Fairfax Age

The Age is a constant source of propaganda for population growth in Melbourne. Jake Niall's article today is another flagrant example. Melbournians need strong minds and hearts to fight back against their runaway parliaments and reclaim their natural rights to self-government.


Age Sports-writer Jake Niall promotes the thinnest of arguments for overpopulating Melbourne as if they had real authority, on behalf of The Age, Melbourne's newspaper for the middle classes. The Age owns a massive international property dot com and represents a moneyed power-elite that relies on overpopulating Melbourne against residents' and electors' wishes and all commonsense. Its role seems to be to suppress protest through the massive weight of continuous propaganda, whilst maintaining a thin pretence of counterbalance by publishing mildly dissenting letters to the editor from time to time.

Whilst insulting Melburnians' intelligence, in "Big Melbourne isn't to be feared, you might find it'll grow on you," (April 23, 2011, The Age), Jake Niall nonetheless adds to the crushing weight of commercially backed propaganda. Presumably this is how awful power-elites like the Nazis eventually overrode all objections and hypnotised a confused public as they harnassed the masses to their big-business-backed tyranny.

Melbournians need strong minds and stomachs to survive this assault on their democracy and community long term, but survive and defend themselves and the truth, they must. If they do not there is nothing to stop Melbourne (and every other green bit of Australia) from becoming like Hong Kong or coastal China. There is actually no end to how bad it can get. Residents groups in Hong Kong now lie down in front of bulldozers merely to protect their high-rises from shadow.

We must not forget the history of our leaders' and press's machinations against our collective welfare. Lest we fall weakly for the various excuses that their representatives trot out.

Niall describes Melbourne's growth as 'unexpected' when it was solicited and promoted by the Kennett government and Bracks governments, then shamelessly continued by the Brumby. The Australian and The Age were involved hands-on in the population growth promotion and constant marketing of lame defenses for growth as if they had substance for anyone but anti-social land-speculators. (See chapter 6 of The Growth lobby and its Absence for the history.) The Victorian government, under Bracks, relied on unsavory business characters to market this growth, notably Steve Vizard and Richard Pratt, who were involved with APop and OzPop and US housing investment promoters.

No way was Melbourne's growth unexpected. This is marketing to deflect responsibility away from the perpetrators of a heinous affront to democracy by successive Victorian parliaments. Let us not forget, either, that neither the Socialist Alliance, nor the Greens, stood up for peoples' rights. These smaller parties have participated in the cover-up, along with the newspapers, which benefit financially through their corporate (housing, building materials etc) investments and ability to manipulate perception of market performance.

Our system needs to change and we might start by looking at the Napoleonic system that Europe has inherited, where democracy is somewhat more robust and population growth is treated as a cost, rather than have its profits artificially isolated from its impacts and costs (which the rest of us pay).