origins of the growth lobby

#F7F8E0;line-height:120%;">On the 13th of May Environment Minister Greg Hunt purportedly answered a simple question about Australia's dangerous and undemocratic population growth put to him by Kelvin Thomson. Minister Hunt's response should be a source of great concern for all Australians. It shows no respect for the very serious consequence to democracy or the environment of continuous population growth. The response is cavalier and disrespectful to Australians who have major and justifiable concerns on this matter. Below we quote the short dialogue in Hansard, and then we publish two observant comments about the Minister's failure to take the question seriously.

House of Representatives Question No.0101

"Mr Thomson asked the Minister for the Environment, in writing on 13 May 2014:

Is he aware that past and current open ended population growth policy creates the inevitable prospect of imposing continual infrastructure projects on the public, each one more invasive and destructive of the social and natural environments?"

Mr Hunt's reply was a monument to obfuscation and unreality, surpassing anything you have seen on Yes Minister:

"Mr Hunt: The answer to the Honourable Member's question is as follows:

Setting a fixed population target can mask the complexities of the issue. For example, there are many aspects of population change in Australia, such as changes in fertility rates that cannot be accurately predicted or directly controlled.

The Australian Government has in place a range of commitments to infrastructure, services, jobs and the environment which will provide for Australia's currently growing population including a commitment to better plan for and sequence infrastructure development across Australia, and to develop a White Paper on the development of Northern Australia. These policies will support environmentally, socially and economically responsible growth and cultivate resilient, productive and fair communities."

Quark: "Not an environment minister's bootlace"

Candobetter's Quark's analysis of the logic involved was breathtaking:

Quark wrote: "Mr Hunt is making something sound more complex than it is.

It's as though Kelvin Thomson had asked if Mr Hunt was aware that if you add 5 to 6 you get 11 and Mr Hunt had answered that it is more complex than that because 2 and 3 make 5 and 2 multiplied by 3 makes 6 and 11 can be reached by adding 1 to 10, 2 to 9, 3 to 8 etc.

It also sounds as though endless infrastructure for Mr Hunt is a good thing

Mr. Hunt is not an environment minister’s bootlace.

I wonder what would emerge if Kelvin asked the same question over and over in different ways to try to corner the little ponce.

Jack Roach: "We should be very worried"

Jack Roach of Boroondara Residents Action Group (BRAG) wrote, in response:

"It is no wonder that Australia is headed for a massive jump in the rate of our population growth with woolly thinking like the Minister for the Environment’s attached reply to a question on our population growth. Our population is set to double within the next 30 to 35 years because we have no clear immigration policies. There is no set annual immigration intake and visas are issued with no limit as to numbers. (And most are issued by licensed agents not by the immigration department – where is the control?)

When a senior Minister says that “setting a fixed population growth target can mask the complexities of the issue” (refer attached reply to a question asked in Parliament on May 13) we should be very worried. He is falling back on the politician’s ploy of trying to confuse the issue by talking about “fertility changes that cannot be predicted”. That is not the concern, it is the number of new migrants that is the issue. The numbers just keep on increasing very year. In the late nineties and early 2000’s our immigration numbers were around to 70,000 to 80,000 but these have steadily but surely increased to 250,000 now and there is no indication that there will be any curbs in this increasing trend. In addition we also have in our country over a million long stay visa holders who put further pressure on our infrastructure. By a well understood visa swapping process they extend their stay and many eventually gain permanent residency.

And who pays for all this new infrastructure required to cope with this growth? Certainly not the new arrivals to this country, it is you the taxpayer that foots the bill. Who benefits from this massive population growth. The productivity Commission has issued a statement that it is not the existing general population, the main beneficiaries are the new arrivals themselves and, of course, the development industry.

Kevin Rudd’s BIG AUSTRALIA was a con but it is still being pushed by many of today’s politicians and the growthists. The time has come for an Australia- wide debate on our lack of any real immigration policy and the increasing rate of our population growth. What we need from now on is a properly planned rational and sustainable migration policy.

Send a copy of this [...] to your local state and federal politicians and demand a debate on this issue before it is too late."

According to this author's research, Malcolm Fraser contributed policies which would assist the dismantling of Australia's then growing democracy and aid and abet this colony's overpopulation and overshoot of its own resources. These actions should not be forgotten, despite any subsequent helpful comments on foreign policy, a long time later. After the Whitlam government was sacked, and during high unemployment, the Fraser Liberal/National Party government (November 1975- March 1983) reinstituted economic policies that were dependent on rapid population growth - through high immigration - and high energy consumption. [1]

Whitlam's concept and attempts to create a system of feedback loops from population to housing were dismantled or under-financed. Prime Minister Fraser abolished DURD very early in his government, under which Federal funding for urban and regional development declined by 86 per cent. [2] He also began to liberalise the foreign investment rules, with the Foreign Takeovers Act (1975). [3]

In Whitlam's time foreign investment had been less than 10%, but it increased steadily after 1975. Between 1980 and 1981 there was the "highest capital inflow on record." Much of this was for loans to State governments for infrastructure projects, but after 1980 more and more was borrowed by private firms with an ever greater part going to property development. By 1985-86 services, tourism, real-estate and property development were responsible for over fifty per cent of incoming capital and real-estate was the biggest borrower. [4]

The Australian housing industry continued speculative land development and reliance on high immigration to feed population growth and thus demand, with little central planning. As the economy was opened up to the ideology of free market forces, speculation and housing price inflation increased. However, from 1974-1986 economic recession affected the housing industry. [5]

Government policies assisting home ownership were identified as an impediment to economic growth by, among others, a group that included the Australian Treasury, [6] over which Federal Treasurer Philip Lynch had presided until 1977, when he was sacked for involvement in Victorian land speculation scandals. Land scandals were not confined to Victoria, however. An example of political corruption and land speculation, with the demise of DURD and the Whitlam Government, occurred when the Liberal West Australian Minister for Industrial Development, Sir Charles Court, bailed out property developer, Alan Bond [7] by purchasing a property that Bond had been trying for years to get rezoned but which had been destined, with the co-operation of the previous WA Labor Government, under the Federal department, DURD, to remain a green corridor. Instead of leaving Bond with his unrezoned rural property, Court used DURD funds to purchase the property from Bond. Bond subsequently donated $20,000 to the Liberals' 1977 election campaign. Soon after Sir Charles Court raised $250,000 in a syndicate to finance Bond's America's Cup venture. [8]

The ALP West Australian Government that followed on from the Liberal one was no better. It formed a corrupt network with WA land speculators which was subsequently to be known as "WA Inc." The Premier involved in this was Brian Burke and he was later imprisoned for corruption. [9]

The members of the Australian Treasury group wanted a reduction in all forms of housing assistance. They also called for the freeing up of the housing market to market forces, without interference from subsidies or regulated industry rates. They blamed government regulation for keeping the cost of home ownership unrealistically low, inflating ownership expectations and leading to people owning too many houses. [10]

In response to lobbying, [11] immigration began to climb again from 1979 and remained high until 1982.

As well as dismantling Whitlam's urban and rural development system, the Fraser Government commenced the first of a long series of steps to dismantle the free tertiary education system. It thereby reduced that avenue for Australia to increase its skilled and tertiary educated workforce, leaving industry few options but to import new skilled workers. The structure and finance of the industry meant that support for developing a local system to provide skilled tradesmen remained weak and unorganised. Thus the industry continued its strong reliance on imported skilled labour. As the economy was opened up to the ideology of free market forces, speculation and housing price inflation increased, with strong encouragement from the Australian Treasury.

The section in The Growth Lobby and its Absence on Australia's return to a populationist development and housing policy under the Fraser government illustrates my argument that in countries where a highly profitable property development and residential construction industry dominates, individual firms may be more inclined than government assisted housing systems to access international loans in order to finance continued expansion. Furthermore a deregulated financial environment will assist the strategy of borrowing to finance expansion.

In the end of Chapter 7 and in Chapter 8 of The Growth Lobby and its Absence, I examined evidence for the hypothesis that Australia had followed a cornucopian route and France a Malthusian one after the oil crash. My evidence consisted largely of indicators of policy and practice related to per capita and industrial energy consumption, principally in the building industry and the production of dwellings. I situated these indicators within the context of the different land development and housing systems in Australia and France and showed how the first relied on immigration but the latter did not. I gave evidence that both countries had temporarily reduced immigration at the time of the first oil shock for energy saving and economic reasons, but that the fall of the Whitlam government had brought an end to these politics in Australia and ushered in a high conventional energy using expansionist period with fast population growth. I attributed this growthist course in Australia largely to a populationist lobby in which property developers and residential construction companies were important actors. I explained the ability of France to consolidate its population and energy use to the absence of such a lobby.

There are, however, other possible additional explanations for the difference between immigration policies in France and Australia that have resulted in a higher migration intake in Australia. For example there is, arguably, a stronger ethnic lobby in Australia than in France and this lobby is able to press for extended family reunion. Because Australia has an active immigrant recruitment intake, it is difficult to justify a small humanitarian intake. A multiculturalist approach to new settlers, rather than an integrationist approach may favour the development of ethnic lobbies and the establishment of distinct communities with a variety of motives for expansion. These explanations were not explored in my thesis but that is not to say that they and others have no value. Nevertheless, the evidence pointing to a very important role for the property development lobby in driving immigration was strong in 1998 when I began my thesis, stronger in 2002 when I completed it, and overwhelming in 2014 as I update this excerpt.

Malcolm Fraser’s policies furthered the interests of the Australian property lobby and undermined the capacity of the Australian people to resist it and to self-govern. It seems likely to me that there was interference, in the form of a ‘shock doctrine’ type program that could well have been pushed onto Australia by the CIA, as the Christopher Boyce interview seems to point to and as John Pilger argued in A Secret Country, Vintage, 1992.

NOTES

This article is based on research and a modified excerpt from Sheila Newman The Growth Lobby and its absence (longer title, The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France), Swinburne University Research thesis in Environmental Sociology, 2002.
[1] Sandercock, Property, Politics and Urban Planning, Transaction publishers, 1990, p.17.
[2] Ian Manning , “Policies: Past and Present”, Chapter 2, pp10-32, Eds. Ruth Fincher and John Nieuwenhuysen, Australian Poverty: Then and Now, MUP, 1998, p.14 and Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, Viking, 1985, p.404; Leonie Sandercock, Property, Politics and Urban Planning, op.cit., p. 16.
[3] Later to be renamed the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act (1975)
[4] R.H. Fagan, "Foreign Investment" in Australian Encyclopaedia, Terry Hills, NSW, Australian Geographic, Pty. Ltd, 1995, pp. 1393-1394.
[5] Trevor Sykes describes a wave of property crashes in June 1974 and at the start of 1977 in Trevor Sykes, The Bold Riders, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards, New South Wales, Australia, 1996 edition, printed 2000, p.267. David Hayward, "The Reluctant Landlord", in Urban Policy and Research, Vol. 14., No.1, 1996, p.23, describes the property recession as lasting from 1975-1986. There were however also small peaks in 1976 and 1982 which coincided with relative peaks in immigration. See my figure 8.1, Chapter 8 and the discussion below it.
[6] Terry Burke, Peter W. Newton, and Mary Ann Wulff, "Australia", International Handbook of Housing Policies and Practices, Ed. Willem van Vliet, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1990., pp.722-762: p.728 &732, citing Stone 1979.
[7] Alan Bond migrated to Perth, Australia as a child with his English parents. He began business by property speculation which relied on land rezoning and although he finished up having many other kinds of investments, the basis of his business remained property. He wheeled and dealed for three decades, generally using time payment to deal with huge loans, including one that he floated with Kumagai Gumi. He won the America's cup in 1983, thus earning great popularity for Australia and the public approval of Prime Minister Hawke. He became a multi-millionaire, increasing his fortunes greatly during the 1987-89 period, but underlying this was a 20 fold rise in debt over the last five years and, in 1989 Bond Corporation announced a loss of 980 million, which was the largest in Australia's history to that date. Bond eventually went to prison, but not for very many years. Source: Trevor Sykes, The Bold Riders, op.cit., Chapter Six.
[8] Trevor Sykes, The Bold Riders, op.cit., pp.57-58.
[9] Ibid., pp.58-141.
[10] "The push of the group [Stone writes about], including the Australian Treasury, was for a reduction in assistance for housing generally and an opening up of the housing market to market forces unfettered by subsidies or regulated interest rates that artificially lower the cost of home ownership, raise ownership expectations, and encourage overconsumption of housing." Terry Burke, Peter W. Newton, and Mary Ann Wulff, "Australia", International Handbook of Housing Policies and Practices, op.cit., pp.722-762: p.728 &732, citing Stone 1979.
[11] Birrell and Birrell, An Issue of People, Longman Cheshire, 1987, pp.236-237. Criteria for skilled immigrants were made easier to meet in unilateral decisions made by the Department of Immigration without consulting the Department of Employment. Birrell and Birrell describe the Department of Immigration as actively supporting the immigration lobby. They describe this lobby as being made up of "well-organized, financed, and articulate industry associations and companies, and vocal ethnic associations who can claim to represent and perhaps to influence the voting intentions of significant numbers of citizens."