't there more to life?

Over the next 40 years, Melbourne's is to be projected, or force-fed, to grow geographically and in population.
The discussion paper is how to plan for that growth and miraculously at the same time “ensuring our city remains one of the most diverse, distinctive and liveable cities in the world”. The “discussion” is not about democratically deciding whether we want the growth or not, but propaganda that endorses the benefits of growth, and how to implement it. It's a long term vision, of continuous growth- whether we want it or not!

Melbourne, Let's Talk about the Future, Oct 2012

Over the next 40 years, Melbourne's is to be projected, or force-fed, to grow geographically and in population.

The discussion paper is how to plan for that growth and miraculously at the same time “ensuring our city remains one of the most diverse, distinctive and liveable cities in the world”. The “discussion” is not about democratically deciding whether we want the growth or not, but propaganda that endorses the benefits of growth, and how to implement it. It's a long term vision, of continuous growth- whether we want it or not!

The Victorian government wants conversation with the community on how to respond to population growth, economic challenges and profound demographic changes that will be socially engineered through record high levels of immigration – and “natural” growth. On one hand we are fortunate that our culture is not one that endorses large families, or the growth of tribes. Our population growth rate is a government-based, an economic model, one that can easily be addressed – politically.

Benefit of growth

This discussion is about people’s quality of life. It is also about finding new ways to share the “benefits of growth and investment, and the responsibilities of delivering these benefits”. It doesn't actually say what the “benefits” of growth will be – other than for businesses and the property industries. While the growth-based economic model has served us well in the past, but is no longer appropriate in a planet, a nation, of diminishing and finite resources.

While accommodating this growth, we are suppose to have “choices about where
we live and work, how we travel to and from work and what we do in our leisure time – these are all influenced by how we plan and manage the growth of our city”. On the contrary, the greater our population grows, the less choices we have about where we live, housing alternatives, how we travel, our leisure time, and the costs of living. Living in the more “affordable” fringe areas of Melbourne means having a income per year of at least 70,000, but this means being denied public transport, and more reliance on cars.

What benefits?

We face many challenges and choices if Melburnians are to continue to share the benefits of growth and development..... Urban renewal can have many positive effects. It can replenished housing stock and improve quality; it can increase density and reduce sprawl; it can deliver economic benefits and improve the global economic competitiveness of a city’s centre. It may improve social opportunities, and it may also improve safety through passive surveillance.

Planning for our future is not about the abstract – it is about people’s quality of life. It is also about finding new ways to share the benefits of growth and investment, and the responsibilities of delivering these benefits.

Growth is not a pre-condition for improving quality of housing. Increasing housing density is not a benefit, and reducing urban sprawl is not guaranteed as our city has been growing outward as well as upward. People still prefer to live in the privacy of a house, with a garden and amenities despite being in far-flung suburbs. The “economic benefits” are not for the public, but for those associated with the housing industry, and mega-stores and businesses.

The discussion paper on planning Melbourne's future, (The Age, 26/10) released by the Baillieu government, warns that housing has become less affordable, pushing people further out to where there are fewer services and jobs.

The report also says that in just two decades the number of people fully owning a home in Melbourne has dropped from 40 to 30 per cent and the number of people paying off a mortgage has risen from 30 to 35 per cent. Households on Melbourne's median income of $70,300 a year were being blocked from the city's housing market with few suburbs now affordable. “Medium” income means that there are many people living on under $70k per year and are locked out of home ownership, even if the fringes of Melbourne.

More population growth will only add to the squeeze on affordable housing, increase land prices, push up the demand for public housing and force more people to “choose” high density living.

No “sacred cows”

Jennifer Cunich, from the Property Council, welcomed the planning discussion paper and said there should be no ''sacred cows in this important community debate''. The “sacred cow” that needs to be sent to slaughter it the myth that ongoing population growth in Melbourne will give us any benefits.

The only beneficiaries will be the property developers, banks and investors.

There appears to be little inclination of governments and businesses to abandon their enthusiasm for the "sacred cow" of their growth-based economic model - something inappropriate in a world of finite and diminishing resources.

The reports includes:

....by 2050, Melbourne's population will likely be between 5.6 and 6.4 million.

Another recent document from the Planning Department (DPCD)
“Victoria in the future: 2012 - Population and household projections 2011 – 2031 for Victoria and its Regions” states that:
Over the 40 years to 2051, Victoria’s population is projected to increase by 3.2 million to 8.7 million. Over the same period, Melbourne’s population is expected to grow to 6.5 million, while regional Victoria is projected to grow to 2.3 million. The “projected” growth will obviously be controversial, so they dose out their growth plans in small, digestible doses!

....a possible new airport in the south west of Melbourne, serving one third of Victoria's population. There is adequate capacity to increase the number of aircraft flying into Melbourne ...

A new airport denies peak oil, and the increasing costs of aviation fuel. According to a graph in the Sydney Airport Master Plan of 2009, there should have been 42.5 million passengers at Kingsford-Smith airport in 2012. But extrapolating growth data up to August this year, passenger traffic in 2012 is likely to be just 36.3 million or 85% of this estimate. While international traffic grew continuously, domestic traffic stayed practically flat at around 24 million pa since 2010.

While the “immigration” debate rests on asylum seekers arriving by boat, the vast hoards of new arrivals arrive at air ports – without debate! But jet travel is also something that does and will always depend on liquid fuel, so it is likely that constraints in the liquid fuel supply will directly show through into constraints in jet travel. Fossil fuels are being relentlessly depleted, it takes an inexorable amount energy to produce them, resulting in a cumulative and rising energy demand overall.

A policy U-turn to limit the use of biofuels comes after studies cast doubt on the carbon dioxide emissions savings from using crop-based fuels, and following a poor harvest in key grain growing regions that pushed up prices and revived fears of food shortages. The amount of land available worldwide that is not suitable for agricultural use is currently estimated at anywhere between 600 million and 3.5 billion hectares, according to the Aviation Initiative for Renewable Energy in Germany (AIREG).

A “20 minute” city, with jobs and services within 20 minutes of home..

Congestion significantly impacts Victoria's productivity and liveability. In Melbourne, both the Commonwealth Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics and the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission estimated the
cost of congestion in 2005-06 was in the billions of dollars and both institutions expect this to double in the next 10 to 15 years.

Services need to be provided in a more timely manner to urban growth areas and established outer areas of Melbourne. ...

More freeways and roads will simply attract more cars and traffic, and the cost of providing for these “services”, always failing to keep abreast to growth, need to be funded at a time households are already suffering from high costs of living.

The debate about infill housing in Melbourne must move beyond the impact of villa units on suburban streets and address how we can deliver the diverse housing, in the right locations, at a reasonable price. Rather than “diverse” housing, we are seeing more cookie-cutter developments, and more ubiquitous high density apartments and sky-scrapers. The rising costs of land will prohibit “reasonable” prices for housing. More people will be forced to “choose” higher density living and smaller living compartments.

Melbourne is a suburban city and that will not change. The environmental performance of its suburbs can be dramatically improved. The last decades have seem Melbourne not improve, but decline. TAFE funding has been cut, schools are closing, public housing waiting lists are exploding, even for “urgent” cases. (10 years). Hospital funding is being cut, public transport is failing to keep up with demands, and our city is continually suffering from “shortages”. The costs of population growth are simply ignored.

shifting housing growth to towns and regional centres...
House prices cripple many families. Mortgage pressure is an increasing concern. Population pressure and densification produce ever-worsening traffic jams which merely add to the time parents spend away from home. Victoria’s regional house market yielded a stronger result over the past year than Melbourne’s.  Over the past 12 months the regional increase was 8.5%, according to the REIV June quarter survey.

Across Victoria, there is also a large-scale population shift happening now with tens of thousands moving from the Wimmera, Mallee and Western District to regional centres such as Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo. This is putting new pressure on services and infrastructure in those areas while other towns, districts and communities are drained of people and the economic lifeblood they need to thrive. There are massive gaps in public transport, community services and employment options on the urban fringe and in regional Victoria fueling increased demand for emergency assistance and financial support, and it is community and welfare organisations that are forced to fill the “service hole” created by the lack of investment.

People in these communities find it harder to cope with unaffordable housing, rising costs for utilities and other non-discretionary spending items – such as food, health care, education, and transport, the increased cost of which have a disproportionate impact on low-income households. Meanwhile, job losses in manufacturing and other sectors of the Victorian economy are starting to bite.

The ills of Melbourne are spreading out to regional areas, and Councils are under financial stress.

The most pressing issue facing councillors about to be elected to office in rural and regional areas is how best to protect ratepayers from the impact of the developing financial crisis in local government. Over the past few years nearly all rural and regional councils have become financially reliant on increasing rates and charges at about twice the pace of their metropolitan counterparts and sometimes up to five times CPI.

options for funding new infrastructure – such as user-pay tolls, asset sales, borrowing, and project-specific bonds..

A very detailed study for the former Bureau of Immigration Research found the net cost to government budgets for an annual migrant intake of 114,000 was well over $3 billion dollars, or about $34,500 (in 1992 dollars) per immigrant. (Mark O'Connor) So the existing population needs to spend at least $200,000 on infrastructure for each new person added to Australia. If this is not spent before the new people arrive, we get the congested roads, hospital queues, overcrowded trains that we see in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Selling off more assets means more privatisation and higher costs, something that will only benefit the buyers and shareholders, not the public. Selling off capital assets that belong to the public for day to day running costs is not good business practice. It's an admission that the economic “benefits” of population growth fail to cover the costs.

creating a new metropolitan planning authority to guide development..
One option is to establish a metropolitan planning authority which, amongst other responsibilities, would coordinate relevant Government agencies in the timely delivery of city-shaping infrastructure and other projects of metropolitan significance.
Already we have too many tiers of planning, with public consultation and Councils giving approvals, then to have them rejected by VCAT. Another tier or “authority” will give one more storey of detachment from democratic input from those who carry the impacts the most – the public of Melbourne.

Environmental costs of population growth

Melbourne needs to be environmentally resilient. We need to be able to respond to changing environmental and climate conditions and ensure development does not undermine natural values.
We will need to use resources more efficiently and produce less waste.

City growth should be about expanding people’s choices and giving them the capabilities to exercise choices for a better life, while respecting the natural environment – on which we, future generations, and our native species depend.

Melbournians,due to overpopulation, already have a $24 billion bill for water from the desal plant!

On the contrary, The Baillieu Government's decision to scrap plans for the creation of vital habitat corridors for Victoria's endangered Southern Brown Bandicoot have angered conservation groups. "Obviously the Victorian Government has been captured by developers and is failing to take into account long-term conservation and community needs." VPNA

"The environmental side of growth planning in Victoria has become a shambles and is putting the credibility of the entire process under question," VPNA Executive Director Mr Ruchel said. The expansion of Melbourne's urban growth boundary will also include the clearing of critically endangered grassland and woodlands, as well as the establishment of large grassland reserves west of the city and 200m wildlife corridors on each side of creeks for to help protect Growling Grass Frog habitat.

Globally, city populations are expected to grow by five billion people and expand by 1.2 million square kilometers by 2030. Much of this expansion is forecast to occur in the tropics, which contain the bulk of the world's species.

Global population will expand to up to 10 billion people this century, with two billion additional people on the planet within 40 years, all needing food, water and shelter.  Climate change will further wreak havoc on basic human needs. We have world-wide threats of "peaks" in energy, water, soils, fertilizers and species losses.   it's obvious that growth - what served us well in the past - can't be a model for the future.

Matthew Guy and the Baillieu government, and our Federal government, seem to consider we can make growth policies in a vacuum, as if we live in a parallel universe of endless resources, untouched by Earth's limits.

Protecting future generations, an their quality of live

An Australia with a stable population promises a better and safer quality of life for our children and grandchildren, and secures more choices in the face of global threats and depletions. Although our current population is higher population than we should have, it is at least a population we can still plan for. It is logically impossible to plan for an indefinitely increasing population and ignoring the constraints, the limits to growth, will compromise us socially, environmentally and economically.

According to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, at 30 June 2010, an estimated 566 815 New Zealand citizens were present in Australia. Total departures to Australia were a record 53,900 departures, offset by14,000 arrivals from Australia.
Already there are unlimited temporary sponsored working visas to Australia. These "temporary" workers are then allowed, after 4 years, to apply for PR. New Zealanders can enter Australia unlimited. Business-savvy migrants with at least $5 million to invest in Australia can apply for new investor visas from November.

Unlimited New Zealanders

Under various arrangements since the 1920s, there has been a free flow of people between Australia and New Zealand.

The 1973 Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement has allowed Australian and New Zealand citizens to enter each other's country to visit, live and work, without the need to apply for authority to enter the other country.

According to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, at 30 June 2010, an estimated 566 815 New Zealand citizens were present in Australia.

Clifford Hayes, Victorian Senate candidate for the new Stable Population Party, said rapid growth was worsening urban congestion and damaging the environment. Australia's population grew by 1.4 per cent to reach 22.5 million by the end of last year.

Cr Hayes, who is deputy mayor of Bayside Council, said more than 50,000 New Zealanders moved to Australia during the past year.
He said the deal that allows unlimited trans-Tasman migration should be abolished.

Call to Stem Kiwi tide as States Head Count Surges- Herald Sun

Total departures to Australia were a record 53,900 departures, offset by14,000 arrivals from Australia. In both directions, most migrants were Kiwis. They seek higher wages and a better standard of living, thus creating a political issue for the National government, which vowed to reverse the trend.

From the data gathered the findings suggest that the Amendment to the TransTasman Travel Agreement has had a number of negative impacts on the Pacific Islander and Maori population in South East Queensland. The younger generation experience barriers to education, which constrains employment opportunities and exacerbates social problems within families, communities and broader Australia.

Out of Reach, Out of Sight : Unequal Opportunities across the Tasman. Tove Andersson, Rebecca Latta, Jeremy Leonard and Jordan Stock . University of Queensland.

457 Working Visas

Already there are unlimited temporary sponsored working visas to Australia. These "temporary" workers are then allowed, after 4 years, to apply for PR. New Zealanders can enter Australia unlimited.

This 457 visa allows a business to employ someone from outside Australia in a skilled job in Australia. If you hold this visa, you can:
- work in Australia for up to four years
- bring your family with you (people who may not be skilled)
- travel in and out of Australia as often as you want

The 457 visa is Australia’s principal long-term working visa, and as such is the favoured means among Australian employers looking to bring on skilled offshore talent, or individuals who want to work temporarily in Australia.

The 457 visa program is demand driven and therefore uncapped (unlimited in the number of visas the government can approve) and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) "Centres of Excellence" who process these applications prioritise quick processing so that Australian businesses can access the skilled workers they need from overseas without delay through the visa process.

Immigration Program: record numbers, city bound

At the time of the 2012 May Budget announcements the Labor Government indicated that there would be a further increase in the permanent-entry program from 163,000 in 2010–11 and 185,000 in 2011–12 to 190,000 in 2012–13.

The skilled program includes points-tested, state-sponsored, business-sponsored and employer-sponsored migrants. The humanitarian program is likely to add another 14,000. These categories add to 204,000, which is the highest annual permanent entry level since World War Two.

This record-high intake will occur at the same time as the Labor Government is permitting employers to sponsor an unlimited number of temporary entry 457 visa holders.

(The 2012–13 immigration program: record numbers, city-bound Bob Birrell and Genevieve Heard. Centre for Population and Urban Research , Monash University, May 2012)

Their conclusion:

The Government’s migration program is out-of-date. It is now part of the problem. The new circumstances require a smaller and better targeted intake, which delivers scarce skills to the industries and locations which really need them. The rest of the program should be culled until the current employment crisis is over.

With little industry in Australia, and heavy reliance on the now-peaked mining industries, wealth creation and revenue raising has resorted to actually poaching not only skilled from Asia and developing nations, but the wealthy too. It assumes that Australia has unlimited natural resources to plunder, and that any population pressures, infrastructure shortages and costs of living can simply be passed onto voters who will bear the brunt of this excessive welcome to Australia of unlimited numbers of foreigners.

Discussing of population has been (almost) successively squashed by political correctness, and any criticism of our immigration levels - mostly from Asia - is often unreasonably deemed "racist" and "xenophobic".

We face challenging times ahead, with a changing climate and managing natural resource depletions. Adding more people is a sign that those who have their bums on seats in our political power-houses have little appreciation of Nature, planetary threats, social justice issues, and the pressures on our social and environmental structures that are exacerbated by increasing populations.

Australia is being wrecked by an environmentally bankrupt administration. They imagine that Australia is no more than an Economy, and our economy can survive, despite a sterile and depleted environment, overwhelmed by concrete housing, urban sprawl and the multiple demands of growing human numbers.

False assumptions

Birrell and Heard conclude that the Labor government has acted on two assumptions. One is that the minerals boom will require a huge increase in skilled workers who must be drawn in part from migration. The other is that, as a consequence of the resources boom, the rest of the Australian economy will surge, generating a nation-wide shortage of skilled workers.

The first of these assumptions is correct, but not the second. DIAC’s skilled visas are structured on the assumption that there are nation-wide shortages of skilled workers and that employers everywhere should be allowed to sponsor 457s and permanent migrants in any skilled occupation, industry or location in Australia. As a result most of the migrants in the record-high intake planned will end up in East coast cities, particularly Sydney and Melbourne. They will add to the stresses of Australian workers struggling to find work in a weak labour market.

It's also tunnel-vision thinking – the jobs market, skills supply and economic development do not embrace democratic considerations, housing, costs of living pressure, environmental impacts, human footprints, and social/economic implications for existing Australians.

New Business migration

Business-savvy migrants with at least Got $5 million? Here's a visa - The Age can apply for new investor visas from November. The investment visas were announced in May and Immigration Minister Chris Bowen released what the conditions were on Wednesday.

People can submit expressions of interest through SkillSelect from November 24.

Australia seen as a refuge in a troubled world

The Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) is uncovering record numbers of fraudulent weddings and spouse claims being made by visa cheats in order to gain Australian citizenship.

The Herald Sun recently reported details of DIAC's efforts to find and act upon the fraudulent claims:
Immigration report reveals Former foreign students switched visas in a bid to stay in Australia

More than 1300 overseas-born partners have been sent packing in the past four years after their relationships with Australian residents and citizens were exposed as lies - 406, or eight a week, in the past year alone.

Given the increasing value of an Australian visa in a troubled world and the massive interest in coming to Australia it is high time that we raised the bar, Monash University immigration expert Bob Birrell said.

 Immigration officials granted 45,150 partner visas in the past year, almost 20,000 more than 15 years ago.

Australia is assumed to be a repository, a safe haven, and unlimited resource for jobs, housing, food, and immune from the world's increasing problems – caused largely by human overpopulation.

New era of food scarcity threat

Environmentalists say the world is on the brink of a new era of food scarcity driven by a "perfect storm" of climate change, water shortage and a rising population” says US analyst and author Lester Brown.

The world is adding 80 more million people are year and that means there's an extra 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who weren't there last night.

And it's not only that, as you know it's fed to cattle, pigs and chicken. So it's the price of meat that's really at stake here when the price of corn doubles as it has over the last several months.

US Drought

More than half the counties in the US have been declared natural disaster areas by the US Department of Agriculture due to the drought, which now covers more than 60 per cent of the lower 48 states. In response, the US Government plans to buy up to $160 million of meat from its farmers to help them through the drought crisis. Severe draught is also crippling farmland in Russia's wheat belt, while below average monsoon rains in India is also adding to concern that global grain crops could plunge.

Ukraine, also a major exporter of grain, has banned wheat exports due to poor harvest this year.   As a consequence only 50 days’ worth of stocks are left in world’s granaries.

A rise in food prices is often linked to social and political turmoil in poor countries, where people already use most of their income to buy food.

Since the 1990s, a once-standard policy of most countries since ancient times – maintaining of reserves from good years as a hedge against famine in bad years – has disappeared, making all people reliant on this year’s weather – something so stupid it has never been done before. Over time,  these grain reserve programs were discontinued largely because of cost and improved market efficiency. If  future supply disruptions attributable to drought  become more frequent, they  may affect not only livestock production but human food consumption as well.

The high costs of producing meat

Meat raising use up 43% of entire grain harvesting and 85% of entire legume harvesting. Of all the cause of Amazon virgin rain forest deforestation, 70% are cut down in order to raise meat.

If crops wastefully fed to livestock are included, European countries have more than three times more food than they need, while the US has around four times more food than is needed, and up to three-quarters of the nutritional value is lost before it reaches people's mouths.

High corn prices mean high feedstock prices, so impact on livestock industry not only in China but throughout Asia because Asia imports corn for livestock. Many ranchers have been forced to bring their animals to market earlier than usual because they cannot afford the rising price of grain, thus cutting into the market value of their animals. Providing assistance to Mid-Western farmers makes matters worse because a good portion of the grain grown in the “farm belt” is used to feed livestock. Very little of the US's rich agricultural lands actually grows food for direct human consumption; rather a large proportion is fed to cattle.

Meat eating surging in Asia

As recently as 1995, China was basically self-sufficient in soybeans. Today, imports account for 75 per cent of its soaring consumption as rising incomes, especially in the burgeoning middle-class, enable many of the country's 1.35 billion people to consume more meat, dairy products, eggs and farmed fish.

More than a quarter of the meat produced worldwide is now eaten in China, mainly pork and poultry. In 1978 when China started agricultural reforms, its meat consumption was one third that of the US. Today, China's annual meat consumption of 71 million tonnes is more than double the US figure.

Wastage and devastation of eating meat

Entire livestock in the world produce 87,000 pounds of excrements per second, which is 130 times more then the human population.

Raising animals for food requires massive amounts of land, food, energy, and water and contributes to animal suffering. According to PETA more than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution claim that the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed worldwide every minute to create more room for farmed animals.

More than 70 percent of the grain and cereals that are grown in the USA are fed to farmed animals. Raising animals for food is grossly inefficient, because while animals eat large quantities of grain, soybeans, oats, and corn, they only produce comparatively small amounts of meat.

It takes more than 11 times as much fossil fuel to make one calorie from animal protein as it does to make one calorie from plant protein.

Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.

According to Greenpeace, all the wild animals and trees in more than 2.9 million acres of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil were destroyed in the 2004-2005 crop season in order to grow crops that are used to feed chickens and other animals in factory farms.

The EPA (USA) reports that chicken, hog, and cattle excrement has polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and contaminated groundwater in 17 states.

This industry is based on a cuisine that demands animal products, to conform to traditions of our assumed "hunter and gatherer" past, slavishly assuming that the hunting harvest is and must remain the main source of our nutrition. It's rapacious in it's appetite for natural resources, environmental destruction, pollution and ongoing animal cruelty. Farms are not what they once were, with farmers having a close connection with their land and stock. They are big corporations now, and factory farms are inherently cruel - with massive political power.

Much of the world's water supply is quietly being diverted to raise livestock without any media coverage, while millions of people across the globe are faced with droughts and water shortages. Sadly, as the Western diet spreads to the rest of the world, even desert nations in Africa and the Middle East are pouring what little water remains into meat production.

Vegan Organic and Environment

Lester Brown: if it's business as usual, nothing else happens, there'll be food scarcity but I find it inconceivable there wouldn't be responses (from world leaders).

Some nations, such as China, are already taking action by buying arable land around world, including Africa, and, yes, Australia.

SAVE OUR PLANET Energy sectors to shape sustainability of future development -- UN

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, FAOSTAT data for 2009: 8,702,490 beef cattle, 32,049,100 sheep , 474,809,000 chickens and 4,521,760 Pigs were sent to slaughter in AUSTRALIA in just one year (Ref. Food and Agr. Org. of U.N website)

Over 700,000 unwanted week old dairy calves are sent to slaughter ever year in Australia as a by-product of the dairy Industry. (Ref, Animals Australia website)

Embracing a diet full of organic life giving fresh fruit and vegetables and whole grains not only nourishes the body but the mind and spirit as well.

VEGUCATED – the movie Six people- Six weeks – One Challenge

SYNOPSIS
Part sociological experiment and part adventure comedy, Vegucated follows three meat- and cheese-loving New Yorkers who agree to adopt a vegan diet for six weeks. Lured by tales of weight lost and health regained, they begin to uncover the hidden sides of animal agriculture that make them wonder whether solutions offered in films like Food, Inc. go far enough. This entertaining documentary showcases the rapid and at times comedic evolution of three people who discover they can change the world one bite at a time.