growth lobby

For example, the Ukraine is geopolitically important for many reasons; including its value as a food bowl and as an export route for oil and gas. The Ukrainian people are secondary to the interests of the foreign powers that seek to influence or control the territory and its resources.

The current turmoil in Syria and Iraq has been preceded by French and British military intervention respectively in the early 20th century, combined with imposition of new territorial borders. This was arguably an autocratic foreign assault on the region. People subject to somewhat arbitrarily defined borders have different histories and different vested interests little understood by the foreign autocrats. The same was true of the foreign assault on Australian Aborigines when their territory was first invaded in 1788. Have a look at any capital city in Australia. There are "Boundary Roads" everywhere.

#comments">Armchair experts #comments">sit around hypothesising about what should or should not be done, based on their subjective versions of humanitarian and strategic principles. Many know little of the history of the regions they discuss and use terms such as "democracy" and "territorial borders" to define right and wrong.

In Australia in particular, neither the Government nor the people have the ethical credentials to justify interference in geographically remote regional conflicts.

Australia is a country founded upon the principles of invasion and dispossession of "indigenous" peoples. That foundation remains the cornerstone of government policy to this day. It is an autocratically imposed policy that has nothing to do with democracy. This "invasion" does not prioritise humanitarian intake. In its current form it focuses on attempting to cherry pick healthy and relatively wealthy, educated people for their alleged "financial" value; at the expense of refugees.

Government media seeks to justify a government policy of invasion and dispossession in the interests of something it vaguely refers to as economic growth, although the economic impacts of extreme population growth are not investigated in the public interest. Politicians control decision-making on what lines of public inquiry deserve due diligence. Mass migration has always been the "robot-mode" status quo in Australia and politicians don't even question a policy that many other countries would regard as outlandish.

Between 1788 and 1900 Australia's population rose to 3.7 million. From 2002 to 2014 it rose another 3.8 million. This invasion is accelerating. This is extreme, unsustainable, Government imposed, amoral, financially motivated "developed world" population growth.

The ABC is not governed by any laws that can be enforced to hold it accountable for failing to comply with its Statutory Duties of impartiality and integrity. ABC agendas appear set by politicians rather than by analytical thinking.

The ABC's approach to the climate change debate has been the ABC–branded Carbon Tax debate, analogous to a doctor advising a patient that the only therapy for treatment of obesity is exercise (economic incentives to reduce carbon emissions), while encouraging the patient to eat fattening food (extreme population growth driving extreme emissions growth) from a company the doctor owns. The doctor also deliberately conceals the fact that eating is the primary cause of explosive weight gain.

So we have a lawless, government sanctioned, propaganda machine purporting to act as a humane and democratic voice of the people, while failing to address some of the most pressing moral and environmental issues in Australia. Population growth stands out as an issue of critical importance.

The Challenger Space Shuttle disaster occurred in similar circumstances. The Solid Booster Rocket seals failed causing a catastrophic explosion because NASA approved the launch at an unacceptably low ambient temperature in full knowledge of the risk. The 7 astronauts killed in the explosion were not informed of the risk.

NASA abused its position of dominance by prioritising a political desire for launch over competent risk management.

The ABC is a news and current affairs broadcaster. It has limited, if any, expertise in the sciences or in risk management. Yet it uses opinionated bias as a basis for concealing critically important information from public policy debate. Whether that bias is driven by Government or the ABC itself is immaterial. It is clearly contrary to the public interest and it is defined as unlawful, if not criminal, by the ABC Code of Practice.

The relationship between the adverse humanitarian, social, environmental and economic outcomes of population growth and the rate of that population growth is off the ABC agenda.

The latest propaganda inundation to force people to accept overpopulation as a fait accompli is coming from the so-called "Bradfield Oration",₁ which is to be inaugurated by that mass-media propaganda horn, Australia's Prime Minister, Tony Abbott. The University of Sydney and Lend Lease have been described as 'key partners' in this 'initiative'₂ which will steer university students their way by awarding an associated prize. So much for independence in academia, eh?

The current publicity machine anoints some architect from New York to tell Australians how to suck eggs for their greedy masters.₂ Vishann Chakrabarti is being used to frighten the people of Sydney with a "build up or else" and to market the idea of selling air-space to developers so that they can build the residential towers residents have been fighting for generations. This concept of selling airspace is obscene in the context of human rights as well as Australian values of freedom and nature accessible to all. Australia's self-appointed leaders are in the business of making everything for sale by privatising all natural rights and resources. They should be put on trial for this as a criminal conspiracy to advantage a few at the expense of the many citizens whose taxes they abuse for their own ends. Unfortunately they also make the laws.

“If you don’t plan, those folks in Western Sydney will have their worst nightmares come true,’’ Chakrabarti told The Daily Telegraph, threatening that Sydney "would also struggle to create good jobs and fall behind East Asian cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai".

That is the awful benchmark our enemies who call themselves our leaders seek to impose on the rest. It is indeed our worst nightmare, to compete with Hong Kong and Shanghai. Only psychopaths like warlords and corporate landlords would wish such a nightmare on Australians. Good leaders would lead us against it.

Bad leaders stand on a rubbish heap of trashed human rights

How could any self-respecting media dignify such authoritarian drivel as the basis of planning policy? Is this what inevitably happens in a capitalist system that privileges bullies and psychopaths by making them rich enough to dominate the public messaging system? If it cannot be made democratic then we can only hope the system will be brought down. The sole reason most of those talking up development and population growth are even heard is that they stand astride a skyscraping rubbish-heap of trashed human rights which they have helped to bury through land-speculation on an industrial scale.

The mass media that purveys this propaganda and invests in real-estate, keeps any dissenting views to a whisper. The ABC follows suit in a conspiracy to protect the beneficiaries of propaganda. Australians hate what is happening, but because so many still rely on the mainstream media to understand what is happening and to represent their views, they fail to connect on the ground and therefore fail to organise. Most people reading these transparent propaganda tracts marketing population growth and infrastructure explosion as inevitable must feel alone in their horror.

I believe that I have shown in Demography, Territory, Law: the Rules of Animal and Human Populations, that growth is not inevitable and that about half of the first world nations are planning to adapt positively to smaller populations by the 2050s.

Chakrabati is also reported to have said that the selling of airspace to highrise developers is, “a very viable model as areas around train stations are very, very valuable.’’ Fighting highrise development above a local station was where Marvellous Melbourne came into being, with the help of Planning Backlash. Marvellous Melbourne sought to publicise what the speculators who have taken over our government had planned for Camberwell Station, in Melbourne, Victoria. As well as the imposed massive changes to the local visual and experienced environment, there was the abrogation of democracy of local residents. The situation has since greatly deteriorated with VCAT, the Victorian Court system, now imposing impossible costs on citizens to prevent them from exercising self-government.

Coming up from the wings in the two party fixed horse race _{#fnAirSpace3" id="txtAirSpace3">3} towards impossible living conditions is the growing unaffordability of land-rates. As well as driving up rental costs, elderly residents innocently living in homes they bought and paid for decades ago, find that rates based on speculative land-values are pulling them into debt at a time of life when wages and pensions do not keep up with the related inflation. And it is not just the elderly, young renters and young home-owners face lifetimes of enslavement to debt with little prospect of retaining equity in purchased property as these costs rise.

Of course, this suits the predators who pass for parliamentarians and their friends, because it means that a proportion of those people will be forced to sell-up and move out, creating a dynamic that will favour subdivisions, making housing even less affordable.

"Policies which promise to build low cost modest housing, or any policy which increases density will only drive prices higher and worsen the situation. By reducing dwelling size, the premium paid for land increases and land price increases." (Dennis K in "The Housing market and the death of Australia.")

Whilst building high-rent slums, the person or corporation that buys the 'air-rights' around the stations servicing increasingly congested suburbs will make billions of dollars, far more than is needed to buy parliamentarians and political parties.

We are told that the Planning Department estimates Sydney’s population will increase by 1.6 million over the next 20 years, requiring 664,300 new homes. Chris Johnson, of Urban Taskforce, an organisation that represents the interests of property developers, is quoted predictably as saying that 'Sydney will need to build 100 new high-rise apartment towers a year for the next 50 years to accommodate a third of the increased population.' Only if Mr Johnson and his allies get away with their political push to bulldoze Australians' rights.

Australia's population is increasing at an unsustainable rate, impacting on democracy, the environment, and civil rights, only due to immigration policy at both Federal and State levels. All the states have websites inviting people to come and live in them and all the states pretend they have no control over the situation. The Australian government is trying to induce young people to move to the north of Australia in the context of high unemployment. The aim is to give young people no choice but to work for the predators who are moving in on the north to cover it in mines, roads, dams and suburbs. There will be no natural environment left at this rate. The high immigration that permits all these abuses is not Australia's friend. But it's not terrorism from overseas we should fear most; it is the terrorism of the developers inside and outside parliament who are removing our rights in order to promote growth for their selfish profits.

Probably the only way to change this kind of situation is through a revolution that redistributes land and decommodifies it. With the mass media working so successfully to keep Australians ignorant and isolated from each other, this would be almost inconceivable, except that there is also a good possibility that petroleum depletion and the inadequacy of alternative sources of power and of nuclear will undermine the awful profit system we are groaning under. The result will be a decline in the ability to travel long distances and a return to the family and clan unit, interacting locally. The family and clan unit has an organic power structure, rooted geopolitically in its local environment. _{#fnAirSpace4" id="txtAirSpace4">4}

Did Vishann Chakrabarti, touted as a 'leading New York architect' willingly lend his name to this subversion of democracy by the new Australian squattocracy? Such a man could use his position to denounce the hidious transformation of the world into New York-style ghettos divided by desert, or he can use it to help Australian Prime Minister Abbott to further privilege corporate power and wealth, in an entropic race to the bottom.

Footnotes

#fnAirSpace1" id="fnAirSpace1">1. #txtAirSpace1">↑ Bradfield was a founding member of the Australian Engineers Institute and famous for being the engineer in charge of the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He was also famous for pushing schemes to turn Australian rivers inland to animate the desert. Someone decided to attach his name to give some ersatz gravitas to this grande bouffe for greedy developers. However, I note that his great great granddaughter, Holly Parker, won a young scientist prize for a kind of packaging that can be replanted after use, which sounds like a generational turn for the better.

#fnAirSpace2" id="fnAirSpace2">2. #txtAirSpace2">↑ See, for instance, article in the Sydney Daily Telegraph: Sydney Harbour Bridge engineer John Bradfield: A great legacy to live up to in our city.

#fnAirSpace3" id="fnAirSpace3">3. #txtAirSpace3">↑ The ALP saw that Bill Shorten, rather than the membership favoured Anthony Albanese, was pushed to the top of the heap after the last election. Shorten, like Abbott, will push population growth on behalf of the ruling and wealthy classes, whereas Albanese actually said he preferred for Australians to democratically decide on immigration numbers. See "Numbers man” Shorten apparently open- ended on Australia’s population numbers."

#fnAirSpace4" id="fnAirSpace4">4. #txtAirSpace4">↑ Demography, Territory, Law: the Rules of Animal and Human Populations

Poor beautiful Tasmania, scene of abject tragedy for the local aborigines, site of Port Arthur, a cruel prison for lower-class offenders of Britain's laws, where a still unexplained massacre took place so recently, host to a disfiguring fatal cancer among its Tasmanian Devil population, and now to have its nature desecrated by people who just want to sell houses to anyone they can and the hell with the consequences. For a long time Tasmania was the one Australian state that lacked the problem of foxes predating on local wildlife, which was in consequence, abundant. Then a few years ago someone let a fox in. At the time it did not seem like a good omen. And it wasn't.

"The Mercury reported yesterday that business and community leaders agreed that increasing the population was a priority, with support shown for the incoming Liberal government’s aim of 650,000 people by 2050.University of Tasmania sociologist Brendan Churchill said it was heartening to see population again at the forefront of public debate."

'Heartening', although he conceded that it would cause 'tension about peoples' standard of living.' He also talked about population being 'one of the most important debates that Tasmanians and Tasmanian politicians should be involved in'.” Any kind of population expert should be aware that there has been and is no democratic 'debate' from local Australians on what is happening to their social and physical environment. There are managed and sidelined discussions. Population growth is a totalitarian spear thrust into our midst by wholly commercial interests, aided and abetted by governments which are really corporations.Hobart sociologist warns stakeholders on setting population targets.

Our world, locally, nationally and globally is already over-populated to the environmental detriment of the planet - the ONLY one we have - or ever will have. Take a look around and see what damage we have caused - [and are still causing] - to our environment over the last 200 years of our so-called stewardship. If the Hodgman Government wants to boost the local economy, they should improve the education and skills of the citizens we already have, not import what will later present an even bigger problem.

In 2011 the Property Council of Australia and the Mercury newspaper began to push back democracy in Tasmania in favour of population growth. With the coming in power of the Liberal Government there, the similar plans of the old Labor government will come into fruition. With a Catholic prime minister, Tony Abbott, the bulldozer will finally be given absolute domain (easily confused with domain.com.au) over nature, beauty and freedom.

Let's not dick around

As the introduction to the article that Tim Murray wrote in "The Sky is the limit for Tasmania's population"reads:

"Liberal Leader Will Hodgman's idea of pushing up Tasmania's population from 512,000 to 650,000 by the year 2050 has started a predictable bidding war, with Housing Industry Association's Stuart Clues, weighing in with a proposal for one million by the year 2050. Tasmania is currently a destination for Australian refugees from the unpleasant effects of turbo-charged population growth in Western Australia and other mainland states, so no-one in government or the property development industry is likely to ask Tasmanian residents what they think. Meanwhile, Canadian population renegade, Professor T. Murray, is accusing the Libs and the HIA of lack of vision. In a phone call to Candobetter.net, he called them 'pussies.' "Let's not dick around," he said, "The sky is the limit for Tasmania...""

The newspapers are promoting the despotic commercialisation of human population growth, with the Mercury leading with beat ups. There were signs of the gathering storm in 2012. There are no major newspapers prepared to present to the public how bad this is going to be for them, nor to canvas informed opinion on this situation.

Local university commentators, overlooked to date, will be touting themselves as population experts, singing the song of the Property Council of Australia and the hollow lie that growth is good. There will be more conferences, adding nothing but sound to the furious bulldozing of Tasmania.

In 27 March 2012 Candobettter published an article at "Property Council pushing Doomsday scenario that Growth is Inevitable", with this on Tasmania about the Property Council's social engineering blog called "Makemycitywork":

Look out Tasmania!

Although this so-called "Makemycitywork" blog has different portals for every Australian capital city, this article cannot deal with them all, so I have chosen to look at how it treats Tasmania.

We recently heard from Tigerquoll of how an entire suburb full of Koreans is to be inserted into the Tasmanian electorate without so much as asking the community's permission. So we know that Tasmania is in the sights of the growth lobby. And we also know that Bernard Salt was recently campaigning for growthists to start spreading their propaganda via the social media, in order to get an apparently authentic trend happening to counter grass-roots counter-growth lobby which came into being to help ordinary people identify the agents of unwanted and unnecessary growth and organise to stop being snowed by them.

We see many of these propaganda trends in newspaper articles which just happen to feature property council views again and again, and in a kind of parallel tv universe creation in the form of the current-affairs format panel interview called 3Q, on "Essential Vison", where, Peter Verver is presented as a bland kind of socially motivated 'expert' pushing the idea of cities. href="http://makemycitywork.com.au/tasmania/">"What's wrong with our cities? [Read more about 3Q.[1]]

Council Merger push by corporates

The nightmare for Tasmania includes, "Council Merger Kick-along: Property Council of Australia executive director Mary Massina has demanded action on local government reform, as an independent report recommending council amalgamations sits gathering dust in mayoral offices."

For those of you who have already suffered, since Jeff Kennett in Melbourne, and Anna Bligh in Brisbane, from council amalgamations, here are the vested interests that drive them, which are totally anti-democratic. On 21 March Australian banker, Elizabeth Proust, pushed a line that Australians should be denied their local councils because they were more easily able to stand up against property development and overpopulation. She used the term 'NIMBY' as a derogation.

In Charles Waterhouse, "Council Merger Kickalong,", The Mercury, March 03, 2012 12.00, the journalist has created a 669 word article, citing a number of professionals praising council amalgamations, suggesting that there is a general swing towards these among ordinary Tasmanians in the first 593 words. Right at the bottom (and how many readers would continue down that far, he apportions 76 words to another side to the propaganda [the real community] allowing that:

"However, some residents are worried for their communities and question the benefits.
Citizens for Glenorchy leader Jan Dunsby said no business case study had proven cost savings from forming a greater Hobart council.

"How can we form an opinion when there is nothing to back up any cost savings?" she said.
"Other councils which have amalgamated on the mainland have not produced cost savings and if rates have diminished, so have services you can't have both.""

Another article, by Craig Hogget, "Council merger risk warning," September 28, 2011, which gives a bit more weight to those who are not taken in by council mergers, nonetheless uses biased language. Mergers are dubbed 'reforms', as in "Council mergers have been increasingly on the agenda since the Southern Tasmanian Councils Authority set up an independent review into the issue. The Property Council of Tasmania has also been campaigning for local government reform."

In another article by Craig Hoggett, "Bold Bid ends in farce," September 28, 2011, about local council elections, we can read of how Liberal Party member, Mr Bold, had been campaigning for months on a platform of reducing red tape [euphemism for pro-council amalgamations], but missed the deadline for election candidates. Mr Bold is in the construction business with a company, "Bold Impressions," which "creates 3D computer models of construction projects."

Yet another article in the Mercury, by David Killick, "Planning rated as a failure," March 16, 2012, begins with the ubiquitous Property Council of Australia again, "TASMANIA'S planning system has been rated the worst in the nation by the Property Council of Australia." Much of the rest of the article gives prominence to Property Council state director Mary Massina.

You get the picture, I hope. And let's all hope that it never comes to pass, for the outrageous growth that the Property Council seeks so remorselessly is not inevitable, but they would have it so.

It may seem impossible to stop growth, but stopping slavery was also considered impossible not so very long ago.

NOTES

"Essential Vison", where 3Q is presented, lists some strange assortment of bedfellows as its 'partners': "Industry Super Network, Every Australian Counts campaign, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, Australian Super, Greenpeace, Community and Public Sector Union, bankmecu, Property Council of Australia, CFMEU."

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."

Melbourne lord mayor Robert Doyle has called for an end to “dumb growth”, saying the Victorian capital needs to “stop spreading at the edges like some sort of stain”. The former Victorian opposition leader told a seminar on future visions for Melbourne that he was alarmed by new communities springing up in the outer suburbs, marooned from jobs and public transport.

Cr Doyle said the only “smart” way to achieve a “big Melbourne” was to inject new homes into established suburbs and the city's extensive urban renewal areas, such as E-Gate and Fisherman's Bend. He said the City of Melbourne believed an extra 3 million people could comfortably be housed within the current boundaries of the city.

The embedded Table shows that Melbourne, Queensland and Western Australia have achieved Developing World status in the rapid population growth stakes.

With the exception of Singapore and the UAE, which are wealthy City States with limited cost of infrastructure expansion; only Developing World states have higher rates of population growth than some parts of Australia. Hallmarks of such states include:

• GDP per Capita roughly 4% that of Australia's
• Extreme rates of population growth due to chaotic rates of childbirth
• Autocratic regimes
• Extreme wealth in the hands of a few
• Lack of human rights
• Lack of social welfare
• Lack of health care
• Rapidly degrading environments

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see some conceptual similarities between Australia and these states. It is all a matter of degree. A common factor, of course, being extreme population growth. Australia's is autocratically imposed on us all by the Federal Government.

The Mayor doesn't control the rate of population growth. However limits to growth do exist. He says the "City of Melbourne" viewed an extra 3 million as feasible, but did not mention a time span; when the expansion would slow or stop; or who has the right to impose that kind of growth on Melbournians. That all seems to be part of the "Vision" which is accepted without question; like subservience to an autocratic rule by "High Priests of Growth". No worries mate; we can just keep building more housing, on less land,............forever. And if the building industry slows down we can get jobs digging holes, in Western Australia, Queensland and NSW.............forever.

Housing might be crammed into the Greater Melbourne area; but with an economy geared towards this kind of development in the short term; where will the next 3 million people be housed? And the next 3 million after that?

In the long run, endless plans for massive population growth simply don't work. It's not sustainable. So why not admit it now and plan for slowing down?

Any form of rapid population growth, without questioning its long term feasibility, is "dumb growth", because it is a form of procrastination-in-denial. Ultimately the responsibility for change lies with the Federal Government.

Please review and consider signing this petition and forwarding it to as many people as possible: Australia requires a public inquiry to determine a basis for the optimum rate of population growth

The Victorian state budget was released today. The estimate for gross state product growth is 1.5% and population growth at 1.7% Note forecast for population growth has been raised to 1.7% for outlook period (until 2016) compared to 1.6% for previous budget. 0.1% seems tiny, but that is a 6.25% increase. No one is pointing out that per capita Victoria is going backwards.

Lots of mention of population growth, compared with the 2012-2013 budget, where the only mention of population was related to Victorian share of Commonwealth outlays.

From the Budget Overview, actually titled "BUILDING FOR GROWTH",
Building for Growth.pdf a quick search on "population" elicits the following:

The Coalition Government’s fiscal strategy allows it to advance major, transformational infrastructure projects, as well as the ongoing road, rail and other infrastructure required to keep pace with population growth Population growth in Melbourne, in particular in the west and north, will continue to place pressure on cross-city routes.

The Coalition Government continues to make significant investments in Victoria’s road network. These investments will meet the demands of a growing population and improve the safety and reliability of the State’s roads.

Monash Children’s Hospital Funded in the 2012-13 Budget Update, the new Monash Children’s hospital will deliver 230 paediatric beds to service growing populations in south east Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula and south east Victoria.

Waurn Ponds Community Hospital – a new 32-bed community hospital in southern Geelong. This hospital will meet service pressures for the growing populations of Geelong and the Surf Coast Shire.

Planning for better cities The 2013-14 Budget funds several projects to plan for growth and change, and to cater for expected population growth. By laying the groundwork now, the Coalition Government is building for the future.

Targeting housing affordability As part of the 2013-14 Budget, the Coalition Government is targeting its support for first home buyers of new homes to improve first home affordability, increase jobs in the housing construction sector and increase the supply of housing to meet the demands of Victoria’s growing population.

Only in Canada you say? Perhaps you have wondered, like me, why--- given the substantial number of Canadians who have consistently told pollsters that they want lower immigration levels---there isn't a single MP in any party who will take up their cause. Not one. At least four MPs from two different parties in the UK have done so, and in Australia, Labor MP Kelvin Thomson has loudly spoken out for lower population numbers and a cut in migration levels. But there is not a whisper about reducing immigration numbers from the trained seals on either side of the aisle in Canada's House of Commons. Why not?

Party scrutiny of politicians screens out 'surprises'

At least part of the answer, I think, came up during a panel discussion on CBC news ("The National") last night February 25th. Panellists were asked how various nominees for the three major parties are "vetted" so that there are no embarrassing "surprises" that emerge during the election campaign. They told host Peter Mansbridge that nowadays, candidates' lives are intensely scrutinized. There is a search for every possible skeleton in every possible closet. Everything they have done or said in the past is investigated. Even ex-wives or ex-husbands are approached for information, if they can be.

Since being "anti-immigration" in Canada is regarded as a sin equal to pedophilia or murder, you can imagine that anyone who is on record of making any negative comment about immigration or any class of immigrants is subject to instant excommunication from the party. There is not a chance that such an individual could ever survive as a nominee if such "racist" feelings were to come to light. Not a chance. And if it is somewhere on the Internet, it is there forever and it will be found. The party brass will hunt you down and ferret you out.

That is true of the Conservatives, the Liberals and the NDP. What about the Greens, you ask? No worries there. Obviously you can't run for the Green Party unless you are certified open-borders moron and Islamopanderer.

Pity you need to be Swiss to have Swiss-style direct democracy

My answer? We need Swiss-style direct democracy. An end to the monopoly of political parties. That should be the first reform.

But then, to bring that about, you would need to work within one of the major parties, who have a vested interest in maintaining the party system. Good luck with that. You wouldn't even get your foot in the door. Start a new party? Forget it. It has been tried. It is a ticket to oblivion. You need at least 35% of the popular vote and a bucket money just to win one seat, and without a seat, you have no profile at all.

The only option is to become a Swiss citizen. But the recent referendum has shown us that the Swiss, wisely, will not have us.

This article may be seen as a follow-on from "A history of politics and population in Australia: Thomas Malthus in Australian thought". The Australian business community easily convinced itself that rapid population increase would provide a solution to all its problems, especially after the 1890s, when the property market lost momentum. By this time building societies had mushroomed and banks had begun to invest heavily in property. [1]

In 1893 the New South Wales bankers' Journal published an article by WH Eldred wherein one of the causes of the financial crisis was identified as "the cessation of immigration caused by the withdrawal of government aid, whereas the true policy of the country lies in encouraging population." [2] Neville Hicks [2] says that Eldred was a former bank director acting in 1893 as Consul-General for Chile in Sydney.

Other writers to the same journal made similar points: In 1898 an unidentified correspondent linked the approximately 40% population increase in the 1880s with six-fold increases in public and private borrowing. He said how much might have been reaped from this if the borrowed money had been put into 'productive works'. He felt that the consequent demand for labour would have attracted emigrants from as far away as Europe.[3] The same year the editor bemoaned the departure from Victoria of 50,000 adults in three years, which he believed, had badly affected the State's population numbers. He expressed the hope that a liberal government, a good season or two and some opening up of the backcountry would make people stay. [4]

After 1900 the business community became quite desperate about increasing population. In 1903 the President of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce announced that it is necessary to have a population "which steadily increases as commerce itself does." In 1905 the New South Wales Chamber of Manufactures supported Prime Minister Deakin's immigration proposals because

"Desirable immigration means more people, and more people means more capital, and the utilization of millions of acres of unused territory, and thus increasing our national wealth".

Founder of the Federated Chambers of Manufactures, President of the New South Wales Chamber of Manufactures from 1902-1904 and President of the Chamber of Commerce, Octavius Beale, was an "old ally" of Deakin's. "As State President of the National Protection League, he kept Deakin, an old ally, informed on political matters in Sydney."[5] He was also to become one of the Commissioners on the Royal Commission on the Decline in the Birthrate 1904.

In 1906 the acting President of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce enjoined, "an increase in population means an increase of wealth not only of the few but of the many." In 1908 the President of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce pushed for immigration on the grounds that suitable immigrants would be consumers as well as producers and should therefore be welcomed by all classes". In 1907 the General Council of Chambers of Commerce asked the government for a steady stream of immigration to provide for the "growth in industrial manufactures which will shortly exceed the volume of consumption of the present population". In 1908 the President of the New South Wales Chamber of Manufactures stated that:

"…to get any benefits from increased protection they must get increased payment and that could not come from their own limited populations. A wisely managed scheme of immigration would be as much the saviour of the manufacturers as anything could be." [6]

(Note that the above represents an early reference to enlarging the local market of consumers.) There was much more of the same. Related demographic concerns were about population distribution, especially as regards opening up further territory for farming. There was still a perceived colonial duty to open up the land.

"Politicians, both in England and Australia, avoided discussion of this development, for, inevitable or not, an industrial dominion economy was outside the scope of the imperial purpose. The role of Australia was seen in the traditional light and the economy was to remain colonial. The growth of rural industries which would supplement the industrial might of the United Kingdom was the real task - all that was needed was men to populate Australia, money to develop it and markets in which to sell the resultant increase of primary products." [7]

We can see here that a rise in Australian anti-Malthusian thinking coincides with a rise in the financial and manufacturing side of its economic community that occurred between 1850 and 1890. In Malthus's time this was foreshadowed by the ideological and political divisions over the economic implications of the British Corn Laws between (agricultural) Landlords and Manufacturers in Britain, who tended respectively to be Malthusians and Ricardiens regarding the importation of corn. [8]

NOTES

If you want to read more about this history, going up to near the present day, read Chapter 6 of Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby and its Absence, RMIT Thesis, 2000. What you have read comes from Appendix 5, endnote 26, of that thesis.
[1] Source: Leon L'Huillier, "Depression and a National Economy," Essays in Economic History of Australia, Ed. James Griffin, Jacaranda Press, 1973, p 190.
[2] Source: WH Eldred, "The Financial Crisis" in Journal of the Bankers' Institute of N.S.W., II:7 (July 1893), p.227, cited by Neville Hicks, This Sin and Scandal, Australia's Population Debate 1891-1911, Australian National University Press, Canberra, ACT, 1978, p.86.

[3] Source: Journal of the Bankers' Institute of N.S.W., VIII:8 (August, 1898), p.292, cited by Neville Hicks, op cit, p87.

[4] Source: Editor's note: 'Victoria's Loss' in Journal of the Bankers' Institute of N.S.W, XI:8 (March 1898), p 24f, cited by Neville Hicks, op cit, p87.

[5] Source: Australian Dictionary of Biography, "Beale, Octavius Charles," 1850-1930, p225.

[6] Source: Neville Hicks, op cit, pp 88-89, note 30, citing the following: J.G. Farleigh, 'President's Address' in NSW Chamber of Manufactures' Annual Report (1908), p 17 and J Barre Johnston, 'President's Address' in Sydney Chamber of Commerce: Annual Report, (1903), p 39; Report of the Council in NSW Chamber of Manufactures Annual Report, (1905), p 9; George Merrivale, 'Acting-President's Address' in Sydney Chamber of Commerce, Annual Report, (1906), p 31f; RJ Larking, 'President's Address' in Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, Annual Report, (1908), p 59; General council of Chambers of Commerce of the Commonwealth of Australia, Report (1907), p 47.

[7] Source: Richard Cotter, "War, Boom and Depression", Essays in Economic History of Australia, Ed. James Griffin, Jacaranda Press, 1973 p251.

[8] Source: Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosopers, Penguin Books, 6th Ed., pp 78-82.

Article by Sheila Newman and James Sinnamon.

Absence of choice hallmark of Big Population

The tone is dictatorial: You will have a Big Australia. It will be perhaps 48.3m in 45 years. Nowhere in the article is anyone saying who decided to allow such high immigration or questioning the events leading up to this - certainly not the current Australians or those of 20 to 40 years ago. It is as if the author, who is the Melbourne Bureau Chief for the Australian Financial Review knows about some change afoot that the rest of us don't suspect; perhaps something violent that will stop dead any revolt as more and more Australians realise what they are being herded towards.

Aztec-like traditions

Aztec-like, the article harbingers the elites' desired crammed Australia with a symbolic child sacrifice, Alexander Marshall of Malvern East. As with the best traditional victims, Alexander, who looks about 5 years old, has no say in his fate. Innocence is what the gods and the elites require. Alex's appearance as a star on the elite-media altar that is the Australian Financial Review will be all too brief. Soon, through the aging process, he will look different from his photograph here. If the elites who drive the big financial markets and Australia's distant governments have their way, Alexander will gradually fade into an ever growing crowd of Australians suffering shortages of vital resources and competing with a stream of foreign born students and workers who will, by that time, have completely overwhelmed Alex's contemporaries. With immigration 60 per cent of Australia's population growth now and if the anticipated population of 48.3 (or more) actually happens, most of those people will be a foreign born selection-weighted for their ability to out-compete the natives in housing, income, position and status.

The infill process

Alex's suburb, Malvern East, will be unrecognisable, well before he reaches fifty, for Malvern East is doomed by planners to 'high densification', part of the plan to cram in that 48.3m and the next 48.3m and the ones after those. This old suburb, with its spacious and ornate wooden houses (all that is left of once vast forests nearby), its broad-leafed plane trees on every street, is already pocked with moonscaped sites and notices announcing twelve new units for a single block.

Scapegoating the elderly

The article pretends, "That people can expect to live longer than any other period in history is a main driver of this population increase." In reality it is out-of-proportion mass immigration that is clearly driving Australia's overpopulation. Ironically, that immigration, far from keeping the population youthful, is actually increasing the rate of aging. The article uses the old fallacy that we need many migrants to care for our hugely aging population, without ever admitting - does the writer even realise? that past immigration contributes more aged to our population than the native-born? See "Immigration speeds up Australia's rate of aging - FECCA" and High post-war immigration blamed for today's economic problems.

For a completely different way to manage the needs of our population and economy, see: "Discussing Australia's Dependency ratio 2009 with graph by Dr Katharine Betts".

Scapegoating outer-suburbanites and the disabled

Another hallmark of this typically growthist article is its scapegoating of certain classes. Scapegoats include those who live at a distance from the CBD away from major transport routes. They are portrayed as costing the rest of us for infrastructure, however elsewhere, the article acknowledges that population growth is driving housing unaffordability and thus pushing people outwards to cheaper lots. (High density inner suburbs also need lots of infrastructure - consider the proposed and already hated East-West Link. High-rise use more fuel to run than houses.) The aged, of course, are accused of being the reason that we must all submit to our 'demographic destiny'.

The AFR beats the ageist drum, beginning the article by evoking how a tram has to wait while a 70 year old man with a prosthetic leg slowly mounts it. "Getting drivers to wait for passengers to reach their seats is just one example of the changes we will have to make in the way we live and work if we are to cope with the massive population changes experts predict." The problems with this image and its conclusion are multiple. Firstly, people have long lived to 70 plus and had prosthetic limbs. (Remember Long John Silver?). Secondly, we are in a society that promotes independence for the disabled. Thirdly, and much more relevantly, has the author not noticed that women with prams and toddlers usually also cannot mount moving trams at a run. This is an example of the absurd lengths to which journalists, high and low, are expected to go to market the growthist message in Australia. They might as well be writing for real-estate agencies, but in fact they are. Both the Fairfax and Murdoch press are heavily invested in global marketing of Australian real-estate among their many other corporate interests. More and more of the pages of the Australian Financial Review these days are taken up with real-estate, property development, land-marketing, land-use planning arguments, and industries associated with immigration. This article by Dunckley is just one more example, a double-pager one, signifying that someone there thinks they have to step up the pace of propaganda.

Live AFR videos: Rebecca Thistleston tells of measures the Building Industry advocates the government adopt for a sufficient number of houses to cope with population growth to be built; Matt Starkey describes our future with more than double (48 million) our current population (23 million) by 2061 and 70 million by 2100.

Demographic mythology of the Growth Lobby

I have been reading articles like this one in the Australian press since the early 1990s, when I began to understand what was driving Australia's population growth in the face of manifest democratic disquiet. See The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France, which first identified what it is about our system and other Anglophone systems that makes it so hard to stop population growth when elites are driving it. For a short explanation of what the "Growth Lobby" is, see "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future". I recently wrote a book, the result of ten years of independent work on population and economic theories, (S.M. Newman, Demography Territory and Law: The Rules of Animal and Human populations, Countershock Press, 2013.) I honestly know quite a lot about population and I can tell you that this article is a compendium of demographic mythology, thrown together to prop up a failing economy in the short-term, and throwing the rest of us to the wolves. The scale of population growth that this article is advocating is nothing short of an invasion.

Why it all makes sense

My attention was first drawn to Mathew Dunckley's article in the Financial Review by a number of people who are concerned about the consequences of overpopulation in Australia. A frequent remark was that it did not make economic sense to advocate a situation where democracy would be frankly reduced by crowding of electorates and an increasing number of people would face malnutrition, homelessness and disease. Why would anyone advocate such a situation? The answer seems to be that this situation benefits a few corporations and their investors. The banks want it, the property developers want it, the miners and building materials producers want it, and the newspapers want it. They want it because there is global economic decline and they have important investments in resources and commodities that benefit from increased demand. They know that increasing demand by driving up population growth will cause poverty and social dysfunction. But they don't care. Unlike the Australian, the Age, the Herald Sun, the Sydney Morning Herald or the Courier Mail etc., which all have the same agenda , the Australian Financial Review does not even pretend to care about 'democracy' or the 'people'.

Tourism vs Big Business - an example of the paradigm

Many people in Australia are worried about the effect of human population growth and infrastructure expansion on Australian wildlife and habitat. They often seek economic arguments to defend other creatures and the beauty of nature against people and forces that appear completely uninterested in anything but money. So these conservationists wonder why, for instance, koalas are being driven extinct through the rapid removal of their remaining patchy habitat. Why, they wonder, would the government damage local tourist industries by removing the very things that attract so many people to this country? This conundrum arises repeatedly. Indeed the native animal and wild spaces tourism is a huge and valuable source of income for many people in Australia, and particularly for those in rural areas. So, why would government policy be so much more inclined to destroy than to protect it? The answer is obvious to anyone except those who still believe that Australia's governments try to promote what is best for most Australians. Our governments are only interested in what is good for banks, property developers, and allied corporations. Our elites and their parliamentary servants have become quite distant from nature and reality. They have no feeling for their compatriots, only for their financial and political peers. They are not interested in local economies; they are probably against local self-sufficiency, cooperation and self-government. So, the senseless makes sense, in a way, if you are blinded by greed.

The ABC has done a great job documenting its Vote Compass Project. However the results highlight the role of the ABC in setting the election issue agenda, despite the fact that the ABC explains: "Vote Compass is not a poll. It is primarily and fundamentally an educational tool intended to promote electoral literacy and stimulate public engagement in the policy aspect of election campaigns."

Some time ago I complained to MediaWatch that the ABC Vote Compass was biased due to its omission of the Population Growth Management issue. I am still waiting on their response. The results of the Vote Compass appear to support this complaint.

The Essential Report, 23 July 2013 was a poll that identified population growth management as a Top 15 Federal Election issue without including immigration as an issue. Immigration is one input to population growth management. The outcome is arguably the issue. Just as water shortage is an outcome/issue and water consumption is one input to this issue. Numerous other polls in recent years, including ANU Polling, have also identified population growth as a significant concern for 50% or more of respondents. The ABC's Vote Compass listed immigration as an issue but omitted Population Growth Management (which is a pure sustainability issue that should be untainted by racism or xenophobia). Was this pro population growth bias?

Agenda-setting theory applied to the ABC's 'Vote Compass'

Agenda-setting theory describes the "ability [of the news media] to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda." That is, if a news item is covered frequently and prominently the audience will regard the issue as more important. Agenda-setting theory was formally developed by Dr. Max McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw in a study on the 1968 US presidential election. They demonstrated a strong correlation (r > .9) between what people thought was the most important election issue and what the local and national news media reported was the most important issue. By comparing the salience of issues in news content with the public's perceptions of the most important election issue, McCombs and Shaw were able to determine the degree to which the media determines public opinion. Since the 1968 study, more than 400 studies have been published on the agenda-setting function of the mass media, and the theory continues to be regarded as relevant. (ref. Wikipedia).

Neutral and/or Undecided

The Vote Compass Results show that of the 30 listed issues, the largest neutral (or undecided) votes went to:

- How many new immigrants should Australia admit? (35.9%)
- How much financial support should the Commonwealth provide to the car industry? (36.0%)
- How accessible should abortion services be in Australia? (39.4%)
- How much government regulation should there be on business? (41.1%)
- How much should the government spend on defence? (46.3%)

Were these high Neutral votes because of the complexity of the issues, a feeling of being unqualified to decide due to lack of information/understanding, or simply no opinion? The latter seems highly unlikely for the population growth management issue (which is a pure sustainability issue), and the issue itself is relatively simple to understand. Is the relationship between population growth, population size and migration being confused by government and media under-reporting the adverse impacts of rapid population growth while rapid migration continues? Does defining the issue under the banner of migration confuse and lead to any opposition being characterised as racist or xenophobic? How perfect this might be for those favouring rapid growth!

The smallest neutral or undecided votes went to:

- Medicare should offer basic dental care for everyone, even if people have to pay a higher Medicare levy. (7.4%)
- Boats carrying asylum seekers be turned back. (8.7%)
- Students in government and non-government schools should receive the same amount of federal funding. (9.0%)
- The government should further restrict foreign ownership of Australian agricultural land.(9.1%)
- Should asylum seekers who arrive by boat should not be allowed to settle in Australia (9.3%)

Was this because voters are confident that they understand these issues and/or feel they have enough information to form an opinion?

Balanced (and therefore Contentious/Controversial?)

The issues showing the most balanced agreement/disagreement (or more/less) rating (ie with the proportion of those agreeing within roughly +/-5% of the proportion disagreeing) are listed below with percentages (Neutral/Agree/Disagree):

- How may new immigrants should Australia admit? (35.9%/30.2%/33.8%) (Not covered by the ABC in lead up to the election. This is also a completely different issue to Population Growth Management which was not even listed as an issue)
- Boats carrying asylum seekers should be turned back (8.7%/43.5%/43.8%) (Covered by the ABC in lead up to the election)
- The national budget deficit should be reduced, even if it means fewer public services (12.6%/45.6%/41.8%) (Covered by the ABC in lead up to the election)
- When there is an economic problem government spending usually makes it worse (18.5%/40.1%/41.4%) (Related to the above)
- Live animal exports should be banned (15.9%/39.1%/45%) (Major issue covered by the ABC)
- Australia should end the monarchy and become a republic (21.5%/40.4%/38.1%) (Subject of a Referendum in 1999)

As shown by the percentages, the immigration issue is in a class of its own; with balanced agreement/disagreement combined with a very high neutral vote.

Some conclusions

Conclusions that could be drawn from these Vote Compass results include:

- The immigration issue has one of the highest neutral and/or undecided votes, which could reflect a failure of the ABC in promoting electoral literacy of this issue, relative to other issues
- The ABC did not cover the contentious immigration issue in the lead up to the election, which could reflect a failure of the ABC in promoting electoral literacy of this issue, relative to other contentious issues
- The ABC did not include the Population Growth Management issue at all, which reflects a failure of the ABC in promoting electoral literacy of this contentious issue, relative to other contentious issues
- Failure to cover the Population Growth Management issue, despite the results of the Vote Compass categorising the related issue of immigration as both contentious and somewhat misunderstood, indicates a degree of pro population growth bias by the ABC which is totally consistent with the ABC track record in this key area of National importance. [For more on this see Candobetter articles at: ABC bias]

Findings of the Essential Report, 23 July 2013: Which are the three most important issues in deciding how you would vote at a Federal election?

Punch Line

The Vote Compass confirms that all the major political parties (Labor, Liberal, Green) support ongoing rapid, migration-based population growth at or above current (2012) levels. In 2012 the level was 1.8% per annum (roughly 4 times the OECD country average based on CIA World Factbook Data versus ABS data for 2012).

The Vote Compass preferentially concealed the existence (under the term "other") of a party standing to represent voters concerned about population growth management (The Stable Population Party), while preferentially naming parties such as Wikileaks, Katter, Palmer. Wasn't this all simply part of the ABC's biased agenda setting?

Do results of the Vote Compass showing balanced agreement/disagreement combined with a large proportion of neutral or undecided votes, conclusively show the impact of ABC bias by omission of information in this key population policy area? Has the ABC selectively chosen to ignore an issue when it should fully understand that 50% or more of voters disagree with Liberal, Labor and Green policy? Does it really matter why this happened? Isn't it simply important to recognise the bias and make amends by correcting it? You can encourage the ABC by signing, and most importantly also forwarding, this petition. Thank you for supporting this cause:
Australia requires a public inquiry to determine a basis for the optimum rate of population growth

What, exactly, is the ABC's definition of bias in its Code of Practice? Here's what they say in their introduction: "The ABC has a statutory duty to ensure that the gathering and presentation of news and information is impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism....... Aiming to equip audiences to make up their own minds is consistent with the public service character of the ABC. A democratic society depends on diverse sources of reliable information and contending opinions."........ and so it continues ..........

Key findings from the ANU poll (October 2010 http://socpol.anu.edu.au/polls-and-surveys/anupoll/population and http://socpol.anu.edu.au/polls-and-surveys/anupoll/polls/governance and http://socpol.anu.edu.au/polls-and-surveys/anupoll/polls/environment) include:

- 44 per cent of Australians favour population growth, while 52 per cent want the population to remain at or below current levels.
- Opposition to population increase is broadly-based, with concerns about the effect on the economy and the environment.
- A majority of Australians think the world’s population is too large and is causing environmental damage.
- Half of the country say people should consider limiting the sizes of their families in order to minimise the impact of population growth.
- 16 per cent of Australians would want to see population increase through more immigration rather than through increased fertility.
- Two thirds of Australians say the ageing population will cause real problems — a majority are concerned about the government’s ability to tackle the problem and reject increased taxes as a solution.

Booming Australian Population Needs Booming Housing Supply!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Quirk of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA), Victorian and Tasmanian Branch, writes about the many problems of Plan Melbourne. Indeed there are so many problems that it is crazy to go ahead. But most of us realize that the Planners and Ministers behind Plan Melbourne intend to just go on driving bulldozers until something bigger stops them or they run out of oil. There is no plan B and so no room to listen to comment. This is a real problem for the rest of us because we live here.

"Populate and reap rewards," was Monday's editorial (2 December 2013) in the Australian Financial Review. Its flimsy self-serving logic provides a curious contrast to Kelvin Thomson's superb speech on the same topic to a full auditorium of concerned citizens on Sunday. (The speech is embedded in this article.) Where Thomson has reacted to the news that population growth is completely out of control by attempting to help people to organise against the growth pushing forces who seek to benefit financially from overpopulation, the editorial in the Financial Review is cynical in its enjoinder to exploit those problems for elite gain.

Click here for Kelvin Thomson's speech about Victoria First and our population problem.

Orwellian AFR Editorial

In this editorial, Fairfax news markets overpopulation in a sinister fashion. It distorts economic principles. It views the economy only from the angle of the very rich, but doesn't bother to warn the uninitiated that that is its perspective.

It minimises the projections to 53.6 million by 2101, rather than the even worse likelihood of 70m by the end of the century. (See http://candobetter.net/?q=node/3560.)

The editorial talks rot about the dangers of a 'stagnant' population, taking a gratuitous swipe at Julia Gillard's initially unfavorable attitude to big populations.

It pretends that a small population causes inflation, when inflation is actually created by demand, i.e. more people wanting finite or fixed goods and resources.

The rationale appears to be a belief in endless economies of scale making everything cheaper, however this is contradicted by the reality, which is diseconomies of scale. These the editorial ignores because that is what big business is able to profit from at everyone else's expense. Hence Victoria and other states' problems with huge infrastructure projects that trample democracy and trash natural and social ammenity, like the East-West link.

Shameless

The editorial shamelessly promotes the idea that a small population would harm the 'national housing wealth' - which it fails to admit is a product of just the inflation it pretends would result from a smaller population, as well as a recipe for homelessness and housing stress. The rising cost or 'value' of housing is a direct result of rising demand related to population growth. Fairfax (like Murdoch) should declare its dependency on the real estate market to its readers.[1]

The editorial fear-mongers by relating the possibility of housing prices coming down to loss of returns on superannuation, shares and savings, but fails to factor in how lower housing prices would cause lower cost of living, making it much cheaper to live. We would not need inflated returns on investment.

What manufacturing?

It claims, nonsensically, that we would lose manufacturing to bigger populations overseas. A sane response would be, "What manufacturing?" When there were 7 million people here we had a thriving manufacturing sector, which has actually declined to almost nothing during the precise period that successive Australian governments have been engineering population growth through mass immigration. The rising cost of land, power and other resources, like water, drives up all costs of manufacturing. Wages must be higher for people to be able to afford these costs and businesses must also pay those costs. These are direct results of population growth.

The only kinds of business that can survive in this environment are huge corporations, such as transnational banks, mining, agribusiness, infrastructure and property developers. These corporate entities survive and 'prosper' because they actually own most of the resources, assets, and utilities that cost the rest of us - wage earners and small business - so much. But these are the only kinds of economic entities that really interest the elite agenda.

What is this editorialist smoking?

It is as if the editorialist is drunk, or believes that his/her audience is, as he/she strings outlandishly contradictory assertions together. For instance, the article maintains, on the one hand, that we need a huge population, but then bases this on the idea that Australia will "prosper as a supplier of minerals, energy, food, specialised manufacturing and professional services" to growing middle classes in Asia. That is not a description of the kind of economy that needs a lot of workers. Mining, utilities, industrialised agriculture and professional services are sectors with low ratios of workers to product.

This statement is bizarre:

"Instead, the striking successive increases in population projections since 2003 reflect the advent of Australia's China boom since that time, and subsequently the broadening of the opportunities through our so-called Asian century."

It can only be due to the lack of media diversity in Australia that this kind of intellectual foaming at the mouth can get published.

The editorialist insists: "A wealthier nation in turn will attract more people both to produce these export-oriented goods and services and to supply services to a more prosperous (and ageing) domestic population."

Note that more immigrants means bigger faster-aging cohorts,[2] but that seems to be what the Murdoch Press and its cronies really want: more expensive problems to market expensive 'solutions' to the rest of us.

The editorialist raves on, like the Queen in Alice: "This provides the chance for the Australia concept as we know it - a western outpost at the foot of Asia embodying the best of British-American Enlightenment concepts such as the rule of law, an open society and a vigorous meritocratic democracy - to fortify our security through increased national wealth that will sustain a healthy defence force and underpin our diplomatic and trading efforts."

What democracy?

What democracy? We have super-corrupt governments at every level of our society.

As Ted Mack recently commented in his brilliant Henry Parkes Oration [emphases added]:

"The fundamental problems of our system of government have not seriously ever been addressed since Federation. These problems can be summarised as the level of over-government. The obsolescence of the constitutional relationships between the three levels of government. The two party “winner-take-all” executive domination of parliament and the associated corrupted voting systems. The domination of the political system and public service by the two private unregulated political parties and their largely self regulated access to the public treasury. Almost a total absence in the school system and for new citizens of any education concerning the three levels of government, their function and voting systems."

"Big business is implacably opposed to more democracy. It wants more centralisation of power. It currently employs more than 600 registered lobbyists in Canberra and spends millions of dollars to subvert democracy. Big media is always constrained by its owners' interests. Since the Second World War there has been a growth of corporate propaganda to protect corporate power against democracy."

"The 2010-13 Federal Parliament saw the major parties virtually eliminate any real form of democratic debate substituting little but character assassination of opponents. It was a three-year election campaign of personal abuse and fear mongering. It was debased even further with aggressive bullying by the media and special interests at unprecedented levels. The same period saw both state and federal governments pandering to special interests allowing massive increases in the promotion of gambling and alcohol. Pandering to the development and mining industries and the seemingly endless privatisation of public assets often creating private monopolies, continued irrespective of public opinion." - Ted Mack, Henry Parkes Oration 2013 [3]

Perseverative demographic policy

The Australian Press's 'Asianisation obsession seems to be code for a big population - of any origin. Not just a big population, but for population growth at frightening levels never previously imagined, rightly feared by those already here.

I liked what Aung San Suu Kyi had to say about this systematic legalised mass invasion, which many won't criticise for fear they will be called racist, even though it is the massive numbers rather than their origin that is so frightening:

“I’d also like to remind you that you are unique and you do not have to go all Asian,” she said. "I understand that this is a trend of Australia today – to try to become ‘Asianised’ as it were. “You are special because you are a unique combination of the east and the west. “I hope and pray that Australia will … make an example of the possibility of genuine unity and diversity.” [4]

As Kelvin Thomson says, the bird has flown; we are already a multi-racial society. No-one I know is trying to make us British again. We do not have to work to make Australia multicultural. It already is.[5]

Push for overpopulation and authoritarian government in Australia

The editorial rightly says that "Immigration will be the major driver of this fresh population growth." As our population grows the fertility opportunites increase so that high immigration finds its echo in a rising birth rate overall. We are now facing the loss of control over population growth that India still faces and which caused China to bring in the one-child policy. At the same time we are looking at a decline in energy resources that power the world's economy. We are on a collision course of overpopulation with dwindling resources. And the press is applauding.

Although the huge volumes of mass migration that are now in train threaten to impoverish Australia's environment and most of its people, by far the most immediate threat they pose is their ability to atomise our social organisation through displacement and induced competition for scarce resources and opportunities. Our vulnerability in this is already apparent in the lack of public participation in government or independent grass-roots movements among our young. Without the social organisation that we once grew up with, along the lines of family, clan and neighborhood communication, we will increasingly become isolated overworked commuters, forced to observe the rules of a manufactured consensus such as we can read today in this intellectually and morally corrupt editorial in the Financial Review.

The editorial gives no quarter to democracy on this issue. It concludes with this understatement:

"It will be hard work to accommodate a bigger population. Sydney in particular, where 40 per cent of the population already live in apartments, and which is playing catch-up with road, airport and rail capacity, will need to be better managed. Tony Abbott's promise to be the infrastructure prime minister, with improvements in financing, regulation, incentives, and demand triggers, could not have been better timed."

Under these demographically explosive terms, Australia has as much chance of catching up on its infrastructure needs as the Phillipines and its democracy is similarly doomed.

There is one new hope: Join Kelvin Thomson's "Victoria First" NGO, which is helping Australians to organise against overpopulation. Contact Kelvin's office to know more at http://www.kelvinthomson.com.au/

NOTES

[1] "The reverse takeover of Fairfax’s high-value classifieds business Domain by glossy real estate upstart Metro Media Publishing is complete after Antony Catalano was appointed Domain’s CEO this morning. Property Observer's sister publication Crikey can reveal that Catalano, a former Fairfax executive, will seize the reins of the Domain group following Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood’s decision in March to spin the booming business unit out as a standalone entity. There is now frenzied speculation that Hywood and Fairfax will end up floating Domain to prop up shaky revenues elsewhere in the business. Alternatively, Hywood could sell all of Fairfax’s flailing publishing and broadcast assets and retain Domain with Catalano at the helm." Andrew Crook, "Catalano appointed CEO of Fairfax’s Domain,"
Tuesday, 19 November 2013 http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/news/catalano-appointed-ceo-of-fairfaxs-domain/2013111866435

[2] Because immigrants arrive in Australia after they are born they are always older than people born here, thus contribute to an older population. In fact they are usually of working age or quite mature, and will often bring out their elderly parents. That has quite a bubble effect on our demographic pyramid. See, for instance, http://candobetter.net/?q=node/1986
[3] The Henry Parkes Oration 2013, The State of the Federation, presented by Ted Mack, Sir Henry Parkes Memorial School, http://www.parkesfoundation.org.au/HPoration2013.pdf
[4] "Aung San Suu Kyi awarded honorary doctorate from ANU"
[5] Paraphase from Kelvin Thomson's speech launching Victoria First. See video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL4e0swBntg&feature=player_embedded

Jenny Warfe went to the Westernport Catchment Committee meeting yesterday 18th October 2013 to hear the PoHDA CEO Mike Lean’s presentation about the proposed Hastings Port expansion. It was all about business as usual, ignoring resource depletion, seeing growing the economy as the only way to provide jobs, unwilling to contemplate the ceasing of engineering population growth upwards. Here is a report.

I went to the Westernport Catchment Committee meeting yesterday 18th October 2013 to hear the PoHDA CEO Mike Lean’s presentation about the proposed Hastings Port expansion. Some of his memorable (predictable ) statements included, according to my notes:

• There are no other options
• Construction phase 2018-2025
• Will serve Victoria's trade for the next 70,80 to 100 years
• It is fundamental as a gateway for the State
• Australians overwhelmingly want their children to have jobs
• Westernport highway would be upgraded to 6 lanes with dual train track in centre
• Project would also require the metro train tunnel to be built to allow for better movement of passenger trains on the Dandenong line, freeing up space for freight trains
• Shipping lines are now moving to wider container ships and steaming slower [so much for the PoMC’s Channel Deepening rationale that the Heads must be deepened because container ships would always be getting deeper and it was uneconomic for ships to wait for tide assistance]
• Container trade is growing at 5-7% compounding annually
• Planning for a minimum of 9 million containers per annum by 2060, ramping up from 2025
• Victoria is growing at 1500 people per week [it is actually 100,000 per annum at present, 60% of which is elective immigration]
• We are many years from having an outcome in the business case
• Compared with any other Australian port, Hastings has the largest amount of port related zoned land close to a port
• If you put it in a container we will move it
• Aiming for maximum automation at the port, so that flood lighting at night is not required, so that birds won’t be disturbed – might only be a few dozen people on site [so much for jobs then.]
• There will be positive impacts as well

[et cetera]

Clearly the plan is predicated on a business as usual scenario, reliant on a doubling of the state’s population and a quadrupling of trade by mid-century and of course abundant fossil fuels to power the juggernaut.
When asked, Mr. Lean denied any knowledge of coal export through Hastings as part of the business case- although acknowledged that he had “read something about it recently.”

There was quite a bit of concern expressed in questions from the meeting and amazement at the numbers of containers, ships, trucks and trains that his “vision” would entail. .....And quite a bit of defensiveness in his replies- perhaps reverting to his former Army Lieutenant Colonel days. Prior to PoHDA, Mr. Lean was responsible for the Williamstown shipyard and the Maritime Business Unit at BAE Systems Australia working on the Air Warfare Destroyer and Landing Helicopter Dock projects.

In an effort to provide some relief to those readers who are paralysed by the idea of population growth as a tragedy for Australia, candobetter has invited writer Cirrus McNimbus to give us the benefit of his optimistic views on Australia and Melbourne's population growth. McNimbus is a well-known commentator for the ABC on housing and lifestyle imperatives and he is also the CEO of the international accounting firm, StormT and Cup, which is a member of the Australian Property Atheneum and Pyramid Association. Today he writes about how his three year old grandson will handle the future.

It's I'm alright Jack to you, granddad

My 3 year old grandson Jack is amazingly clever. He can download an “app” onto his dad’s Smartphone and Google the rules of a new game in one minute. His fellow kindergarten classmates all seem pretty smart too, especially with electronic devices. One of them can program his mum’s GPS to pin-point their route and destination in the wilderness of Melbourne’s latest batch of outer suburbs while his mother is securing the baby in her capsule in the back. My own grandson is cleverer than the others of course, but I have to say they all amaze me with what they can do at an age when I couldn’t even put my Derwents in the right sequence in a box of 12.

This realization allays my worries about the future and gives me great confidence that no matter what seemingly irreversible problems we create now – e.g. global warming, annihilation of local environments, extinction of species, such as the local bandicoots, Leadbeaters possum, the koala and the helmeted honey eater - as well as working our way through what’s left of eternity’s endowment of oil - our grandchildren will have the technical know-how to fix it all up after us and put all that we have broken back together again. For example the recent finding of the blood of a long extinct frozen mammoth breathes certainty to the notion that Jack’s generation will bring life and breath again to extinct animal species!

The other side of the intergenerational equity coin

I guess it’s the other side of the intergenerational equity coin! What I mean is this; I cleared up my children’s toys after them and mopped up all their spilled food and drinks from bench tops and carpets. I even once had to clean up some red cordial from the walls of the dining room! Likewise my own children have had to do the same for their children and even I have had to do it again on the occasions that I have been looking after my grand children.

Yes, pretty soon it will be our grandchildren’s turn to clean up after us and I am confident they will do a good job of it.

Bigger than a chocolate milkshake

What they will have to face may seem at first glance rather more complex than mopping up a chocolate milk shake, but they will have the expertise to attack the problems.

It may seem somewhat challenging that when they are 40 they will be dealing with a severe overpopulation problem in a Australia at the same time as abundant fossil energy disappears and the use of it has to be avoided anyway because of the climate change consequences.

Our grandchildren, who are now in kindergarten will be trying to retro-fit public transport in our neglected outer suburbs as car use becomes rarer.

The kids who rode in the supermarket trolley

These children who rode in the supermarket trolley as their mother took a seemingly endless supply of food from supermarket shelves as needed, could not have understood that their food supply relied on huge fossil fuel inputs in an era when a very conscious minority said that modern agriculture is the process of turning oil into food.

These supermarket trolley riders, as adults, will be discovering from necessity how our food is grown and how to grow it themselves. They will, however find that the best land has been covered in roads and houses with cement driveways and paling fences that enclose the occupants in a tiny pocket of mainly house with a small border of land shaded by the proximity of the next door house, if they are lucky.

It's in the jeans!

Our grandchildren will not have much latitude in their struggle to keep their families alive under these circumstances, but hell, they are made of stern stuff as were their pioneer forefathers or later migrant forefathers.

Of course they can do it!

The only thing is that they may wonder why they are bothering on this continent as they look around at the razed parched “climate changed” countryside, punctuated with faded real estate hoardings, the latter a reminder of the “glory days” of land speculation, forever extending “urban growth boundaries” and endless “inevitable” population growth.

Kids with a 'can-do' attitude

Our grandchildren, clever as they are may have moments of doubt and wonder why their seemingly kind and indulgent grandparents left them so little with which to survive. But let’s not immerse ourselves in self doubt, nor -even worse - in doubting our three year olds. Faith is needed. And optimism, of course!

They can handle it.

We just need to keep on the way we are with growth for growth’s sake. Despite the train wreck ahead, my little Jack will come the rescue!

The “Outcome principles” as set out in the discussion paper, are aspirations with which no-one would disagree but they do not encompass an overall vision for Melbourne. Furthermore, they are, in our view in reverse order of their actual importance! Confining this part of the submission to what is before us we will examine the importance and substance of each “principle.” Firstly it is necessary to look at the rate of growth which underpins the whole strategy and discussion paper. The present rate of population growth should not be “non negotiable.” [...] One must ask “How much harder does a high level of growth make the achievement of any of the aims underlying the principles?” [...] While the Minister invites the public to “talk” about Melbourne's future, its growth is considered inevitable and non-negotiable. That is, “Over the next 40 years, Melbourne will continue to grow, both geographically and in population.” This is not compatible with the overall aims and objectives of preserving and enhancing the 5 principles stated above.

Submission of Sustainable Population Australia, Victorian and Tasmanian branch to the Metropolitan Planning Strategy for Melbourne

[Dated:] 28 3.13

By Vivienne Ortega Secretary and Jill Quirk, President SPAVICTAS

[The submission begins by referring to statements in the Government document:]

Melbourne, Let's talk about the Future:

"What we want to achieve

The discussion paper refers to five outcome principles:

Principle 1: A distinctive Melbourne

Principle 2: A globally connected and competitive city

Principle 3: Social and economic participation

Principle 4: Strong communities

Principle 5: Environmental resilience"

[The Government document asks the following questions, which SPAVICTAS responds to in ordinary font:]

Question 1. What do you think of these outcome principles?

The “Outcome principles” as set out in the discussion paper, are aspirations with which no-one would disagree but they do not encompass an overall vision for Melbourne. Furthermore, they are, in our view in reverse order of their actual importance! Confining this part of the submission to what is before us we will examine the importance and substance of each “principle.”

In reverse order: We take Principle 5, “Environmental resilience” to mean an aspiration to maintain a healthy environment and not to degrade it , this is essential to our long term survival and present health and well being. The environment in an urban context refers to plentiful fresh water, adequate vegetation to reduce urban heat island effect (especially in light of changing climate ) , open space and gardens- public and private, excellent air quality and biodiversity- especially in adjoining natural areas. Environment is a primary concern. Due to urban expansion and the stretching of the urban growth boundary, more people are being put at risk from bushfires, food bowls are being buried under housing, our green-wedge buffer zones are being invaded, and natural water production has been overshot, necessitating a desalination plant.

4 “Strong communities” should go second. A society will have problems maintaining its environment if it is not united in its efforts to do this. Factors that fragment communities, e.g. frequent need to move house, homelessness, unaffordable housing, factors that impede people from using local amenities and facilities – e.g. parking restrictions and traffic congestion will break down communities. A lack of common facilities for local sport and passive recreation as well as venues for community meetings mitigate against strong communities. Living in high rise apartments and housing estates increases social dis-connection, and stigma. There are many stairs, balconies, limited emergency escapes, limited space for gardening and outdoor exploring for children, stranger-dangers, and noise disturbances. High rise affords little opportunity for environmentally advantageous options such as water harvesting, recycling, outside clothes drying and solar panels. Inside living is inherently carbon-intensive and energy-consuming.

3. Social and economic participation is a subset of strong communities rather than a separate principle.

Each individual should firstly have somewhere to live (Melbourne does not even meet this basic requirement) and a place in the life of the city of Melbourne. There are many and varied ways that people can fit into a megalopolis such as Melbourne: as a worker, a parent, a volunteer, an elder, a neighbour, but the basic requirement of a place to live underpins participation. Rising house prices and declining affordability are undermining exactly what is essential to meet “principle 3” (which would remain principle 3 if the order were reversed.)

Our “ageing population” should be celebrated as the back bone of communities rather than considered a threat. Older people are living longer and healthier lives. Greater longevity is a sign of good health care and living standards. Older people’s contribution through paid and volunteer work needs to be facilitated, encouraged and appreciated especially given the necessity for 2 members of younger couples to be in paid work in order to service mortgages.

2 A globally connected and competitive city. Thanks to the Internet and other modern communications many of which have actually been around for about 100 years, Melbourne can't really help but be “globally connected”. In a resource constrained world which we are entering as we hit the wall of non renewable resources, especially oil it is more critical to our long term survival that Melbourne connect to its outskirts and agricultural regions than to remote sources of essentials.

1 A Distinctive Melbourne. This is a less important aspiration. Any place be it city, town or village is naturally distinctive due its geographical location and natural surroundings. Melbourne is distinguished by its bay setting, the Yarra River and the Dandenong Ranges. The more the underlying natural beauty of Melbourne’s setting is engulfed by housing, shops, roads, and concrete, the less distinctive it becomes with respect to its setting. Secondary to the natural endowments are our (remaining) heritage from the founders of Melbourne and those who came soon after. Examples are the Botanic Gardens, Carlton Gardens, Treasury Gardens, The Windsor Hotel, Victorian architecture through the older inner suburbs, modernist architecture in suburbs such as Eltham in their bush settings and the most humble and suburban, post war suburbs with their brick villas surrounded by gardens front and back. These last “ordinary” suburbs that allow space for children to play and habitat for suburban wild life are real treasures and an indication of what was once (but no longer) the expected standard of space, comfort and amenity for the working people of Melbourne.

What made Melbourne distinctive in the past was its seamless public transport but this is no longer coping with increased population. The people of Melbourne have enjoyed high standards of living, good quality public spaces, and heritage values. It is difficult to see how these can be preserved with a rising population with no limit envisaged into the future.

While the Minister invites the public to “talk” about Melbourne's future, its growth is considered inevitable and non-negotiable. That is, “Over the next 40 years, Melbourne will continue to grow, both geographically and in population.” This is not compatible with the overall aims and objectives of preserving and enhancing the 5 principles stated above.

Federal government policies mainly the baby bonus and the immigration program are the biggest levers on population growth but the Victorian government is remiss in its responsibility to fellow Victorians in reducing the ability of local authorities to determine the level of population they can accommodate and in its gung ho enthusiasm for population growth e.g. the website http://www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au/

That which works well in making Melbourne distinctive is its livability which needs to be enhanced and shortcomings addressed . This means extending and improving public transport, protecting our city from endless expansion as well as the loss of amenity from intensification of development in residential/family suburbs and from towers blocking sunlight, and puncturing the horizon. Melbourne’s assets should be celebrated and protected especially, the natural setting and the heritage values bequeathed by planners of the past. Living standards, and affordability, can only erode with higher population.

The Ponzi-demographic model, relying on population growth as a source of revenue, means growing costs of infrastructure, pressure on land and open spaces, and loss of productivity due to congestion. These are counter-productive and contrary to the aims of keeping Melbourne distinctive in a positive sense.

Question 2. What do you think is needed to achieve these outcome principles?

Firstly it is necessary to look at the rate of growth which underpins the whole strategy and discussion paper. The present rate of population growth should not be “non negotiable” It is true we need to accept the present pattern of natural increase for a few more decades, but the over- all level of population growth should be curbed in the interests of people living here now. One must ask “How much harder does a high level of growth make the achievement of any of the aims underlying the principles?”

The current population of Melbourne is suffering because of traffic congestion, periodic water shortages and consequent construction of the desalination plant, cut-backs of public services, pressure to accommodate ever more people in existing suburbs, the threat of high rise in established suburbs, and the swallowing up of arable land on the fringes of the city for housing to accommodate extra population.

From the point of view of social and economic participation, jobs need to be brought back to Melbourne. They are being lost through the high Australian dollar, and the free-market economy. Business rents need to be affordable, local people need to be employed, training opportunities need to be increased (not quashed as they have been through privatization of State departments and utilities), and closure of TAFEs.

Already $10 billion is needed to bring the infrastructure of Melbourne's fringe suburbs up to standard, so we need to avoid more debt.

There needs to be a period of reduced growth, a stock-take of Melbourne's infrastructure assets and an assessment of essential road and public transport upgrades. Melbourne needs to have its transport bottle-necks fixed to achieve a fluid, flexible city. Melbourne once had a vibrant manufacturing base, and it needs to be restored.

Question 3. What are the key ingredients for success in achieving the vision of an expanded Central City?

The expansion of the Central City will only be the result of organic growth, and in response to economic demands and natural resources. Expanding the city, and then trying to create jobs and infrastructure in hindsight, does not work. Already Victoria is in recession, and our economy, and jobs growth, is failing to keep up with population growth. No more public assets should be sold, and the infrastructure in demand for many years - such as a rail link to Tullamarine and Doncaster link - should be priorities. Melbourne needs to be more accessible, not bigger.

We do not see any advantages in the expansion of Melbourne's CBD, and it would be detrimental and expensive to retro-fit our politically-imposed growth.

Question 4. What do you think of the idea of identifying and reinforcing employment and innovation clusters across Melbourne?

“The Central City is the core location of the ‘knowledge economy’. Building an expanded Central City can attract new jobs to Melbourne and reinforce Melbourne as a world city and tourism hub”. This won't happen while TAFE courses keep being slashed, teachers are retrenched, universities, starved of funds are forced rely on revenue from international students, and temporary visa holders instead of our own skilled workers. A 'knowledge economy' must rely on high standards of education, training, investment in R&D, and innovation – not housing!

Housing is not a consumable commodity, and maintaining Stamp Duty revenue means perpetuating ongoing population growth, and ignoring the downstream costs to the 5 above principles.

A jobs market heavily reliant on housing is fragile and market-dependent. It needs to be reassessed in the light of the massive infrastructure costs. Australia must invest in skills, education, innovation, knowledge and cutting edge 21st century technology, not in population growth and housing. It served us well in the past but can't be assumed to do the same in the future.

Question 5. What is needed to support growth and development in regional cities?

More investment in food production, and farming is needed. Land in our food bowls needs to be protected and preserved, not absorbed into a rubbery urban-growth-boundary. Regional growth should be in the understanding of food production, permaculture, alternative energy sources, organic farming and practices that mitigate against climate change, an anticipated energy crisis, loss of soils and shortages of oil-based fertilisers. Rail links to peri-urban food bowls should reinforce our food security. The “growth” of regional cities must be forged on growth in support of agriculture, natural resources, conservation, tourism and heritage.

Question 6. What do you think of the idea of a ‘20 minute city’?

A “20 minute city” can only be feasible by getting more traffic off the roads and increasing the efficiency and availability of public transport. Greater road, infrastructure and housing density is counter-productive to creating such an ideal. Private traffic needs to be kept to a minimum, in local areas, and the freeway mentality needs a good dose of reality. They only attract more dependence on private transport and on trucks and heavy road transport.

Question 7. How can established suburbs accommodate the needs of changing populations and maintain what people value about their area?

There needs to be a change in our immigration policy from one that is growth-based, to zero-net growth. This means that immigration should be equal to emigration, and much fewer categories of visas to reflect and reciprocate the immigration policies of our nearest neighbouring countries and the higher-per-capita wealthy nations.

While immigration in the past has benefited Australia, and created the diverse population we have now, our record-breaking levels of population growth can only erode our standards of living and entrench us further in debt. A Ponzi-economy based on perpetual growth is detrimental economically and environmentally especially in light of the planet's diminishing natural resources.

According to Australia's Energy White Paper 2012, 'Projected reductions in our crude oil production and refining capacity will mean that demand will increasingly be met by imports of crude oil and refined product.”Overseas sources of liquid fuel will mean Australia must rely more on international supply chains with increasing competition for dwindling supplies. The cheap fuel that drove our economic growth in the past will become more and more expensive and prohibitive. Stretching Melbourne's boundary any further will leave more people isolated in the outer fringes of urban sprawl, exacerbating the costs of infrastructure.

Question 8. How do we ensure a healthy and sustainable environment for future generations?

Good living spaces, backyards for families, community gardens, unencumbered and protected green wedges and buffer zones, sporting facilities, protection for our parks and gardens, bike paths, seamless and regular public transport, protection of neighbourhood values and character, and high standards of amenities are all important contributors to a sustainable environment . Cities should be built for people and families, not for a “bigger” economy that's not in the interests of ordinary people. We need to bequeath a city offering a positive experience and environment and social justice for future generations.

Question 9. What do you think about the possible ways of funding infrastructure?

Infrastructure to accommodate population growth is extremely expensive. It has been worked out at over $200,000 per additional person. If we are not to live in perpetual infrastructure deficit , infrastructure and services must be in place before the population is in place!

Ref . The downward spiral of hasty population growth

By Jane O'Sullivan - posted Monday, 8 March 2010

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10137&page=0

Melbourne’s present infrastructure needs a stock-take, audit and assessment. Priorities must be set. Good household and economic management means not overspending. Likewise, Melbourne needs a plan rather than ad hoc expansion. Without adequate infrastructure funding the public is condemned to live in deprivation. There needs to be a long period of consolidation, and improvement of infrastructure and services in Melbourne, not more stretching to accommodate growth.

Question 10. How can all levels of government, business and community work together to create the city you want?

What makes a pleasing and liveable city are comfortable living standards, heritage values, clean air, cultural venues, recreational facilities, accessibility, transport, and vegetation. One of Melbourne's greatest assets is the Yarra River, plus the accessibility of beaches, coasts, parklands, Mount Macedon and the Dandenongs for tourists and residents. Our near regional centres and coastline must be protected from generic urban sprawl. Rather, they need to be preserved to encourage tourism and day-trippers.

Melbourne must retain its position as a “liveable city” .We should be investing in 21st century technology, cutting-edge inventions, and be leaders in sustainability. A growth-basis served us well in the past, but must be replaced by sustainability - by building resilience into our communities, environment, and economy.

Unfortunately the “principles” as discussed describe qualities we are losing in Melbourne rather than qualities to which we are aspiring in an improving and developing situation. Unfortunately, all that makes Melbourne distinctive and livable is in jeopardy because of never ending population growth and increasing dominance of the built environment.

Planning is for the long term and as such it should not respond to short term pressures. Developers will act in their own interests. This means that government regulations are imperative and strategic plans are the role of government. Strategic plans should also be bipartisan since they are long term if not “forever”.

Planners, economists and politicians are generally well educated, with logical thinking skills and the ability to link cause and effect, but when it comes to population growth, logic often fails. The cornucopia myth is that when it comes to the human species, barriers and constraints to Nature don't exist and the Horn of Plenty will keep providing food, land, water, energy. This fallacious perspective is one where there are no limits to Nature's abundance, nor to how many people can be crammed into our finite urban areas.

Building cities and retro-fitting them is expensive, and standards can only be eroded. Sustainable growth is an oxymoron, and if the State's economy depends on profits from housing, then there's little to look forward to for the residents of Melbourne- and the city which future generations will inherit.

On the Sunshine Coast development has destroyed a great deal of the beautiful natural surroundings that attracted people there in the first place. Native animals are being cruelly decimated by starvation and exposure.

Developers seem animated by greed alone, machinally moonscaping lots when buyer uptake has dropped to 1996 levels[1] in Australia, despite constant mass immigration. The developer lobbies have not been able to restimulate demand, even by touting for overseas immigrants and selling property to foreign investors off the plan. (That doesn't stop them charging huge fees for membership.)

Photos by Brett Clifton

We need laws to imprison developers who ruin nature but they now run our parliaments

The conduct of developers in needlessly clearing land merits new laws that would imprison them for gross vandalism, cruelty to animals and dangerous greenhouse gas generation. The main reason that Australia lacks effective laws to protect wildlife and that it seems helpless before the grotesque appetites for speculative profits of property developers is because of the Labor and Liberal Parties' huge investment in property development and financing and the cancerous presence in State parliaments of property developers or people who represent their interests over those of other citizens.

Citizens feel helpless against residential developers

James Ray, who is a resident of the Sunshine Coast, moved into a development a little while ago. He enjoyed seeing wildlife in the surrounding bushland. Although he had some idea that this bushland was also marked for development, he was shocked to see these areas cleared way ahead of lots actually being sold. He protested that this seemed premature, but also asked why buyers could not buy lots with trees retained on them and clear them only if they chose. He wrote to his council about this in an article published at http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/ancient-bush-levelled/1794757/

Why clear land brutally and unnecessarily?

There seems no good answer to this question of why clear land unnecessarily except for the corruption in parliament and of our economic system.

In fact Australia should not be clearing any more land for housing at all and it should not be artificially growing its population either. The two things are related. We have huge immigration numbers coming in all the time, inflating prices. Investors in property development lobby constantly for mass immigration. The cost of land is now so high that even this population pressure is not producing more buyers, it is simply displacing people already here, by pricing people out of the market and into homelessness, or leaving only the option of sharing with relatives or living in group houses.

What is happening to our wildlife is a weeping sore in our society. It is consuming and deforming our whole way of life. Although Queensland and West Australia are the worst for recent wildlife annihilation due to state-induced rapid population growth, the older states had already cleared too much to keep on clearing. In Victoria, the most cleared state, population growth has outpaced New South Wales due to State Government policies that ram development down the throats of local communities despite continuous protests.

Stupidly stealing habitat from native animals and the ignorance of people

It seems that the Sunshine Coast is a dark and depressing place for those who love nature. In Victoria, in an outer suburb, also called Sunshine, things are very gloomy too.

Pamela, who lives in Sunshine Victoria, and works in animal welfare, writes:

"Every time we steal more habitat from our native animals people are stupidly surprised to see kangaroos looking lost on a new vacant block where their habitat used to be. They wander down new cul-de-sacs or get hit by cars.

People come into contact with them and call them 'pests' just because they're still there.

People believe kanga numbers are 'exploding' just because they are more visible without their Australian bush to hide in for protection from humans and dogs. When the truth is their numbers are actually dwindling because of floods, dogs, dumb human hunters, vehicle strike and bushfires.

Those who spread the myths of 'ballooning populations' are only the shooters and hunters who have a vested interest in killing them.

We also have a spate of vicious attacks on kangaroos by yobbos. Kangaroos are being shot with arrows, hacked to death, beheaded, joeys are being ripped from pouches and swung against the bullbars of utes or dragged behind them until dead.

I work in animal welfare and these sorts of brutality are an ongoing problem in this country. We should be ashamed of ourselves for the way we treat the animals we proudly display on our Coat of Arms."

NOTES

[1] "House Sales Drop: The number of houses and units sold in Australia last year dropped to 256,559, the lowest level of transactions since 1996, according to RP Data. The second half was 7.6 per cent stronger than the first, but analyst Cameron Kusher said a further incease in sales would be needed to underpin more price rises." Australian Financial Review, 10-17 March 2013, p. 3. Candobetter Editorial Comment: This is a sociopathic policy, to keep housing prices up for the benefit of the few who care more about their investments than in the country, and the disbenefit of the vast majority, who go into debt and homelessness because of this Australian political and economic phenomenon that corrupt parliaments encourage.

"This submission does not follow the suggested response questions but sets out to make comment upon what we see as the necessary strategic planning issues for the future of Melbourne... In our previous submissions on planning, BRAG has pushed for a federal population policy that limits immigration to more sustainable levels like we used to have in the 80’s and 90’s of around the 70,000 to 80,000 p.a. mark and we have not moved away from that stance. The first step in any planning is to have a population policy that is sustainable otherwise planning policy will continue to fail....we believe that the general planning powers must be with local councils who better understand their municipalities and those who live in them. Centralization leads to power and power leads to corruption and this is one of the issues we are now facing with developer donations being used to corrupt decision-making." You may not agree with everything, but it's a pretty impressive democracy submission.

Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Strategy Submission from the Boroondara Residents’ Action Group (BRAG)

The Boroondara Residents’ Action Group has a current membership of over 500, mainly residents and small business operators in Boroondara. BRAG also receives strong support from the general residents of Boroondara.

BRAG is registered under the Associations Incorporation Act 1981 N0 A0054624J
P. O. Box 1034 Camberwell Vic. 3124 www.brag.asn.au [email protected]

Introduction

The Boroondara Residents’ Action Group has been lobbying for a new planning strategy to replace Melbourne 2030 and Melbourne@5million since before the last state election but the discussion paper is a big disappointment because it provides little in setting a strategic direction or evaluated options.

Therefore this submission does not follow the suggested response questions but sets out to make comment upon what we see as the necessary strategic planning issues for the future of Melbourne. Any planning for the future must be accepted by key interest groups but most importantly by the residents and general citizens of Melbourne. Otherwise it will fail, just as M2030 did, because the residents and general public were not really consulted so they had no ownership of M2030 or M@5Million.

The Ministerial Advisory Committee has indicated that we must move away from regulation as the primary means of achieving outcomes, which is very concerning, as that would leave planning and construction in the hands of developers who would act in their own interests and not in the interests of the end users, the residents of Melbourne.

The Committee has listed some principles including a Polycentric city linked to regional cities which could be developed further to provide a more realistic planning direction but the Committee has accepted that Melbourne’s population will continue to grow without any indication that it is the escalating growth that is part of the problems we are now facing, overloaded infrastructure, unacceptable housing densification, water and power issues, public transport issues, traffic issues, etc.

In our previous submissions on planning, BRAG has pushed for a federal population policy that limits immigration to more sustainable levels like we used to have in the 80’s and 90’s of around the 70,000 to 80,000 p.a. mark and we have not moved away from that stance. The first step in any planning is to have a population policy that is sustainable otherwise planning policy will continue to fail.

We recommend that the principles set out in *Kelvin Thomson’s 14 point plan are seriously considered and we understand that this is really a federal issue but unless the state governments start a push to review the current policies nothing will change.
( *Kelvin Thomson is the Federal Member for Wills and a copy of his 14 point plan is attached)

Recommendations For a Planning Policy for Melbourne

One of the key issues that residents are concerned with is protection

- for Melbourne’s leafy green suburbs and the increasing amount of opportunistic development that is changing the character of their tree-lined streets. Therefore any plan must contain mandatory protection of neighbourhood character and mandatory height controls set by the local councils after consultation with their local residents.

- Any proposed new suburb in future must first have the necessary infrastructure before any housing is built including roads, drainage, sewerage, water and power, shopping centre, social amenities and transport links.

- A detailed plan to upgrade existing public transport to meet immediate and future needs in Melbourne including a rail link to the eastern suburbs and to existing and any new airports

- A detailed plan to capture and recycle suburban rainwater and build local water storage and distribution capabilities.

- Plan for reducing our dependency upon building houses to keep the economy going and introduction of hi-tech industries and intellectual products – bring back the “clever country concept”.

- Decentralization should be one of the main objectives of any planning policy. In Victoria there are opportunities to create regional cities with one initially in the east of the state where there are resources for power and water and one in the west where there are several suitable sites such as Hamilton or Warrnambool.

- We believe there should also be a plan to develop in the future another major city in Victoria of about 1 million ( or more) and, because Portland has the potential to develop a natural harbour, it should be investigated now as a possible site.

Note : regionalization, with good planning by establishing smaller cities using cheaper land tax and other exemptions, can be surprisingly inexpensive and would strike at the cause of our current urban problems. First build the infrastructure then the people will follow. Fast trains linking to Melbourne will be essential.

- There have been many suggestions, mainly from those in the planning profession, to centralize planning. However we believe that the general planning powers must be with local councils who better understand their municipalities and those who live in them. Centralization leads to power and power leads to corruption and this is one of the issues we are now facing with developer donations being used to corrupt decision-making.

- It will be essential that VCAT be returned to be an appeal body on planning issues ( partly because tribunal members are generally planners or architects who’s professions rely upon the development industry for their income and their decisions continually go against councils and resident objectors). VCAT should only be able to adjudicate on whether or not council has made its decision properly based on its own and government regulations and procedures, VCAT should not be able to act as an “Authorized Authority”. This would return some sanity to issuing planning permits.

- Currently planning permits can be rolled over for a further period and are often traded on sale of the property, which places a value on the permit and makes the property more easily tradeable. Very often large profits are made by such trading. This is undesirable and should be stopped.

Finally

Currently planning has been ad hoc and continually changing depending upon the government of the day. This will be the sixth strategic plan for Melbourne in the last 25 years plus many minor planning changes which does nothing for certainty. (That means there are real changes about very four years).

Over this period public consultation has been token and inadequate resulting in planning decisions being heavily criticized by the public. We note that members of the Ministerial Advisory Committee consulted with many who were listed at the back of the discussion paper “Melbourne, Let’s talk about the future” but not one resident or resident group. This is damning but not surprising because that is how it has always been.

It looks to us that nothing has changed. The professionals seem to be saying “we know best” but do they? We don’t think so for in all that time they still haven’t got it right.

Jack Roach
President Boroondara Residents’ Action Group.

In Summary.
Any planning policy must contain pointers to the following :-

- A plan made in concert with the federal government for developing a sensible population policy.
(To continue to support population growth in our cities makes no sense when we don’t have enough water, power, public transport or adequate health systems, police, etc to cope with the current population numbers).

- A similar plan made in concert with the federal government for a workable policy on climate change & environmental issues in conjunction with the population policy
- Ensure honest and genuine community consultation processes in developing a new metro strategy. ( Didn’t happen for M2030 or M@5Million).

As well as developing a new planning blueprint for Melbourne it is essential for consultation on a new planning blueprint for coastal areas and consultation on a new planning blueprint for country areas

- Regionalization policy which should include broadband rollout for home office connection and improved train and fast train services.
- A plan for a future airport to service the eastern growth corridor and the Mornington Peninsular.
- Remove dependency upon development as the only way to keep the economy going.(Strengthen manufacturing base toward hi tech. industries and intellectual products. Bring back the “Clever Country” concept).
- Scrap Melbourne 2030. and Melbourne@5million.
- Positively protect heritage.
- Protect suburban residential from opportunistic infill development Return planning power to Councils. (Centralized planning V each council having its own say must be in balance). Melbourne is like a giant tapestry with each area having its own character with different requirements and different demographics. Ensure that the Minister for Planning’s plan for new residential zones is enacted to protect the residential suburbs from opportunistic development through his Neighbourhood Character policies.

- Retain third party rights - to be notified, object & appeal.
- Councils to set and control zones in their own municipality.
- Councils to set height controls.
- Councils to identify where any development should occur
- Review Urban Growth Boundaries to ensure they are permanent
- Convert VCAT to an appeal body only.
- Restrict VCAT from acting as a planning authority.
- Limit areas for high-rise development.
- Provide positive plan for protecting public land and open space.
- Provide guidelines for better designed student accommodation complexes that blend with existing residential areas & amenity rather than the current future ghettos that overpower the local area especially in university precincts.

Other suggestions that are not directly related but must be included in policy:

- A Corruption Commission that has the real power to work properly.
- No Political donations (for access and/or favours – especially from developers).
- The role of paid lobbyists must be removed.

Kelvin Thomson’s 14 point plan.
Condensed from a recent speech made to the Malvern East Group.

A lot of people have agreed with me that a population of 36 million is not a good thing for Australia - opinion polls show 2 out of 3 think it is a bad idea. People don’t want it. But a lot of people think it is inevitable, that there is nothing we can do about it. This is simply not true. As I said earlier, the population number we end up with depends on our net overseas migration numbers.

So to show there is an alternative, in November 2009 I released a plan for population reform, a plan to stabilise Australia’s population :

- Stabilise Australia’s population at 26 million by cutting the net overseas migration program to 70,000 p.a.
- Cut the skilled migration program to 25,000 p.a.
- Hold the family reunion program at 50,000 p.a.
- Increase the refugee program from 13,500 to 20,000 per annum.
- Alter the refugee criteria to include provision for genuine climate refugees.
- The revised number of annual permanent arrivals from these programs would be 95,000 – 50,000 family reunion plus 25,000 skilled plus 20,000refugees. Two more factors need to be considered, the number departing permanently from Australia and the number of people arriving permanently from New Zealand. To reach a net overseas annual migration target of 70,000, the number of automatic places available for New Zealanders needs to be restricted to the number of departures from Australia over and above 25,000.
- Reduce temporary migration to Australia by restricting sub class 457 temporary entry visas to medical and health related and professional engineering occupations.
- Require overseas students to return to their country of origin and complete a 2 year cooling off period before being eligible to apply for permanent residence.
- Abolish the baby bonus.
- Restrict large family supplement and Family tax benefit A for third and subsequent children to those presently receiving them.
- Dedicate the savings from the baby bonus and reduced expenditure on family payments fro 3rd and subsequent children towards increased investment in domestic skills and training through universities and TAFE
- the final 3 points go to increasing aid to the U.N. and using aid budget to educating girls for better family planning and putting overpopulation on the agenda for International Climate Change talks.

“Mr. Rudd needs to be severely questioned on the title of his talk but the context makes this unlikely. Were he speaking in parliament or the public realm he might be questioned but his speech on Thursday will be heard at a forum of an industry known for its bias to high population growth with no practical or logical end point.” (Jill Quirk, President, SPAVicTas)

“The Urban Development Institute of Australia congress being held in Melbourne this week is a blatant exercise in talking up Melbourne’s and indeed Australia’s population for the benefit of developers rather than for the current residents,” says Jill Quirk, President of Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian and Tasmanian branch).

“In a return to the past (the year 2010) ex PM Kevin “Big Australia” Rudd, will be the keynote speaker on Thursday March 7th. His topic will be “Population growth for a stronger economy”. He would do better to find out how Melbourne residents actually feel about more population growth. Melbourne is presently groaning under the planning and environmental implications of being capital of the state with the highest numerical population increase of any in Australia, with no relief in sight.”

Miss Quirk said, “Mr. Rudd needs to be severely questioned on the title of his talk but the context makes this unlikely. Were he speaking in parliament or the public realm he might be questioned but his speech on Thursday will be heard at a forum of an industry known for its bias to high population growth with no practical or logical end point.”

President Quirk added, “Population growth is placing strong pressures on our environment and on planning. Economically it is causing reduced housing affordability and a huge need for upgrading, replacing and building infrastructure and services. It is clear that Victoria is already not keeping up with these increasing needs in the vital areas of schools, hospitals and fire and ambulance services.

Endless and high population growth is not inevitable and with the reality of an energy and resource constrained future, responsible leaders would be planning for a stable population and a steady state economy as soon as practicable. SPA hopes these issues will be raised effectively but the program and industry bias of the conference gives little hope of this.”

Liberal Leader Will Hodgman's idea of pushing up Tasmania's population from 512,000 to 650,000 by the year 2050 has started a predictable bidding war, with Housing Industry Association's Stuart Clues, weighing in with a proposal for one million by the year 2050. Tasmania is currently a destination for Australian refugees from the unpleasant effects of turbo-charged population growth in Western Australia and other mainland states, so no-one in government or the property development industry is likely to ask Tasmanian residents what they think. Meanwhile, Canadian population renegade, Professor T. Murray, is accusing the Libs and the HIA of lack of vision. In a phone call to Candobetter.net, he called them 'pussies.' "Let's not dick around," he said, "The sky is the limit for Tasmania..."

"Tasmania could easily accommodate over 174 billion Breatharians. How so?"

Let’s be generous and assume that the average individual is 6 feet tall, two feet wide and one foot thick (planners, politicians and economists thicker). Each human of these dimensions lying down would take up an area of 12 square feet. The land mass of Tasmania is 26,383 square miles. Therefore, to determine the number of people who could rest horizontally in Tasmania, one must multiply 26,383 by 5280 (the number of feet in a mile) divided by 12 feet. Since air is breathable at 16,000 feet---make it 15,000 feet for good measure---and most people are one foot thick, you could stack 15,000 Breatharians one atop the other in 11, 608,520 12 square foot columns. Grand total, 174,127,800,000 environmentally responsible Tasmanian citizens who draw all the nutrients they need from the air and the light without pushing anything out the other end. Zero consumption, zero waste.

Tasmania, a shiny beacon of greendom

Naturally, it would be unrealistic to expect Australians to transit to this green lifestyle abruptly. All emigrants sent to this new shining beacon of Greendom would first have to be processed in a kind of dietary decompression chamber. Meat eaters would first become vegetarians, then vegetarians would become vegans, then vegans would become exclusive consumers of raw food, and finally nirvana. Raw food eaters would then become Breatharians. At each juncture of the process, transisters could enjoy the sublime pleasure of moral one-upmanship--- one of the prime motivations of being an environmentalist. The ability to turn around and say “my footprint is lighter than yours” would be well worth the sacrifice. After all, environmentalism is not really about achieving actual results, but about feeling good about oneself and expiating sin. Secular Christianity with a green face.

An airy, optimistic footprint

Of course, skeptical voices would no doubt say that living exclusively on air and sunlight is physically impossible. Friends, the Devil is always sowing doubt in our ears. His is the same voice that says that alternative energy sources cannot be found to supply all of our current and growing energy needs, and that substitutions cannot be found for all of the 69 metals, minerals and fuels that Chris Clugston has shown to be in scarce supply and increasingly economically inaccessible. We can continue to live fulfilling and meaningful lives without these material prerequisites, so long as we agree to shed our selfish desires and share our space. Move over, squeeze tighter, and reach for the sky.

All you need to do create this new world, this new Tasmania, is faith and vision. For those of weak resolve, encouragement can be sought from the Green Gospel According to Lovins, John 6:50 and 11:26, “Here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die”, and “who ever lives in me will never die”.

It is not how many Tasmanians there are, but how they live.

Tim

"Both the process and the discussion paper are undirected, unsatisfactory and of little help to anyone or anything. Nothing so inadequate has ever been seen in the history of Melbourne strategic planning."... "The paper generally avoids any discussion of how to intensify established areas while not destroying amenity, or even whether it is possible to achieve both objectives. It does not discuss in detail the major options for intensification, mentioning only briefly the capacity to redevelop large brownfield sites, and arguing that medium and higher density residential development should not be regarded as a problem. It states that “there are different ways of increasing housing density without undermining the valued characteristics of local areas” – what are these and why would they not destroy valued amenity?"(Michael Buxton, Professor Environment and Planning, at PPLVic AGM on Saturday 23 February 2013.

Michael Buxton
Professor Environment and Planning, RMIT University

Context

Link to videoed speech here.

The process of developing a new Melbourne metropolitan strategy, and the discussion paper prepared by a ministerial advisory committee, are deeply flawed. The discussion paper seeks ‘to help generate debate and discussion about the future of our city”. But the process is neither properly participatory nor informative. The discussion paper does not canvass well supported and evaluated options. No detail is provided on how public comment will contribute to the development of policy. In short, both the process and the discussion paper are undirected, unsatisfactory and of little help to anyone or anything. Nothing so inadequate has ever been seen in the history of Melbourne strategic planning.

Some earlier plans for Melbourne have involved years of research and investigation, and the modeling of options. The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW) strategic planning was exemplary for investigation and consideration of options, particularly the 1954 and 1971 plans. Later planning, such as by the Cain government for the 1987 plan and the Kirner government in the early 1990s, considered a range of options for the future of Melbourne and associated strategic issues. Seven major reports into such subjects as activity centres, sustainability and environmental issues were commissioned during the preparation of Melbourne 2030 and informed the final plan. No additional research or investigations lie behind the new strategy process other than normal government activity, such as Victoria In Future and the Urban Development Program.

Metropolitan strategic planning should be long term and bipartisan, and accepted by key interest groups and citizens. This will be the sixth strategic plan for Melbourne in 25 years, together with a number of other minor plans. A plan on average about every four years does not provide for either certainty or continuity. There is little sense of what the government has in mind for the future of Melbourne, how this relates to previous planning and what this means for the future of the city.

The consultation process has been inadequate. Another weakness in the process is the government preempting major strategic initiatives by prior policy and statutory decisions. This continues the approach of the former Kennett government to metropolitan strategic planning. Kennett and his planning minister, Robert Maclellan, had no use for strategic land use planning and did none. Their metropolitan plan, Living Suburbs, was little more than a promotional document. The real planning lay in the statutory changes to planning schemes which implemented their ideology of development facilitation as part of deregulated governance.

The Baillieu government through its planning minister, Matthew Guy, is following a similar approach. Guy has introduced new planning zones which further deregulate planning rendering strategic metropolitan planning obsolete. For example, the new Melbourne strategic plan cannot include a retail policy which restricts out-of-centre development because the new zones will allow it, much as-of-right. A new plan cannot limit Melbourne’s outer urban growth because governments have provided 30 years land supply on the urban fringe. Baillieu and Guy supported the former Labor government’s abandonment of the urban growth boundary as a major strategic tool and then in government expanded the area of Melbourne by a further 6,000 hectares. Clearly, the metropolitan strategy can say nothing meaningful about restricting outer urban growth.

All this means that the new metropolitan strategy must avoid most of the key strategic issues affecting the future of Melbourne. So far there has been little left to discuss in the discussion paper except for a series of general principles (‘globally connected and competitive city’), truisms most people would accept (‘fostering strong communities’), and platitudes (‘a 20 minute city’). It remains to be seen whether the strategy itself can actually develop a strategic direction with meaningful implementation tools. The signs so far are not promising. The strategy would have to improve markedly on the discussion paper. The choice is for it to either make clear the de-facto planning policy of government or convince the government to abandon its direction. The first option is unlikely – the government does not want its direction blandly spelt out or the people will know what it is really up to. The second would seem impossible.

Strategic approach

The discussion paper outlines its objectives through five principles, what needs to change in two principles, and implementation in two more. Overall, there is no clearly stated vision. Long term intention is fundamental to strategic planning. An acceptance of growth is implied through the statement that planning needs to be for a city of up to 6.4 million people by 2050. The paper advocates alternatives to business-as-usual activity, but such growth is business-as-usual. It rejects the use of land use planning as a tool to achieve change, arguing against intervention through the planning system to achieve alternative future scenarios: “The Metropolitan Planning Strategy must move away from regulation as the primary means of achieving planning outcomes”, it argues. This diminution of government leaves decisions to developers and other private interest groups such as large retailers who will act primarily in their own interests. This concept of the role of government fatally handicaps a future strategic plan. Only government can plan strategically in the public interest.

Networks to regional cities are canvassed but no detail is provided about how this concept might be achieved and how regional development could lower the projected size of Melbourne. How much growth should be transferred to regions; should it be concentrated in large regional centres or some located in smaller regional towns along fast rail routes? There is no discussion of the necessary links between regional growth, access, amenity, types of regional employment, education, improved infrastructure and other services. Regional manufacturing, for example, is declining while Geelong and Ballarat are embarking on their own versions of urban sprawl in standard single use suburbs far from town centres.

The paper argues for a ‘polycentric city’. Shifts in urban strategy have become more common in recent years from the centre-periphery model focused primarily on reinforcing a CBD, to networked metropolitan connections to regional settlements. However, it is crucial to define the polycentric approach proposed, and the functional connections between networked urban areas. The discussion paper’s notion of a multi-centred city seems to include the CBD, a limited number of activity centres, a few innovation clusters and the whole of inner Melbourne. This notion is unhelpful and confused. The opportunity was available to the discussion paper to remove confusion about multi-centred activity centre policy. MMBW district centre policy concentrated on a limited number of activity centres. Melbourne 2030 made every large or small centre an activity centre. However, the discussion paper does not adequately analyse the notion of polycentrism, wants a limited number of centres but defines a large differentiated part of Melbourne (the inner suburbs) as one centre and allows a multitude of local activity centres to be developed. The inner suburbs include most advanced business service and professional jobs and employee residences and contain a large number of activity centres. To talk of the inner suburbs as one element in a polycentric city makes polycentrism meaningless. The paper suggests that many local mixed use activity centres should be developed but some of these already contain important concentrations of employment, retailing and housing. No suggestion is provided on the size of proposed clusters, what would happen in each, or when local activity centres might transform to major ones. The three examples given of polycentric innovation clusters, Monash-Clayton, Melbourne Airport and Parkville biosciences precinct vary significantly from each other. Only Parkville has reasonable public transport facilities. Melbourne Airport is a large out-of-centre retailing precinct and is an undesirable location for such retailing. Similarly, large freight and logistics clusters are located along fringe metropolitan freeways, a similarly undesirable trend.

The paper is silent on the destructive impacts of out-of-centre retail development on existing strip centres and other impacts such as on traffic. Any comments by the discussion paper on this issue are irrelevant in any case because the real policy and power is in the new commercial zones which will lead to extensive out-of-centre retailing and commercial uses and accelerate the destruction of strip retail centres. The paper does not properly analyze the differences between elements of what it advocates leaving a confused mess.

Global connectivity sounds attractive but what in practice does the advisory committee believe it means? The discussion paper is little help here, repeating usual mantras of links to a global knowledge economy without analyzing possible future trends and alternatives. It is likely that this century the cities which relate satisfactorily to their hinterlands will survive best. This notion is largely ignored. Lip service is paid to the importance of peri-urban diversity and agricultural production but nothing is said about how these assets can help position Melbourne to survive. By 2050 most peri-urban agriculture will have disappeared on current trends. A metropolitan strategy should state clearly an alternative pathway to business-as-usual trends to achieve desirable alternative scenarios. But there is no consistent vision of the future for the Melbourne green belt. The paper mentions its importance as a food bowl, but then adopts the Tourism agency dogma that existing zones prevent tourism development. The Baillieu government appears set to emasculate native vegetation protection controls. The paper contains no endorsement of the need to prevent such major changes to policy.

Its discussion about urban form is another unsatisfactory element of the paper. Melbourne 2030 attempted to shift a large proportion of planned outer urban growth to the established metropolitan area through the use of an urban growth boundary. It proposed government intervention to achieve a desired future end. The discussion paper canvasses no such options. It is marked by an absence of discussion on the major pressure points of the inner city, activity centres and outer growth areas. It is reticent on the problems arising from Melbourne’s continuing sprawl in single use, poorly serviced suburbs and on the need for improved urban design there. It says nothing about the need for much higher average densities in outer urban areas, higher densities around new town centres, and a mix of lot and house types. The paper farcically states that the “green edge” of Melbourne should be strengthened but ignores the spoiling effects of a 30 year supply of outer urban residential land on proper planning through prior expansions of the growth boundary. There is no discussion of the reduction of this land bank in the context of an overall strategy for the city.

In discussing a distinctive Melbourne the paper says little about amenity and nothing about the importance of heritage as a crucial factor in the identity of citizens and as an economic asset. Heritage means money – destroy it and Melbourne’s greatest asset is lost. The paper generally avoids any discussion of how to intensify established areas while not destroying amenity, or even whether it is possible to achieve both objectives. It does not discuss in detail the major options for intensification, mentioning only briefly the capacity to redevelop large brownfield sites, and arguing that medium and higher density residential development should not be regarded as a problem. It states that “there are different ways of increasing housing density without undermining the valued characteristics of local areas” – what are these and why would they not destroy valued amenity?

The paper also is another lost opportunity to raise and discuss seriously social issues associated with inequity, particularly unequal access to services, and a crucial range of housing issues including affordable housing. Simply put, the discussion on these topics is more of the same avoidance that has characterised decades of policy discussion by government.

What is left?

Avoiding the major metropolitan strategic issues leaves only a series of five general principles and some trite proposals. The principles are; a distinctive Melbourne; a globally connected and competitive city, social and economic participation; strong communities; and environmental resilience. None are applied to detailed discussion or practical concerns drawing out issues, options and conclusions for elements in a functionally connected urban system. The principles are not related satisfactorily to each other. There is no sense of integration of ideas around a unifying vision for the future of Melbourne, just a grab-bag of ideas gleaned from somewhere and placed in little more than a list. Argument, substantiation and examination of evidence are all lacking. A metropolitan strategic discussion paper should place evidence, information and argued positions before people, canvass well considered options and propose an integrated strategic approach for the future. It should link spatial concerns to other sectoral ones. A brief mention is made of the need to integrate land use and transport planning – this too is a mantra which has hardly affected practice in recent years. There is almost no discussion of cross-sectoral policy and integrated institutional and governance arrangements.

Then there are the unexamined proposals. Perhaps the most trite is the proposal for a 20 minute city. Has a less useful proposal ever been put forward as a serious contribution to policy? This is a substitute for policy, what is left when all the effective decisions about the future of Melbourne are made outside the ambit of strategy, leaving only a shell with a brittle crust.

Speech given at Protectors of Public Land Vic (Inc). AGM on Saturday 23 February 2013. Thanks to Secretary and chief dynamo, Julianne Bell, for providing this text and organising the meeting.

Reading this letter to the Wheeler center about a shocking spin exercise delivered by professional development spruikers, with Roz Hansen (who is also involved in fielding public submissions), one is reminded of the film, We need to talk about Kevin, a film about a totally underestimated problem with utterly dire consequences. In fact, Melbourne really needs to talk about the corruption of democracy via Melbourne planning and development organisations, their contempt for citizens, their infiltration of law-making in parliament, and the gross unsustainability of the philosophy and projects they seek to unilaterally impose - Candobetter Ed.

Letter to the Wheeler Center after “We Need to Talk” The Wheeler Centre Books Writing and Ideas – Series on “Ideas for Melbourne” Part 1 “The City of the Future” Wednesday 13 February 2013.

Subtitles are by Candobetter.net editor

The booklet said re ‘The City of The Future:’ session: “In 30 years, Melbourne’s CBD will have another 220,000 new residents. A ‘second CBD’ has been proposed for Melbourne’s west, along with a third runway for Tullamarine Airport – and more green wedge land for housing. Can a big Melbourne remain beautiful – let alone liveable or sustainable? Can we have it all, or do tough choices lie ahead?” The panel consisted of Roz Hansen who is the Chair of the Metropolitan Planning Strategy of Melbourne Committee; Alan Davies; and David Nichols (University of Melbourne?). Jane Rawson was the interviewer.

Vivienne Ortega and Julianne Bell attended this Wheeler Centre evening event.

Here are our comments about the event:

We need to talk about what is happening to our democracy

We considered this exercise a piece of political spin, full of contradictions, and generalities. There were no speakers on the panel debating or contesting statements made by panel members; all 3 were in furious agreement with each other. There was no community involvement and no audience interaction. Few questions were allowed at the end of the session. We considered that it was simply a lecture by growth-lobbyists. We were just being lectured to as to how a “Future Melbourne” could accommodate a rapidly growing population!

Roz Hansen - Ethics and Fairness in question

Firstly, it appeared to us extremely inappropriate that Roz Hansen would be speaking at a public forum with obvious references to the Metropolitan Planning Strategy of Melbourne (MPSM) when she was Chair of the Ministerial Committee which is still receiving public submissions on the MPSM. In our view she was giving us the spin on Government policies which ensures growth for developers, the real estate industry and the road lobby. While Ms Hansen said that she wanted “community dialogue” and to hear what we think, she made it clear that said some topics were "non-negotiable" or off limits. It appeared that one of the “non negotiables” was the topic of trains. She made it clear – and had done so at a community forum she attended with the Minister for Planning Matthew Guy on 21 November 2012 - that the “Future Melbourne” would have buses but not urban rail, apart from the underground Metro rail. It would of course have the East West Link tollway/freeway.

Hobson’s Choice promoted as Consumer Choice

The panel was of the opinion that, with population increase, people would “choose” apartments and high density living. We see this as Hobson’s choice, that is, no choice at all. Many people have not now, and will not have in the future, any other affordable alternatives to high density living. No mention was made of the inevitable increase of per capita greenhouse gas emissions, and the denial of facilities enabling residents to reduce consumption and energy, reuse and recycle.

Mythologising exercise

There was an assumption by the speakers that "empty-nesters" will want to buy apartments and units. We know it has found to be a myth that the retired and the elderly want to “downsize”. Many want to stay in houses with gardens and keep their rooms for family and guests. (We have been through this argument with Bernard Salt who took a more extreme line stating that widows should move out of their large houses in the leafy suburbs to provide accommodation for incoming family groups of migrants.) [See Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?]

Urban Parks for food production; shopping mall walks for exercise

It was suggested by one of the university academics when the subject of “food security” was raised that urban parks could be turned over for food production and that residents could exercise by walking in shopping malls. Presumably people would be denied back gardens though this was not specifically discussed. In the context of food security it was suggested by one of the speakers that more "intensive farming" could take place in the outer urban growth areas. To us it meant more factory farming, which is cruel and unethical. (Many animal activists want to put an end to it.) We are of the view that our food bowls and green wedges should be protected. Roof top gardens and parks are not a viable alternative.

False perception of inevitability dishonestly imposed on public

It was assumed by the speakers that this "future" spelt out for Melbourne with a rapidly growing population – 6.4 million by 2050 - was inevitable. We say it is not inevitable as the high net overseas migration intake could be capped and reduced as it has been in the past. We consider that the terms “sustainability” and “growth” are oxymorons. Anthropogenic climate change can't be addressed with an economy based on population growth.

Spin cannot hide increasing congestion and no solutions in sight

The "20 minute city" – one of the principles of the MPMS - is to us a contradiction in terms. The proposed growth of Melbourne will inevitably cause more congestion. Infrastructure continually fails to keep abreast of population growth. Rather than more buses, we need more linked public transport and trains. If we cannot manage with congestion and traffic gridlock now why could we manage any better in the future?

Resounding Silence on development-threatened Green Wedges

We consider that our green-wedges are not for housing - they have a purpose as our "green lungs" and should be protected. This was not discussed.

We were of the view that trying to maintain Melbourne's status as a "liveable" city, and "sustainable", are contradictions if our population is "projected" to be 2 million more by 2050 - at a time of severe climate change warnings and increasing scarcities of natural resources.

Homelessness swept under carpet

The problem of “homelessness” was not discussed. It is related, in our view, to the power of developers, grabbing rooming houses for "developments", and forcing up the price of family homes over what is affordable by those on normal fixed wages.

The threat of racism arising from unwelcome mass immigration was not discussed.

Sneering, out-of-touch panellists artlessly contemptuous of public

We were offended by the supercilious rather sneering tone of panellists and comments made. One panellist referred to the “great unwashed” from the outer suburbs. The other male panellist commented that with population pressure new suburbs were becoming “trendy” and expressed surprise that even in Preston growing a moustache was now acceptable and one could get a café latte there. We thought this showed contempt for the audience.

There were few questions, no real vision or strategy for improving or enhancing our city, and there was no chance for the audience to challenge the panel’s opinions. The "Ideas for Melbourne" lacked balance and a contrary side of the debate.

Signed:

Julianne Bell, Secretary, Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc.
Vivienne Ortega, Secretary, Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian and Tasmanian Branch)

28 February 2013

VCAT is proposing draconian fees on citizens who wish to protect their property and environment from undemocratic corporate backed development and overpopulation. Fees for a citizen lodging an objection to any development in 2012 were $38.80. For 2013 fees are proposed to rise to $731.80 (for developments costed at less than $1.0m) and to $1,462.30 for developments estimated at $1.0m or more. These fees would increase even more in 2014 respectively to: $869.60 and $1,737.90, and, in 2015, respectively, to $1,007.40 and $2,014.80. Add to this the cost of hiring barristers and this will make a complete mockery of democracy, which is already a laughing stock in Victoria anyway.Submission deadline is 5pm Friday 15 February 2013.

Victorian Government overdevelopment regime trying to price citizens out of their rights to object at law

The government is trying to act to protect the interests of developers and their overwhelming vested interest in unwanted population growth by restricting peoples access to their own courts and tribunals through the imposition of draconian fees. The fact is that so many 'developments' (multiple new structures with costly impacts) are being forced on the people of Melbourne and Victoria that their objections are clogging up VCAT. Although VCAT stands for the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, instead of heeding democratic objection and curbing this remorseless overdevelopment, the government is attempting to stop democratic objections by making them too costly for citizens to bring about. This is a total scandal and if the government succeeds in removing most peoples' ability to influence what happens around them to their environment, there will be very little left that it will feel that it cannot do. Making government for big business is a major part of fascism, as is removing access to the law for communities. The only thing lacking now is overt violence against citizens.

Source of fee details - Regulatory Impact Statement

Here is information regarding the proposed fee increases at VCAT (they want to cover part of their costs). Submissions are invited on the attached Regulatory Impact Statement no later than 5pm Friday 15 February 2013. Information on how to make a submission can be found here: http://www.justice.vic.gov.au/home/the+justice+system/regulatory+impact+statements/ris+for+proposed+vcat+fees+regs.

Go to the Regulatory Impact Statement, near the bottom of the page.

It could see an objection against a development valued at over $1m go from the present $38.80 to $2,014.80. Obviously a massive cost impost on any affected person objecting to a development

For example, page 13 0f the Regulatory Impact Statement, dealing with an increase in fees for the years 2012, 2013, 2014, & 2015:

#ChargeIncreases" id="ChargeIncreases">1. If the proceedings are in respect of a development of any kind where the estimated cost of the development is less than $1 million

(2012) $38.8 (2013)$731.8 (2014)$869.6 (2015)$1,007.4

2. If the proceedings are in respect of a development of any kind where the estimated cost of the development is $1 million or more

(2012) $38.8 (2013)$1,462.3 (2014)$1,737.9 (2015)$ 2,014.8

To put these increases in percentages really highlights how out of proportion they are - an indication of how out of proportion population growth and overdevelopment are in Victoria.

Kelvin Thomson’s submission re this matter:

http://www.kelvinthomson.com.au/Editor/assets/public_docs/2013/130114%20vcat%20kt%20submission.pdf

The Age article on the fee increase is here: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/vcat-fees-set-to-rise-20130108-2cdtr.html.

The Herald Sun article on the fee increase is here: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/vcats-win-is-peoples-loss/story-e6frfhqo-1226549124582

What we have here in Victoria - and the same thing is happening Australia-wide - is a small set of people who happen to have been able to get financial domination of institutions and land-use planning and who are now using the parliament and the law to get whatever they want by depriving all the other citizens of their democratic right to self-government and control over their environment. Another name for this power-elite is the Growth Lobby.

Amazingly or perhaps, true to type, Australia is experiencing extreme shortages of domestic natural gas supplies. World-wide there is a gas-rush. It also looks like oil is already not keeping up with demand as countries scramble for new more energy costly, polluting and environmentally destructive forms of energy, like tarsands, fracked gas, and sugarcane ethanol. The media is failing to paper over the cracks: Australia looks like a cartoon demonstration of entropy with energy dispersing, the environment overheating, overpopulation and political disorder. And there is nowhere for Australians to escape.

Oil and gas consumption rising of course

According to the BP Statistical Review of World energy, the world's natural gas reserves would last for 59 years if production continued at the 2010 rate (which it didn't of course - it increased by 0.7% in 2011, and Australia's consumption increased by 5.7%, China's by 5.5% and Belarus by 22.8%. You can download historical time lines here.) The BP prognosis for oil is comparatively optimistic. That is probably because BP has over the years added to its definition of crude oil, shale oil, oil sands and NGLs (the liquid content of natural gas where this is recovered separately). That’s a lot of new sources, all of them requiring more energy to extract or transport than that required to harness and package the traditional ‘gusher’ close to the surface, now a rare phenomenon.

Supplies of oil that comes out of the ground from vast reservoirs are actually being drawn down faster and faster, so gas is being called upon to substitute for more and more other forms of energy. While Australia looks to reintroducing coal to substitute for petroleum and exports more and more natural gas, China is substituting gas for coal on a massive scale.

If it quacks like a duck ...

In fact, watching countries scramble for new more energy costly, polluting and environmentally destructive forms of energy, like tarsands, fracked gas and sugarcane ethanol, you sure could be forgiven for thinking that this is a sign that oil is already not keeping up with demand.

And all these new fuels involve trampling democracy on a larger and larger scale. The biofuels cause hideous suffering to animals and are driving extinction through the destruction of habitat. In the mean time various high-tech wars in the Middle East are burning up traditional oil supplies day and night as China, Russia, the US, and Europe, attempt to get power in the biggest oil-reserve regions.

Send in the clowns

You hear governments talking about letting the market have its way and you fear that they say that because they have absolutely no control over what is happening. Because of the tyranny of profit we have more and more desperate attempts to promote business as usual. Policy follows the dollar ... anywhere. Into enslavement, overpopulation and death.

What can one say about the future when leaders all over the world seem to be escalating all our energy and pollution problems or allowing them to escalate because they simply don't know how to stop them?

Martin Ferguson, Federal Resources Minister's energy white paper argues that 'market intervention' should only be considered 'where there is clear evidence of market failure'.

King Kong had nothing on the corporate ape

Free market policy does not make sense in any social welfare or governance way. It only makes sense if you consider that the concentration of power and wealth at global levels has promoted a range of super dominant male apes absolutely ruled by their need to sit on the heads of other apes in human pyramids beyond a level where they can actually comprehend their impact and take responsibility. In the jungle other male apes would simply have beaten these big fat bullies up and removed them. In the global governance and concrete and banking jungle, where money can substitute for muscles, size, brains and agility, nothing can stop them. They can temporarily be brought to their knees financially, but they will just sacrifice lesser apes in order to get back onto the global baccarat table. Even when they die, more take their place, blindly pursuing the same senseless objectives of expansion and dominion. Following the money down a terminal plughole.

Australia already running out of natural gas

As many candobetter.net readers are aware, Australia has for decades now been in the death grip of a voracious housing industry that has major responsibility for pushing up population growth here.

You can tell when the housing industry is going bad when you see the building materials industry is in trouble. Then they start talking down resource prices so that the developers they supply can keep cranking out those houses (incidentally boosting the demand for gas even more - but what does the building materials industry care about the final result? Not a fig.)

Apparently local and international demand has forced the price of gas right up, to triple its 2008 price in West Australia and Queensland. The gas extracting industry is chasing the international dollar, leaving local manufacturing industry without supply.

Brickworks, Australia's largest brick manufacturer (responsible for those houses that cover once loved forests and fields) claims that it has been reduced to using sawdust (in Tasmania) and methane from infills. That is probably a sign of the times. If they would just adjust and downsize, then maybe we could all go home and relax, as the population growth they demand constantly to satisfy their bloated purses would die down in the absence of that demand.

But corporations have to grow, don't you know. So they are in there dividing and conquering, accusing the 'Greens' and environmentalism of causing gas shortages. How do they figure that? Well, Lindsay Partridge of Brickworks says that the shortages that are caused by exporting all our gas are only shortages because Green concerns cause obstacles to total open slather mining everywhere. So, the answer, according to Partridge, is for the government to simply remove all laws preventing mining everywhere, bringing on coal seam gas as well as natural gas.

For reasons not elaborated Mr Partridge also thinks that the supply of natural gas will become abundant towards the end of this decade. For a man who complains that he cannot guarantee supply for the next two years to plan, he is very optimistic about supply at the end of this decade.

Gas is fugitive

Other people worry that the way gas comes out of the ground - very quickly - means that the more you are getting the less time before it is all exhausted. The gases just zoom out into the atmosphere when you take the lids off the earthern reservoirs they accumulated in. There is nothing to stop their natural reservoir from emptying almost immediately unless you can plug and control their escape. It is like undoing a balloon. Natural gas even escapes between the denser particles of pipes as you transport it. These elusive qualities of gas should concern those in power but somehow they seem to remain oblivious.

Martin Ferguson, Federal Resources Minister's energy white paper argues that 'market intervention' should only be considered 'where there is clear evidence of market failure'.

Because Martin Ferguson (the Federal Resources Minister) does not consider that Australia's remaining businesses going out of business is evidence of market failure, he won't regulate gas distribution. Nor will he regulate business and housing rents driven up by population growth (the other reason that business goes out of business in Australia.)

"The role for government is not to step in and intervene but to let those better placed to negotiate a commercial outcome," he is quoted as saying.

We now seem to be witnessing “market failure" to avert environmental damage and in the scramble for ever diminishing energy sources. We may also be witnessing market failure to select technically and humanistically competent politicians.

West Australia reserves the princely portion of 16% of its natural gas production for the Australian market, but NSW and Queensland have no policies to retain any gas for domestic use, according to the Financial Review (See sources below).

It is not surprising if all this makes you feel extremely insecure with respect to future gas availability in Australia - or anywhere.
The media is failing to paper over the cracks: Australia looks like a cartoon demonstration of entropy with energy dispersing, the environment overheating, overpopulation and political disorder. And there is nowhere for Australians to escape.

Click here to Buy PRINT VERSION of S.M. Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations (2013)

When you think that the Australian Aborigines probably inhabited this continent for 40,000 to 60,000 years in a mostly stable population and economy you cannot help but envy them their incredibly long run of luck. They obviously knew what they were doing!

NOTES

Source: Peter Roberts, "Gas crisis looms for industry," Australian Financial Review, Monday 21 January 2013, pages 1 and 4.

Source: Rebecca Hyam,Coal seam protests forcing gas prices up: industry
Jan 21, 2013.

"Let me return to my old primary school, St Joseph's convent [in Cloncurry]. Saint Mary McKillop, I'm sure, was just like my principal, Sister Thomas..." Bob Katter's book, while retrieving some good Australian ideas and paying its respects to our ancestors, also markets big population ideas uncannily like those of B.A. Santamaria.

Bob Katter An Incredible Race of People Murdoch Books, September 13, 2012.

Down the rabbit hole

Hurrying through a mall in outer Brisbane, a few weeks ago a book by outback Queensland independent politician, Bob Katter Jr., caught my eye amongst the fat-foodie and ‘life-changing’ array in the bookshop. It was strangely alluring like the rabbit hole for Alice.

A friend and I found it so fascinating in its chronicle from a particular point of view of Australian political and economic history that we bought two copies; one for kindle and the other a hardback, so that we could compare notes.

Even so, this book review was very hard to write. Katter’s book reflects a long lifetime of quirky political observations and experience in a head-long rush of a narrative, opinion and anecdote. It is a long and detailed book. Even if you disagree with every word, it is hard to dislike the enthusiasm and overt individuality, so rare in an Australian politician.

Surprisingly, I found it easiest to start by comparing Katter’s book with professional journalist Laura Tingle’s article, “Great Expectations”, in Quarterly Essay recently. See [See "Tingle shoots blanks ..."]

Tingle dumbfounds in her strangely arrogant and unempathic painting of Australian convicts as wimps and whiners, and the Australian population as curiously dependent, whereas Katter writes warmly of an 'incredible race of people' who came from the "convict crucible".

Katter performs an educational service in telling of all the things that Australians managed to create and do with a population of only about 7 million - proportionately more than we now achieve in manufacture. But he seems not to realise the contradiction between his acknowledgement of how well we achieved and what we created at 7 million and his current perception that we now need a much bigger population. In fact, in his last two chapters, he puts on the growth spurs and urges for a population of 55 million by ... wait for it... 2037! That's in 24 years. One generation. An immigration invasion, no less.

Katter is a self-confessed 'developmentalist'. He admires 'doers' and despises ‘pygmyism’ [what he perceives as the opposite of developmentalism]. His whole book is a hymn to engineering, peasant farming, empire building and … did I say? … population growth.

The son of a Cloncurry Labor Party secretary, Katter seems to be a B.A. Santamariarist (a Grouper) at heart in his desire to irrigate the Australian desert and settle tens of millions of peasant farmers there. You wonder why and, in the very last chapter, you realise that he is the product of a Catholic education and the associated ideology about civilization as a moral imperative, medical science as having saved us from an eternal struggle against pestilence and disease, without which one in four would not survive birth, [1] and that population growth is normal or good. Despite all his lauding of the 'first Australians', he is a fan of the 'civilising' influence of the Conquistador.

"Let me return to my old primary school, St Joseph's convent [in Cloncurry]. Saint Mary McKillop, I'm sure, was just like my principal, Sister Thomas..."

Katter's values shape the things he chooses as important in history. It makes sense to compare Katter with Tingle because both use quite different interpretations of the same events to kick off opposite ideologies. Tingle uses the history of politicians selling off our institutions to argue that we can no longer expect anything of governments. Katter uses a different interpretation of the same thing to argue for the election of his party of 'doers' to bring back those lost empowering institutions - like a Peoples' Bank, patriotic Australian employers, Australian manufacturing and design, and an owner–operator society, in which men sell their labour or their produce through collectively owned ‘means of production’, or at least through statutory collective marketing arrangements.[2] Many Australians would welcome these among Katter’s policies.

Tingle mentions how Australia has been subject to constant mass immigration. She then glaringly omits to comment on this. Katter can hardly stop talking about it. He wants more, more, MORE!
Most Australians don’t want a bigger population.

Katter’s dream

What is to underpin Katter's vision of turning of rivers inland and the flooding of the interior with water to create an inland sea for a hugely swollen population? Katter believes that almost limitless coal resources underlie about 20 per cent of Queensland. In fact he believes that Australia has the most coal of any country in the world. (Usually Australia is placed around third in coal reserves globally). He actually believes that Australia can be a great power just on these, with 'clean coal technology' [3] and ethanol from sugar cane. These energy sources combined with massive irrigation throughout much of Australia, for Katter would enable a host of peasant farms across northern Australia, to feed the world and power Australian industry and huge new cities in the north and south, plus our current cities ballooned to megapolises.

Creating an inland sea, if you added trees (which Katter does not mention) might affect climate positively, although this is an old idea which has been criticized as unlikely to do what it purports, and of a scale so financially costly that no government has ever gone further than look at the idea and hastily discard it.[4] If our population stayed the same, in theory such a scheme might help our current environmental problems, however, Katter simply wants to use it to add to our problems by turbo-charging immigration. So we would have massive increased energy costs associated with a vast engineering scheme, plus all the additional costs of the new population. Katter, however, only assesses things in terms of a credit side to an imaginary financial balance sheet. He just doesn’t get that the financial balance sheet depends on the health of the environment and that we are already overpopulated. Or, maybe he does get it but he knows that he is more likely to get coverage in the mainstream press and funding if he makes an appeal to the big populationists of corporate Australia.

Population and scale

Katter believes that big populations carry ‘economies of scale’. He seems not to have heard about the diseconomies of scale we are all experiencing with congestion in Australian cities. Nor does he seem to notice the loss of democratic representation as our representatives preside at a great altitude over more and more vast electorates in a materialistic hierarchy antithetical to the Australian egalitarianism that Katter also extols. His answer to our overlarge population’s overshoot of Australia’s water supply is to turn the northern rivers inland. Katter is the kind of man who cannot acknowledge limits. (In this he is no different from nearly every Australian politician).

He thinks that Australia can return to farming and manufacturing and inventing with

"[...] an extra 100,000 migrants a year [...adding] to the current immigration mix of 250,000 a year, giving us a population by 2037 that would be in line with most countries: around 55 million."

Yet he began his book saying how much we manufactured with only 7 million people. He also notes how successive economic liberalization policies put Australian business out of business and promoted international corporations. It seems to me that, if we changed our anti [small and medium] -business laws, our enterprise would again flourish, probably better without the constant pressure on land and resources prices of a bigger population.

He does not explain how he arrives at a definition of 'most countries' nor why we would aim to be of a particular [big] size. If you look up countries with populations over 30m but less than 100m you get: Philippines, Vietnam, Germany, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Congo Democratic Republic, France, Thailand, United Kingdom, Italy, Myanmar, South Korea, South Africa, Spain, Ukraine, Colombia, Tanzania, Argentina, Kenya, Sudan, Poland, Algeria, Canada, Uganda, and Morocco. The list of countries with much smaller populations than that is much longer and includes Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, Denmark, Ireland, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Taiwan, Australia, Syria, Romania, Netherlands, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, Czech Republic, Hungary, Iraq, Venezuela, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and more...

Hydraulic engineering

In his barracking for a huge population for Australia, Katter is also calling for increased irrigation and the canalization of Australia's waterways on an unprecedented scale. He completely ignores wild ecology, animal rights, and the right of people to have wilderness. He celebrates as worthwhile the activities of engineering, road building, dam building, and irrigation channel building above all.
He is like a man in the grip of an ecstatic vision driving at 200 kpm down a highway in the middle of the night without any lights on, with no brakes and no insurance. In this he seems to be exactly like nearly every other politician in the country – except that he remains interested in primary products.

"Our mining product, our beef and our ethanol would be carried out on great canals fanning in from Spencer Gulf and south from [...] Two per cent of northern Asutralia's land and just 7 per cent of its water, combined with 10 per cent of Australia's grain [...] a real, open and sensible migration system. It will be unlike our current migration system that chokes off people [...] Some of this new population and much of the old will have moved out of rabbit-warren cities and onto their own one to three [...] A population of that size will provide great prosperity and great economies of scale. [...] All of northern Australia will become 'the land of 10,000 billabongs', with wildlife and nature no longer struggling [...]

Catholic education negates sensitivity to nature?

Note that this last statement is the only one that sounds even faintly kindly towards our natural environment. My impression was that Katter's catholic education probably taught him to block nature out, in the belief that endless human expansion was our manifest destiny. For Katter, science is not about understanding and cooperating with our wonderful natural world; it is about dominating it and subduing it. And that means dominating and subduing local senses of place and local empowerment with massive engineering projects and mass immigration, for all his talk about democracy.

Whilst one can understand his position as a representative for farming influencing his perception of engineering rivers and dams, he actually seems to be irrigation and production- mad, to the extent that there can never be enough! For this reason (as well as the extraordinary financial and engineering costs and poor chances of success), one cannot endorse his wish to revive the Bradfield Scheme to water Australia's inland deserts, leaving the rest of Australia trashed and going forth to multiply and trash the rest.

(For a dissection of the Bradfield scheme and its paroxysmal resurgence from time to time in Australia, see, Dr Robert Wooding, "Populate, parch and panic: two centuries of dreaming about nation-building in inland Australia," Chapter 6 of John Butcher (Ed.), Australia under construction : nation-building : past, present and future, ANU School of Government, 2008.] [For a discussion of the Australian tendency to big huge and costly projects of little real benefit, see, Dr Richard Evans' "A passion for white elephants: some lessons from Australia’s experience of nation building" in Chapter 5 of John Butcher (Ed.), Australia under construction : nation-building : past, present and future, ANU School of Government, 2008.)

Aboriginal Land and Water

For Katter, private property is the key to civilisation. Unfortunately he is unable to see that modern economics in Australia also has a downside in its zero-sum capitalisation of land.
Convinced of the British capitalist system as the way forward, Katter thinks that Aboriginal land should be alienable - that is, that Aborigines should be able to buy and sell their community land - principally in order to borrow from banks so as to start businesses.

"It should appear obvious to any objective social commentator or historian that the often portrayed ugly picture of ‘Aboriginal’ Australia would be exactly the same picture in every town, village and city in the rest of Australia if the inhabitants were suddenly bereft of the private ownership of land and realty, and all that land and realty was suddenly to belong to the so-called ‘community’." (Jnr, Bob Katter (2012-05-15). An Incredible Race of People (Kindle Locations 714-716). Murdoch Books Australia. Kindle Edition.)

He is right, of course, as far as his philosophy goes, but it doesn’t go very far. The problem is that all that privately-owned land and realty is exponentially gravitating to fewer and fewer hands because of our 'wonderful' land-tenure system, so that the majority of Australians are becoming increasingly land and capital poor and endebted. What is the point in turning Aboriginal land into this economic quicksand?

Equity is preserved far better in the European roman law or Napoleonic system, but Katter, like most Anglophone politicians does not know of this alternative system that almost every country in Europe uses. (Pity, because he might like French dirigism and he might learn something from a system that counts population growth as costs to the community.) Aboriginal land as the founding institution of their 60,000 year old society has a much better record than a 300 year old capitalism that is cannibalising its own people and their property. Try taking Maori land away! No-one would dare to suggest that as a good idea.

Katter damns the Queensland Labor Government for reversing attempts to privatise Aboriginal land. Basically he believes in 'progress' as an evolutionary and divinely inspired constant. He does not seem to appreciate (and it does not seem to occur to him) that the Australian Aboriginal way of life retains its intrinsic validity, any more than he seems to appreciate the intrinsic validity (or value) of nature itself without the imprint of industrial man. Even though he describes gallantly the stand that the Australian Aborigines made against the British invasion, one can see that he feels it is all in the past, in a time unredeemed by Progress, Catholicism, mining and irrigation.

He also cannot stand to see all that water in the north under native title.

Ethanol and Carbon Emissions

Inspired by the Brazilian ethanol industry, Katter promotes the idea that carbon emissions will be taken care of by the production of ethanol from sugar cane, which can be substituted for petroleum. The next sugar cane crop will reabsorb the carbon emissions, he believes. Although he is a rural politician, he has a strange disregard for soil.

The main problem with the production of biofuels from crops is the overuse of soil, which is biologically alive. The constituent soil organisms cannot survive frequent mechanical disturbance and applications of rich fertilizers, which is what is required for the production of monocrops. Another problem is the great amount of water necessary to grow the crops and create the fuel. Use of diesel fuel for mechanical operations, especially at farm level, detracts from the ultimate net energy production and from the ultimate net CO2 production. (It is true that the latter would be zero if it were not for the use of fossil fuels in production.)

Brazilian scientists have costed their ethanol industry:

“…the production of 1 liter of ethanol from sugarcane requires approximately 18.4 l of water, 0,07 kg of crude oil equivalent, and 1.52 m2 of annual land use and results in the lost of 1.8 kg of soil due to erosion. These results are impressive, especially when the Brazilian ethanol production, 16 billion of liters in 2006 (Brazil, 2007) is considered. The soil lost is of utmost importance since the ability in growing sugarcane to ethanol production, or any other crop, is directly related to this natural non-renewable resource.” Source: Consuelo L. F. Pereira and Enrique Ortega, 2005. “Sustainability Assessment of Ethanol Production from Sugarcane,” Conference Paper, , http://www.advancesincleanerproduction.net/first/textos%20e%20arquivos/sessoes/4a/1/Consuelo%20Fernandez%20Pereira%20-%20Resumo%20Exp..doc

“Although the popular belief that ethanol systems have no net CO2 emissions, they do have because of direct and indirect oil consumption; this system uses external inputs that demand petroleum in their production: fertilizers, equipments, chemical inputs, infra-structure and so on. Our estimate is that there is a release of 0.29 kg of CO2 per liter of ethanol produced.” Source: Source: Consuelo L. F. Pereira and Enrique Ortega, 2005. “Sustainability Assessment of Ethanol Production from Sugarcane,” Conference Paper,
http://www.advancesincleanerproduction.net/first/textos%20e%20arquivos/sessoes/4a/1/Consuelo%20Fernandez%20Pereira%20-%20Resumo%20Exp..doc

To summarise the above: There is no such thing as a free lunch; the transformation of one energy form to another costs. A lot. We are using giant fossil fuel oil reserves. When they are gone we won’t be able to replace them with anything even remotely so vast. Trying to do so with sugarcane is a wet dream.

Loaves and fishes mentality

Katter expresses religio-economic beliefs in the value of capitalism and a notion of 'progress' similar to those of most parliamentarians today. This makes him argue like an ecological and thermodynamic simpleton about economies of scale with an increased population when we are looking at fossil fuel resource depletion and cannot cope with the pollution and emissions fall-out from what he have already used. Confident as a brave hunter that there will always be something out there to spear, he sounds like too much of a Man to carry a dilly bag or stop to clean up the mess before inviting 35 million more people along to the barbecue.

As a "Developmentalist" much of his economic philosophy is founded on the Keynesian way out of the Great Depression, when, in an age of cheap oil, governments poured money into projects to employ their people to build infrastructure for future manufacture and expansion. Reasonable for that era, but not for ours. The circumstances have changed.

His hero, Ted Theodore, who built the Australian Workers Union up, was Premier of Queensland from 1919 to 1925, a member of the federal House of Representatives from 1927 to 1931, and Federal Treasurer from 1929 to 1930, was a champion of the Keynesian approach, but was not able to get support to implement it, due to a political scandal.

Katter’s opus is peppered with positive delivery of the kinds of statements that give ecologists and enlightened farmers the willies, such as:

"Les Thiess had revolutionised scrub clearing by putting a big cable or chain between two tractors, but the cable would ride up, particularly with brigalow scrub. Joh,[Bjelke Joh Petersen] using a similar method, had added a huge steel ball in the middle of the chain that stopped it from riding up over the scrub." [Kindle Location 3752]

Katter's heroes are typically the object of 'green attacks'. You can see where his solid antipathy to the Greens arises. Their rhetoric attacks the heart of his values.

Even if Katter's big population, big engineering, big irrigation, big roads, big development obsessions etc make you want to run away and hide, they aren't much different from those of the Liberal Party, the Queensland LNCP, or the Labor Party. Furthermore, the Greens do precious little to stop the push for population growth that causes all the big engineering projects and expansion that oppress and destroy nature, biodiversity and democracy. What's different is that Katter's writing is complimentary and sympathetic to most Australians and he pays his dues to those who laid down their lives or toiled to build this colony from its desert beginnings. You sense his fellow feeling and you respect his ancestors because he seems to respect yours.

He has noted and taken to his heart our battles. Often he was there. He is friend to the soldier, the miner, the worker, the disaffected ALP True Believer, the ex-Lib, the strayed CP member, the misunderstood Pauline Hanson party member, the capitalist Aborigine - and the Catholic Church.
I can't be the only Australian to wonder if Katter is for real or if he's just a brilliant politician in his ability to appeal to marginalised Australians in farm, mine, and satellite suburb and anyone who is just sick of the economic rationalist parliamentary babble. It takes more than luck to survive this long by yourself in Australian politics. But then Katter is second in a dynasty of rural politicians, headed by his father. Katter's father had a country store and Katter himself spent some time in mining – which probably accounts for the rigid solidification of his pioneer mentality. He now occasionally buys and sells cattle and mining interests and his wife buys and sells houses which might be worth around 700,000 (according to disclosure of interests for Parliament).

Katter might have written an unusual and interesting book, but I was surprised at the media coverage it got and the coverage of his party, The Australian Party in the mainstream media - including The Australian. In fact I thought that Katter's new salience in Australian politics probably relates to the huge promotion he makes for rapidly expanding the population in Australia, especially for The Australian. The Murdoch press constantly promotes the idea of a bigger population for Australia. Surely Katter’s book cannot have escaped the notice of the desperados in the growth lobby, who one would expect to be queuing up to throw money at him. Surprisingly, he seems not to be able to attract candidates to his Party, which would otherwise present competition to the Stable Population Party Australia candidates in marginal seats. I think many people would front up to join, were it not for his big population policies.

Finally, one cannot help noticing how Katter’s push for a big population for Australia and his Catholicism are, as I mentioned earlier, very reminiscent of B.A.Santamaria’s philosophy which, with the backing of the Pope, caused enormous harm to Australian democracy. The Catholic Church in Australia has a long history of immigrationism and the Vatican is possibly the richest corporation in the world, with a penchant for interfering in politics and economies. For years The Australian employed Santamaria as a journalist. For anyone interested in familiarising themselves with this fascinating era of Australian history, see "Pronatalist Policy in Australia: 1945-2000" On the other hand, I have no evidence that anything like that is going on with Mr Katter.

NOTES

[1] Katter, for instance, believes that one in four people alive today would be dead if it were not for modern medical technology - antibiotics and vaccinations. Like most people he has fallen for the lurid myth that people in simple societies had life expectancies of around 30 years old and that the appallingly low life expectancy of Europeans in early industrialisation was a norm that had existed up until then. This is complete and utter nonsense but it underpins much of the developmentalist dogma of the Catholic Church and capitalist foreign aid. For the real demographic story read Sheila Newman, Demography, Territory and Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, December 2012.
[2] These are deceased Queensland Premier Ted Theodore’s words, but they also seem to be among Katter’s policies.
[3] A good book to read about a future relying on coal and for an explanation of the concept of clean coal is Barbara Freeze, Coal, a Human History 2004.
[4] Dr Robert Wooding, "Populate, parch and panic: two centuries of dreaming about nation-building in inland Australia," Chapter 6 of John Butcher (Ed.), Australia under construction : nation-building : past, present and future, ANU School of Government, 2008.] [For a discussion of the Australian tendency to big huge and costly projects of little real benefit, see, Dr Richard Evans' "A passion for white elephants: some lessons from Australia’s experience of nation building" in Chapter 5 of John Butcher (Ed.), Australia under construction : nation-building : past, present and future, ANU School of Government, 2008.]

If I were an aboriginal in West Australia, I would be buying up camels and organizing my clan to develop them as transport, food and materials in a revival of a new style Aboriginal society, which might take in some, but definitely not all, of the refugees from Perth’s collapsing civilization only decades from now. Submissions invited from public on planning doc. (Link inside article)

Picture: The future for some Australians?

West Australian government planners are facilitating perilously high population growth in Western Australia today, with citizens’ survival casually hoisted on unlikely discoveries of ways to replace fossil fuels. They are dishonestly marketing as inevitable a future where West Australians would mostly have to work harder and harder for less and less, spending all their salaries on food, power, rent and desalinated water and living in highrises.

"A West Australian living in 2050 will pay much more for housing, groceries and amenities. The availability of land, food security and dwindling water supplies will be the challenges of the generation." [3]

Shockingly, the government is behind the very problems that it is pretending to respond to. Their projections go forty years into the future in the State Planning Strategy (Draft) - 2012.

You can download the Planning document chapters here at http://www.planning.wa.gov.au/publications/6561.aspx. The title of the draft is "State Planning Strategy (Draft) - 2012." The good news is that this draft document is quite short and easy to read with some colorful and overly simplified maps. It is interesting to see the appalling level of superficiality of some policy and planning statements, such as those about social infrastructure. Public consultation is invited until 29 March 2013. You can use a "Have your say submission form" There is also a phone number for contact: 08 6551 9000. You can also email a submission to [email protected] or send it by mail to
Project Manager
State Planning Strategy
Department of Planning
Locked Bag 2506
Perth WA 6001

A society of slaves, doomed to collapse

We seem to be witnessing the creation of a society of slaves, a worse event than the initial British invasion.

Unless the government planned scenario is prevented, land will fall into the hands of unregulated corporations and most people will not have any land to supplement their diets with their own produce and relieve the pressure on them to work and commute until they die. Imagine the state of the hospitals with even more people with fewer rights and less disposable income. It is unlikely, however, that the present economy with its network of production and employment will even last that long. Those most likely to survive will be people who own and have managed to conserve some form of power, water and food production from desert encroachment.

Preventing farms and the entire coast of Western Australia, which is the only green part, from turning to desert will be the ‘challenge’. Of course the elderly of West Australia can recognise it as a tragedy and the current generation will know it as a battle for survival among neighbours who are mostly strangers in a society poorly organized to replicate the Saudi experience without the oil.

Natural gas prospects, mineral wealth

Gas comes out of the ground very quickly, unlike oil, and natural gas production will be in decline,[1] much of it already having been burned up in foreign lands. The West Australian planning document just released [3] admits as much in its empty claim that

"Climate change will, however, boost renewable energies which will supply about a third of the State's power by 2050 while fossil fuels and coal diminish in significance."

In the current global economic model, short-term ongoing growth in mineral production will only fuel this slave society; there will be little sharing of wealth and leisure. As we know West Australian mining magnate, media ambitious Gina Rinehart, seems to consider $2.00 a day to be adequate commercial reward for toil in Africa and a model for the Australian economy. She is not Robinson Crusoe in mining society. With that kind of commercial and social philosophy dominating the West Australian economic paradigm, what is to stop West Australia from becoming like Nigeria, its people landless and oppressed by corporate government backed by foreign mining interests and private armies? West Australia Inc. [2] may seem a mere cockroach infestation compared to the locust plague in store.

Camel-power

Ethiopian desert nomads half way through last century. Not such a bad way to live, especially in a stable population.

It is probable that the wild camels now considered a nuisance, will become desired means of transport, food and materials for people unable to live within the reduced function of the city. We are looking at the possible rise of a desert nomad society, similar to that of the aborigines, but riding camels and preserving some long lasting technologies.

If I were an aboriginal in West Australia, I would be buying up camels and organizing my clan to develop them as transport, food and materials in a revival of a new style Aboriginal society, which might take in some, but definitely not all, of the refugees from Perth’s collapsing civilization. (We know that the camel transport system will work in Australia because colonisation of these areas actually initially relied on camels.)

Extrapolating from present rates of population growth, according to planner John Day, the city of Perth would grow from nearly 2 million now to five million within 40 years.[3] Of course the economic system that encourages this population growth and sustains the current population will probably collapse well within the 40 year period. Even the current government is admitting that the stresses are immense.[2b]

Who is responsible?

West Australian Planning Minister John Day excuses this terrible outcome as due to climate change and globalization.[3] It is clear that the government of the day, led by Premier Colin Barnett, which gives this kind of planning license, has no intention of trying to protect its citizens by increasing their democracy so that they can resist the disabling population growth. It is all top down government and authoritarian imposition of high migration and infrastructure expansion on an increasingly unreliable natural resources base.

Democracy cannot withstand this social engineering which drives physical wedges between neighbours and kin with infilling and the creation of entirely new suburbs overnight, purchased and populated in advance by future overseas migrants ignorant and careless of their impact on the society they are treating as their host.

The shortages of water are expected to become permanently in crisis due to climate change and the desertification that the current population has caused through the removal of vegetation and water diversion.

Future generations, if they could speak now, would probably put the West Australian government and its planners on trial for crimes against humanity and nature. If only they had the power to do so now, we could hope they would lock them up.

There is another way

Another way of dealing with climate change and energy crisis that would bear more hope for survival and society would be to reduce the risks of certain overshoot by cutting immigration right back in West Australia by ceasing to grant any new building permits, ceasing to advertise for new immigrants, and by slowing down extractive processes in mining through the imposition of taxes incremental above a certain level of production. Then cut down all work and production by halving the working day, but boost democracy by sharing that work around. If a target of halving production and population growth were met then Western Australians would have twice the time to adapt to their changing climate and environmental circumstances, and, in the longer term, to a far smaller and more conservative and closely knit society adapted to the use of flow energies and the biology of the region. This could be a beautiful and long lasting society. The cost increases for water, power and food would gradually decrease as the population decreased and human activity, currently manically driven by bubble finances, relented to a sane rhythm. [4]

If you think this other way is eccentrically drastic, do consider how we have gone from a free and pleasant society in West Australia to finding ourselves in a position where mere planners are actually telling us we will be forced to lives of poverty and toil for less and less return.

The government is causing and exacerbating of the very problems that it is pretending to respond to: population growth, massively polluting rates of fossil-fuel extraction, housing shortages, food shortages and water shortages, but the planning document in question encourages the misleading perception that it is only responding to something inevitable: "It is not so much a bleak future as it is the reality of living in an era characterised by climate change, population growth and unprecedented global economic transition."[3]

Sheila Newman has also just published a new theory of population and political organisation, which is coming out in four volumes. The first volume is called, Demography, Territory and Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, December 2012.

Why is anyone putting up with this and why does the West Australian report such prognostics as if they were anything but an invitation to overthrow the government? Well, that is of course a rhetorical question because the Australian media and the government are interdependent and responsible for the way things are presented as fait accompli when, if the rest of us just talked to each other instead of relying on a media invested in mining and land speculation, we would know that almost none of us want this engineered future and that we would do anything to avoid it.

NOTES

[1] See for instance trend-based predictions in 2005 here: http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/27/61031/618 It is basically the same story as for oil except that gas is supposed to replace depleting oil production and promote more growth. Extraction of shale gas carries terrible costs to water and natural resources and ammenity, destroying democracy in the process and will increase the nightmare proportions of the problem of energy resource depletion and associated pollution. See also Sheila Newman,(Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, UK, 2008, Chapter 2: "101 Views from Hubbert's Peak" which documents trends in oil substitution by gas from the 1960s, or, a more up to date graph can be found in Sheila Newman, Demography, Territory and Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2012 in the introduction (dated 2012).
[2] See Trevor Sykes,The Bold Riders: Behind Australia's corporate collapses, Allen & Unwin, 1996 (2nd ed.)

[2b] "The [planning discussion] document also points out that reduced rainfall and rising temperatures brought on by climate change will hurt WA's vulnerable agricultural industry and more importantly, affect water supplies. Dam levels will plummet as demand for water doubles by 2040. Desalination plants will be the primary water supply source of the future." (Source: Yolanda Zaw, "Planners prepare for population explosion," The West Australian, December 26, 2012)
[3] Yolanda Zaw, "Planners prepare for population explosion," The West Australian, December 26, 2012
[4] For the detail of these arguments, see Sheila Newman, The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Books, 2008, Chapter 2, "Measuring our predicament" and Chapter 20, "France and Australia after Oil.")

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community groups are making submissions on the Reformed Zones in Victoria. The government's zoning aims to increase commercial areas into residential areas in a serial manner and to intensify activity in the green wedges. The Department of Planning and Community Development has appointed a Ministerial Advisory Committee 'to review all submissions and provide advice back to the government', but the Chairman of the Committee is Geoff Underwood, who is prominent in the affairs of the Australian Population Institute (APop), which is officiated by professional developers and has the primary aim of promoting a huge population for Australia. What chances do robust submissions have with APop defining the parameters of planning in Victoria? See Planning Backlash submission inside.

The zones in question have as their stated objectives 'to better manage growth' and to 'simplify requirements' and to 'allow a broader range of activities to be considered' and 'to ensure that they still reflect the aspirations of all Victorians'.

Despite the latter objective, the zoning, if it remains as it is, will increase the intrusion of commercial areas into residential areas in a serial manner and intensify activity in the green wedges. The government has appointed the Ministerial Advisory Committee to consider all submissions, but the Chairman of the Committee has been prominent in the affairs of the Australian Population Institute from its beginning. APop is officiated by professional developers and has the aim of promoting a huge population for Australia. Along with billionaire, Richard Pratt and Steve Vizard, it played a major role in ex-Premier Steve Bracks's 2002 Melbourne Population Summit which began the current campaign to institute population growth as a norm for Australians and used sophisticated propaganda techniques to do this. See /node/594#comment-981and http://candobetter.net/node/149

The members of the committee are:

Geoff Underwood, Secretary to the Victorian Branch of APop http://www.apop.com.au/who.html

Chris Canavan, QC, represented Hotel Windsor Holdings in their bid to get an extension in time for redevelopment, which had been denied them by this [Baillieu] government.

Joanna Stanley, Communications Consultant with the particular specialty of "Advocacy and influence through media and stakeholder relations," but who is better known as the media spokesperson at Brunswick Residents Unite.

Liz Johnstone, Planner, Planning Institute of Australia and Manager, Planning Policy & Projects, Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV).

Planning Backlash's submission

Below is Planning Backlash's submission to the 'Reformed zones for Victoria' Ministerial Advisory Committee. It begins by thanking the Minister for his good work, because of his apparent receptiveness to the need for democratic input, however it then requests very challenging, but absolutely necessary, real reforms.

"Suburban - Residential

We agree with the proposed changes to residential zones as finally we can have the protections against inappropriate development that we have been advocating for since Melbourne 2030 was brought in and forced onto us by the previous government, in spite of our objections. The Residential Zones are excellent and we thank the Minister of Planning for his courage bringing these in, no doubt against the wishes of the DPCD.

However there are a number of points requiring amendment and the Minister has heard us voicing our concerns and has said he is open to change and is waiting for the report of the Review Committee. Our agreement to the whole zone concept is dependent on these amendments, because if these are excluded, the advantages would be seriously compromised.

List of Amendments that we request

1. The Minister will scrap the ‘within 100 metre’ of a commercial zone to prevent commercial creep into residential zones. This can in effect double the business area and has unwanted implications.

2. The Activity Centres will be Principal and Major also central, and must have fixed boundaries, and not extending out 400 metres.

3. Neighbourhood Activity Centres will be just local shopping strips.

4. There will be no population targets.

5. There will be no reduction in residents right to object and appeal.

6. Maximum heights must apply to all buildings in the zone.

7. The only uses not requiring permits in residential zones will be those not requiring permits now. Everything else requires a permit and residents retain the right to object. Current prohibitions must be retained with no dilution of present conditions. Rather, enhance the zones to provide the tools to enable the protection of neighbourhood character.

8. The Council working with residents can say where and how big the residential zones will be and the Minister will approve and the DPCD will not interfere.

9. If the Council wants mandatory heights the Minister will give it and the DPCD will not interfere.

10. No offices and shops as of right in the Residential Growth Zone (RGZ) or the General Residential Zone (GRZ).

11. No food and drink premises as of right in RGZ.

12. No medical centres as of right in RGZ, GRZ or Neighbourhood Residential Zone (NRZ).

13. No place of worship as of right in any residential zones.

14. No changes in size of land where houses can be built without a permit.

15. No to nine metre building heights in NRZ areas as these areas are predominantly one and two storey houses, or in GRZ where it conflicts with the Neighbourhood Character.

16. Neighbourhood character must be considered and this could mean in areas of predominantly single story detached housing that ResCode is varied to suit neighbourhood character, allowing prohibition of boundary to boundary dwellings

17. Height limits must apply to all buildings and not just residential. "

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

On November 6, 2012 it was reported that the Victorian government was cooling on the idea of another port for Hastings and instead its planners were casting their collective beady eye in the direction of Werribee. ("Government looks west for next port development," The Age, 6 Nov., p.6.) One imagines hope springing on the Mornington Peninsula as a dark shadow turns west to cast its pall on Werribeeans instead. But do we even need one new port?

At first gasp, if you have lived down on the Mornington Peninsula under the threatening shadow of a planned port for Hastings, you might tentatively hope that the government has actually called the dogs off. Then, if you have some conscience, you might think, "But why inflict the same on Werribee?" The people who live in Werribee are our fellow citizens.

Werribee is, it is true, heavily industrialised, however the area also has extensive wetlands that nature relies on. Worse, there are documents indicating associated plans for even more elaborate destruction for the wider coastal area which is of historic cultural significance in Victorian hearts, bearing the evocative name of Avalon:

"Transport Minister Terry Mulder had been briefed on a proposed ''master plan'' for the Avalon region, including a container port, an international airport, industrial development and a formula one track."

The Absurdity of multiple ports

But why are we even thinking of another port? When did state governments begin to think in terms of serial ports, one after another, in preparation for a huge increase in container traffic against a real backdrop of container traffic decline. It seems insane, unless you consider the desperation that affects people accustomed to a certain income who see the prospects of maintaining their corporate and private empires declining in a world where growth is going to become impossible to maintain. Over the past few years such people have convinced governments to use taxpayers' money to finance huge infrastructure projects - like desalination plants and massive tollways - of questionable value but involving enormous turnover for those involved. Ports are just another version of the tollways, tunnels and city apartment blocks template for raising cash from banks, investors and taxpayers. The key is to make the project sound inevitable and necessary. That's their game and the growth merchants don't have another one.

Jenny Warfe, of Blue Wedges, says,

How many ports do we really need? We have a massive port in Melbourne – with another $1.5 billion expansion planned for soon, a substantial port in Geelong, and smaller ones in Portland and Hastings."

She reminds us that all these ports occupy important, formerly publicly owned coastal assets. Every one imposes considerable negative impacts on its surrounding suburbs and waterways.

With regard to 'heavily industrialised Werribee', the greater part of the Western shoreline is largely untouched.

"The area that is being talked about for the ‘Bay West’ port is an internationally significant RAMSAR site, on which rely millions of migratory birds every year, just like Westernport," Jenny reminds us.

Only in September, Jenny compered a lecture in Melbourne from visiting US academic Richard Heinberg, who is a well-known author on the problem of oil-depletion, which many think is behind the wars we are involved in in the Middle East. Oil production or extraction is no longer keeping up with the demands of compound growth in human economic activity. Even though there is oil out there, it is harder and harder to get out of the earth, with high risks for investors and the environment. Although there is an industry for recovering oil from tar sands and even shale, what the public lack the education to understand is that the cost of extracting oil from such forms hardly leaves room for any profit and is deadly for the environment. Decline in abundant, cheap oil availability means that there won't be any new sustained 'growth' in production, trade and transport of cheap goods round and round the world. The price of production goes up as the availability of easily accessible oil goes down, so production must adjust downwards.

"In his recent Melbourne address, Heinberg warned that as we reach peak oil and peak everything else, we may not be exporting and importing so much, and surely not so much of the low cost high volume junk that fills up so many import containers at the moment, " comments Ms Warfe.

(Although 'peak oil' indicates a peak of production, where there is more oil than at any other time, there is a cliff on the other side, and that is where we are heading. In fact there are many indications that we have passed that peak.)

"Mr. Heinberg is right to be adamant that we should focus on getting population expansion and consumption levels under control and power DOWN not UP, " she says.

Nutty idea to increase trade infrastructure when trade is in decline

This is the most important message of candobetter.net and Jenny joins the dots well. There is no point in building new ports for declining trade.

Jenny suggests that these ideas for more ports are coming from old fossils in suits blowing $billions on the tired old ‘business as usual’ pipe-dream- which is this latest port proposal in a nutshell.

Instead of more of the same with the public expected to lie down and think of England, while pipe-dream addicted planners rifle through the public purse, as Ms Warfe sums up:

"We need funds and good minds with the capacity to deal with reality. We need different solutions for the very different future we and all species on Earth face."

Yes, we don't need a new port in Hastings and we don't need a new port in Werribee. They are both bad ideas. A formula one car racing track in the Avalon Region, in the light of declining oil and the need to conserve energy, is sublimely ridiculous. One can only interpret this suggestion as symbolically associated with the awful and tragic dependence of the Australian economy on the automobile industry (which also enables the suburban development industry). For anyone who had never thought of this, try ... um... driving... round some outer suburbs and you will see entire districts dedicated, not only to the sale and maintenance of new and used cars, but to marketing and retailing a range of associated paraphernalia, from deodorisers to window transfers to car brand-name wind sheeters. This is the outcome of colonial corporate thinking and the suppression of diverse local manufacturing activity. Our politicians are responsible.

Peninsula Port Plans have already cost the community dearly

Unfortunately and absurdly, even if the Mornington Peninsula is reprieved from a huge industrial port sector at Hastings, the future traffic predicted to be associated with the Port was used as an excuse to put a huge new tollway, which already scars substantial landscape and bushland. Westerfield heritage area and large parts of The Pines have been destroyed to build that road in preparation for traffic to and from Hastings (port), over years of protest by environmentalists. Even agreements to fence off predators from bandicoot areas in the Pines have since been renegged on with the special sums allocated arbitrarily diverted to other projects by Parks Victoria, according to Hans Brunner.

But do the authors of these huge projects even care, as long as someone makes a profit along the line? Costs will be borne by any investors that were counting on guaranteed tollway profits due to hugely increased volumes of traffic on the Peninsula. Such schemes are money floats for those who initiate them, but the chances of them paying down the line with oil depletion looming are minute, and the designers almost certainly knew this. They were probably taking advantage of public ignorance of resource supplies. See SEITA tollway using old data on oil prices.

At no stage either is it ever made clear to the public how closely political parties of all hues are associated with such massive land-development projects, via their business and investment arms. For an idea of how this works, look at Labor Resources, bearing in mind that this kind of activity, although on a grand scale in the Labor Party, also goes on in the other established parties with big budgets and major landed and investment assets.

There is more to these port projects than meets the eye of the casual observer.