In early 1990 I changed my name to ZPG and stood for the NSW Senate because of the big lie - that without immigration, Australia's population is declining. It was so wrong then, and it is so wrong still. But recently Nine/Fairfax/ABC/SBS/News have been revving up the old propaganda. Is the big lie propaganda being orchestrated by dark hands?
"Not only is Geelong now effectively subsumed into the greater growth orbit of the Melbourne conurbation, but there are surprise population surges in some of the state’s remoter provincial cities and communities. I am so excited about this.” (Bernard Salt, "Victoria reimagined from basket case beginnings," The Australian 8 August 2019.)
In a News Limited piece whose title fails to take into account the original careful planning by Robert Hoddle for natural open space and avenues rather than choked alleys for Melbourne, Bernard Salt somewhat maniacally promotes the Federal and Victorian State Government's planned immigration innundation on disenfranchised Victorians.
“The previous set of state projections released in 2016 had Victoria rising to 7.7 million by 2031 whereas the latest iteration has upped this outlook to 8.1 million. That’s another 400,000 Victorians and another 200,000 houses or apartments that must be delivered during the 2020s. That’s important if you’re in the property game.”
Salt lists 15 local government areas with the biggest absolute increase in their 2021 populations according to the 2016 to 2019 projections, and says,
“This is important for big property players. It shows a significant shift in the demand for housing.”
Here’s the line I’d run: “Minister, we need to rezone more land to accommodate the population projections released by your own department.”
“The 2031 outlook for ¬Monash has been upped by 19,000 while for Whitehorse the upward revision is 14,000. More units, I would imagine. And maybe even a touch of high rise or perhaps a more vigorous application of the principles of suburban densification.”
The article also dooms Melton, Whittlesea and Hume to severe growth and Salt predicts that the ‘urban growth boundary’ will need to be pushed out: .
“I can only imagine that all this net additional growth is taking Melbourne’s footprint closer to the edge of the urban growth boundary.
He asks himself:
“I wonder if the really big property players are thinking about where this boundary might next be “adjusted” to accommodate a city not of the five million we have today, but of the eight million projected by mid-century?”
Of course Bernard Salt with KPMG has been a major driver and promoter of such population growth, frequently seen at the various confabs of the ‘big property players’, so this wondering seems very rhetorical.
He discloses the nature of population growth as a ‘burden’. Indeed, it is costing all of us more than money, although the “big property players” probably consider themselves adequately compensated and possibly above suffering from the destruction of community networks, natural spaces and freedom.
“I do think it’s important that the population burden being added to Victoria needs to be fairly distributed, with the inner city taking a higher proportion. It’s a bit like the progressive tax system where the rich pay a higher tax rate. In demographic planning, greater growth should be attached to localities culturally aligned to higher density, and that offer access to jobs and public transport.”
He describes the metastasies of the ghastly tumour that Melbourne is becoming with a pathogist’s delight:
“It’s in rural Victoria where the demographers have done their most riveting work. Yes, riveting. Not only is Geelong now effectively subsumed into the greater growth orbit of the Melbourne conurbation, but there are surprise population surges in some of the state’s remoter provincial cities and communities. I am so excited about this.”
Excited at the loss of control by residents of their city and citizens of their democracy? Excited at the rising costs of living, at water shortages, at pollution, at wildlife extinction?
Excited?
I think that growthism is an addiction with consequences that cause enormous harm. Like war, which some also consider exciting, it needs to be recognized for the all consuming ill that it is, for the vast majority, with only a tiny few reaping the questionable benefits of cash and power over their increasingly beggared fellows.
Article by Sheila Newman, Demographer and Evolutionary Sociologist.
A business blog, calling itself, The Advisor, is advertising its 'Better Business Summit' with an article quoting the well-known population growth spruiker, Bernard Salt, who they describe as 'One of the nation’s leading demographers'. This would hardly be news for candobetter.net, except that Mr Salt, who does a line in growth 'demography', has suddenly changed his well-known tune. Previously a household word in pushing the aging population bogey, Salt has suddenly begun describing Australia as 'young and vibrant'.
Apparently decrying rumours of a property crash which he perceives to be rampant in the mass media, 'Mr Salt said Australians need to take a “bigger picture view” and argues that we are a young, vibrant country with strong levels of population growth, very aspirational, and we’re rich in terms of income per capita.' (http://www.theadviser.com.au/breaking-news/33760-salt-slams-negative-property-outlook)
An observer says, "I find it delightful that he's now saying "we are a young and vibrant country". He's a surprise a minute. :-) He must have decided to drop his alarmism about demographic ageing." The observer supplies some recent quotes:
We can’t afford older people:
“The science is settled; there's not enough workers to fund the likely number of retirees” B. Salt, ‘Grim reality of when the boom goes bust’, (The Australian, March 12 2015, p. 26, 28.)
He wishes they’d drop dead:
“workers and governments of the day are more than happy to support others in old age … just so long as there are not too many of them, that they're not too demanding of services such as health and welfare, and that they promise to drop dead within a reasonable timeframe from the point of retirement.” B. Salt, ‘Older workers unite, you have nothing to lose but your privileges’, (The Australian, April 19 2014, p. 12.)
Monsters from the black lagoon?
“All of sudden this cohort [of ageing baby boomers] will be visible -- rising like a monster from an otherwise indistinguishable retirement swamp…” (B. Salt, ‘The inexorable rise of the opinionated boomer retiree’, The Australian, May 24 2012, p. 29.)
So, we cannot help wondering, if Australia's population has suddenly reversed its moribund status in Salt's eyes, why is he still talking up population growth?
In a piece in The Australian[1] Dec 24, 2015, entitled "Honey, we shrank the backyard," population growth promoter for the property investment sector, Bernard Salt, observes that the block size of ordinary Australian houses has shrunk due to lifestyle changes such as after school organised sport and other after school activities and women working. The backyard, Salt acknowledges, was a “wondrous place” where children used to play in a relatively unstructured space, unobserved by parents, during an unsophisticated era devoid of today's patios and outdoor eating. The conclusion is that, after all, shrinking backyards come with bigger cities, and and a “leaner, cleaner more efficient way of living”.
One must bear in mind that it is the 1950s brick veneer villa that Bernard Salt targets. It appears to be his job to do this and to "evict" the ordinary Australians who live in these houses. He does not target houses such as the luxurious older style mansion where he lives in the comfortable suburb of Camberwell.
I heard him in person, as an invited speaker at a public meeting in Hawthorn about 4 years ago, derisively referring to widows in these houses "rattling around" and that they should move out, or words to this effect. This latest piece specifically refers to the back yards of brick veneer houses.
Many of the Post WW2 brick veneer houses in Melbourne were built by A.V.Jennings when there was an acute housing shortage. According to Jennings, one of the key design features of them was that children could be observed through the kitchen window playing in the backyard. I know this because a friend of mine was related to Jennings by marriage and she reports this is what he used to say about his creations. (This contrasts with Salt's memory or description of children being unobserved.)
The apparent purpose of the middle paragraphs of Salt's article are to paint an unattractive, unsophisticated rather bogan picture of what is being snatched from us, so that we won't want to try to hang on or to grieve too much. In this, Salt appears to draw heavily on Barry Humphries' work so - easy money for him.
Regarding Salt's pronouncement that "Mum's at work" and kids are in after-school activities, I would have thought the first would be the cause of the second. They are not independent of each other. Why is Mum at work? Or should I ask, "Why are both parents working and paying others to look after their children after school?" (After school care is not a free service.) Did people suddenly realise what great fun it was to be at work, so much fun that they would deny themselves the ONLY, chance that they would ever get in their lives to spend time with their offspring in the brief period called childhood? I somehow doubt it.
I would suggest that the design of low maintenance outdoor living areas probably reflects time poverty in households where both parents go to work. The trend to smaller blocks for people raising children is not a reflection of lifestyle choice but of economic imperative as housing prices and rents have risen. Both parents working instead of one amounts to a loss to the home of about 10 hours per day, 5 days per week. That is time lost to such activities as maintaining a garden.
Salt makes the loss of the backyard sound like an evolutionary process as we find more enticing pursuits outside the home but he doesn't say what those pursuits are. In rubbishing the old back yard, he singles out the incinerator. The incinerator has recently acquired very unattractive connotations both aesthetically and in terms of air pollution and carbon emissions. People are now very sensitive to these issues and Salt's reference to incinerators provides a great example of a way to turn everyone off the notion of ordinary Australians having a bit of land for themselves. I don't think incinerators then were universal, anyway and now we have paper and cardboard recycling. But is this a fair exchange for losing "the back yard" ? Should we be thus punished for past incinerator follies?
Society's gain is expressed as a "leaner, cleaner more efficient way of living." This is, however, unconvincing, as there is nothing in this description that alludes to quality of life or to any actual purpose for our lives, apart from "work".
Who might this article convince? People who have very limited time for reading, the actual victims who are fast losing space and amenity as the population soars and for whom a no regrets article like this might be somewhat comforting.
[1] Note that Murdoch's Australian is one face of Murdoch's property dot com, www.realestate.com.au, so it is not surprising that Mr Salt writes for the Australian and for the Herald Sun.
Professional growth spruiker, Bernard Salt of KPMG, says that 80% of Australia does not want population growth. ("Straightening out Bananas", Property Council Congress, 2011) So how come we are being swamped?
There is a theory to explain how unpopular and costly policies survive in a 'democracy' when the benefits are focused among a few people who can organise to protect those benefits, whereas the costs are diffused among many people thus difficult to recognise and organise against. This theory explains why 80 % of Australia does not want population growth for good reasons like the cost of housing and the wrecking of the environment, but we still have it because the Growth Lobby makes billions of dollars (not just millions) out of it. (See Chapter 5 of Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby and its Absence.)
The cartoon illustrates this, as an organised and wealthy rent-collecting Growth Lobby Inc. swoops with a helicopter, while people look around them, confused about what’s happening.
We applaud the initiatives of the Gillard Federal Government today in refunding Aged Care. PM unveils $3.7bn overhaul of aged care, Friday April 20, 2012. We are particularly impressed to read that: "The [Gillard] government rejected a Productivity Commission recommendation that proposed allowing the use of reverse mortgage facilities to help fund care costs." Good on the Gillard government! Reverse mortgages steal inheritances, impoverish youth and render them homeless, and amount to double charges for old age care provision (on top of taxes). We republish a relevant and well-researched article on this matter. See also "Ageism" and ABC article on reverse mortgages.
Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk. First published June 16, 2011. Republished for news relevance on April 20, 2012. Title changed at this time to include 'Reverse mortgage and other'.
This article applies to all Australians, including men. Women live longer, however, so age discrimination is actually also a feminist issue. The Australian system builds in a bias of financial vulnerability for women. Any property women may have accumulated despite this bias is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care. If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day. Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or relatives who qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed. There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis, which amounts to secretly, and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian. And population pressure makes it all worse.
Main points
Women live longer so age discrimination is also a feminist issue
Any property ordinary people may have accumulated is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care
• If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day
• Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or qualify for income support, but then only if they qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed.
• There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian.Aged Care robs the poor of their Land and Inheritance
• This algorithm obviously doesn’t take property inflation into account, either as a cost or as a so-called “asset” and it doesn’t ensure that your children and grandchildren will be protected and sheltered after you have gone. It makes it even easier for the banks to own everything and for everything you have worked for to go into the hands of private business interests.
How the government is making the elderly pay again for their health care
Nursing home care: The residential care facility becomes the chronically ill person's home. It counts as medical care for income tax purposes, but is not counted as medical care for other purposes. Arguably this is a breach of citizens' rights to free public medical care in Australia, denied them on the basis of age.
High land costs erode affordability of nursing homes and shrink profit margins
What else is really wrong with the health care system: why so many elderly people occupy ?80% of beds
• Ambulances misused
• Lack of visiting nurses
• Lack of visiting GPs
• Lack of trained Personal Care Assistants
• Rental and Land costs erode funds for wages, so we cannot pay these people properly
• Many of the 80% elderly in hospital beds could be dealt with better and more cheaply at homeSome fixes for the Oz Health Care system within the limitations of the current [insufficient] paradigm
Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.
Conclusion: Why the costs of aged health care are not the taxpayer or the elderly person’s responsibility, but the government’s. (Land costs and failure to provide services in the community)
Although this article definitely concerns elderly men, age discrimination affects more women than it does men and they are materially more vulnerable to its effects. Why does age-discrimination affect more women? Simply because more women live longer, by a substantial margin.
We choose here to attract the attention of elderly women to this matter because it tends to take them unawares. We want men to read this article as well though because it directly concerns them as well. It also concerns peoples' children because it affects their inheritance rights to shelter in a country where most people can no longer guarantee indefinitely against homelessness.
Why are women more materially vulnerable to the effects of age-discrimination?
By materially vulnerable, we are referring to the average earnings, savings, shares, superannuation and property held by women. It is well-known that women earn less overall than men because women’s work is less well-paid. For elderly women this was actually true in legislation until 1972 when women were awarded equal pay for equal work, however 40% of women did not do work which was considered equal to men’s work, and this situation is still not entirely remedied. Many women also work fewer hours due to caring for children. Women are also less likely to be promoted into high management with higher pay in any workforce situation due to positive discrimination towards men in the work-force.
Some of the positive discrimination in the work force towards men is partly rectified by the tendency for wives to inherit from their deceased husbands. This however works against women whose husbands remarry, for it is likely to be the last wife who inherits what the husband has accumulated. Divorce also tends to leave women worse off than it leaves men if they have children, particularly if the married couple’s income relied on the man as the sole wage-earner. Although divorced couples are obliged to split up their property, they are not obliged to split up the wage ongoing. The man (or the woman’s wage) is their own. Courts will award payments to the children, but these tend to be rather inadequate. That means that if the woman is caring for the children and cannot work, she must rely on subsistence allowances from Social Security. If she is a mother then her chances of having a history of equal wages, education and training are less than a man’s, as are her future chances of getting these.
Historically British territories and colonies have tended to have inheritance laws favouring males, notably in Britain where, until 1922, only the first born male could inherit land. Although parents may now leave their estates to whomever they please, the tendency is still to leave more to boys than to girls. This situation puts women at an immediate disadvantage in life and is one of the reasons that women are intrinsically more dependent on marriage to raise children in our society than in France, for instance, where equal inheritance by children is the law.
Where a person marries more than once, the tendency of the law is to award all the estate to the latest spouse. This usually leaves any earlier wives, including de facto wives, in the cold, along with their children, who are very poorly protected under Australian law. These situations increase the bias against female property accumulation and mean that when women are old they have lesser means to enjoy their retirement and to pay for health care.
[There are exceptions which you can read about in a good 2010 transcript and interview on the ABC Law Report http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2010/3016770.htm] Note however, that few ordinary women can afford to pay a lawyer, let alone go to court.
There is a lot, a lot wrong with the way that our medical system treats the elderly - male and female. Women however bear the brunt of this medical system age discrimination.
We are born in a women'’s hospital, a general hospital or at home. At this point in our lives all efforts are made to give us the best start in life. New babies are screened for medical and sensory defects and early intervention is commenced where any needs are detected. Whilst maternal care is probably not as luxurious as it was a few decades ago when mothers were relieved of normal responsibilities and full care of their babies for about 10 days after the birth, they are still at least cared for in hospital for a day or two, funded through the medical system.
During childhood, serious illnesses and accidents are dealt with through the medical system and children’s' hospitals. Of course where long term care is needed for a disability, the system is seriously inadequate. Institutions and processes caring for the seriously disabled are universally underfunded and under-resourced.
Treatment of other accidents or injuries are paid for through Medicare national medical insurance –(up to a point) in the public hospital system or the private hospital system where, ironically, if you carry private insurance, you end up paying far more in out of pocket expense than you would if you carried no insurance and were treated in the public system. Still - one has a choice – if one has the money!
When you are classified as elderly, the situation changes. You go into hospital as a normal adult, with, for example, a leg break from a fall at home. When hospital treatment has gone as far as it can you are then assessed by a team of medical and social work professionals in conjunction with your family (if you have one). If, following this, you are unable to go home again you will need to go into long term care.
At this point your whole accumulated wealth over a lifetime and income will be assessed in determining how much you now pay for essential medical care.
If you have no wealth apart from your house, this may need to be sold or remortgaged to pay a deposit on a place in an aged care facility. Medicare does not care for your next hospitalization - the nursing home. The Act that provides for this is The Aged Care Act 1997. The exceptions for low-income earners are truly Dickensian:
According to Elderly Rights Advocacy (www.era.asn.au):
“The following people are not required to pay an accommodation charge:
• residents whose assets are worth less than 2.25 times the annual single age pension ($39,000 as at 20/3/11);
• users of respite care;
• anyone who is suffering financial hardship (this is decided by the Department of Health and Ageing);
• residents entering low level care or an extra service facility to receive either low or high level care (these residents may be asked to pay an accommodation bond instead): and
• “concessional” residents.”
Whatever the thresholds and grab-back clauses, an important consideration that is never canvassed is the effect on peoples’ inheritance. Land and housing go out of the family and into private business. In a context of rising housing prices family homes and other assets which might have compensated children for the harsh economic conditions they have been born into, are not available to them.
What do people pay taxes for? Most people pay somewhere around one third of their income in income tax. On top of this there are rates and charges for services, and on top of these, the Goods and Service Tax (GST).
What do we get in return?
Before the second world war the rate of income tax was a great deal less – perhaps around 10%. Income tax was introduced to Australian states between 1880 and 1907. In 1849 in NSW income tax was introduced at the rate of 6 pence in the pound. (A pound contained 240 pence]
Overall we work harder for many less basics and we need more costly items, such as cars for travel. The major cost which has risen is the cost of land, which underpins all other costs and cuts profits.
The care of elderly people and of disabled people used to be provided mainly by the state, using crown land, for which no rent was charged. The state did not need to make a profit and costs were paid for by income tax. The state has since sold off most of the land where buildings with suitable services were provided to private developers. Most of those developers have turned this land over to private housing. So the services it once provided have disappeared. As population has increased in this country (due to government policies to increase it through immigration) the price of land for any building or business, including agriculture, has greatly increased – to levels among the highest in the world.
Nursing care and special accommodation is now provided by private business, which needs to make a profit.
Now old age care providers complain that they not only cannot make sufficient profits, but they cannot even make ends meet. All sorts of adjustments have been made to the supply and remuneration of labour in order to mitigate this problem. For instance doctors and nurses have been imported from other countries and these people are taxed at a much higher rate than Australian nationals. In this way the government actually cuts the cost of wages in some government facilities. Another instance is where registered nurses and state enrolled nurses have been replaced by Personal Service Attendants, with no professional health delivery training, who are placed in charge of frail and elderly persons with medical problems and who need their medication supervised.
The one adjustment that needs to be made is the reduction in the cost of land and rent.
This discriminatory treatment of a whole class of citizens has far-reaching undesirable consequences for most of our population, but it advantages the property development and conveyancing industry. Probably due to their enormous influence over Australian governments, this economically and socially unsustainable situation continues to consolidate.
For instance Bernard Salt, of KPMG, and Andrew MacLeod, of The Committee for Melbourne, with the help of Murdoch's Herald Sun, recently tried to market the idea of older people selling their low density properties to make way for higher density ones for younger people.
"If they are an empty-nester living near a school they are actually taking a role that from a society's perspective would be better taken by a family." (Andrew MacLeod)
See the article, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" There was no acknowledgement that, in the normal course of life, old peoples' properties go to their children or other relatives who survive them. For the property industry, this traditional legacy is undesirable because it cuts down on their potential opportunities to make money on property transactions. It does this by avoiding a commercial transaction in the transmission of property. The state still makes a quid, through death duties, but the State and the property development hanger-ons (conveyancers/lawyers, subdividers, builders, agents etc) get few or no bites at the property of the deceased.
“Now Australia's "Productivity Commission," is advocating so-called "reforms" for the $10.1 billion sector, which would force people to pay between 5% and 25% of their incomes towards old-age care, and which would include their actual homes as part of their incomes. This proposal has been called "HECS for the elderly."” (April 22, 2011, Herald Sun
In fact this proposal does not seem much different from what is already happening. Basically no person with any assets above $39,000 can keep ownership of their home and get aged care unless those who live in their house are pensioners of some kind with similarly small asset bases.
Such measures entail mortgages being taken on the family home, to be paid after the death of the home-owner. This makes the bank the owner of the home and capable of dispossessing any future inheritors or that they simply inherit colossal debts.
This is a form of serfdom.
It is all part of a trend toward dispossession of a larger and larger class of people. Ask yourself what will happen when - as in feudal times - only a very few people in society own all the property, all the assets and all the means of production. Everyone else will have only their labour and skills to sell in an employers' market.
Why would any free people allow such a thing to happen? If Australia were really a democracy, how could any government auspiced commission dare to propose such abrogation of basic rights through enslavement and theft? The excuse is always 'economic efficiency', but this is really only an excuse. It does not stand up to examination because economic efficiency in Australia is constantly undermined by huge land and housing prices which erode profit margins. The only give in the system involves legislating for undemocratic wealth transfer - robbing the poor to give to the rich. Since the property moguls are constantly making laws and policies to push property prices up, that only leaves wages that can be pushed down and privately owned homes that can be acquired through debt induced by such government policies as mortgaging elderly peoples' homes by threatening to leave them with no services as they near death.
Under European law, the State not only has the duty of providing health care for people of all ages, but it also has the duty to provide shelter. And, when a person dies, if their property does not go to their nearest kin, taxes penalise those who acquire it. We need such laws in Australia.
What happens to elderly peoples' property when they go into homes? What happens to their children's inheritance? How much does it contribute to homelessness?
What can we do about it?
Can we demand back our rights to property?
80% of public hospital beds are taken up with people over 65 years old, of which a good proportion are over 75 years old. Private hospitals are different because people are admitted for elective surgery and discretionary treatments. Private hospitals can also pick and choose who they take.
Most hospitalisation for any person is in the last two years of life. Medically the most expensive time of anyone's life is in the last two years, regardless of age.
The aim of the nursing home care is to keep the person as independent as possible. Often the services they are paying for would cost less if they were delivered in their real homes.
Unfortunately, health cover - public and private - doesn't cover home care, except where it is provided by medical practitioners. Some private insurers do cover some post-hospitalisation care, such as rehabilitation.
Most chronic conditions could be treated preventatively and conservatively in the community. Take, for instance, the need of many diabetics for frequent continuing podiatry. With medicare you can get five visits per year, but this is often insufficient. Because podiatry access is insufficient, complications become more serious and require expensive and extensive hospitalisations for problems like ulcers, resistive infections and amputations. Those complications affect blood sugar and increase the risks of blindness, cardiac complications and muscle wastage.
People with chronic or end of life illnesses, like respiratory problems and heart failure, can live in the community for years with occasional medical crises and readjustments. When they have these crises in the community, their options boil down to General Practitioners, ambulances, hospitals and nursing homes. GPs are flat out and almost never make home visits any more. In many cases outside of big Australian cities, you just cannot get a G.P. if you don't already have one. You also cannot change to another if you don't like the first.
Ambulance services spend a lot of their very expensive time and taxpayer funds attending to crises caused by simple handicaps of age or disability - such as falls which interrupt the person's capacity to care for themselves only because the person is unable to get up unaided, even though they are not injured. These do not require specialist attention, but simple mechanical help. Just imagine if you could call 000 or another number and ask for prompt and necessary assistance from a non-specialist person employed by the council for residents. This could solve a lot of problems.
Respiratory problems and heart failure need good oversight in partnership with the patient in the home, as well as crisis plans. The person with such a slowly deteriorating condition should be able to ring their GPs if necessary. Because GPs are so busy, however, they ring 000, end up in a public emergency department, in an acute system, and the hospital goes into overdrive with admission, treatment, and tests.
Allied health professionals, such as physiotherapists, can be very useful for keeping people mobile. There are not enough allied health providers working in the community. For example, one large regional center might have only one physiotherapist for 10,000 people which is not sufficient, compared to three physiotherapists for six thousand, in an inner Melbourne suburb.
Personal Carers are skilled to help in all kinds of non-medical situations that can cause problems for people with medical conditions like frailty or poor balance. They can help with gardening, cooking, cleaning, tidying, posting letters, etc. Local government provides Personal Carers, but they are in high demand, badly distributed, and low-paid (of course). Wealthy people have greater access to them through private agencies, but it is very hard for ordinary people to get enough of these services. For this reason many people finish up in hospital with avoidable problems like malnutrition, falls, severe depression from isolation and helplessness.
In most states of Australia Community Care is very fragmented. You might get someone something through one scheme and someone else something through another scheme, but you need to know the ropes intimately. The knowledge and skills to source and find funding for scarce services is not available to everyone, which means that people often don't get access to things that are available and which they need, although often enough those things are not even available.
There is a crisis of insufficiency. It's not just a matter of coordination. Coordinating nothing does not lead to something. There is a catch-cry of "Stop Duplication," but why not have duplication if that is what is needed? Multiply services by four or five and you might begin to provide what is needed
Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.
20 per cent of the population are admitted to Australian hospitals in any one year. This is much higher than in other countries.
It is obviously very costly to have lots of elderly people with mild problems taking up acute hospital beds. If we diverted the funds from a proportion of those beds to the training and deployment of usefully skilled non-medical staff in the community, so much more could be achieved, saving elderly Australians and their children from losing their homes to pay for unnecessarily expensive residential care.
So, why should Australians pay, not just with their taxes, but with their homes and inheritances, for aged care when the high costs of hospital care are ridiculous, avoidable, and not very effective?
Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk, based on their presentation on 3RPP's Freewaves Feminist program, on 16 June 2011.
Here is the transcript of the notorious growth-lobby video “Straightening out B.A.N.A.N.A.S” with Bernard Salt, Rob Lang (CEO Parramatta City Council) and Guy Gibson, which we wrote about at "Salty follies and the Naked Property and Growth Lobby."Here the participants, notably KPMG partner and Murdoch journalist, Bernard Salt, discuss how to influence public opinion by posing as the 'public' in a variety of informal forums. Ironically, these wrinkled old men show disrespect for Australian citizens who object to their bulldozer development tactics, generalising them as old has-beens - Gibson describes them as "wrinklies" - and suggesting that they have nothing better to do than to participate in democracy - only they don't acknowledge that it is democracy - they call it 'populism'. More and more, growth lobby queens sound like the Mary Antoinettes of Australian society.
The transcript below is from the Property Council of Australia's inhouse production of a how to mislead the public video entitled “Straightening out B.A.N.A.N.A.S,” starring professionals of spin, Bernard Salt, Rob Lang (CEO Parramatta City Council) and Guy Gibson. We wrote about this film at "Salty follies and the Naked Property and Growth Lobby."
The participants discuss how to influence public opinion by posing as the 'public' in a variety of informal forums in what is known as 'astroturfing'. Apparently featuring frequently on television and radio, ABC and commercial, and in major newspapers isn't enough. They need still more media influence. They bare their bottoms metaphorically towards Australian citizens who object to their bulldozer development tactics, generalising them as old has-beens - Gibson describes them as "wrinklies" - and suggesting that they have nothing better to do than to participate in democracy - only they don't acknowledge that it is democracy - they call it 'populism'.
What does this say about Murdoch journalists in Australia, if not that some of them have similar ethical codes to Murdoch journos in Britain? Salt had a column in the Herald Sun and now he has one in The Australian. All the Australian mainstream media, including the ABC, now broadcast Salt and similar lobbyists as if they were 'experts'. Andrew MacLeod of the Melbourne Committee was recently given free range by The Herald Sun to insult Melbourne's real representatives - Citizens Mary Drost, Geoffrey Rush, and Barry Humphries - for standing their ground in the face of top down engineered overpopulation and development expansion. Mary, Barry and Geoffrey have shown the courage of Davids to Goliath in the face of of this Augean stable of property-development spin artists maintained constantly in the public eye by Australia's commercial/public totalitarian press. In fact the reflection on the Australian press is not just its journalistic ethics, but the fact that it is an integral part of the growth lobby and has major and multiple vested interests in it which are antithetical to democracy. (Examples are www.realestate.com.au and www.domain.com.au as well as lifestyle shows that push real estate and lifestyle retail daily down our throats.)
Bernard Salt on the difficulty in pushing a big population on Australians:
"The reason why this is important is that public policy is now determined by focus group. And this was proven by the ‘big Australia’ debate. Kevin Rudd said “I believed in a big Australia” on the 22nd of October, 2009 on the 7:30 Report. He did not repeat that claim for three months. He would’ve got off that set, and his minders would’ve said 'don’t ever use that term again.' They polled it, no doubt, and it would’ve come back 80/20 against. At 80/20 against, modern politicians, regardless if you are advocating, regardless if you are lobbying, regardless of whatever cosy relationships you have with whatever minister, if it’s 80/20 against, drop it! And that is exactly what happened over the following nine months. It’s hearts and minds. If you can get that 80/20 sentiment down to 55/45, then you have a case. Then you have a prospect of influencing policy in the 2010s. That’s how it works, I think." Bernard Salt
Transcribed under the supervision of a member of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA).
Transcript of The Australian Property Forum, “Straightening out B.A.N.A.N.A.S” with Bernard Salt, Rob Lang (CEO Parramatta City Council) and Guy Gibson (General Manager for Lend Lease’s community business in Queensland), 25 July 2011, uploaded to You Tube by Propertyoz, 14 August 2011. See
*During parts of this session Mr Salt was addressing the audience with aid of power point slides. The text of these slides, together with the times for which they are visible, is given just before the relevant section of the transcript of his talk. It is presented here as boxed text.
B. Salt – 00.04: Uh, my presentation today is Straightening Out B.A.N.A.N.A.S – power over populism.
B. Salt – 00.08: I’ll uh, explain exactly what I mean uh a little later on, but the essence is that I have a very simple proposition, and that proposition is that there has been an ideological shift in the Australian continent, community and people that is having a direct bearing on the performance of the property industry and the broader business community in Australia.
B. Salt – 00.28: I call it the rise of negativism over positivism.
B. Salt – 00.32: And there is no point lobbying, advocating, doing anything in Canberra, with a minister, whatever, unless you get in there and grab, make change at the grass roots level.
B. Salt – 00.45: It is now about how the average Australian thinks.
B. Salt – 00.49: And the mistake that the property industry and that the business community has been making, I think, over the last decade is that you need to actually engage with the people.
B. Salt – 01.01: It is no longer an option to sit back and do nothing.
B. Salt – 01.06: Don’t give the issue oxygen.
B. Salt – 01.09: We have tried that, and it ain’t workin’.
B. Salt – 01.13: That’s my proposition.
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody 01.14-01.53
or
The Negativism versus Positivism Debate
B. Salt – 01.14: BANANAs, of course, is an acronym for Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
B. Salt – 01.20: Um, and it is a mindset.
B. Salt – 01.24: And my argument is that if the property industry, if the business community does not fight back, then you create a vacuum.
B. Salt – 01.31: And in the PR world, um views um extend into a vacuum.
B. Salt – 01.36: And mum and dads now have a negative view of growth, of development, of property, of big business, big banks.
B. Salt – 01.44: Big, whatever it is, is seen as negative.
B. Salt – 01.47: And that’s because no one is prepared to actually stand up and put the positive side of growth.
01.53-02.03 What are the issues
The action/behaviour of councils, councillors, council officers, action groups, local media ... are common themes
Pedantic regulation ... decisions rescinded ... craven populism by local councillors ... labelling all as ‘grubby developers’
Objections from people beyond the local area ... professional agitators looking to make a point ... compliant local media
And these same people complain about housing affordability!
02.03-06.23 Development site on the edge of Sydney
Local meetings staged for local media
Council staff ‘scared to make a call’ ... ‘don’t want bad press’
Intimidation and hysteria are the preferred MO of action groups
Local councillors fearful of vocal groups as they have to live among them
We are living in the era of the professional objector ... if business doesn’t defend itself then negative sentiment expands into a PR vacuum ... mum & dad believe the sentiment
Public policy now determined by focus groups – Minerals Council proved this last year
B. Salt – 01.53: No wonder, mum and dad out in the ‘burbs believe big banks, big business, big profits, big developer, because no one is articulating the case.
B. Salt – 02.03: We are now living in the era of the professional objector.
B. Salt – 02.07: There has been a paradigm shift.
B. Salt – 02.09: What we have done in the past is no longer good enough to navigate the next ten years.
B. Salt – 02.16: If business doesn’t defend itself, uh then negative sentiment expands into a vacuum, and that is my point.
B. Salt – 02.24: Every time you do not say something, every time you do not speak out, then negative sentiment expands, and it’s not just the property industry.
B. Salt – 02.34: I can’t believe it.
B. Salt – 02.35: Every year when the banks announce their profit, you know, CBA announces 1.5 billion dollars profit.
B. Salt – 02.42: Big banks, big greedy whatever it is.
B. Salt – 02.45: No one from the property industry [has and says] hang on, that’s unfair.
B. Salt – 02.50: 1.5 billion dollars profit on, on equity invested is this percentage return.
B. Salt – 02.58: No shh, shutdown, don’t say anything, not my problem.
B. Salt – 03.03: I say it is your problem.
B. Salt – 03.05: I think this is a whole of business approach.
B. Salt – 03.08: I would like to see the PCA.
B. Salt – 03.10: I would like to see the BCA.
B. Salt – 03.12: I’d like to see the IAG.
B. Salt – 03.14: I’d like to see the Minerals Council.
B. Salt – 03.15: I’d like to see the Australian Banker’s Association actually get together and start fighting back, but fairly, in a measured, responsible, planned, articulate way, presenting the case for growth and development.
B. Salt – 03.30: About four years ago, 2007, early in the year, um I was writing for the Herald Sun in the, in the opinion pages in Melbourne.
B. Salt – 03.38: Very high profile opinion page uh and um I led off.
B. Salt – 03.43: Was asked to do it by um the editor at the time, now I led off with something I thought was going to grab Melbournians’ attention, uh it was a complete whinge about John Howard uh moving the Prime Ministerial residence to Kirribilli, uh and I thought this is gonna be very popular, and of course it was.
B. Salt – 03.58: Whipped Melbournians’ up into a frenzy of anti–Sydney sentiment.
B. Salt – 04.03: Uh which is what I do.
B. Salt – 04.06: Um.
B. Salt – 04.07: The next day, in the letters to the editor, there was a very measured response from some guy at Beaumaris.
B. Salt – 04.14: “Mr. Salt is mistaken, [the] constitution does not disallow this modern transport.”
B. Salt – 04.20: “Mr. Howard is able to conduct his business in both Sydney and Canberra.”
B. Salt – 04.23: “There is no issue here.”
B. Salt – 04.25: There was something about that letter.
B. Salt – 04.28: Uh I think it was a fine, I think they made a great point.
B. Salt – 04.31: I think that was a letter from a hack.
B. Salt – 04.33: From a political hack.
B. Salt – 04.35: I think the politic–political parties have someone monitoring the opinion pages of the Herald Sun, and anytime there is negative sentiment, bang!
B. Salt – 04.45: In comes the counter argument.
B. Salt – 04.48: Now, if my argument had swayed, say, a hundred people across to my side, without a counter argument, they remain on my side.
B. Salt – 04.58: But just putting a counter argument, fair, measured, reasonable, polite, might just claw back 10 or 15, 10 or 15 per cent.
B. Salt – 05.09: And that’s my point.
B. Salt – 05.10: If you don’t fight back, then all of that negative sentiment goes to uh, to one side.
B. Salt – 05. 17: The reason why this is important is that public policy is now determined by focus group.
B. Salt – 05.22: And this was proven by the ‘big Australia’ debate.
B. Salt – 05.25: Kevin Rudd said “I believed in a big Australia” on the 22nd of October, 2009 on the 7:30 Report.
B. Salt – 05.32: He did not repeat that claim for three months.
B. Salt – 05.35: He would’ve got off that set, and his minders would’ve said “don’t ever use that term again.”
B. Salt – 05.41: They polled it, no doubt, and it would’ve come back 80/20 against.
B. Salt – 05.46: At 80/20 against, modern politicians, regardless if you are advocating, regardless if you are lobbying, regardless of whatever cosy relationships you have with whatever minister, if it’s 80/20 against, drop it!
B. Salt – 06.02: And that is exactly what happened over the following nine months.
B. Salt – 06.06: It’s hearts and minds.
B. Salt – 06.08: If you can get that 80/20 sentiment down to 55/45, then you have a case.
B. Salt – 06.16: Then you have a prospect of influencing policy in the 2010s.
B. Salt – 06.21: That’s how it works, I think.
06.23-06.37
‘The reason why someone like me doesn’t complain is I know it will affect my next project dealing with council ... and it may affect financing as bankers don’t want to hear there was a problem with my last project’ – Brisbane developer
B. Salt – 06.24: The reason why someone like me does not complain is I know it will affect my next project dealing with council.
B. Salt – 06.31: And it may affect financing as bankers don’t want to hear there was a problem with my last project.
06.38-10.53
The way forward?
Industry bodies need to be players not observers of the debate ... ‘doing nothing’ is no longer an option
Set up a think-tank in concert with other industry bodies:
Articulate participants in the debate
Counter negativism in all theatres – press, blogs, meetings
Active in the ‘hate blogosphere’
Can be called to ‘balance debate’ in specific areas
Intellectual and participatory
Commission ‘Pulse Survey’ of attitudes to development every 6 months in major markets
Cost? $2-3 million p.a.
B. Salt – 06.39: Industry bodies, like the PCA, like the BCA, like the Minerals Council showed us how it was done.
B. Salt – 06.46: Brilliant.
B. Salt – 06.48: 20 mill. Done. Fixed.
B. Salt – 06.51: Not lobbying any prime minister, not lobbying any minister.
B. Salt – 06.55: Going to hearts and minds.
B. Salt – 06.58: We will sway the people that you survey in order to determine your policies.
B. Salt – 07.04: It’s not right.
B. Salt – 07.06: It’s not the way I want my country to be managed.
B. Salt – 07.08: I want my country to be managed by real leaders, who have a vision of where this country should be and who are prepared to lead and sway opinion.
B. Salt – 07.20: That is not what we’ve got.
B. Salt – 07.22: What we’ve got, is people too scared to make this decision or that decision without polling.
B. Salt – 07.28: Well fine.
B. Salt – 07.29: You need to get in there and change the mindset.
B. Salt – 07.33: Doing nothing is– I want to set up a think tank in concert, perhaps, with other industry bodies.
B. Salt – 07.39: I want active, articulate participants in the debate.
B. Salt – 07.44: About 18 months ago, um someone– I was in the centre of inter– uh, independent studies, is a right wing think tank in Sydney, wrote an article in the Sydney Morning Herald opinion pages on the benefits of growth.
B. Salt – 07.57: They wanted to balance the argument at that time.
B. Salt – 07.59: I read the blog responses to that.
B. Salt – 08.03: If you ever want to see the hate blogosphere, the extreme thinking that you are up against, just jump onto any of those websites.
B. Salt – 08.14: Not one person, not one, in 230 put a reasoned, balanced, measured counter response.
B. Salt – 08.22: I want to see someone actually in there and every time you do not respond, negative sentiment extends just that bit further across middle Australia.
B. Salt – 08.32: I want to see someone, somebody, some group of people, counter the negativism in all theatres; social media, Twitter, blogosphere.
B. Salt – 08.44: Seek out, and not destroy, seek out and balance every extreme view.
B. Salt – 08.52: Take the fight to them.
B. Salt – 08.55: Sitting back is not an option.
B. Salt – 08.56: I do understand that individuals cannot do this.
B. Salt – 09.00: But surely there is a way you can actually fund a group to do it on your behalf.
B. Salt – 09.07: This is not a pitch for me, at all, but I would certainly be advi– I would love to advise, say this is what you need to do, this is how you need to set it up.
B. Salt – 09.16: Um, this is, these are the groups that you need to go after.
B. Salt – 09.20: And the other thing I would do is actually run a pulse survey.
B. Salt – 09.25: What is the sentiment towards business in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane?
B. Salt – 09.30: Is it 80/20 against?
B. Salt – 09.32: Odd surveys, every six months
B. Salt – 09.34: I dunno what that costs, whatever that costs, I’d run it every six months.
B. Salt – 09.38: What’s your attitude to growth and development? Hate it, don’t like it.
B. Salt – 09.42: 80 percent against, 20 percent for.
B. Salt – 09.45: Then I’d run it six months later. And then six months later, and six months later.
B. Salt – 09.50: And I would see whether this taking of the fight to the blogosphere, to the meetings, to every possible theatre you can imagine.
B. Salt – 10.00: To the opinion pages of the Herald Sun; see whether it works.
B. Salt – 10.05: You can actually measure it.
B. Salt – 10.08: Um, cost, look I don’t know what this sort of thing costs, I’m just basing it on, you know, a small consulting group, I suppose, two–three mil a year.
B. Salt – 10.16: What is the cost?
B. Salt – 10.17: What is the cost of doing nothing at the moment?
B. Salt – 10.21: And my argument is, doing nothing is not an option.
B. Salt – 10.25: I think this goes beyond the BCA, the PCA.
B. Salt – 10.27: I would like to see this done in concert with a whole range of uh, of industry and business groups, to actually balance the argument that, for strategic reasons, that industry players are not able to uh, uh pursue at the moment.
B. Salt – 10.48: Um, in order to uh, perhaps um discuss this uh, uh this, this idea I’ve uh asked a number of um, or two people to uh, to come up to the stage so we can have a discussion uh, around the um, the findings and in that regard I’ve asked uh Guy Gibson from uh, Lend Lease.
B. Salt – 11.06: Could Guy come up to the stage please?
B. Salt – 11.08: Uh, and also Rob Lang, uh GM from the Parramatta City Council, could you uh, come up to the stage.
B. Salt – 11.14: I’d start off by asking perhaps uh, Guy, for your overall reactions to uh, to what I’m suggesting.
G. Gibson – 11.21: Uh, well I guess um, not surprisingly, I very largely agree with your sort of prognosis of the situation we find ourselves in.
G. Gibson – 11.28: Um um, and I’m pleased to see the property councillors got rebranding the industry’s image as, as one of its priorities, but I think uh, it’s priority number eight in the uh, in the power house update and it’s not mentioned anywhere else in the document, other than being identified as priority number eight, so there’s no sort of set of actions that’s been identified to, to prosecute the cause.
G. Gibson – 11.48: Um, a-and I think, really, you know, many of the other initiatives that we were attempting to pursue as an industry, are not likely to find favour with uh, with government or the community generally unless we attack this issue of industry image head on.
G. Gibson – 12.01: And I-I think, you know, the mining industry have done a fantastic job, was at the cinema recently, sitting and watching an ad that went for about a minute and you really don’t know what the ad’s even for for a whole minute, it’s just sort of pictures of people being helped out of flood water, and care flight helicopters, and, you know, food parcels arriving, and thriving local economies, and you get right to the end and it’s an ad for the mining industry, and just, it’s a minute of feel good, brought to you by the mining industry, but, you know, the property council used to do quite a lot, particularly in the shopping centre space to remind um, you know, MP’s just how important shopping centres are to local economies, generating uh, wealth and, and employment and so forth, and we’ve sort of um, largely vacated that space over the last few years.
G. Gibson – 12.43: I-I think we need a big, broad um, community campaign uh, at a PR level.
G. Gibson – 12.50: I think we certainly need to continue the political engagement uh, on all sides of politics.
G. Gibson – 12.55: I think we need to fight the-the-the-the hand to hand battles, project by project, and in fact that’s-that’s where I think the industry is-has gotten very much better at over the last few years, and our community engagement techniques, project by project, are much more effective than they used to be, but it-it’s against this, this rising tide, as you pointed out of, of uh, sentiment which is very much anti-growth, uh, anti-development.
B. Salt – 13.17: My thinking was that a think tank, and I think it needs to be some-a body that is um, that is separate to the, uh, the PCA, and is why also want to buy in from the BCA, I can’t imagine that the Australian Banker’s Association would not also be interested in something that is shifting sentiment.
B. Salt –13.34: Now this idea that, you know, banks should not be able to get a fair return on their investment is, is bizarre.
B. Salt –13.42: We have this disconnect in Australia between the way we want to live our superannuation and our objection to every development, to anyone making a profit.
G. Gibson –13.51: Hm I think that’s right, there is an anti-business sentiment um, abroad as well as quite specific, sort of sentiment that’s um, antagonistic towards growth and development.
G. Gibson –13.59: I mean you’ve mentioned the Centre for Independent Studies, they came out with a report last week where they, they’ve actually um, polled, uh, all the mayors and CEO’s of liable governments across the country and uh, in just about all the cases, uh, increasing growth and development is associated with pressure on local government revenue, because they rely on rates revenue and developer contributions, and, you know, so they’re really they’re- they’re- they’re really being uh, uh sandwiched at the moment between, you know, demand for more development and their ability to-to finance infrastructure for new development, and they’ve really got nowhere to go so, I mean, one of the conclusions the Centre for Independent Studies came to is we really need to revisit the-the structure of financing for local government, to actually give them access to a growth tax, whether that’s, you know, a-a-a increasing the GST and hypothecate a proportion of liable government based on population size or whether it’s just a, a clearer grants process that delivers more federal grants to uh, um, to growing local authorities, but we-we need to, we need to address that issue as an industry as well, so we need to engage with local government, we need to engage with the planning profession uh, as well as sort of political and a, and a community PR level, in my view.
B. Salt –15.09: Thanks, uh, thanks Guy. Rob, your thoughts from the Parramatta City Council perspective, do you see what I see?
R. Lang –15.15: Well Bernard, first of all thank you for the, uh, craven populism tag, I think I’ll, I’ll enjoy that going forward.
R. Lang –15.20: Uh, look I don’t think it’s true uh, that-that um, and I think Guy’s right, councils do have a-an interesting challenge, an interesting opportunity, uh our council Parramatta absolutely pro-uh development, pro growth, uh, in fact we’re-we’re growing a city.
R. Lang –15.33: Parramatta is the uh, thir-the sixth biggest city in Australia, we’re the third largest economic zone after Sydney and Brisbane uh, Gulf Coast.
R. Lang –15.42: Uh, we see enormous need to build hundreds of thousands of square metres of office space and residential in density in Parramatta over the next decade.
R. Lang –15.49: Uh, and unless the um-
B. Salt –15.51: How are you gonna do that with-with the sentiment of objections?
R. Lang –15.54: That’s it, unless we embrace growth we’re not gonna be the city that we aspire to be.
R. Lang –15.58: So, um, I agree however that the uh, the um, negativism that you talked about is absolutely out there, in fact it’s happening already, uh and the challenge is not to silence the baby boomers, but in fact to balance them, and I think you’re right.
R. Lang –16.10: We need to hear from the, from what has been the silent majority, uh, there are a lot of developments where people are, you know, um, either positive or maybe at worst, indifferent.
R. Lang –16.18: But we never hear from them.
R. Lang –16.19: We hear from the one percent or two percent of people who have this enormous objection uh, and uh, we’ve gotta make sure that our politicians, whether they are state or local, are not swayed by a very, very small voice.
16.30-17.54
Do State Governments still deserve a piece of the policy pie? Would problems around politicisation of development be simplified though greater consistency in approach that could be delivered with Federal Government policy formulation and Local Government execution?
‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ is endemic in mainstream Australian culture and runs deep to our convict and European roots. Australia is increasingly reliant on the Asia region, which proudly celebrates success. If Australia doesn’t move from negativism to positivism how will Australia look in 20-30 years?
G. Gibson – 16.30: Um, I mean I-the-the difficulty of the Federal Government getting involved in-in planning issues is that they do it at such a-a scale um, that um it-it really is sort of um, you know, parenthood and lamingtons stuff, I mean the-what we want from the Federal Government is-is funding for infrastructure, I think, and they’ve really got little capacity to-to add value in uh, in town planning regulation in my view.
G. Gibson – 16.55: I mean it’d be-it’d be helpful if all the states would move towards more harmonious um, planning legislation and planning and environmental uh, regulation and policy um, but I really can’t see any process driven by COAG getting us there.
B. Salt –17.09: I actually don’t see that as the immediate issue, I see it as an intermediate issue.
B. Salt –17.13: This is not an issue to think about, I think this needs to be done right now, this whole changing the sentiment and attitudes towards business.
B. Salt –17.21: And I’m not sure whether in fact this has heightened since the GFC, the collapse of Wall Street, evil bankers, evil business, whatever it is, but it seems to be certainly gathering momentum.
B. Salt –17.30: And you can see it crystallised in any number of projects.
B. Salt –17.33: What about your response uh, Rob, to uh is this Tall Poppy Syndrome?
Do you think that’s uh, pretty much what this is?
B. Salt –17.40: Big business is really just um, a way of cutting down tall poppies.
R. Lang –17.44: Look, I think Australians have always had a-a healthy uh, um, disregard for tall poppies uh, and I don’t think that’s actually changed much.
R. Lang –17.51: I think what is different is that you’re absolutely right in saying earlier we have a very articulate uh, very well educated uh-uh set of people who have a lot of time on their hands who are able to respond uh, to anything.
R. Lang –18.03: And it really wouldn’t matter whether it’s a, you know, this issue or another one, they-if they can’t-if-if we took away their issue they’d find another one.
B. Salt –18.09: Exactly.
R. Lang –18.09: So I-I think we need to be conscious of that and to uh-uh, engage better, and this is a-where-I-I actually liked what Peter [Berger??] was saying earlier about a-a new approach to advocacy, I think we need to take a new approach to consultation, advocacy, call it what you like, but it’s more about changing the hearts and minds of the population than it is about changing the hearts and minds of politicians, because they won’t.
B. Salt –18.29: Exactly. It’s-It’s beyond advocacy, I think.
B. Salt –18.31: There’s a no ordino-another level of advocac-advocacy uh, and that is hearts and minds.
B. Salt –18.36: I wanna go in there and change the way middle Australia thinks.
B. Salt –18.40: And the rea-I don’t think it’s hard because we haven’t been fighting back at all.
B. Salt –18.45: You will never get the extremist, but it’s the-it’s that balanced 25 percent of the population, between the sort of 40 percent, 65-70 percent that I think is swayable, simply by putting forward a reasonable counter argument.
B. Salt –19.00: Exactly the way I think that party hack achieved his goal by balancing my um, whipping up of a frenzy of anti-Sydney sentiment uh, in the uh, in-in the Herald Sun.
B. Salt –19.12: Fair, reasonable, measured, balanced, just providing reasonable people with a way to actually think differently.
B. Salt –19.21: Are there any classic examples you could think of uh, Guy, that in your recent career that um, uh, that exemplify this uh, this culture of negativism?
G. Gibson – 19.31: Well you know, in my experience it’s very largely a sort of a generational um, phenomenon as well mmm, say this Queensland’s been going through a regional planning uh, growth management processes for the last uh, 10 years or so and at almost any public forum about regional plan, you’ll find like a busload of wrinklies will arrive from sort of Buderim on the Sunshine Coast or, you know, somewhere up the back of Esk or something, and they’ll arrive and the, you know, they’ll-they’ll uh, speak in very kind of uh, emotional language about how terrible it is that uh, that-that Queensland’s growing and how, you know, the Premier ought to stop making statements that encourage people to move to Queensland from interstate, and they really, they’ve got a complete disconnect between the way in which development works and the, and the sort of uh, the imperatives which drive development, so they think uh, basically if we stop building houses in South East Queensland people would stop moving there from, you know, Victoria.
G. Gibson – 20.24: They’ve got the exactly the kind of reverse causality to—to the way in which, the way in which, you know—
B. Salt –20.30: But-but no one explains to them—
G. Gibson – 20.31: Well no, and the funny thing is—
B. Salt –20.32: No one, no one if—in the absence of real information they form these distorted ...
G. Gibson – 20.36: In my-in my experience, like people, younger people in South East Queensland are very positive about the future, very, you know, young people are very optimistic about the future and it’s the, it’s the older people who seem to have forgotten that uh, South East Queensland a very much better place to live than it was sort of 30 or 40 years ago.
G. Gibson – 20.50: All the changes that have occurred in Queensland, say these Queensland last 30 years have been overwhelmingly positive in terms of employment opportunities, you know, lifestyle opportunities-
B. Salt –20.58: But-but there’s also an issue, I think, in retirement of taking up a cause, you know, you have nothing else to do, so you take up those causes, and there’s no greater cause than the environment uh, and taking on big business or a big developer, and-and-and achieving, achieving some sort of s-power kick or status amongst your social group.
B. Salt –21.20: It ticks all the boxes, it’s very hard to negate.
G. Gibson – 21.23: Yeah I-well I think there’s a, sort of a-a-a-a-a-a mood, a positive mood amongst younger people that we can definitely tap into it, if we-if we got positive messages out as an industry to um, uh, to sort of younger population, I’m sure they would resonate with a younger population.
G. Gibson – 21.40: They are looking forward to the future with confidence if they weren’t getting all these kind of anxious messages from, you know, their parents and grandparents about how everything’s going to hell in a hand basket.
R. Lang –21.49: And-and I think we can pick up on that too by using some of those techniques that are more popular with the younger generation, let’s get into the Facebooks and the Twitters and all those things because if we—if the only way to object to a planning proposal is by writing a written submission by a due date and uh, have it considered by, you know, that process, that’s a process that is ideally suited for baby boomers, and yet it-a-a person of 35 wouldn’t even uh, in their broadest dreams would even bother to do that, so we’ve gotta make sure that the other mechanisms that we’re hearing that voice, that silent majority voice uh, by making it easy for them to submit and to provide a-a-a voice, an idea, and then we’re gonna get a more balanced view.
B. Salt –22.25: What about my idea of a pulse survey? Uh, every six months, running a survey on sentiment.
B. Salt –22.31: Just asking average Joes in the suburbs of Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, what their attitude is to specific development propositions and then tracking that, seeing whether it rises, whether it falls, whether there’s some places that need better and more attention than others.
B. Salt –22.48: I have no idea what the cost of that is but, to my knowledge, I’ve never seen that sort of publicly available information previously.
G. Gibson – 22.56: Hm, well I think uh, to-to a certain extent the anti-development uh, anti-growth sentiment is really just a surrogate for, you know, o-other concerns anyway, so I think it’d be very useful to-to do that uh, pulse check every six months or so.
G. Gibson – 23.07: If you did a pulse check in the population now, what they think of the mining industry you can, you can bet it’s overwhelmingly more positive than it would’ve been before the mining industry started their campaign.
B. Salt –23.15: Yep.
G. Gibson – 23.16: So, um-
B. Salt –23.16: Well in fact um, you know the-the carbon tax, what is it, is it 12 million dollars worth of uh, advertisements over the last week or so, and Julia Gillard has pulled back six percentage points.
B. Salt –23.26: 12 million dollars of advertising campaign buys you you six percentage points in sentiment.
B. Salt –23.32: That’s the equation that I took out of that.
B. Salt –23.34: Cynically, rightly, wrongly, that’s the way the game is played today.
G. Gibson – 23.37: Yeah, alright, well I-I-I agree, it is a hearts and minds issue, it’s not, not so much even the information we put forward, ’cause you can rationally—you can attempt to rationally engage with a lot of the—the uh, this anti-growth uh, sentiment or objectors to individual projects and it’s-it’s-it’s not an, it’s not an argument around facts, this is an argument around values, very largely, so we-we need to engage with them at that level, rather than attempting to convince them that-that doing something is gonna have this impact on-on uh, on GDP, or, you know, local job creation in terms of raw numbers, it’s-it’s actually, it’s a-it’s a mood we’ve gotta create.
R. Lang –24.10: I think you need both though, you need to have the facts because knowledge is power-
B. Salt –24.13: Of course.
R. Lang –24.10: And if you can, if you can put across a-a vision, that gets the hearts uh, and the, and the facts that gets the minds, then you’re going to have—you’re going to get the right, you know, balance of people responding to your-to your perhaps more positive uh, view of the world than the negative view that you hear.
You've got to see this video. Salt and cronies rattling on at an industry talk-fest.
Warning: Likely to cause anger, nausea or both. An even bigger chance of dying laughing at these unselfconcious antics of the Property and Growth Lobby.
http://australianpropertyforum.com/topic/9032052/1/
The powerpoint slides and Salt monologue give way to footage of Co-conspirators... well conspiring.
One of those present is the CEO of Parramatta Council. All those on-stage seemed completely naive to the notion of democracy or the public interest. This was a 2011 talkfest by KPMG and the Property Council of Australia which has been sitting in our draft articles for some time, but age has not tarnished it.
Debating them would be like debating the three stooges - which is perhaps why they never debate any of the counter-growth lobby.
They seem utterly clueless regarding the nature of their opposition.
There are comments below the video on the above site from people who seem amazed at these antics. Most of candobetter.net's readers would not be amazed, but amused to see what we knew to be true actually played out on stage. There are also comments about some nasty sock-puppets who seem to be located in Prosper Australia. One of them is noted to attack people who want to stop undemocratic population growth in Australia. The same guy seems to get around a lot - from the Refugee Alliance and their friends in Right to Life, amongst shouter-downs in the Greens, the Socialist Alliance and even in Bicycles Victoria. (What do all these organisations have in common that could interest him? - Political turf.)
This page from another site also carries the same video and discusses the issue of online property shills and astroturfing.
http://www.differenthere.com/2011/08/on-internet-nobody-knows-youre-dog-or.html
This page, also from the site above, is also very interesting. It discusses the commercial collapse of The Block'
http://www.differenthere.com/2011/08/real-estate-in-crisis-block-auction.html
Here's an example of a comment posted after watching this video:
"This is very disturbing.
KPMG's Bernard Salt is advocating the creation of groups of paid shills and spruikers, backed by big business and the property industry, to 'counter the negativity' by posting on opinion pages of newspapers, forums, social media, twitter and the blogosphere. He wants these groups to take on the 'doomsayers' by seeking out and 'balancing extreme views'. He says individuals can't do it but there are ways to fund groups to do it.
His guests say the property council used to do this a lot to promote the property industry but vacated that space in recent years and he recommends they return with broad campaigns at the PR level to fight negative sentiment in the property market.
It makes you wonder whether they've already been successful in doing this, and the bulls and spruikers on forums like this one are bankrolled by the real estate industry and big business to sow seeds of uncertainty and doubt among the dominant (and correct IMO) bearish viewpoint. Would it surprise you if our one-eyed permabulls and their socks are puppets of the propaganda arm of the real estate industry, here to manipulate public opinion and drown out reality? Who to trust?"
Jon Faine's Conversation Hour featured a debate between growthist Bernard Salt of KPMG and Australian businessman and author, Dick Smith, who argues against growth. The only possibility of commenting was by SMS. There was no phone-in. My own experience of debating population growth on the conversation hour with ex-Premier Steve Bracks was that people later tried to make comments on the internet page associated with that debate, but the page was dysfunctional and quickly fell into total disrepair. I am therefore creating this page in the hope of getting some representation of public opinion on this matter. Comments on these mens' respective books are also welcome.
You can access the debate here, immediately, and here on ABC, eventually.
Hear Dick Smith talk about his book on the Allen Jones show, NSW.
Buy the book, Population Crisis, The Dangers of Unsustainable Growth
for $19.99 here.
This is what I wanted to say, and which I finished up emailing to the station under a general heading "Jon Faine Conversation Hour with Salt and Smith."
Bernard Salt's main argument is that we will need more young workers to pay for the retirement of elderly baby boomers. He overlooks the fact that population growth makes us uncompetitive because most of our labour goes into paying for the rising cost of land in the form of high rents and huge mortgages. Without these rising costs people would need very little money in retirement and young people would not have to work so hard and would be easily able to purchase or inherit housing. I think that Bernard Salt's policies are dangerously anti-social, anti-democratic and promote an unsustainable economy.
Here, by the way, is the link for the debate I had in April 2010 with Steve Bracks, when the phones went absolutely wild - as Jon Faine commented excitedly - yet the web-site for comments was not viable. (I retested it recently and it was still not working. Potentially thousands of comments were prevented.) In this most recent debate on a subject marketed with pro-growth bias by all the mainstream media, phone-ins were simply not possible. Will there be a page for comments?
I thought Bernard Salt successfully presented himself as a small target by agreeing with Dick Smith too often, but as far as I am concerned this is a rhetorical device for hiding his extremist views. I felt he (Salt) misrepresented his real personal views.
What I am trying to say is that someone sitting on the fence of the population issue would have probably been reassured by Salt and seen Smith as more alarmist. Salt used a platitude about business people being concerned about the future which was total rubbish and not at all a reflection on the way they behave. If you have no concept of peak oil and want to think that climate change is not an issue, the things Salt was saying sounded reasonable.
This was illustrated when they talked about population targets for 2050. He made out that Smith's target based on 80,000 NOM (I think) would reach 29M and his (Salt's) higher immigration for this decade before coming down to Smith's level would end up at 32M. So his point was we are talking a difference of only 3 Million or around 10%, which Salt suggested was a marginal difference that will hardly be felt in 2050. But Salt uses every other opportunity to promote population growth and economic growth in general, he never presents any arguments about needing to slow down in the future. If we still have "business as usual" in 2020 and Salt is still around I am sure he will still be advocating increased immigration.
I would like to see Kelvin Thomson debate Salt. Thomson is quicker on his feet and always seems to have the statistics at his fingertips. I witnessed the debate between Thomson and the Committee for Melbourne (CFM) CEO Andrew MacLeod. Like Salt, the MacLeod guy agreed to much with Thomson and said things that he would never otherwise say to any other forum, but Thomson always had really good answers.
So the conclusion is that the growthists are taking note of our arguments and are now using "small target" tactic by agreeing with many things the other side of the debate says, but this only happens in direct confrontations. When they are speaking at a business breakfast or any other corporate talk-fest, they repeat the same mantras that have long been refuted
Committee for Melbourne growthers are scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for new ways to get people to move to the hated high-rises the property development lobby has planned all over Melbourne. Mary Drost says, "Both Andrew McLeod and Bernard Salt are obsessed with growth. It is exactly this growth that is making Melbourne less liveable as everything is overstretched." Jill Quirk asks, "I wonder if Salt and MacLeod think widows Jeannie Pratt or Elisabeth Murdoch should vacate their premises for a flat in an "activity centre" or is just people who inhabit more modest post war triple fronted accommodation who are being asked to move over ?"
A group with an apparent interest in land speculation, with the dignified sounding name of The Committee for Melbourne, is pushing a crude barrow to get elderly people to give up their homes. It wants them to agree to be rehoused in high-density apartment blocks and thinks that if the State government lets them pay less stamp duty, they just might be tempted. This was the subject today of an article by John Masanauskas in the Herald Sun, "Lobby group calls for older couples to give up family homes," 17 February 2011.
It is probably not coincidence that, at the same time, Boroondara Council is trying to force 48 so-called "activity centres" (i.e. high rise developments) on its protesting residents. In a hangover from the Brumby government's human sardine policy, the council hopes to attract some of an additional 17,600 people that a few business hopefuls have promoted as likely to arrive over the next 16 years, based on shaky statistical projections.
Bernard Salt, the well-known KPMG spruiker for population growth and megacities, and the CEO of the Committee for Melbourne, Andrew McLeod, have managed to leave some unfortunate quotes for posterity.
Herald Sun writer, John Masanauskas, gives the impression that Salt believes that middle Melbourne (whatever that is) is fraught with the probability that "dad's going to drop dead and mum's going to be living by herself in a three-bedroom home". Salt predicts that the iconic 'mum' will eventually "find that the three-bedroom home with a garden and lawn becomes too much for her and she will therefore want to downsize."
In Salt's world, like Brumby and Bracks's macho-small-minded worlds, all women are 'mums' if they aren't girls trying to overcome a 'man drought' [catch his latest book], and all men are 'dads'. One senses that they are doomed, like cabbage moths, to fly and mate, lay their eggs, then die. Some, however, live on past their use-by date and become 'empty nesters', as CEO, Andrew McLeod calls them, opining:
"If they are an empty-nester living near a school they are actually taking a role that from a society's perspective would be better taken by a family."
You get the picture. According to this kind of view, societies and their suburbs should be reorganised into age cohorts. None of this bowls club down the end of the street and the little old lady in the corner shop, or the old man sitting on his porch in the sun, surveying his tomato patch, and the children visiting the lady over the road to climb her mulberry tree and use her grown-up daughter's books and toys, while their mother heads down for a game of tennis and their father takes the dog for a long walk up to the top of the hill to watch the sun set over the bay.
Salt and McLeod seem to have an odd and naively statistical view of societies, where people are labelled according to some of their qualities, like cards in packs, and are okay about being moved around in a kind of Lego world on the whim of some boys who never quite got over playing Monopoly.
Jill Quirk, President of Sustainable Population Victoria, comments:
"I think the rhetoric from Bernard Salt and Andrew Macleod that widows and "empty nesters" should leave their homes" and move into apartments for the convenience of others who would like to buy their houses is opportunistic , sexist, vulture-like, devoid of compassion or understanding, and the language of Grandpa and Grandma and (quote Bernard Salt) "rattling around in their veneers" is belittling to ordinary people.
"I wonder what the adult children of these targets of the hovering developers and real estate agents think of this blackmail? I also wonder if Salt and MacLeod think widows Jeannie Pratt or Elisabeth Murdoch should vacate their premises for a flat in an "activity centre" or is just people who inhabit more modest post war triple fronted accommodation who are being asked to move over ?"
She adds,
"Behind the figure of ridicule, the widow, whose husband has "dropped dead" is a person in shock, in grief and who is making a huge adjustment to a major life-change.
Importantly, she perceives,
"The widow is extremely vulnerable and could well fall prey to the kind of persuasion and pressure that Macleod and Salt seem to want to institutionalise so that everyone these people meet will echo the same refrain. 'Don't rattle around in the veneer, it is your civic duty to move out of your house now and let a young family with children at Lauriston and Camberwell Grammar move in.'"
And then she asks an interesting question:
"I wonder what Barry Humphries might say about this. He ridiculed the Australian suburban lifestyle for decades but I don't think he ever seriously thought of disrupting it and breaking it down."
What next? Will Mr McLeod and Mr Salt be investing in cemeteries and urging everyone to buy vertical plots in order to squeeze more coffins in? With the baby boomer curve on course to crash over the next 20 years, it's a sure thing.
Planning Backlash is the name of an umbrella group under which many different suburban groups gather to protect the rights of citizens whose environments and properties are threatened by intensification of development and the population growth that drives this. Mary Drost is their main spokesperson.
Mary says that all of Melbourne will be affected by this population growth and overdevelopment if the Boroondara Council gets away with it, and that the local people are furious that Booroondara Council is continuing a densification plan dating from when Justin Madden was Planning Minister under the Brumby government, which lost power in the last election. Densification will wreck the area, she says, and Planning Backlash is appealing to their State Member, Ted Baillieu, for help based on promises he made before the election.
Mary is actually pictured in John Masanauskas's article in a photo by Ben Swinnerton (which I have cropped above), leaning, smiling, over a picket fence, with a large sunny garden behind her.
She says,
"Both Andrew McLeod and Bernard Salt are obsessed with growth. It is exactly this growth that is making Melbourne less liveable as everything is overstretched. Their obsession is taking them to new boundaries, now they want the older people to get out of their houses to make way for the next generation. Maybe they want to euthanase us as well. I am not going to be stuck in a dog box to keep McLeod and Salt happy!"
She adds, "They would have done well at the time of the Russian Revolution, move the mobs into the big houses and let the owners live in one room. How would the grandmothers look after their grandchildren in dog boxes? What a nerve!"
As her own lifestyle shows, everyone is not a poor old used up mum or a dad pining away without purpose. For years, in a tradition starting with her mother, young couples have been living rent-free in a little flat that Mary's husband and she had made at the side of the house. In this way they "get a start in life." In return they help where they can.
"People usually stay about three years and then get their own place, after they have saved a deposit," Mary said. "Sometimes our guests have been young couples who were relatives."
At the moment, she is sharing her house with one couple, who "came back for a while." In the flat on the property there is a second couple.
She thinks and I think that this is a good way to use property. But it's not what Salt and McLeod would want, because their objective is to increase property turnover. Their guiding principle is commercial, not social.
Mary says that her brother and his wife, who have grandchildren, could not do without a big house, as they are "forever having children coming to stay and the families come home for dinner sometimes twice a week."
"What nonsense to say that we should all be moving into dog boxes," Mary exclaims. "Some no doubt want to, but I tell you this, it is the quickest way to give up and age and die. If you want to stay young then stay active. Don't forget that the government wants people to age in place and not go into nursing homes. The Dutch do this very well Australia should learn from them."
Ironically, Bernard Salt, who looks to be over sixty in his photographs, actually lives in a heritage house a couple of blocks from Mary. We googled the address we were given and provide a picture above. We have removed the name of the street from the picture.[1] Candobetter.net doesn't believe in exposing peoples' addresses unnecessarily, but it does seem on the face of it that Mr Salt talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk, and it is of interest to those dealing with the impacts of his marketing to see where he is actually coming from.
Since her photo and some comments appeared in Masanauskas's article, a number of people have looked Mary up in the phone book and have called her, agreeing strongly with her defense of her right to remain in her home.
[1] After an unsolicited comment which complained about this exposure of Mr Salt, we canvassed our editors and writers who all agreed that it was relevant to show how Mr Salt lived. It was felt however that the important thing was to convey how he lived, which should include the suburb (of which it seemed typical, and which was the same suburb as Mary Drost's), but not necessarily the street. Therefore we have reduced the information on the photo. Discussion welcome.
Bernard Salt says that there's a strong need to lift the number of taxpayers in Australia during to pay for the retirement needs of the baby boomers, that mob of imminent retirees born between 1945 and 1960. And it's not a Ponzi scheme, he says, noting that the baby boomer bump is a one-off.
Whereas Kevin Rudd said in October last year I believe in a big Australia, Julia Gillard is now saying I do not support the concept of a big Australia. Bernard Salt's main concern is that we need strong population growth to support a rising tax base in the coming decade. At least he is inadvertently revealing the real rationale for population growth – a bigger tax base!
New figures released last week by the ABS show we added 432,000 last calendar year.
Bernard Salt is a Partner of KPMG, a financial services company, based in Melbourne. Bernard holds Bachelor of Education and Master of Arts degrees and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is considered a demographer.
His view is that after 2020 it will be a bleak time for Australian investors, as baby boomers retire off. Salt predicts that as the growth in the number of centenarians continues to outpace every other age group in Australia, governments will struggle to afford to keep them alive.
These are very expensive years to maintain, he said. Dismissing people as economic burdens is clearly his way of evaluating people, as economic units! His solution? Keep growing the population to 'balance” older people, despite the fact that all populations grow old eventually. This is a simply life cycle. Many older people are self-funded now. The real costs in taxes is actually in supporting population growth!
If we continue with our forced population growth rate, will will continue to have not one-off “bumps” of older people, but cumulative mountains of them.
Despite the costs of population growth, the scientific facts as opposed to columnists’ opinions, it will be the size of our wallets that determines our future? Economics alone cannot be the simple rationale for justifying a "big Australia", as suggested by Bernard Salt.
(Melbourne's sprawl - Wikimedia Commons)
If we stabilise our numbers, we won't need the big tax base. We won't need the continually increased spending on schools, hospitals, roads, freeways, law enforcement, water and power infrastructures. The amounts would be fixed and stable, except for maintenance.
There are many dimensions and implications of increasing our population, and the only "benefits" are economic ones, simply devoid of the multitude of considerations. People are not a economic units that can be stacked and stored for financial benefits, like factory farmed animals.
The costs of population growth are many, and are financial, environmental, wildlife losses, social and in living standards.
Prior to European settlement, there was little bare soil in Australia apart from the areas that were sparsely vegetated in the semi arid and arid regions . Erosion in pasture lands has doubled from natural conditions, with a five-fold increase for improved pastures. Soil stability is essential to the health of the vegetation growing in it and the other biodiversity inhabiting that vegetation. Vegetation is also essential to maintaining soil stability.
If our arable, fertile coastlines and vegetation areas are covered by housing, infrastructures and developments, Australia's capacity to maintain viable biological services would be severely compromised.
Grazing is the main land use contributing to total soil erosion across assessed river basins, because of the vast areas involved in grazing and their location in northern Australia.
The number of species on Earth was gradually diminishing – not by the slow inexorable processes of extinction on a geological time-scale, but through the landscape changes imposed by human ‘development’ – by clearing, agricultural chemicals and housing developments as well as the more direct impacts of hunting and gathering to satisfy an exponentially growing human population.
"Sustainable growth" is an oxymoron as nothing can growth forever while our land and natural resources are finite.
The overlay of climate change will impact more, and large communities are more at risk from threats and extinction than small, flexible, and diverse communities.
If Population Minister Tony Burke is still conducting his inquiries, how do we know that he might not conclude that Australia could indeed expand to 35 million, or to 40 million, by mid century? If so, should we expand to our maximum numbers, deny climate change, and deny the livelihoods and an intact, beautiful Australia, to next generations? How will they be able to grow, or will they be forced to stabilise their numbers?
This short-sightedness is based on consumerism, greed, and ignores the multi-dimensional costs of expanding our population.
On Tuesday 25 May Mark O'Connor and Bernard Salt debated Australia’s population options at the “Future Summit”, run by the Australian DAVOS Connection (ADC) at the Hyatt in Melbourne. It was a one-hour debate, moderated by Jane-Frances Kelly of the Grattan Institute, before an audience mainly of business people. Organizers were surprised by the numbers this session attracted.
On Tuesday 25 May Mark O'Connor and Bernard Salt debated Australia’s population options at the “Future Summit”, run by the Australian DAVOS Connection (ADC) at the Hyatt in Melbourne. It was a one-hour debate, moderated by Jane-Frances Kelly of the Grattan Institute, before an audience mainly of business people. Organizers were surprised by the numbers this session attracted. The session was recorded.
Originally there were to have been four panellists, but professors Roger Short and Hugh White (Strategic Studies ANU) cancelled at the last moment, leaving an hour’s debate between environmental writer, O'Connor and growth marketer, Bernard Salt. Moderated by Jane-Frances Kelly of the Grattan Institute, this parallel session surprised the organizers by attracting more than its share of the mainly business-person audience. The room was packed with more than one hundred people.
Recently a letter appeared in The Canberra Times questioning Bernard Salt's status as a demographer and this time he was introduced as some kind of 'urban investigator'. Salt nevertheless quickly took the debate into the demography area, by running a version of the ageing population scare.
O'Connor said something about Salt and himself being good 'amateur demographers' and implied that they should both defer to the real experts. Salt explained that he was "not a demographer at all but an historian” and described himself as having an MA in urban history. He added that he wished journalists would not describe him as a demographer. A Google search will, indeed, find him repeatedly described as one.
Bernard Salt comes across as a “true believer” in population growth, conceding few if any downsides to it. He appears to have trouble understanding where the other side is coming from, and tends to caricature environmental and resource arguments against growth.
In this debate, he began with an exaggerated account of the costs of paying the old age pension for an aging population. He claimed that, even by raising the retirement age to 69 years, that would only buy us “a year or two”.
He based his positive case for growth on the value of 'optimism', concluding with a virtual paean to optimism, describing his belief that our cities will become marvelous, exciting places to live, with superlative transport systems made possible by density.
Indeed, the optimism of growth economists and neo-liberals lies not just their failure to foresee economic crises but in their apparent belief that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse went out in the medieval era, or at least with WWII. Like Francis Fukuyama's End of History, they seem to believe that the establishment of Western [pro-business] liberal democracy is the ultimate and final form of human government.
Bernard Salt characterised the recent leap in immigration figures as temporary, pending the return home of overseas students. He also did not seem to make a difference between gross and net immigration figures. Peter McDonald of the ANU, who is a 'professional' demographer and a fellow growth lobbyist, seems less confident that the students will go home, and suggests that recent projections of an Australian population of 36 million projection in 2050 would need immigration to come down to 220,000 a year. Mark O'Connor thinks that the numbers would have to come down to 180,000 net.
In reply to a statement from mining executive, Hugh Morgan, in the audience, Mark O'Connor observed how little China or India would gain by invading Australia. Salt said that he had never held out the prospect of Australia being invaded by more populous nations. Only a short time later, however, he had come full-circle, sternly warning that the USA would not come to our aid if this happened. Dismissing an argument by O'Connor that Australia was not a large fertile and empty country, Salt said that what mattered was Australia's failure to convince its Asian neighbor nations of this.
He often sounds, however, as if he actually believes this myth, and is not averse to trying to spread it. In this debate he seemed to avoid making any firm call on whether Australia was in fact a semi-desert continent with limited carrying capacity. In fact, such an admission would pin him down to a factual argument and impede much of his pro-population growth rhetoric.
Salt seems to have a bizarre view of the world we live in and what should be our priorities. One got the impression that introducing an even mix of the world’s races into Australia was more important than keeping our population sustainable. The rationale he manufactures is that otherwise other nations will mistaken Green Australia policies for the old White Australia policies. Aided apparently by his ignorance about Australia's environment, Salt conveys a right-wing-business attitude, dismissing people who object to environmental destruction as hysterical exaggeraters.
The Grattan Institute moderator often failed to refer illogical claims for countering by the opposing debater. She seemed more concerned with moving through a variety of subjects, and getting audience response. Many of these responses from big business people showed how little some people in the commercial world understand threats to environments, or limits to natural resources. One man from Geraldton in West Australia, for instance, claimed that Geraldton had about twice as much renewable wind-energy generation as they could use, and a vast resource of underground fresh water inside the sands. There was no chance to ask if the water was renewable, or if these wind plants were real or projected.
So far the only account of this debate we have seen in the mainstream media was one strongly biased towards the pro-growth side in Alan Kohler's in Business Spectator, Entitled, “Rolling up the drawbridge” it began with Bernard Salt's ludicrous premise, “Australia risks becoming an international pariah if it relies the environment as an excuse to resist further migration, the Future Summit heard today." Kohler then gave eight paragraphs to summarizing Salt’s remarks, and two paragraphs on Mark O'Connor's.
Later this item, by Dally Messenger, appeared in the Business Spectator. It improves coverage of the debate.
Republished here to give background to Sheila Newman's remarks in her debate with Steve Bracks on the Jon Faine show 19-4-2010. You can comment on Jon Faine's "Population Forum" about the debate here and you can listen to the podcast here. The sector in Australia that has the most costly dependency ratio must be the property sector, since it costs all Australians an enormous and unreasonable amount just to cover the cost of land for housing, business and agriculture. Most of the very high costs involved are completely unnecessary, except in the eyes of greedy developers and their hangers-on
Yesterday (4 Feb, 2010) the Australian had Bernard Salt raising the alarm about the dependency ratio (again). But the man is hopelessly misinformed. Elderly people are not the big problem. And children (who are more dependent and for longer and who outnumber elderly people) are not the problem either.
The sector in Australia that has the most costly dependency ratio must be the property sector, since it costs all Australians an enormous and unreasonable amount just to cover the cost of land for housing, business and agriculture. Most of the very high costs involved are completely unnecessary, except in the eyes of greedy developers and their hangers-on. The only reason that the costs are so high is that the industry wants it that way and our state and federal governments are in cahoots with it.
Australians pay these monstrous costs first and must deduct them from their disposable income. These unnecessary costs affect the amount of hours we must work and how hard we must work and whether we can afford to take holidays. They affect our health and happiness. The high prices affect the cost of doing business, of manufacturing, of storage, garaging etc. When these costs are inflated they take away from other economic and social obligations, which are to provide education, hospitals, child support and retirement funding in the form of pensions and superannuation. Yes, even for self-funded retirees, the cost of doing business is inflated by the cost of land and is deducted as a variety of costs from any profits which devolve to shareholders.
Australia's inflated land-costs mean that small business has had increasing difficulty surviving and that for an increasing number of Australians, survival itself - in terms of accessing shelter and having enough money left over for food and clothing - has become difficult and sometimes impossible. For more Australians each year, transport to get to work or education to train for employment, are luxuries. Yet all this could be changed if property development and housing were no longer considered as private profits but as public expenses and the factors that contribute to their inflation were adjusted accordingly. These factors are those which drive up demand. Demand is affected by births, deaths and immigration and, to a lesser extent, by household size, location and position, which may all be to some extent discretionary.
The most noticeable adjustable drivers of demand are overseas and interstate immigration. Interstate immigration can be dealt with by adjusting building permits at local levels. Overseas immigration can be dealt with by State Governments ceasing advertising for new immigrants and by National Government revising immigration quotas downwards. For maximum reduction of costs, land and housing availability should be exactly equal to demand.
In a steady state society, houses would become available as people died, with some overlap, at very little cost.
It is Australia's housing industry which is responsible for elderly people being scapegoated instead of honoured and supported to enjoy the long and happy lives that we should all be able to look forward to.
"For most Australians, whether buying or renting their home, the provision of adequate housing for themselves and their families involves substantial ongoing expenditure throughout much of their lives. Housing costs are often the largest regular expenses to be met from a household's current income.
The housing costs measure compiled from the Survey of Income and Housing is defined as the sum of:
* rent payments,
* rates payments (general and water), and
* mortgage or unsecured loan payments, if the initial purpose was primarily to buy, add or alter the dwelling."
Source: 1301.0 - Year Book Australia, 2008
It is always very difficult to get information from public sources on how the cost of land affects the cost of living in Australia because the Australian Bureau of Statistics refuses to treat land as a 'commodity' and our cost of living measure, the consumer price index, only factors in the cost of 'commodities' - other things you buy.
This kind of information is about the best we can get from the ABS (see below). It doesn't tell us very much. Most of the information is in the private sector and costs a lot to see.
It also doesn't tell us how much people who have businesses pay for rent and buildings on top of the money they pay for their own housing.
Yet land is treated like a commodity in Australia, and we know for sure that for many of us it is our greatest burden:
“The development of stock mortgages and wool and crop liens in Australia represented legal ingenuity in that on traditional analysis, a property transfer was taking place with respect to something which would only come into existence in the future – the crop or wool to be grown.
In Australia land was not in itself a source of power but an asset capable of producing wealth. Improvements, particularly fencing, represented a high proportion of the value of real estate and borrowings on the land seem to have been greater than in England. It is thus argued that land in Australia was always viewed as a commodity, see Davidson and Wells, “The Land, the Law and The State: Colonial Australia 1788-1890” (1982) 2 Law in Context 89 AND Whalan, D., The Torrens System in Australia p.98.” Source: Adrian J Bradbrook, Susan V MacCallum, Anthony P Moore, Australian Property Law, LBC Information services, 1996, p.1.103:
Mr Salt recently argued that the property sector was being too timid. He implied that they had become somewhat embarrassed by bloggers highlighting the industry's reasons for promoting high immigration. He urged them to weigh into public debate and wondered why usually high profile growth lobbyists were acting like such wall-flowers.
"... I must say the “growth vs no growth” issue is ascendant and is likely to remain so during 2010. What disappointed me about this debate was the lack of supporting comment emanating from the property industry. No-one that I could see was out there putting the case for growth.
And I suspect the reason is that “big (property) business” doesn’t want to draw attention to itself on a contentious public issue. There seems to me to be almost a timidity in property individuals getting involved in public debate about growth. The logic seems to be don’t rock the boat."
Well, maybe, the property industry is becoming a little more self-aware and less inclined to shoot from the mouth. Perhaps some of the younger people in the industry are becoming ashamed of the role the industry plays in creating and increasing poverty and inequality. Perhaps some of the young planners and builders aren't too keen on trashing the countryside. Maybe when young property developers, engineers, planners and developers you go to parties these days, their mouths go dry and they blush when some nice girl or bloke asks them what they do for a living.
I mean, what do you say? "I make my money out of unaffordable housing." "My boss is a land-speculator." "I serve the land-lords of the world." "We're in the business of overpopulation. It's good for our profits." "Oh, your mother protested on the steps of parliament last week?" "You hate people who bulldoze trees?" "Um, you think we cause most of the carbon gas increases in Australia?" "Well, I didn't choose to have small animals flee at my approach." "Gee, I might be responsible for people dying of thirst in a few decades, and I'm already responsible for animals dying of starvation, but hey, it's a job."
"The only way to offset the impact of the baby bust next decade is to grow the tax base through immigration. That’s why we need a big Australia, at least in the short term. And, make no mistake, this trajectory is good news for the property industry," writes Bernard Salt.
Well, no, Bernard. There is another way and it involves downsizing the property development industry so that we can afford what any normal functioning society can expect to provide for its children and elderly.
I look forward to some intelligent and responsible leadership from those young people who are currently embarrassed by their industry.
Basic economics requires profit to be made from land so that society can have publicly available infrastructure. Land commodifiers and speculators use the need for a profit margin to justify the buying and selling of land at unreasonable prices and for government and business conspiring to inflate those prices. But, when the costs of land are so high that they make business impossible, the time has come to say good-bye to the private housing and development industries.
First published here 2/6/2010 but republished to give background to my remarks on Jon Faine Show - 19-4-2010
The Sydney Morning Herald article, "Cap, 'Not the answer to population growth'"(AAP 30 March 2010) quotes only those on the high-population side of the debate. Yet it depicts almost all of them as desperately trying to hose down the arguments for capping population.
Why they are so on the defensive is clear from the Essential Research political poll that was released back on March 1st. Among the usual questions on voting intentions etc was included one on attitudes to population, and the results were stunning:
* 75% agreed and only 19% disagreed that "We just don't have the infrastructure and services to manage more population growth."
* 64% agreed and only 29% disagreed that "Immigration should be slowed as it causes too much change to our society"
* 61% agreed and only 30% disagreed that "Australia has a fragile environment that cannot cope with a much larger population".
* 38% agreed but 52% disagreed that "Having a larger population will help our economy."
* 35% agreed but 58% disagreed that "Australia has the space and resources to cope with a much larger population."
* Coalition, not Labor, supporters were more likely to agree to the first two propositions.
See Source.
Predictably the growth side tried to argue that it isn't the number of people you cram into the cities that counts, it's the superb way they plan to house them. Growth-promoter Bernard Salt once again got himself described as a "demographer". He also tried to run the aging population scare in reverse, as an optimistic claim that an immigration intake of 180,000 each year is Australia's "get out of jail free card to fund our retirement of the baby boomers".
However Salt admitted that "One thing that you can be confident about in the next 40 years is that, in real terms, petrol will be $5 a litre." It did not occur to him that high-priced fuel implies similarly high-priced fertiliser and food. (Food riots broke out last time oil reached $100 a barrel, because even the third world now grows its food with nitrate fertilisers derived from oil and gas.) One problem with the mega-cities that Anna Bligh and others would create is they will be totally unsustainable -- dependent on people elsewhere being willing to send them millions of tanker-loads of fuel and millions of trucks of food. It is far from clear what these cities can produce to offer in exchange.
Just at present the really valuable commodities, like oil and food, are dirt cheap whereas one pay through the nose for fashion accessories etc -- a situation which makes cities seem sustainable and provides millions of jobs for city dwellers. But it is unlikely this would be the case in an oil-starved world.
Wayne Swan is still trying to swat away the population issue without descending to debate it: "I can't bring myself to agree with those who think we can solve all our problems by putting a freeze on national population growth." But the democratization of the internet makes it harder to get away with such tactics. One internet correspondent, Skooner, retorted:
"No Wayne, we certainly can't solve all our problems that way, but it sure would go a long way toward easing house prices, shortening hospital queues, saving the environment and cutting our carbon footprints. I, and a lot of other Australians would also like to know who exactly you are referring to when you talk about "we" Mr Swan? Just who are "we"? The "working families" which elected you - the Australian people - or just the vested corporate interests that possess an insatiable hunger for more growth and more people.
The ideological gap between the Liberal/Labor (Liboral?) party elites - that are addicted to huge population growth, baby bonuses and mass-immigration - and the electorate has never been greater."
("Skooner", on [email protected])
(Illustration: For more on Colonel Blimp see "Notes" [1])
Original title was: "Mr Salt and Mr Murdoch team up again to can Australians". See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09.
According to yet another article in Mr Murdoch's Australian newspaper by self-styled demographer, Bernard Salt,
Australia "quivered when a passing Japanese submarine lobbed shells into the eastern suburbs of Sydney in May 1942: property prices plummeted."
You can find the article, "Invasion victory ensured by complacency" in the business and property section in The Australian. A sort of where to buy and invade section, I guess. Here Salt advertises Australia as an easy target for any enemies. Pretending that he is writing for a mythical Peoples' Army in Bernardistan, he plots entry via the Kimberleys.
Why Salt's antics here are not seen as treacherous and inciting invasion would be a mystery to anyone seriously subscribing to the Axis of Evil myth. More sophisticated readers may wonder, however, if the property development industry is so worried by the Australian public's louder and louder calls for population stabilisation, that they must have decided to ask Mr Murdoch and Mr Salt to try provoke a full-on invasion.
Mr Salt probably realises that conducting a military invasion of Australia (rather than the economic immigration one) is not as easy as his imaginary character pretends. What may still be possible, however, is to misinform elderly Australians (members of the property lobby and readers of The Australian, for instance) via one of our only two national newspapers, and panic them into calling for a bigger population. Either strategy could work and, without an invasion - of immigrants or armed forces - the Colonel Blimps (and Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swann) of the Property and Development Lobby are doomed. A welcome extinction, in the view of many ecologists, which would prevent so many sad ones.
Australia Overloaded author, Mark O'Connor wrote recently in response to Bernard's attitude which seems to be that Australians are complacent cowards and the country needs more of them:
"If the Australians of our fathers' or grandfathers' generation had been as faint hearted as Mr Salt, back when our population was only a third of what it is today, Australia might now be a province of Japan."
(O'Connor was responding to an article, "Australia told to grow or risk invasion", in the Canberra Times, 31/3/2010, p. 6 which was reporting on what seem like Bernard Salt's attempts to commercialise fear and ignorance in yet another forum.)
James Sinnamon commented on the facts:
In fact, Australia achieved self-reliance in 1942 and stood a very good chance of being able to defeat a Japanese invasion. That is why the Japanese Army in March 1942 vetoed the Japanese Navy's plan to invade.
The reason why the Japanese Army vetoed the Navy's invasion plans is explained in detail by Andrew T Ross in Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945 Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, on pages 408-418:
By June 1942, the earliest date an invasion force could have been assembled, Australia would have 8 fully equipped divisions in the field as well as an air force capable of denying the Japanese total air supremacy. To win, they would have had to capture a deep water harbour in order to enforce a blockade to prevent Australia being able the resupply itself with some of the very few materials with which we were not self-sufficient (including petroleum). The northernmost deep water harbour was Newcastle.
Mr Sinnamon, who obviously has no serious investments in housing or infrastructure or bank shares, continued:
During the Second World War Australia was one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, a technological edge we have largely lost since then thanks to Australia having allowed its manufacturing sector to be destroyed as mandated by free market orthodoxy.
Of Australia's contribution to the Second World War, US President Truman said to the US Congress in a report on Lend Lease (including on Australia's reverse Lend Lease to the US during much of the Pacific War) on 27 December 1946:
"On balance, the contribution made by Australia, a country having 7 millions, approximately equalled that of United States." (Andrew T. Ross, Armed and Ready: the industrial development and defence of Australia, 1900-1945, Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, p 427)
Sinnamon asks,
Why would Bernard Salt wish to deny this, as well as this country's impressive military achievements, by focusing on only two episodes in the war?
In the case of the bombing of Darwin, the attacking Japanese force exceeded that which attacked Pearl Harbour, so I would think that the panicked response by some Australians was understandable.
(See also "The myth of the Howard Government's Defence Competence" of 21 November 2007 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6665)
Well, I guess it doesn't matter to Mr Salt's objectives whether his statements are accurate or fair. The aim of the article seems to be to generate enough fear to overcome Australians' democratic desire for a small and stable population. This means we can expect many more articles like this one, sigh.
And the battle to invade and subdue Australia is half-won anyway. As Bernard Salt knows and Greg Woods writes, we are already well on the way to being a nation of disorganised captives to propaganda and consumerism.
So why would having a lot more of that kind of Australian serve to defend us against the tens of millions in some Bernardistan?
As Greg Wood writes:
Pray tell Mr. Salt, how would even tenfold more Australians, wedged into the alienating fringe of suburbia and the high-rise catacombs of your ambitions, and beguiled into apathy by myriad imported electronic eclectica, be of any practical assistance against this massed force from your imagination? As an audience to watch the news-feeds and up the ratings of the conflict perhaps?
Your narrow and convenient account of WW2 Australian response to Japanese attack is simply bad history. In fact the response was broadly self-sacrificing and heroic. That earlier time exhibited remarkable social identity and spirit, which acted as the glue that draws together the resistance your argument so disingenuously questions. That character is now largely lost as recent decades have seen genuine neighbourhoods sacrificed as commodities for trade in the game of property speculation and growth-for-profit that you advocate.
And the futility of your proposition sucks one’s breath out. Why bother to invade Australia when it is already for sale world-wide on the internet to the highest bidder with the strongest exchange rate? N.B. 80% of Australians (and growing) need not apply – insufficient funds!
Well, that's right, Greg. And the Property marketers of the Growth Lobby want more customers with ready cash. For some reason they think that the Peoples Army might have the ready. (After all, armies are where a lot of foreign aid ends up and big spending goes on.) So Bernard is getting the message to them, via Mr Murdoch's Australian that it would be a doddle to invade Australia. While they're perusing our topology on GoogleEarth, they can also have a look at property on Mr Murdoch's www.realestate.com.au
But Greg continues, referring to the treacherous conduct of The Australian as a 'community sell-out' in printing an article that purports to give fail-safe directions to invade your country:
Harking back to WW2 and what it truly does take to secure freedom, a community sell-out of this magnitude would have earned a bullet in the back of the head from the French Resistance. Or does your curious brand of history see them as an extremist terrorist group?
However, if you peruse the emailed responses to Salt's article, it really isn't so easy to invade Australia. Perhaps, in fact, Mr Salt was just using the Peoples' Army as a kind of code for the elderly tax-payer army that supplements the Growth Lobby's continued purchase of power in this country.
At any rate, here are some of the best of the responses in The Australian:
ID Langford Posted at 6:13 AM Today
Bernard, you are entirely out to lunch... Consider the SE Asian archipelago that you navigated down to get here...you don't think we will see you coming? Consider the vast interior of the Australian landmass that you will need to penetrate in order to project military force into our decisive areas...does it remind you of the German attempt to conquer the Soviet Union in WW2? Or Napoleon's attempt a century earlier?? Consider the logistics involved in forcing entry onto Australia and then sustaining it...consider the wet season which prohibits movement in northern Australia for much of the year...go read some the Defence of Australia foundational documents that are out there. Most of us are complacent about history; some of us however, are students of history and understand the efforts required to lodge and deny access to an area the size of the Kimberley would be a truly monumental task. It took over 205 German Divisions to invade the Soviet Union and even this massive war machine failed. Have a real think about it...who can even closely imitate this force structure today??
Jason Ransome of Basel, Switzerland Posted at 7:29 AM Today
Fantastic article! But did you take into account our anzus treaty with America. Let's not forget Australia is a huge country, you can start from the west and move east but our army will come from behind and cut your supply routes every time, so you better bring enough personal to protect those supply routes. If it was so simple to invade Australia then it would of been tried by more than just the Japanese Good luck with your invasion, your going to need it
I like this one - short and to the point:
Mr Squiggle of Melbourne Posted at 9:58 AM Today
What an odious little article this is. China's population is 1.3bn. Indonesia's is 231m. Even if we increased our population size four-fold tomorrow, we would still be strategically outnumbered. Just let it go Bernard, we'll never create national security by ramping up our population. The starting gap is too large.
neil of melb Posted at 11:05 AM Today
The problem with invading Australia is purely logistical, How may countries have the capability of transporting 150,000 soldiers, equipment and ongoing supplies over 1000's of km of ocean? The only countries that could conceivably do it are the USA because of their military power and Indonesia because of their proximity. But Indonesia does not have the capability to destroy our air force or stop it being reinforced from allies. They don't have the capacity to land 10's of thousands of paratroopers. We would have control of the skies and the resulting carnage inflicted on a marine invasion would catastrophic. Military strategists run simulations on these scenarios constantly, this is why we are spending billions on long distance radar, aircraft and submarines rather than a huge army. A war would be fought in the Pacific or Indian oceans or Timor sea, not on Australian soil.
Is The Australian in fact un-Australian? Didn't the diggers die to preserve free speech? How come only Mr Salt and his doyen get to say whatever they like?
[1] Colonel Blimp was a cartoon character created by Sir David Low (1891-1963), a New Zealand political cartoonist and caricaturist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom for many years. Low was a self-taught cartoonist. Born in New Zealand, he worked in his native country before migrating to Sydney, Australia in 1911, and ultimately to London (1919), where he made his career and earned fame for his Colonel Blimp depictions and his merciless satirising the personalities and policies of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and other leaders of his times. Source, Wikipedia
See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09, "Madang landowners fight ecologically devastating Chinese mining invasion" of 1 Apr 10.
Mark O'Connor's comments are in italics, in the form of a running commentary through Bernard Salt's article.
In "Inconvenient truth on ageing" (4 Feb 2010, The Australian), Bernard Salt, who markets his version of demography to business for profit, writes,
"WAYNE Swan clearly missed a great opportunity earlier this week with the release of the third Intergenerational Report. He referred to the report by the bureaucratic abbreviation 3IGR4, but if the Treasurer really wanted to appear "with it" he should have christened it the iGen 3.0 Report.
The Intergenerational Report is, of course, the government's key reference document canvassing policy options for managing the ageing of Australia's population."
O'CONNOR: Well at least, that’s Salt’s journalistic slant on it. He wants to see the report as about Gens X and Y and the boomers.
SALT: "-- the problem being that from 2011 onwards more baby boomers exit than Generation Ys enter the workforce."
O'CONNOR: This is a claim he keeps making, but like the basis for his claim to be a "demographer" it comes without explanation. He doesn't say whose projection he is using that shows this will begin to be the case from 2011. (Are we meant to take it on his own authority?) I note that a Google search reveals numerous demographers saying that in the USA Generation Y is bigger than the baby boomer generation, and I can't as yet find any saying the reverse for Australia. But ask Bob Birrell or Katharine Betts.
Since presumably the reverse has been the case up till 2011, I would suspect that the imbalance in 2011 will be, even on his preferred projection, very small. And probably it will not increase very fast either -- otherwise he would have laid stress on that. In short, I suspect this is a weak statistic.
SALT: "The issue is not just the number of baby boomers looking for an aged pension; it's the loss of this cohort's contribution to the tax base."
O'CONNOR: Well, by definition retirees tend to retire from higher salaries than young persons joining the workforce are on, but so what?
SALT: "The favoured solution so far to managing this matter has been to grow the worker base, and in this regard ... "
O'CONNOR: I’d have to check if that (wanting to collect more tax) was in fact Rudd’s stated reason back then. He has since offered other excuses, even defence.
SALT: "Kevin Rudd was emphatic on the ABC's 7.30 Report last October when he stated he believed in a bigger Australia, and further that he made no apology for that view. The Prime Minister's comments have sparked furious debate about the sustainability and advisability of future growth."
O'CONNOR: Yes, perhaps Salt has been feeling the heat on those interactive blogs and online letters that now follow the publication of an article. He used not to have to worry about people raising awkward debates re sustainability, water, food, etc because, at least in the Murdocch Press, there was no counter view.
Mark O'Connor is the author, with Bill Lines, of Overloading Australia, of which a new edition has just been launched. The book is about how Australia is suffering from overpopulation. Mark O'Connor will be one of three people putting the environmental case for a small population in a debate with some die-hard growthists at the next Property Council Conference.
Illustration: "Cage metropolis". The building block for the nightmare city depicted in the illustration comes from stills taken from a France2 (National government) television news report on 9 September 2009. The report showed people living in cages, several to a room, and paying USD$120 weekly in rent.[1]
This suffering is the result of population pressure in a system which does not protect human rights from its impact, in Hong Kong, an ex-British protectorate. We cannot blame it on the recent Chinese government, which has retained the British system. When the British took Hong Kong over, there was no population problem like this. It was a colonial creation which the mainland Chinese have chosen to perpetuate.
Australia's system - like Canada's and most in the USA - shares many of Hong Kong's problems, in part because its land-use planning laws have similar origins, and because population growth is encouraged despite the problems that it causes.
In Australia more people every day are homeless. If you doubt just how precarious many peoples’ situations have already become, have a look at the Four Corners video-report on homelessness, "The Last Chance Motel"
Underpinning the out-of-control cost of living in Australia is the massive rise in land-costs as the principle factor in housing prices and the cost of productive activities. These costs radically reduce the margins for profit in production and the margins for economy among wage-earners, raising costs for Australian small business and consumers.
The Australian Consumer Price Index will not tell you this because it has never counted land in the costs it surveys. The reason is because land is not supposed to be a ‘consumable’, even though the property developers package and market it just like one.
Have we even been asked?
Why are we being pushed into this nightmare and who is responsible?
Read on:
"Where to put the extra millions at the end of the 21st century?" Bernard Salt asks readers of Mr Murdoch’s Australian, September 10, 2009.
What? Doesn't Mr Salt know? I thought he was going to put them up in his lounge room.
Seriously though, Mr Salt, a partner in KPMG, has been doing little else but market rapid and continuous population growth for Australia over the past ten or fifteen years. So, if he doesn't know where to put them, why does he do it?
Recently I heard a radio presenter say, "Demographer Bernard Salt has looked into his crystal ball and has predicted that Australia’s population will grow …"
Mr Salt bills himself as a 'demographer', but I think it is fair to describe him as a property development marketer who describes himself as a demographer and who has used that title to give authority to his claim that high immigration and constant population movement within Australia is natural, inevitable or desirable and that he is a clever spotter of it.
And Mr Salt doesn’t ‘predict’ on the basis of pure statistical trends. Along with other high-profile members of the Growth Lobby, he influences trends. He does this in part by making media announcements as if trends to rapid growth are predictive and then inviting people to invest in the likelihood that infrastructure and housing demand will increase as the population growth does. He also doesn’t just suggest that trends will continue. He is a member of a group which benefits financially from population growth and therefore actually tries to push trends to go upwards faster.
Bernard Salt is a spokesperson for the Population Growth Lobby, which I identify as a set of industries which make money out of population growth and organize to promote it.
Whilst there are other media-promoted spokespeople for the Growth Lobby, such as Peter McDonald of the ANU, Salt is one of the most ubiquitous, appearing frequently in most or all forms of the mainstream media. Not only has he recently been featured in long articles in Murdoch’s Australian, he also now has a column in the Herald Sun. He is also quoted by state and federal governments. The amplitude given to his statements by the mainstream media and government means that what he says has massive political ramifications.
As the then Senator Barry Jones said years ago, in relation to the 1994 Inquiry into Australia’s population carrying capacity, "Population numbers touch every aspect of society."
Uncontrolled population growth is a juggernaut.
You and I haven’t actually been asked by our governments whether we want to be dragged along in the slipstream of the growthist juggernaut, but we have the right to be asked.
As citizens we should be asked before it continues to go ahead.
It is wrong that government and mainstream media have tried to normalize growthism through repetitive promotion of it, via voices like Bernard Salt’s, before any public debate has taken place. Any so-called debate has been conducted with growth lobby promoters given talking rights as if they were ordinary citizens without vested interests, but also featured as authorities with more weight than citizens, quoted and amplified ad nauseum by the mainstream media, public and commercial. The essence of democracy is that the citizen’s voice has primacy over that of any private institution with vested interests in issues of national and state government, resources and assets. That value is being lost in the public-private production of out-of-democratic-control population growth in Australia.
As I mentioned earlier, Mr Salt is a partner in KPMG Australia. KPMG is part of an international accounting company with business relationships with many corporations, whose reputation is not unblemished.[5]
Ten or fifteen years ago I was curious to notice that KPMG Australia was in the business of publishing annual 'population growth trends' in the form of books or folders for businesses that wanted to make money by speculating on where there would be rising demand for land, power and goods. As I recollect, some 15 years ago, these printed volumes cost around $300 each.
When I first noticed KPMG’s role in marketing population growth to business, the internet was not even available for ordinary people. Now Australian property and citizenship are marketed at ever-increasing volume and with almost no restraints over the internet to the world. The profits for those commercial interests which have acquired control over land, water, power and other resources, plus the associated services and infrastructure, run literally to billions of dollars, narrowly channeled to a relative few individuals and corporate streams. That situation has created a political, demographic and inflationary tsunami which threatens to crush any democracy and quality of life in Australia.
Before the internet, Mr Salt himself did not seem to me to stand out from the crowd. He was spotted as a major marketing talent by the Growth Lobby at some stage, however - perhaps because he was waving so hard - and came into focus with his - ahem - wittily titled book, The Big Shift, which came out in around 2002.
The claim to fame of The Big Shift was to predict that housing prices (read land-prices) would grow in Melbourne more than they would in Sydney. And you only have to look at Hong Kong where people pay a fortune to live in smaller and smaller places to see that Salt was right on the nose for the money. (See the illustration, "Cage City".) Where there is growth these days there is pain, and someone has to benefit.
Since Sydney was having huge problems expanding, despite the militant growthists in NSW parliament at the time – Bob Carr not withstanding - the Growth Lobby had honed in on Melbourne. The Lobby was marketing population growth and property development there with a vengeance, destroying democracy in the process. (One nightmare event was Mr Bracks' Melbourne Population Summit in 2002, where school children were bused in with organised enthusiasm reminiscent of a Hitler Rally - Lebensraum! Lebensraum! – and addressed by business ‘leaders’ like Richard Pratt and Steve Vizard.) [2]
In his September 10th article, to my knowledge, Mr Salt has taken a slightly different tack. Here he is warning politicians that the population projections they relay to the electorate as 'predictions' to justify their engineering of artificially stimulated population growth will continue exponentially beyond their theoretical statistical boundaries.
He is right. To put it a little more folklorically, these political sorcerers' apprentices have meddled dangerously with demographics and have unleashed an exponentially growing number of angry magic mops - the angry mop being a metaphor for insoluble, compounding problems and the sorcerer’s apprentice a metaphore for Mickey Mouse politics.
Why is Mr Salt only just now mentioning that the consequence of accelerating population growth to the degree that Australian politicians have been doing is dangerous?
This overpopulation has been caused through excessive immigration to a population which, attentive to the signs all around it, was limiting its own growth by slowing down natural increase.
This overpopulation is not the public’s fault, for they have not been given any real role in the political decision, nor have they received dispassionate information about it.
The fault for this lies in the members of the growth lobby who have militated irresponsibly for population growth and in the members of governments which have allowed the lobby’s agenda to run Australia’s politics, sidestepping democracy.
Overpopulation means starvation, thirst, poverty, insecurity, homelessness, environmental degradation, no wildlife, and corrupt and terrible politics. We already have all these things but they can all get worse with more population growth.
When Bernard Salt was marketing his Big Shift book with its socially divisive generalisations about how younger people should resent 'Baby Boomers' a few years ago he didn't have too much to say then about how:
"There is the very real prospect that urban planners will have to manage the development of three Australian mega-regions (Sydney, Melbourne, southeast Queensland) each rising to between five and seven million by century's end. This means Sydney and Melbourne will have to accommodate an extra three million residents, or two million more than current planning has considered."
Pardon? Urban planners managing the very mess they created and which Salt writes that they could not even see coming? Lunatics in charge of the asylum? Mr Salt, it is up to we the people, to manage our own affairs. It is called 'self-government' and 'democracy'. Butt out!
Nor did he say then:
"If Melbourne and Sydney are to grow to seven million and beyond, surely both cities need to consider long-term water and power supplies."
Or warn that we would run out of water and power:
"It may be possible to crib a few extra years of water supply by preservation and pipelines but this will not supply water needs for the two million-plus residents expected in Sydney and Melbourne beyond 2030."
Or tell the politicians:
"I simply do not see the range of solutions being offered as sufficiently robust to accommodate the scale of growth Australia must accommodate this century."
He did not say:
"Urban consolidation is all well and good but it is simply not possible to add three million people to Melbourne's existing urban footprint. Even if it were technically possible, the citizenry wouldn't accept it."
Or add, sotto voce, tongue in cheek ha ha:
"Although I suppose there is the option of enforcing compliance to urban consolidation laws using a special squad of enforcers."
Nonetheless, if the article introduced a few disclaimers this time, Bernard was still back to his old tricks: at pains to reinforce the growth lobby myth of the inexorable:
"Water savings and renewable energy make a great contribution to the efficient operation of our cities as long as the rate of urban growth is not too vigorous or long-lasting. And that's the issue. Australia will be an immigrant nation for our lifetime and for the lifetime of our grandchildren."
(Who says? Bernard Salt says. And the Murdoch press promotes the ideology.)
Then, seizing the territory of environmentalists, he calls for a 'debate':
"What this nation needs is a frank and robust debate about options for population and urban growth on a grand scale and over the long term."
Now, I would just like to point out that the Nation may need a debate, but that debate should be among the people. Corporate spruikers like Bernard Salt and their sponsors – KPMG, Mr Murdoch, Fairfax et al - or their minders and amplifiers – who include, I am afraid, Mr Rudd and Mr Brumby, as well as a raft of other sorcerers' apprentices who started off the magic mop avalanche - don't have the right to a voice in a citizens’ 'debate'.
Why don’t Growth Lobby spokespersons have a right to a voice in a debate on population growth? Because they don't 'debate'; they market propaganda. They are not acting in the capacity of citizens. They are corporate entity spokespersons. They have narrow profit motives which overwhelm the rights of citizens. Some may actually believe their ideology, but it is a dangerous ideology and should be labeled as such, along with racism. The spokespeople for the Growth Lobby have occupied and taken over the media in every shape and form for years now. They have not just influenced the so-called 'debate' or 'discussion'; they have actually influenced the size of our population and our related fate.
They are in fact responsible for us running out of water, paying unreasonable prices for land, and losing our democracy to laws privileging planning and developers’ objectives over human rights. They have advocated our perilous situation and many can clearly be shown to have done so in the pursuit of related financial benefits, or in order to remain in office in a country where the mainstream commercial media will either ignore you, discredit you or overwhelm your voice with their propaganda, if you are against population growth and have a rational argument. [3]
Indeed, overwhelming of rational argument is what seems to be taking place at the moment in the Press. Kelvin Thomson has come out with sound arguments pointing to the absolute folly of continuing avoidable population growth in Australia. Immediately there is an absolute tsunami of growthist propaganda coming out of every media organ.
And the growth lobby is not going to lose the opportunity to turn the spotlight on growth to their advantage.
Here's their punchline, in the words of Bernard Salt:
"In this debate I'd put hard questions on the table such as the option of constructing metropolitan dams and nuclear power stations."
Mr Salt wants to ... surprise, surprise... argue a need to build nuclear power plants to supply power for the out-of-control population growth which HE says, "Australia must accommodate this century."
Well, actually, it's not very surprising, because it has been obvious that the business lobby was forcing population growth on Australians so as to have an excuse to 'go nuclear'.
Honestly, I wouldn't be so shocked, except that Mr Salt and his ilk really don't seem to care whether or not it works.
See "Nuclear power, totalitarianism and overpopulation in Australia"
If it doesn’t work, millions of Australians will die because you cannot run a complex society without huge amounts of power and you cannot mass produce food and transport it within such a society without cheap and abundant fuel. Going by the major oil discovery trends and depletion models, access to cheap and abundant fossil fuel is currently on the way out.[4]
Furthermore, if we are to attempt to deal with this terrible problem by using nuclear power, then the people who are expected to continue to suffer for it – Australian taxpayers – must own it and control it. Before any population growth goes ahead, the government should contract with Australia’s citizens to make laws so that those who expect to make a profit out of population growth by building cities around power plants, should be made to pay for that power with their profits in taxes on population growth impact-related profits. Indeed, these laws should apply to anyone making a profit out of any impacts related to politically stimulated or politically engineered population-growth. This would allow for immigration to replace emigration, but not to exceed it until such time as the population had stopped growing.
[2] Read more about the cage cities and about how the promise of improved living standards from industrialisation has panned out in Hong Kong. Australia is prey to the same colonial myth associating big populations with wealth. The reality is that the myth justifies a system that exploits people horribly, then chews them up and spits them out. Governments that foster continuous population growth can never keep up with the provision of housing and never have any intention to do so. All policies are palliatives.
Read about it on the Urban Poor Asia: Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. On one page, the Society for Community Organisation (SoCO), reports on a recently finished survey of Hong Kong's street sleepers. "The numbers are on the rise - from 819 in January 2000 to 1,259 in December 2000. .... Not large numbers by Asian standards ... but a rise of 47% .... The surge is attributed to a change in welfare policy and the recession.
Wages for low paying jobs have dropped 30 to 50% over the past 2 years, so many people may not be able to afford housing. Some unemployed refuse to seek the dole (unemployment relief) for fear of being stigmatized. According to the survey there are more younger people becoming street sleepers.
SoCO has urged the welfare department to adjust the unemployment application process to take into account the realities of the poor.
The government according to Ho, have taken up many of the recommendations resulting from the SoCO survey. When the survey was published, one immediate impact was an increase in the government budget allocation for outreach workers.
The SURVEY and other information on Hong Kong's urban poor and Housing Policies is available from SoCO
[2] Pratt and Vizard, together with Tim Watts of OzPop (junior organization to APop sponsored by the New America Foundation), also published the speeches from the event in a book.
[3] How would we prove such a political motive? By showing where the media repeatedly published politicians repeatedly making ideologically-based growthist statements where counter-arguments were put but neither published by the media nor responded to sensibly by the politicians.
[4] There are a great many sources, but I can vouch for Seppo A. Korpela, “Prediction of World Peak Oil production”; Colin J Campbell, “The Assessment and importance of oil depletion;” Seppo Korpela, “Coal Resources of the World;” Michael Dittmar, “Fusion Illusions;” and the articles on Nuclear Fission and on Geothermal power and Australia and France after Fossil Fuel by myself in Sheila Newman, (Ed), The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, UK, 2008
[5] See some more re KPMG in Naomi Klein article ]
A typical member of the growth lobby, for several years now, Bernard Salt, of KPMG, he has been in the business of boosting population growth in Australia, with the idea that people with the same values as him can make a lot of money out of it. Now he is coming out of the closet and telling us that all this population growth means we have to go nuclear. Unfortunately, I don't think he knows what he is talking about.
According to my calculations, if Bernard Salt is allowed to continue to take the stage, and garners support from state governments and the Federal government, along with others of his ilk and values - that means that Australia is up S--- Creek without a paddle and we are headed straight for the rapids - with no lifeboats and carrying far too many passengers, with more coming on all the time. See below on the logistics of power supply and the costs of setting up nuclear.
See more and related articles here Ziggy Switkowski, Population Numbers and Nuclear in the Australian and Nuclear Fission and the future for Fast Breeder Reactors
Short term to 2050
In theory there should be two choices available for Australia in the short term: the ‘Cuba route’ and Nuclear Power (the Growth lobby route) to deal with decline in fossil fuels and the problem of global warming.
The Cuba route: After the fall of the iron curtain, cheap soviet oil was no longer available for North Korea or for Cuba, so both had to lear to live without much fossil fuel. Korea went the industrial agriculture and nuclear power route. Cuba went the relocalisation and permaculture route. Guess which polity did the best? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't North Korea.
You will find all the references for this article in Chapter 20, "France and Australia After Oil," in Sheila Newman, (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto Press, UK, 2008. In the same book you can read more in Antony Boy's articles about North Korea and also about Japan's options for the future without cheap and abundant oil.
The biggest problem for Cuba was and remains transport. Bicycles can only do so much. Servicing a population and infrastructure shaped by oil but without that oil is fraught with difficulty. Cuba had relied on importing food, agricultural fertilizers, and petroleum for road transport. Relocalisation of institutions as well as food production was the main solution. People in the cities were assisted to produce their own food and state farms were turned into small leaseholds and cooperatives. Permaculture techniques and draft animals replaced fossil-fuel based fertilizers and petroleum for farm machines and transport. Cuba is now self-sufficient and Cubans purchase 80 per cent of their food at local markets. Throughout and still, the state remained a vigilant welfare provider, attending particularly to health and education, with an unusually high ratio of doctors per capita.
The key to the Cuban solution was land redistribution, which was possible within Cuba’s system. This alternative is not going to be easily available in Australia because of the land-use planning and housing system, which makes relocalisation very difficult. That is a pity because many see this alternative as a desirable way of profiting from adversity by reducing centralization and aggregation of land, energy resources and utilities, and strengthening democracy, independent and collective economic and social participation.
The Nuclear route is the opposite way. It implies total electrification, synthesising, using complex technology, the pattern of settlement and transport which arose from exploitation of the natural endowment of petroleum. It requires massive investment, and in Australia’s case, the investment sought is likely to be private. This implies ongoing loss by citizens of control over the country’s energy systems and all that flows from that – the future of work, the state of the environment, natural amenity. It implies the reshaping of Australian society by corporations with profit alone in mind, for the benefit of a small dominant asset-rich class, with the electorate a mere captive market.
In Cuba the energy supplies and materials which permitted centralized power were suddenly withdrawn and Cuba lacks the mineral resources to attract capital intensive investment. This situation surely facilitated local reorganization. In uranium-rich Australia, an opposite structuring is more likely. Because government policy favours commercial investment over public investment, nuclear facilities would tend to consolidate corporate power and its relationship with national and state government. Australia’s Anglophone mainstream media derives largely from syndicated US sources and these cultural mediators not only do not support communism or socialism, but they do not support dirigisme or relocalisation either.
In the space of a few years long-established Australian government anti-nuclear power policy reversed under Mr Howard, in spite of public disapproval. Mr Rudd is similarly surrounded by nuclear power fans in the form of the Growth Lobby. See also"Ziggy Switkowski, Population Numbers and Nuclear in the Australian", and
"Scanlon report underpins threat to Australian democracy". Bernard Salt is right there in among them.
I do not expect Mr Rudd to maintain any opposition to nuclear power in this country for long.
Nuclear is seen as an investment opportunity which will provide employment, international importance, and new industries. Rationales offered to the public are the [manufactured] imperative to provide power for projected (politically engineered) population growth and the desirability of off-setting greenhouse gas contributions from coal-fired electricity and coal exports. (Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter.) Australian planning is dominated by what the corporate sector wants. There are many indications that public sector scientists are expected to support private, corporate research and development rather than leading with public research responding to public need, which might result in moderation rather than accelerated consumption.
According to the ABARE, in the financial year 2005-6 Australia’s total primary energy consumption was 5640.7 petajoules (PJ) , growing at an average of 2.2 per cent or about 120 PJ per annum over the past 20 years. No-one is seriously suggesting replacing all this with nuclear. The suggested figure is more like 25 power plants in the next 15 years supplying one third of Australia’s (doubled) electricity demand. But many people believe that nuclear will actually take care of the problem of fossil-fuel depletion, permitting business as usual.
To do so would theoretically take 225.6 thousand MWe nuclear power plants each supplying 25PJ, plus an average of 4.8 new nuclear plants per year to supply annual growth in consumption. Each plant’s initial cost would be around $USD2 billion, in an economy currently valued by the World Bank at $US768 billion, but heavily indebted and privatised.
Of that 5640.7PJ primary energy, around 55 per cent comes from petroleum (35 per cent) and gas (19 per cent). To rely on nuclear to replace this by powering an electric car or hydrogen road transport system is a further absurdity. In addition to the 225.6 imagined nuclear power plants, more would be required to supply electricity to plug-in electric cars and to split water into hydrogen to carry more electricity to fuel the creation of new infrastructure to manufacture and service hydrogen-carrying electric vehicles, requiring more electricity (obviously).
Each 1000 MWe nuclear power plant would itself require around 1.3PJ per annum or 52PJ over a 40 yr life-time according to the Australian Uranium Association.
The government is counting on coal and gas to fill the initial gaps in petroleum supply, but coal is being exported so fast and the world is using it up so quickly with the gas peak already looming, that nuclear will presumably be called upon to supplement coal, gas and oil as well. Perhaps the government is desperately trying to attract nuclear development money by enlarging its population base and intensifying its other extractive industries, in a plan where uranium mining is, of course, a keystone. None of the above calculations factor in the amount of new energy required to build the cities around the plants – to supply and service the infrastructure required for the projected population growth, which is used to lure investment.
In a totally electrified economy, attempting to preserve something like the current consumer-goods based economy, the most likely option is to produce hydrogen electrically and also use it as an electricity carrier, to fuel electric cars and trucks. This implies a vast increase in the need for electricity and a complete renovation of road transport support infrastructure as well as vehicle design and manufacture. The corporations will demand profits from any new ventures. How are the Australian people going to pay for this? What are they going to need to give up for this? In Australia’s ‘trickle-down economy’ who is going to be left out? At the very peak of oil production, public priorities have shifted so far in favour of private enterprise that the Australian government is not capable of providing affordable housing for its constituents.
In the meantime the VAMPIRE index (Vulnerability Assessment for Mortgages, Petrol, Interest Rate Expenditure) is rising. The people at the high end of the VAMPIRE index are those locked into bloating mortgages in remote suburbs with little or no public transport, captive to rising gasoline prices for cars without which they cannot get to work, get their children to school, or get to shops to buy food.
Such hostages to sprawl are most in need of the Cuban route, but Australia’s systemic inability to plan and adapt infrastructures, industry and national resource use to radically changing conditions is perhaps its biggest problem.
Planning departments and tribunals palliate a bewildered electorate with superficial choice between styles, but, whilst allowing endless sprawl on the city-edges, continue to ram through intensified developments in the cities; to purposefully overshoot water resources and transport infrastructure in response to the growth lobby’s insatiable demand for big projects at public expense. These take the form of desalination plants, sewerage recycling plants, complex road-tunnels and expressways and, biggest of all, geological restructuring of seaports to accommodate giant container-ships for anticipated quadrupling in trade. With chilling disregard for the consequences, Australian lobby groups of planners, developers, builders and financiers have successfully campaigned for government led policies to increase population growth and energy demand.
Mr Salt and Mr Peter McDonald (another growthist demographer), the members of the Scanlon Foundation, AATSE, the Multicultural Foundation, the Property Council of Australia, Australia 2020, APop, and a host of other persons, such as Mr Pratt (deceased), Mr Lowy, Mr Bracks, Mr Kennett, Mr Brumby, Mr Rudd, Mr Swann, and politicians in opposition who failed to stand up to this tyranny should have their names carved in stone in a public place so that the people of Australia will know who is responsible as our survival margins decline.
by Mark Simpson
Surrender Australia to overpopulation now, argues "demographer" and investment spotter Bernard Salt, rather than have China lean on us later to take in its millions! (Australian, April 30th, "No room to be smug as population peaks").
What a wonderful combination of long-term cowardice and short-term business convenience!
What a failure of democracy to have a business-man given the spurious authority of the press to manufacture such appalling opinion, which will be read all around the world.
Mr Salt and Mr Murdoch might just as well send personal invitations to the Chinese, telling them to come here. Of course the Chinese would not last very long, and neither would we. We are already running out of water and soil, as Bernard Salt well knows.
No wonder young Australians flock to the War Memorial on Anzac day, to commemorate their WWII grandparents who thought Australia was worth defending against the Japanese superpower, even when the odds seemed overwhelming.
And Salt's argument is demographic nonsense. Pushing Australia's population to 34 million, as he advocates, would take us way beyond the 23 million that the Australian Academy of Science told the Keating government should be our limit. The extra 11 million people, even if every one was a Chinese immigrant, would make negligible difference to China's vast population and is unlikely ever to be a major policy objective of the China's government.
Article written by Mark Simpson
See also: "Bernard Salt, Murdoch media insult the memory of Second World War Australians" of 2 Apr 10, "Invasion victory ensured by complacency" in The Australian of 1 Apr 10, "No room to be smug as population peaks" in The Australian of 30 Apr 09, "Working man's vegetable plot under threat again" of 22 Apr 08.
No room at nature's feast? How do governments deal with catastrophic mistakes?
How does a government deal in parliament with something embarassing but also catastrophic, like its total loss of control over a program for forced population growth? Only a few years ago, this was the kind of question one might apply to Mexico or Jakarta, but now, most unhappily, it applies to Melbourne.
Matter of Public Importance
On Wednesday, 16 April 2008, at a session known as "Matter of Public Importance" in Victorian Parliament, Ms Green, Member for Yan Yean set the topic.
Under the general heading of "Government: performance", Ms Green's "Matter of Public Importance," was:
"That this house congratulates the Brumby government for ensuring Victoria is the best place to live, work and raise a family for a million more Victorians."
In an understatement which should go down in history, Ms Green went on to describe how the way Victorian government's population drive has gone into massive overshoot was really like a big barbecue where too many guests came too early.
"At the outset I referred to the 1 million additional people coming to Victoria. In 2001, when we delivered our 2030 plan, we were planning for that level of growth to occur by 2030 but, because of the popularity of our state and what this government has done with its infrastructure and its people, it is now expected that the population growth predicted in 2001 is actually going to be here in 2020 rather than in 2030. To express it in terms that those opposite would understand - 2020 is only 12 years away - it is like 1 million people coming around to your place next Sunday and expecting a sausage at a barbecue. (...)."
She then burbled on to say that "We have to prepare for that growth. We have to be welcoming to those people who will come here. (...)"
"We" have to be welcoming. Hmm. And just who invited all these people, Ms Green? Does the member for Yan Yean intend to put them all up in her back room or something? Is Mr Brumby going to lodge them all on his wife's farm? Maybe members of the Brumby Government are going to give out a million permits to camp in the treasury gardens. Mr Bracks and Mr Thwaites may have retired into big business, but they did send out a lot of the invitations to the barbie before they scootled. So they really do need to open up their homes to the overflow, and perhaps give up their children's places in schools and universities to newcomers, to show they are really welcoming. I am sure there would be plenty in the community prepared to help them pack and leave some room for the rest of us, and maybe a bit of democracy as well.
Ms Green continued, mentioning, among other things, that "Well-known and respected demographer Bernard Salt" has projected that "in the late 2020s Melbourne will again become Australia's largest city. This means that we have had to make some changes to our planning systems."
Bernard Salt is a salesman for growth to the people who market products, Ms Green. Will the Victorian people be able to hold him accountable for decisions which you and the rest of the government may make on his advice? Don't forget that, we, the people, on the other hand, have an entire department full or professional statisticians called the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Why don't you consult them? They are actually independent sources without any vested interest in growth. They are there to inform governments and we paid for them with taxes just so you could consult them.
Ms Green continued. "I welcome the Premier's recent announcement of zoning changes and the speeding up of zoning within the urban growth boundary which will allow Melbourne to accommodate family growth. Those changes mean that about a year will be taken off the time required for building lots to come onto the market."
It sounds to me as if Ms Green has been introduced to some of the government's associates, possibly from the Property Council of Australia, or APop, or maybe she has had some contact with the Multicultural Foundation or the Scanlon Foundation, or ATSE (although they seems to be more for Federal Politicians).
This barbecue is sure going to cause us all a lot of inconvenience. I wonder if it's really worth it just to sell a lot more chops and sausages?
After a lyrical excursion into the wonders of a Stockland development where she had opened a new road called Mernda Village Drive, and the Catholic community there, the preservation of the river gums, (but not the kangaroos; this is an area known to the Australian Wildlife Protection Council as a wildlife-catastrophe zone) Ms Green (Yan Yean member) concluded her paean to out-of-control population growth:
"I commend this matter of public importance to the house. It is important that we are forward-looking and do not sit on our hands and say, 'Well, we will say “G'day” to these people coming round to the barbecue on Sunday'. We have to do more than be welcoming, although I know Victorians and Melburnians are welcoming.
With the usual logical irrelevance, she adverted to cultural diversity, marketed by successive Victorian governments as an unassailable justification for the high rate of immigration which has impacted in homelessness, wildlife devastation and the disorganisation of communities:
"We are a very culturally diverse community, which is another reason why people are moving to the state."
She insisted unreally: "We are a government that is forward-looking, investing in these people and being welcoming, while retaining our livability at the same time."
Well, not everyone agrees on this point of retaining our 'livability'.
The member for Ferntree Gully, Mr Wakeling, exclaimed, "How disappointing that, with all the things the government could deal with in this house - the problems with public transport, problems with the health system, and the problems with education - the most pressing issue it can find facing this state at the moment is to congratulate the Brumby government on making Victoria the best place to live, work and raise a family.
"What a disgrace; what an absolute sham! For those people expecting this government to start listening to the concerns of the Victorian community and identifying ways to improve our services, this is the best that those opposite can come up with," he said, referring to the members in government as 'those opposite'.
(...) "I will tell members one thing: it is the worst place to live, work and wait for a delayed train. It is also the worst place to live, work and have reduced police on our streets; the worst place to live, work and be stuck on a trolley waiting for surgery; and the worst place to live, work and be educated by this country's lowest paid teachers. Those opposite should hang their heads in shame. While those opposite sit and laugh about the plight of teachers and about the problems besetting public transport, police and other important issues in this state, we on this side of the house are out there listening to the concerns of the community and expressing those concerns in this house. I call upon those opposite to follow the lead and to take on board the concerns of the Victorian community." (...)
"I will touch very briefly on the member for Yan Yean's comments about Melbourne 2030. What an unmitigated disaster! Melbourne 2030 is the planning blueprint to take the state forward to the year 2030, but the government made one slight mistake: it got the figures wrong. It was not one year out, it was not two years out, it was not three years out - -"
Mr Burgess (Member for Hastings) asked, "How many?"
Mr Wakeling replied, "It was 10 years out - in its own 30-year plan. What a disgrace! Melbourne 2030 is predicated on infill development and unit development in local communities. It was going to include the provision of upgrades to infrastructure - that is, public transport." (...) "My community got the worst of both worlds. It got the infill development and, more importantly, it did not get any public transport."(...)
Mr Northe, the member for Morwell, pointed out some more of the costs of population growth:
(...) "The assertion is that in the near future Victoria will have a population growth of some 1 million residents. That begs the question of how well Victoria is positioned to cater for those future additional residents, and from my perspective, what impact it will have on the growth of regional Victoria. Of course population growth equates to an additional demand upon essential services and infrastructure, and issues arising from that have been highlighted in recent times.
"They include the congestion on our roads, the overcrowding on our public transport, the waiting lists in our health system, the shortage of police resources, and disputes that are ongoing with the nurses, police and other public servants.
"An increase in population will create additional pressures in all these areas and will create increased demand for electricity, gas and water." (...)
"The Minister for Health (...) would be well aware of the growing waiting lists and the statistics that unfortunately are worsening with each revelation that comes out through the statistics. With population growth comes an additional demand on our health services. That is indicated by the population growth within Traralgon and the Latrobe Valley in recent times. It has put an enormous burden upon our hospitals and community health centres. That is indicated and verified by some of the statistics that are produced, not only by the Latrobe Regional Hospital, but also the Latrobe Community Health Service, and particularly the dental waiting list over time. It is very difficult for us to try to attract and retain health professionals in rural areas. So as the population grows it is imperative that we have systems in place to attract people to the health-care system in regional areas."
(...)
"Recently we have seen disputes with the police about the lack of police resources. I talk to police officers in my local area on a regular basis; they inform me they are struggling to make ends meet. They do not have the opportunity to be on the beat, where they should be, to protect the community, and they have grave concerns about that.
"An example is the town of Churchill, which has a population of somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 people, and does not have a 24-hour police station. That is of grave concern to the community of Churchill.(...)"
(...)
Mr Thompson (Sandringham): "'Victoria is a great place to live, work, raise a family and speak in clichés"
Mr THOMPSON, the member for Sandringham's speech indicated that he perceived a certain slickness in the Matter of Public Importance (which was, you may recall, "That this house congratulates the Brumby government for ensuring Victoria is the best place to live, work and raise a family for a million more Victorians"). He claimed that, "One of the great political lies perpetrated on the Victorian people in the last decade was the Labor promise that it would build the Scoresby freeway, the EastLink freeway, toll free. Victorians for the next 30 years will be paying an exorbitant amount as they commute from their local suburb. The matter of public importance (MPI) today really should be under the heading of a grievance motion. The topic is that the house congratulates the Brumby government on making Victoria a great place to live, work and raise a family for a million more migrants. Fundamentally it should be retitled 'a great place to live, work, raise a family and speak in clichés', because that is what the Labor Party regularly does and treats this house with disdain.
He gave many examples:
"We have seen other jurisdictions around the world where people speak in clichés. They speak in mottos - be it China, be it the Soviet Union or other regimes around the world. It makes a mockery of this Parliament to parrot these clichés on a regular basis. If one googles the phrase, one will find how many other countries around the world use the cliché, the phrase 'a great place to live, work and raise a family'. I could refer to the United States of America and the town of Annapolis, where the residents regard it as the 'greatest place to live, work and raise a family'. One could go to the area of Cary in the United States, where the locals promote their town and region as the 'greatest place to live, work and raise a family'. One could go to the township of Saskatchewan in Canada, where the state is promoted as the 'greatest place to live, work and raise a family'.
He went on to name more examples, finishing up with Amityville:
"(...) One could go to Amityville - I understand there is a film called the Amityville Horror - where again people find it to be the 'greatest place to live, work and a raise a family'. It may be from this very township that the spruikers for the Bracks and Brumby governments found the phrase in a Hollywood film script. (...)
"(...) The Labor Party is speaking in clichés. It makes an absolute mockery of this chamber. In terms of the matter of public importance before the house, we as Australians should value the opportunity to live in a wonderful country which allows us freedoms and advantages not experienced in many other parts of the world.
"(...)The member for Bentleigh was speaking about public transport, and it will not be long before the commuters going on the Frankston line through his electorate will not have room on board the train with the seats removed, and they will not have room anywhere else. They will have to climb on the roof and follow the New Delhi trains there by way of a precedent in looking at good public transport examples."
(...)
Thompson: "Do I believe this state has the capacity to absorb a million new migrants in the short term?"
"Do I believe this state has the capacity to absorb a million new migrants in the short term? I do not believe so. Why is that? I will outline why. We are still waiting on the delivery of better water infrastructure, better roads and better public transport, real tax reform, and a vision for manufacturing which will provide a fundamental employment base for Victoria, drawing on our energy reserves."
(...)
"(...)We have water shortages that have not been envisaged by the current government. It has been in office for 19 out of the last 26 years in this state. There was provision for better water infrastructure 25 years ago, but the Labor Party has failed to deliver."
(...)
"We need a plan for our electricity supplies and to make clean use of our coal resources, but we have seen recently a decline in the service reliability of power companies. A number of senior citizens in my electorate experienced power blackouts for 48 to 72 hours. We need affordable housing." (...) The Brumby government refuses to recognise the effect of the huge stamp duty windfalls as part of this process. We have the highest stamp duty in the nation. The government continues to collect the money and impose that burden affecting the fertility rate of the next generation and the ability of working families to maintain an affordable quality of life in addition to meeting their housing repayments.
"Looped into their mortgage repayments is the money borrowed to meet the stamp duty commitment.
"Public housing lists are blowing out, with no addition to the public housing stock. There is a disability housing crisis. We confront as a community increases in the cost of petrol, water, power and food, and these are adding to the household budgets of Victorians. The housing boom on the fringes of Melbourne requires hundreds of extra doctors and hospital beds and dozens of new schools as well as billions of dollars in infrastructure spending to supply new roads, public transport, schools, hospitals, shops and child-care centres, but there has been a lack of planning on the part of the Bracks and Brumby governments to provide appropriately for these needs." (...)
And so on.
Look, just before all the members of government give up their homes, and go out into the wilderness to make room for the guests at the big barbecue, could I suggest that someone responsible should consider putting a message up here, on the Government's immigration site, saying, "Immigration program cancelled indefinitely due to overshoot of oil, water, shelter, and soil?"
Source of parliamentary dialogue:
www.parliament.vic.gov.au/downloadhansard/assembly.htm, MATTER OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE, ASSEMBLY Wednesday, 16 April 2008, beginning at p.1274
Until I saw the date of publication, 1 April 2008, the Australian newspaper's article Population soaring across country, purportedly 'celebrating' Australia's current record high rate of population growth of 1.53per cent, up from 1.48 per cent the previous year, had me mystified.
The 1.53 per cent increase represesented an extra 316,000 in 2006-07. This comprised 10,000 extra births (273,000, up from 263,000) and 31,000 extra people gained through migration (178,000, up from 147,000), but also 1000 more deaths (135,000, up from 134,000).
The article features “Bernard Salt”, who I now realise is not real, but rather an invented and extreme caricature of a pro-population growth demographer. Salt implausibly tells of a rivalry that has developed between Sydney and Melbourne, the respective inhabitants of which want to outdo each other in efforts to have the most congested traffic, the longest average commuting times and distances, the highest per-capita tollway charges, the most crowded trains, the highest number of stranded bus passengers, the highest water charges, council rates and electricity bills and longest hospital waiting lists.
In this competition, Sydney which only grew by 51,000 people last year has fallen behind Melbourne, which grew by 62,000. However, Sydney appears to be making up a lot of ground as it grew by only 36,000 the previous year. Mr Salt said, "They love their rivalry, Sydney and Melbourne, and it'll be interesting to see next year if Sydney keeps growing and can get back in front."
However, in relative and not absolute terms, the Gold Coast and Brisbane remained the fastest-growing areas, with an extra 17,000 and an extra 16,000 people respectively. Brisbane residents can now boast at having exceeded one million and eagerly look forward to the pleasures of shared room rental accommodation when they achieve their next million.
The
nutty Mr Salt
rejoiced over what every thinking adult in this country recognises as a demographic and environmental disaster:
“It's everything coming together at the same time.
“Generation X has finally realised they can have babies; migration is very high, mainly because of the skills shortage and the need to fill jobs to keep the mining boom going; and the baby boomers aren't dying yet.”
The Australian's efforts to employ humour in order to draw the public's attention to the threat of over-population is to be applauded.
Towards the end of the 20th Century economists and demographers were promoted to ranks of public importance previously held by the church, as long as they fulfilled the church’s role, which is to prop up governments. All that demographers and economists did was crunch numbers and facilitate the passage of money by encouraging population growth, but, because of the prominence they were afforded by the corporate press, the public came to the misunderstanding that these were wise men.
Demographer Bernard Salt was an Australia 2020 Summit delegate in the Population, Water, Climate Change and Cities stream in 18-29 April 2008. (1)
This is what he calls a ‘big idea’:
He wants to ‘alter Australians’ concept of beauty from a verdant back yard to a desert rockery, so as to enable a population twice Australia’s current size.
Of course he doesn’t mention that this is the way he and his colleagues became rich and could become richer, and the reason that so many of the rest of us pay more for food, water, goods and housing already. Nor that more of the same will mean worsening conditions for the rest of us.
He presents this idea as one involving changing Australians’ perception of beauty. Although the sheer effrontery of engineering our perception, as if we were so many children and Mr Salt were an adult towering over us, is appalling in itself, it is what it conceals and removes from debate that is important.
Changing the national taste in what surrounds a house, would be a strange ambition if there were no reason for it. In fact there is a reason, but it won't benefit the average Australian. Mr Salt is working for people who want to fit another 20 or so million people into Australia in the next 50 years, and, for that, he must change the way we perceive value – or change the way that we are told we will perceive value, whether we like it or not.
He achieves this by simply downgrading the value of fertile soil to a flimsy aesthetic fashion statement, which he relegates to a symbol of the past with a questionable statement.
"Our values were forged in Surrey 220 years go and they have not changed."
He does not acknowledge the obvious, which is that verdant green will grow food and support livestock, hence ensuring at least a degree of independence for a family, as the cost of food and fuel spiral. Because he makes his statements from a position marketed as authorative, it becomes very hard for anyone on the receiving end to contradict them, silly as they are.
Reducing population growth and conserving such values would probably save Australians’ lives in the next 20 years.
But, to a politician looking for an idea to market to the electorate which will also please big business, swapping a vegetable garden and some fruit trees and a place for children and pets to play, for a couple of rocks and a cactus, seems smart. We know that the newspapers will support such an idea, because they are also in the land-speculation business.
Consider this ‘wisdom’:
[Salt writes:] “Two years ago, while driving through the suburbs of the desert city of Phoenix in the US, I immediately understood why it was possible for this city to have evolved from 250,000 residents to 4 million over 60 years.
The concept of suburban beauty is different in Phoenix.”
"They see an earth-toned adobe dwelling surrounded by a rock, scoria and cactus garden as beautiful, whereas we define suburban beauty as a separate house surrounded by a green lawn and verdant foliage. The Phoenicians have adopted values that reflect their environment; we haven't."
"If we could alter Australians' concept of suburban beauty, we could radically reduce our use of water …”(1), he writes. He might have added, but didn't, "...and bankers and developers could make a lot more money out of land whilst packing the rest of you in like chickens into batteries and charging the earth for rent and water."
Worse, in 2006, before the cost of oil went up so much, there was probably a big car parked outside those phonecian desert residences, indicating a little wealth besides their infertile plots, and a job to go to. Picture this in Australia in ten years, but without the car or the job.
I thought we elected government to protect us from this sort of predation.
In the words of King Crimson, “The fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools."
(1)Bernard Salt, “Nurturing big, better ideas for 2020”, the Australian, April 17, 2008
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