growth lobby

George Monbiot is at it again.

See It’s the Rich Wot Gets the Pleasure of 27 Oct 2011.

George Monbiot is at it again.

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/10/27/its-the-rich-wot-gets-the-pleasure/
Why does he and his ilk insist on asserting the primacy of consumption over population growth as the most critical factor toward aggregate resource liquidation and associated global catastrophes such as climate change?

BOTH conditions are the problem!!
Each one factors upon the other to deliver increasing resource depletion and system entropy.
Why waste time and public attention span arguing a false dichotomy?

That said, it is high material consumption standards that are, ostensibly, the central pursuit of our current capitalist value system. It lies at the very heart of the dominant economic growth fetish, which has a core metabolic need for all participants to consume, and to compete to consume, ever greater streams of 'stuff'. Why else would 'consumer confidence' be such a prominent indicator of economic health?

Population growth is merely a lazy way to bid up national or corporate GDP numbers in lieu of the productivity gains that the 'experts' incessantly tout as being the ideal means for economic growth. However population expansion does also serve to bid up the value of resource assets owned by the obscenely wealthy, so perhaps it does provide for an implicit core function within capitalist economy.

In the third world population growth is largely a collateral damage aggregated from the cultural and landscape destructions borne of colonial resource plunder. However globalisation has very successfully harnessed those who are too poor to be effective consumers into a yoke of corporate slave labor. Consequently unemployed westerners can at least afford shoes, shirts and gadgets, even if they are the discards of others who are easily able to buy too much at cheap-as-chips 'discount' prices.

Given this centrality of consumption to the modern economic equation, and the relative periphery of population growth, what is George's plan for reform?

It had better be a damn good one. Consumption levels are now, more than ever before, THE dominant socio-economic value. Radically decreasing them will require absolute system revolution, or a complete systemic collapse. Either way larger population only adds to the difficulties and risks involved within the transition. Without this revolution, incremental consumption will be ongoing and population growth will magnify its impacts upon both the planet and the poor.

Furthermore, excessive population growth also confuses and complexifies systems of communication and delivery, both local and global. The poor are clearly the biggest losers from such systemic 'entropy'.

So then, all things considered, why trivialise or malign concern about population levels?

Monbiot's view on Nuclear power reeks similarly of evidence that he is, in fact, a closet growthist. At complete odds with his stated views against 'over-consumption' he fails to observe that aggregate energy consumption is way, way too great. He implicitly accepts current and growing energy demand levels as a foundation of the problem at hand, factors this with climate change as the greatest concern facing humanity, and arrives at nuclear power generation as the solution.

The contradiction this poses with his 'over-consumption' fetish is astonishing. However the most salient flaw in his thinking is his complete oversight of high energy consumption as a core problem, no matter what the generation method. The most critical fact is that we move around too much, we build too much, we dig up too much stuff, we eat too much and we breed too much. All because we derive access to and consume too much energy. (It is vital to note that we do not 'generate' energy. We extract it from materials and systems occurring naturally around us, all of which have critical extraction limits. There is also always a loss between what we extract from system flows or sinks, thus depleting them by that amount, and what we can actually convert to our use from that extracted amount. These losses also create impacts, such as waste heat and frequency pollution. Our economic system externalises both the depletion and the conversion losses.)

The cold reality of advanced depletion across multiple vital resource values dictates that it's time to simply stop being so utterly and intractably frantic in our lives and in our expectations. It's time to learn how to just sit around a lot more; to think, talk and have simple fun; to spend our precious, finite time upon unhurried days with people and pastimes we genuinely like, rather than purchasing facile amusement and ego adornment with money that we mostly don't have. This shortfall obliges our permanent commitment to a mostly un-fulfilling, grinding work schedule to which our tenure is increasingly uncertain and destructively competitive. Such an uneasy commitment, welded to us by debt, debases our life to being a cellular input to the weight and power of the global industrial behemoth. We become one small cell in a burgeoning consumer battery. And then, like George, we have to conjure or adopt myths that can enable some belief in our personal metaphysical health. Admittedly George has carved a relatively well-configured position within the battery complex.

The commercial cost of genuine basic needs poses a significant problem to most of us when considering this necessary slowdown, most particularly the cost of amenable housing. Both the affordability and the amenity of housing are directly and seriously diminished by rapid population growth. Amenity includes access to land, private or common, on which to grow food bearing gardens. Thus population growth increases our need to work even harder to maintain our own basic standards, even when we renounce mainstream consumer behaviors. Thanks George. Appreciate your help and concern with this problem. Not!

This condition of bondage to growth might be something that the Occupy movements could very usefully focus upon.

The way The Australian writes him up, Tim Flannery, who once wrote so articulately in defense of our land and its ecology and our place in it, now seems reduced to a quasi-apologist for extreme mining technologies. The Australian writes in such an unbalanced way. See also "Fracking Democracy..."

"Tim Flannery backs coal-seam gas and mining industry" by Amos Aikman, The Australian, October 25, 2011

Unbalanced perspective

The article reads as if Tim Flannery, (famously author of The Future Eaters), alarmed at the roughshod being run over Australian farmers' rights and the environment, is trying to get higher standards in the mining industry.

He is reported to have said that, "similar arguments applied to mining generally, and called on government and industry to do more to regulate and rein in poor performers."

The Australian cites him as saying that mining is utterly necessary for modern life.
It fails to balance its argument by giving the case for allowing population to downsize and relocalise and for people to be more self-sufficient in a slower economy to allow the planet time to heal. No attention is given to how we all work harder for less and how many of us don't see the point in producing all this short-lived 'stuff' that finishes up in land-fills. Yet it is only in order to continue producing all this stuff that extreme technologies like gas-fracking can be artificially politically justified. In the end the only reason to go on producing more and more stuff is to keep a few undeserving greedy people at the top in the positions to which they have become accustomed.

Completely different perspective operates outside our system, but we don't know of it

Here is the comment I sent to the Australian regarding their article:

"France recently passed a law in parliament to make fracking illegal. The law rescinds rights previously granted and put any schale-mining for gas on hold pending new and safer technologies. Source: JT, Edition du Mercredi 13 Avril 2011, http://jt.france2.fr/20h/ Since then a further report was released and covered on the news for France 2, Monday 3 October 2011, which said that the French Government remained unconvinced by the latest techniques proposed by fracking concerns. All permits have been cancelled. High on the list of reasons against fracking in France was the risk of contamination of water supply and its impact on agriculture and human health.

This parliamentary decision is yet more evidence for those aware of different legal systems, that the Napoleonic system in France and Europe is far more democratic - in protecting peoples' rights and communal (and national) assets and vital resources - than the anglophone systems in their various forms in Britain and her current and ex-colonies."

Let's see if they publish that.

Murdochian only spoken here

Generally, it seems that, if you want to have your opinion published in the mainstream press you may only express it in so far as it fits their paradigm. So Tim Flannery, who once wrote so articulately in defense of our land and its ecology and our place in it, now appears to be reduced to being portrayed as a quasi-apologist for extreme mining technologies. It is hard to believe that he is really behind gas-fracking. One gets the impression that he is now interfacing, on behalf of numerous committees, with a monolithic industrial mining front that speaks uniquely in Murdochian.

It is as if our press and government have rendered us incapable of imagining any other way. France's parliamentary decision to ban gas-fracking is yet more evidence that the Napoleonic system in France and Europe is far more democratic - in protecting peoples' rights and communal (and national) assets and vital resources - than the anglophone systems in their various forms in Britain and her current and ex-colonies.

Australia's mass media and government keep her citizens in the dark and feed them B.S.

Australia's lack of information and news from Western Continental Europe keeps us in the dark about other ways other possibilities, and notably enduring forms of democracy that retain local powers. We only get an Anglophone perspective on matters of importance. America, Canada, Australia are among the least democratic countries in the world, with vast and growing differences between the haves and the have-nots, in legal systems which cannibalise and destroy their own community, citizens and resources. The reason that these countries are not yet obviously reduced to the poverty of Haiti is that their citizens started out with more resources per capita. As commonwealth is transferred more and more into private hands in those systems, people who have to date been able to survive, will not survive. The growing numbers of homeless and hopelessly endebted are indicators of the social unsustainability of the current economic and legal systems in Australia, America and Canada. In France and the rest of Europe, it is virtually impossible for citizens to be left without shelter unless they voluntarily opt out - as some homeless do - albeit with every attempt made to shelter them each winter.

That this same system was able to appraise and legislate against a threat to its peoples' way of life in response to their protests is an indication that their system is more democratic and more flexible than ours.

Your ABC will be giving yet more air-space to commercial growth lobbyists who will be spruiking at the Wheeler Center tonight. Publicity for the event actually claims that high density living is "great for the environment." In fact, the Australian Conservation Foundation's Consumption Atlas shows that greenhouse gas emissions of those living in high-density areas are greater than for those living in low-density areas. An analysis of the data shows that the average carbon dioxide equivalent emission of the high-density core areas of Australian cities is 27.9 tons per person whereas that for the low-density outer areas is 17.5 tons per person. (Free Event TONIGHT 12 OCT 2011.)

Wheeler Center - another festival for malignant Growth to be amplified by Your ABC.
The Wheeler Center will be hosting a predictable event called, "Seven Billion, it's getting crowded in here," on Wednesday 12th 6.15pm at 176 Little Lonsdale Street, near Russell St.

Money talks over democracy

Publicity for the event kicks off with a completely erroneous statement that "High density living is great for the environment."
We can expect that ignorant assertion to dictate the level of discussion. The advocates of growth seem willing to say anything and repeat it ad nauseum in the appearance of justifying their totalitarian push for developers to maximise their financial returns. Sadly, Your ABC seems happy to promote the malignant growth virus.

"High density living is great for the environment, right? But what does it do to our heads and hearts? The Australian psyche was moulded by the myth of the ‘wide brown land’, so what might life packed like sardines look and feel like? With the world’s seven billionth person is about to be born, can we learn from the Asian megacity experience? And will we still be sharing a cup of sugar with our neighbours? As the population debate gets mental, we’re going in search of the soul in urban sprawl. Hosted by Natasha Mitchell and featuring Kim Dovey, Helen Killmier, Bernard Salt and Sein-Way Tan. Presented in partnership with ABC Radio National."[More about the speakers in note [1]

What does the 'environment' mean to the person who wrote that ridiculous statement? Obviously not fans of biodiversity. Do they actually like landscapes destroyed by coal mining, gas fracking and sand-mining?

But there is a mountain of evidence to show that, not only is high density living unpleasant and reduces options for self-sufficiency, it uses much more energy than ordinary low density blocks:

"On the Green advocacy website Planetizen.com there is an interesting new piece entitled "Resisting Dickensian Gloom." This article cites several new Australian studies that refute the whole notion that we can build our way out of Global Warming. Australia, which bought into the high density dream early on and now has vast swaths of the stuff, apparently now has cause for a little bit of buyer's remorse. Here is a part of what this article has to say:

Greenhouse gas emissions: Advocates of high-density policies (often termed "Smart Growth" but also under other descriptions and euphemisms such as "urban consolidation," "compact development," "growth management," and "urban renewal") maintain these policies save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A comprehensive study of per capita emissions in Australia based on household consumption of all products and services appears in the Australian Conservation Foundation's Consumption Atlas. Unexpectedly, this analysis shows that greenhouse gas emissions of those living in high-density areas are greater than for those living in low-density areas. An analysis of the data shows that the average carbon dioxide equivalent emission of the high-density core areas of Australian cities is 27.9 tons per person whereas that for the low-density outer areas is 17.5 tons per person. As mentioned in the Demographia Survey introduction, food and goods purchase account for most of the emissions and this amounts to more for wealthier inner-city dwellers.

Surprisingly, transport emissions amount to very little (only 10.5%), household electricity and heating fuel being about twice as much at 20.0%. It should also be noted that the emissions from household dwelling construction and renovations at 11.8% are greater than emissions for transport. It is clear that transport, so heavily emphasized by Smart Growth advocates, is responsible for only a small fraction of household emissions.

The article goes on to cite a few more studies, all of which come to the conclusion that packing people into urban core development might not be as "green" a thing as advocates such as noted ecologist Arnold Schwarzenegger have claimed. Which means that low density communities such as Sierra Madre might very well be the greenest possible solution after all. And that Sacramento, along with SCAG and 40% of our current City Council here (they're the ones that talk a lot), should really go find some other way to save the world.

Hopefully one that might actually work.
Posted on the Sierra Madre Tattler at http://sierramadretattler.blogspot.com/2010/02/high-density-development-actually.html

[1] The speakers:
Kim Dovey - Kim Dovey is an Australian architectural critic and Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne, Australia, teaching urban design theory. Dovey, K (2005) Fluid City: Transforming Melbourne's Urban Waterfront, London: Routledge

Helen Killmier - Helen is a community psychologist. Her areas of responsibility include disability services, community aged care, recreation, respite, partnership development, community capacity building, social policy and strategic planning. Prior to this position Helen spent 12 years in Local Government in management positions working directly with communities. Her research interests are in sense of community, the built environment, place attachment, community development, community governance, health and community wellbeing.

Bernard Salt

Sein-Way Tan - serves on the Advisory Board of Global Urban Development, Climate Prosperity Alliance and Data Cities. Sein-way’s consultancy is advising the Chinese government on its sustainable cities policy, and the UN Habitat’s World Urban Campaign. His research focuses on rapid global urbanisation and is conducted in collaboration with more than 400 global leaders in politics, business and environment.

Participants were shocked recently to hear Ms Prue Digby, Deputy Secretary, Planning and Local Government, Department of Planning and Community Development include in her paper on "housing a growing population" a section on "eliminating the NIMBY culture" at the Informa Australia "Population Australia - 2050 Summit." Article by Julianne Bell.

By Julianne Bell
On Monday and Tuesday 26 and 27 September 2011 I I - representing Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc., I attended the second annual Conference organised by Informa Australia Pty Ltd entitled, “Population Australia - 2050 Summit”. This was a national conference and included public servants from Government (State, Federal and Local); eminent academics; and representatives of the business world and the housing industry plus a smattering of representatives of community groups. (Several of us were able to attend only because a benefactor provided us with the admission tickets or Conference fees.)

Ms Prue Digby, Deputy Secretary, Planning and Local Government, Department of Planning and Community Development included in her paper on "housing a growing population" a section on "eliminating the NIMBY culture". Participants were shocked as we considered that this was confrontational and indicated a contemptuous view of the community by a member of a Government Department. We were additionally shocked when she presented a solution stating that 30% of future population growth could be accommodated in "infill" housing in established suburbs. (Dr Bob Birrell of Monash University labels this "opportunistic infill" by developers.)

I - Julianne Bell - asked a question at the end of Ms Digby’s speech as follows: “Your Minister. Matthew Guy, advised us after the election that future density of development would be directed to the inner city, for example in developments such as E-Gate and Fisherman’s Bend and not in the suburbs. Yet after the election we are seeing high rise or high density (housing) proposals in Bayside, Banyule and Boroondara City Councils. Can you clarify what are your policy directions (concerning infill housing)?

Ms Digby refused to answer the question and said “You had better ask him yourself” and with that she left the podium. Unfortunately, we cannot give you a tape of her statement as Ms Digby insisted that Informa and Sustainable Population Australia Inc., who chaired Day One of the Conference, delete their recordings.

Mark O'Connor (Professional Poet and Author of "Overloading Australia") spoke at the Conference on "Environmental and social implications of a 'Big Australia' . He commented to me on Prue Digby's statement about "infill" in suburbs. He said: " Densification cheats residents out of quality of life" and that "it indicates the constant decline of our living standards".

We are seeking clarification from the Minister for Planning about increased density in established suburbs using infill and on promoting high rise along transports routes (tram, bus and rail) and around stations as this is contrary to his stated policies after the election. The questions are topical ones in Banyule, Boroondara and Bayside to name a few suburbs.

Julianne Bell Secretary Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc.

Why doesn't the government cut land costs? High costs of land, and the resources it carries - energy and water - are responsible for our failing economy. The greatest costs to small and medium-sized businesses are the rents they pay for their shops, warehouses, and factories. The greatest costs to workers are the rents they pay for personal accommodation. Small and medium-sized businesses pay both for their business premises and for their personal accommodation. Manufacturing in Australia is losing out to high rents and housing costs. Wages must go up to satisfy the malignant effect of land-speculation, which government continues to encourage against our common welfare. But, why don't they just cut the land-costs? Stop pushing up property prices by reducing immigration and you won't have to put wages up. Business will become competitive on the world market again, because most of its profits won't go on rent of premises. Let's get rid of the property developers. Let's outlaw land speculation. [Title changed from "Cut land-costs, not wages. Down with property developers, Up with workers!" on 9 Oct 2011.]

We hear that over 90% of small businesses quickly go broke. Some of you may assume that this is because they are all incompetent. That would mean that you have a low opinion of your fellow Australian and that you haven't considered the costs that operate in our society and are causing our factories to close.

The greatest costs to small and medium-sized businesses are the rents they pay for their shops, warehouses, and factories.

Do we ever hear the Liberal Party or the Labor Party say anything about this?

No.

But land costs and rent costs erode profit margins and drive everyone except the major corporations out of business.

The major corporations (which include newspapers, banks and developers) invest in land and are responsible for high rents and mortgages. They constantly lobby against ordinary Australians for more immigrants to keep those costs high. They are in the business of putting the rest of us out of business.

Why is the government ignoring that land cost factors completely dwarf all the other factors causing Australian manufacturing and most other small business to founder?

The public service is bringing in contractors in order to keep wages down. Once they did not have the right to do this. Once they had to negotiate fairly.

We are losing our rights to decent wages and conditions at the same time that big business is forcing up rents and housing costs.

The mass media is full of nonsense about how the economy cannot afford for wage rises. The mass media has nothing to say about the huge iceberg our economy is running up against in rising land prices. It only talks about how a tiny minority of people who have invested in second properties are able to sell their houses for more money. It says nothing about how business fails and people become homeless due to these rising costs.

Now I hear of how state governments are talking about bringing in contractors to undercut cleaners' wages. Cleaners are arguably among the most poorly paid workers in Australian industry. They work very hard and have little status.

The same thing is happening to drivers, with local governments considering colluding to introduce strike-breakers in order to stop industrial action to negotiate small wage rises in another ill-paid industry.

Why is it always those who can least afford it who must bear the brunt of our ill-run economy, whilst the CEOs and head-kickers get huge wages for simply being mean and greedy?

Please send this cartoon to Julia and Wayne and your local politicians and ask them, "Why don't you just cut the land costs?"

With so many contradictory policies coming from our mainstream political parties, it indicates they are in a quandary about retaining "popularity" with voters, being seen to address overarching national and global issues, retaining their power, and at the same time appeasing their powerful corporate supporters and their growth-agendas.

The fact that our State and Federal government decided to create a Melbourne @ 5 million , and the "big Australia" policies, contrary to consultation and democratic principles is due to our governments' direction mainly coming from big businesses, global and national corporations, and very large and powerful lobby groups.

Voters and grass-roots interests are increasingly being ignored in favour of the elite, and those with economic and political power.

Plans are now about defining the details of how are communities are to accept the growth that's taken to be already decided, not whether it is in our interests.
Sham "consultations" are on how, not "yes" or "no" do we want them, or whether they in our best interests.

Family-hostile high rise apartments are not appropriate in Australia, and at a time we are often preached to about being sustainable. It's given lip-service in reality!

Melbourne's "activity centres" of high developments mean energy-guzzling lifestyles with little options for alternative living and self-sufficiency.
EnergyAustralia NSW and the Australian Conservation Foundation (download main findings report) have both come to the same conclusion that high-rise living, as more people are being forced to "choose" due to population growth, means much higher per capita greenhouse gas emissions that villas, townhouses or separate dwellings. The NSW Energy Australia study revealed that high-rise apartments use 30 per cent more power than a typical detached house. Much of this is in the common areas such as foyers and car parks where lights are often inefficient and are left on night and day. They are ineligible roof-top solar photovoltaic (PV) systems and water-tank harvesting, or the ability to enjoy the benefits of eaves, the shade of trees or the self-sufficiency of home gardens.

Capitalism is a great ideology and can achieve many wonderful things and open doors, but unchecked, it can undermine democracy and the will of a nation's citizens. Former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, by over-riding the concerns of the Australian people regarding population growth, saw his popularity plummet after he gave his unapologetic support to a “big Australia”. It was also his lack of action on climate change and the power of mining giants that undermined him too.

The groundswell against atrocities committed to Australian cattle sent to Indonesia was overlooked in favour of the power of the livestock industries and their well-financed lobby groups. Politicians are funded by big corporations and they will never “bite the hand that feeds them”.

Despite the overwhelming majority of Australians who don't want population growth, it is foisted upon us by compliant politicians pandering to the greed of big business, the banking sector and developers.

As a society we are succumbing to Stockholm syndrome - where victims start to comply with their prisoners - as we allow capitalist excesses to wreck our land, our cities, and clear bushland and wipe out the habitat of flora and fauna. All for greed and profits – even risking endangered species in the process,

Profits now come before people, profits before environmental sustainability, profits before community. It's money before life itself. The self-destructive human gene is being allowed a free reign to support “economic growth” at all costs, and allow us to collectively ignore the converging signs on our planet that should indicate our time of growth is OVER. Nothing living can keep growing without it becoming detrimental and destructive - to internal vital organs and infrastructures, and on a macro planetary level.

With so many contradictory policies coming from our mainstream political parties, it indicates they are in a quandary about retaining voter "popularity", being seen to address overarching national and global issues, retaining their power, and at the same time appeasing their powerful corporate supporters. Such contradictory forces are hard to reconcile.

In a brilliant new paper released this morning, Labor MP Kelvin Thomson has proposed his "Witches' Hats" theory of government -- a theory that places central importance on rates of population growth.

Democratic politicians, says Kelvin, are often bluffed by lobbyists who convince them that what is good for business is good for their or their governments' political longevity -- and that since population growth is good for business (or at least for big business, since it provides more customers) it must good for the Parties they belong to.

The reverse is the case, he says. It's not just in unstable states that rapid population growth is bad for political stability. Even in securely democratic countries, population growth destabilises leaders and governments.

One striking example is the amazingly rapid fall of Kevin Rudd, the (once) extremely popular Australian prime minister who pushed Australia's annual population growth in 2009 to 2.1%, nearly six times the average for industrialised countries, told the electorate "I support a big Australia" and had a meteoric fall in the opinion polls -- and from office. But Kelvin Thomson argues in his The Witches’ Hats Theory of Government: How increasing population is making the task of government harder that this connection is far more widespread than politicians and political analysts have yet recognised.

Why? Because staying in power, and keeping the electorate happy is a little like an advanced driving course, one in which a government is required to thread a kind of slalom course between a series of witches' hats -- meaning the orange inverted cones that mark out the course. These hats, which the government, like the driver, needs to avoid knocking over, include such things as keeping electricity and water costs down, reducing hospital queues, keeping housing affordable, preserving the environment, providing full employment, restricting inflation, etc.

And the faster a country’s population is rising, the harder it is to do this, says Kelvin Thomson. It’s like trying to negotiate the course at double speed.

"Countries with stable populations, like the Scandinavian nations, tend to have stable governments. I’m suggesting that the life-expectancy of a democratic party or a particular Prime Minister may be crucially affected by how fast the population is growing. Governments that preside over rapid population growth tend to have short honeymoon periods, and soon find themselves on the nose with the electorate.

"I recently headed a parliamentary delegation to the Solomon Islands and Samoa. At the time of independence, the Solomon Islands had a population of 170,000 – now its population is three times that, over 500,000. It has seen frequent changes of Prime Minister, and the other countries in the region have troops stationed there to keep the peace. Its Parliament has not met this year, and our Delegation was told that this was because the Prime Minister was afraid of a Parliamentary vote of no-confidence.

"Samoa by contrast has had a relatively stable population of around 170,000 to 180,000 for decades. It has had the same Prime Minister for nearly 20 years, and the same governing Party for nearly 30 years."

"So when politicians are puzzled by their ratings and ask “Why don’t they like me?”, the answer might well be that they are driving the car too fast and knocking over those witches’ hats. They should slow the car down and focus on solving people’s real-life problems."

Contact Kelvin at [email protected] or phone +613 9350 5777

Mark O'Connor's email address is [email protected] His website is at www.australianpoet.com

The Centre for Population and Urban Research (CPUR) has recently released a major new report on immigration and on Australia's alleged need for labour. It shows that there is no real problem with supplying labour for the Resources Boom -- even if you accept the government's assumption that we need to export our resources as fast as possible.

(For the view that we don't and shouldn't see
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/29145 --but the CPUR report shows that even if we did, there isn't a problem.)

Authored by B. Birrell, E. Healy, K. Betts and T. F. Smith, it's called
"Immigration and the Resources Boom Mark 2."

It says that the government's immigration decisions in the 2011-12 budget show that the PM has walked away from her implied promise to stop Australia "hurtling down a track to a 36 million or a 40 million population," (interview with Leigh Sales, Lateline 28/6/2010).

Among its explosive findings:

There is no real labour shortage. Half of current Net Overseas Migration (NOM) would still produce 1 to 1.7 million extra workers by 2025.

A Skills Australia/Access Economics study that the government relies on, which appeared to show that we would need high migration to provide enough workers, was circular. It assumed a much higher population, such as only high immigration would produce, and then deduced that we need high immigration to provide that population's workforce!

The government has given in to the vested interest of big business.

As Dr Katharine Betts, Sociologist, puts it,

"The Gillard Government has yielded to the demands of the business lobby for a big Australia of 36 million plus by 2051.

This decision was also influenced by the level of aggregate growth in GDP that the government wants to achieve. The government is not managing the economy to increase the people's welfare; rather it is increasing the number of people in order to boost an arbitrary measure of aggregate economic growth.

Projected increases in per capita GDP are miniscule. They will in no way compensate citizens for increased congestion, inflated costs of housing and loss of amenity.

The report also shows that arguments about the the need to import immigrant skills to fuel the resources boom are weak to the point of falsehood. It demonstrates that it would be possible to halve annual net overseas migration from 180,000 to 90,000 with no adverse effects on export-oriented industries."

Here is the Executive Summary:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Contending pressures

Two contending pressures have shaped the Australian Government’s population policy. One reflects employers’ desire to sustain a rapidly growing workforce and a high rate of population growth so as to maximise aggregate economic growth. They want to maintain net overseas migration (NOM) at 180,000 per year or above. The other is urban sustainability. This reflects voters’ concern about the implications for their quality of life if NOM should continue at 180,000 or above. They fear ever-growing congestion, loss of urban amenity and dwindling housing affordability
.
The Australian Government’s decisions on the immigration program were detailed at the time of the 2011–12 Budget announcements. These show that the employers’ concerns have prevailed. As a result, NOM is likely to track at 180,000 or higher into the medium term and the population will grow to 36 million or more by 2051. If this happens, the ‘Big Australia’ that politicians promised to avert at the 2010 election will be unavoidable.

Why do the government and employer groups want continued high migration?

The case for higher migration partly rests on estimates of the number of skilled workers that employers require. The most widely quoted source on the scale of this need has been prepared by the government’s workforce advisory body, Skills Australia. It concludes that, Australia will need an extra 2.4 million skilled workers by 2015 and an extra 5.2 million by 2025. Such enormous numbers cannot be achieved without very high net migration.

However, these forecasts were determined by the assumptions that the econometric modellers (Access Economics) were required to work with. These included that NOM would grow from 220,000 in 2010 to 250,000 by 2025 and that Australia’s aggregate GDP would grow at nearly four per cent per annum over the period to 2025.

These extreme assumptions meant that there would have to be rapid workforce growth. Moreover, Access Economics assumed that productivity growth would be very high, and that this would result in a more skills-intensive economy. This meant that new entrants to the workforce were assumed to be more skilled than in the past. In other words, the Skills Australia projections are based on a circular argument, grounded on the assumptions fed into the model used by Access Economics.

Sustaining aggregate economic growth

The Australian Government’s immigration policy is also influenced by the level of aggregate economic growth that the government wishes to achieve. Currently, this is 3.25 per cent per year. This target requires NOM to be around 180,000. Though this is little known, the government is explicitly setting its immigration program so as to achieve pre-set targets for aggregate economic growth.

This policy is strongly supported by business interests. What matters for their bottom line is the number of workers and consumers in Australia. The higher these numbers, the more rapidly their businesses will grow. This is why there has been a scare campaign by lobbyists that Australia’s workforce growth will dry up in the absence of high migration.

For instance, Bernard Salt claims that 2011 is a watershed year. After 2011 the number of people entering the working ages will fall below the numbers exiting them. This claim is wrong. Even with zero NOM, we would have to wait until 2042 before the numbers entering the ages 15 to 24 fall below the numbers exiting the 55 to 64 age group.

We provide two workforce projections, both based on a NOM of 90,000 per annum. These indicate that, contrary to this scare campaign, there is likely to be substantial growth in the Australian workforce in the medium term even with NOM at half its present levels.

The first assumes that current workforce participation rates by age and sex will remain unchanged and the second that these will increase to match those achieved in Sweden by 2005. In the first scenario, Australia’s workforce grows quite strongly by 950,000 between 2010 and 2025 and in the second by 1,700,000 over the same period.

Per capita productivity will not be lower if aggregate economic growth slows.

Our workforce projections confirm that, with NOM at 90,000 per annum, workforce growth will be well below what it would be with 180,000 NOM. However, it is not the case, as is often argued, that Australia needs high NOM to offset an inevitable decline in per capita economic growth as the baby boomers retire. When this cohort, now aged 55 to 64, leaves the labour market, Australia’s labour-force participation rate will fall and thus per capita economic growth will decline as well. However, recent research by McDonald and Temple and by the Treasury shows that this decline is only marginally affected by the size of NOM. Australia’s per capita economic growth will be determined not by the level of immigration but by the extent to which residents participate in the workforce and by how productively they are employed.

Could NOM of 90,000 deliver the skills needed by the resources industries?

The key finding is that NOM at this lower level could satisfy the skill needs of the resources industries. Most of Australia’s current migration intake has little to do with the skills needed by these industries. ABS final figures for NOM show that when NOM peaked at 315,690 in 2008, 203,820 or 65 per cent derived from temporary-visa holders —students, temporary workers (457-visa holders), working holiday makers and visitors. Apart from the 457-visa holders, most of these migrants work as casuals in metropolitan semi-skilled jobs. And, most 457s are employed in service industries by metropolitan-based employers. Concessions granted by successive Australian governments have opened up pathways to permanent entry visas for all these temporaries. This encourages them to stay on in Australia and thus generate a continuing surplus of arrivals over departures in the NOM counts of temporary visa holders.

The great majority of permanent-entry visas in recent years have also been issued to persons working in metropolitan areas.
There have been major changes to the rules governing both temporary and permanent entry access to visas. We examine whether these new rules have produced an outcome better targeted to the needs of the resource industries. The conclusion is that further reforms need to be adopted.

Permanent migration

The analysis is based on a review of each of the three categories of visas for economic migrants: the points-tested, state-sponsorship, and employer-sponsored visa subclasses.

The share of the skilled visa program allocated to the points-tested visas has been reduced and priority is to be given to applicants with good English and skilled work experience. These visas have been heavily used by former overseas students. A result of the changes is that the number of visas issued to former overseas students will fall sharply, thus largely removing the incentive to study in Australia as a pathway to gaining permanent residence. However unpublished statistics show that tens of thousands of former overseas students will benefit from the transitional arrangements in place. Applications for permanent residence from these students will crowd out better qualified applicants for several years.

The state-sponsored visa subclasses have also been reformed in ways that will improve the English language proficiency and skill level of the migrants sponsored, but not the targeting of skills needed in the resource industries. Moreover, the legacy of past policies remains, notably the propensity of some states to use this visa category to pursue population building objectives. Reflecting this legacy, South Australia and Victoria retain an undeservedly high share of the visas to be allocated. For 2010–11, South Australia has been allocated 4,900 visas of the 23,000 visas available and Victoria 4,500, almost as many as Western Australia (6,000) and far more than Queensland (2,990).

The Labor Government is giving the employer-sponsored visa subclasses priority and these visas have seen the most growth in numbers. They also offer the greatest potential for cut backs. This category gives no priority to jobs crucial to the resource industries, and its policies for assessing credentials and testing English-language abilities are weak. They are far less stringent than those applying to the points-tested and state-sponsored visa subclasses.

A smaller, better-targeted permanent migration program could provide for much of the skill needs of the resource industries. There is also ample scope to tighten the rules governing the length of stay of temporary visa holders and to reduce their current large contribution to NOM. If these reforms were implemented, it would not be difficult to achieve a NOM of 90,000 per annum.

Temporary-entry migration and the construction needs of the resource industries

There will be a high demand for temporary workers in the construction (or start-up) phase of the mineral boom Mark 2. This demand should be satisfied, at least in part, by an increase in the number of workers recruited on temporary-entry 457 visas. This is appropriate as long as local workers are not excluded and as long as the extra temporary workers really are temporary.

A new scheme is to be introduced, the Enterprise Migration Agreements, to allow resource projects of at least $2 billion to recruit 457-visa holders on concessional terms, including the right to recruit semi-skilled construction industry workers. The government intends to allow all of these extra 457-visa holders to be eligible for permanent residence if they can find an employer to sponsor them. This could have serious social repercussions if Australia has to absorb large numbers of semi-skilled construction workers in the post-mineral boom Mark 2 era.

The government asserts that these temporarily recruited workers will ‘only be a temporary solution’. But recent history belies this assertion. In 2005, the government liberalised access to the permanent-entry employer-sponsorship visa subclasses for 457-visa holders. Currently, nearly half of them eventually gain permanent residence visas, and the great majority of those sponsored by employers are former 457-visa holders. The result is that the 457-visa program is becoming a pathway to permanent residence, rather than a temporary solution to Australia’s skill shortages.

The downside of population-induced economic growth

Most migrants locate in the Eastern metropolises, where they are the main contributor to the current city-building and people-servicing boom. The result of this influx is competition for scarce skills, particularly in the construction industries, and for public funds as these cities clamour for subsidies for their infrastructure and public services.

Victoria is a clear example. Thirty-six per cent of all job growth in Australia between March 2009 and March 2011 occurred in Victoria, yet Victoria’s share of Australia’s population is only 25 per cent. Most of this job growth was in Melbourne, where it was largely driven by growth in the construction and people-servicing industries. Links between this growth and the nation’s resources industries were minimal.

Australia risks wasting the fiscal dividend from the resources boom in this city-building process. With more modest population growth, this dividend could be far better spent on investment in education and the development of knowledge-intensive industries.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Approval to rezone the rural land opposite Serendip Sanctuary, Lara, near Geelong, sets a dangerous precedent for open slather development that places the wildlife protected there at risk and flies in the face of democracy. The Sanctuary is internationally recognised for successfully breeding captive species such as Brolga, Musk and Freckled Duck and now the Eastern Barred Bandicoot, which is on the brink of extinction. Serendip forms an important wildlife corridor between the You Yangs Regional Park and Brisbane National Park through agricultural land and the sprawl of Greater Melbourne as it spreads to meet the regional city of Geelong.

Why do Victorians and other Australians have to keep fighting over and over again to protect their rights from the very people who are supposed to be looking after their rights?

The new Liberal Government in Victoria needs to abandon Amendment C73 which was approved by City of Greater Geelong Councillors on 12 April 2011. Approval of C73 will allow rezoning of rural residential land to Residential 1. This retrograde step will literally pave the way for 380+ high density houses.

Residents have been opposing this application for 8 years!

What more do they need to do in a democracy?

Serendip Sanctuary under threat

Approval to rezone the rural land opposite Serendip Sanctuary crosses a line which should not be crossed and which the electorate does not want. To satisfy narrow ambitions to profit from unwanted development, wildlife at risk of extinction will be placed at greater risk.

Serendip Sanctuary is internationally recognised for successfully breeding captive species such as Brolga, Musk and Freckled Duck and now the Eastern Barred Bandicoot which is on the brink of Extinction. The 225 hectares that make it up were purchased and put aside by the Victoria State Government in 1959 for the purposes of wildlife research and the captive management and breeding of species threatened in Victoria. The sanctuary contains many different types of wetland and is home to many plant species as well, such as River Red Gums, tall spikerush, and tussock grass.

How can a supposedly expert and independent panel ignore the regional and international importance of this reserve?

Koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, brolgas, rare native geese...

Numerous nomadic wildlife, including Cape Barren geese, Magpie Geese and Eastern Grey kangaroos breed there and spill over on to the rural land surrounding the Sanctuary, which is only 2 km from You Yangs Regional Park. Serendip Sanctuary thus represents a very important wildlife corridor in an agricultural and small township area, which greater Melbourne is approaching in a pincer movement as it threatens to connect with the regional city of Geelong. The Serendip corridor ultimately leads, via the You Yangs Regional Park to the Brisbane Ranges National Park, which is a haven for koalas, which are daily losing their habitat to the unprecedented amount of development in Victoria and other states.

Serendip Sanctuary is just 45 minutes to the west of Melbourne but visitors will find that they are immediately amongst wild kangaroos and native birds, such as the animated honeyeaters and screeching cockatoos. The lake is the home of crowds of waterbirds. These waterbirds include the magnificent brolgas, celebrated in Aboriginal dance, now rarely seen by Australians.

These precious areas of nature on which our wildlife depend and which Australians and international tourists love will be inexcusably stressed if high density housing goes ahead opposite the Sanctuary, with the intensification of human activity and increase presence of cats, dogs and foxes which accompanies urbanization.

87% of Lara residents oppose this rural to urban rezoning.

Over 3000 residents or 87% of Lara’s enrolled voters have gone on record with submissions or petition signatures which were presented to the Legislative Assembly in November 2009 opposing the C73 Caddys Road Amendment. This level of public opposition is unprecedented in City of Greater Geelong Council history. The voice of the people was ignored by the Brumby Government.

"Independent Panel" unable to recognise importance of Serendip Sanctuary

Serendip Sanctuary and its environmental significance to Geelong and Victoria has been overlooked.

An Independent Panel undervalued the vast majority of serious environmental, safety and community issues that will result from C73 being approved.

As well as the blight on the environment that more development will cause, Lara also lacks infrastructure for additional population. Its schools are already overcrowded and there is a well documented history of fire and flood risk.

Much more careful planning with an emphasis on pulling back, less (development) is more, and quality living over quantity, is required for us all by Local and State Government. To the west of Lara there is already a huge area zoned for future development in Lara. There is thus no reasonable excuse to allow this new development to go ahead opposite the sanctuary.

Australians have a right to demand protection for their natural assets and to ensure peaceful co-existence with our wildlife.

Please help to protect Serendip Sanctuary and to protect Lara from inappropriate development by writing to the new Minister for Planning, Mathew Guy, and asking him to abandon the C37 Amendment which is the administrative culprit in the approaching man-made disaster.

Matthew Guy
Minister for Planning
State Parliament of Victoria
Level 7
1 Spring Street
MELBOURNE.V.3000

Email: matthew.guy[at]parliament.vic.gov.au

The Canadian federal election cries out for an alternative to BAU growthism. It cries out for a party which would present a coherent and distinctive alternative to the system of economic growth. Canadians need a place on the ballot where they can mark an "X" beside "no more growth". In fact they need an opportunity for vote for "de-growth". But the Green Party of Canada is not providing them with that opportunity or alternative. Instead, what they are providing is meaningless rhetoric and platitudes. Shall we lend credence to their approach by voting for them? Shall we allow them to say that they have our support for their direction? Shall we allow them to say, after receiving our vote, that they have a mandate to push for hyper immigration and a foreign aid policy that would continue to promote global overpopulation? I say no. I say that casting a vote can sometimes be worse than spoiling a ballot. There are many things one can do to promote change that voting in a sham election. Writing, petitioning, demonstrating and educating the grassroots come to mind.

The Canadian federal election is upon us and the Green Party claims to offer a "significantly different approach to governance" (see below). Really? Let's take a look:

1. "Growth is fine--as long as it doesn't foreclose future options". What kind of growth doesn't? What kind of growth does not involve the consumption of non-renewable resources? Growth in knowledge? Human brains need energy and sustenance. More humans need more resources, no matter what they do. Doesn't knowledge involve capital investments? Computers? Printers? Books? Classrooms? Laboratories? Lab equipment? Or is this knowledge to be imparted by ESP? Can we have science without technology? And if not, what technology does not require material inputs? Are MRI machines, electric cars and solar panels to be made out of thin air? How can the metals and minerals required for such technology be extracted without "plundering the earth”?

2. "We can have nutritious food forever---so long as we look after the soil" Food for how many people? 7 billion? Without fossil fuel inputs? If soil requires 15 years to regenerate naturally, then how many people could be fed? Do the math. 1/16 of 7 billion is what? Does the Green Party have a plan to shrink the human population down to fit that soil capacity? Do they have any plan that involves the "P" in the IPAT equation? Do they even know what the IPAT equation is?

3. "We could have a well fed, comfortably housed, well educated, healthy and employed population, without plundering the earth" Again, the Green don't tell us how many people could be "well fed, comfortably housed, well educated, healthy and employed" using the resources that are affordably accessible---and for how long.

4."Political parties of every stripe are mesmerized by the mantra to grow, grow, grow---every party, that is, except the Green Party". The Green Party does not believe in growth? Hmm. How would Canada NOT grow when it adds 350,000 people to its number each year? How does the Green Party intend to put an end to growth by advocating an immigration level 25% higher than it is now (285,000 per year)? How does it propose to end growth in a world that sees 80 million additional humans each year? Are they telling us that we can have population growth without economic growth? Will those extra people not demand resources? Where will the material to build "comfortable" houses for those extra people come from? Will no energy will be expended in providing it? Where will the resources for education and health care for those extra people come from? Will people in Greendom be disembodied spirits without a footprint?

What the Green Party offers is shallow trendy rhetoric without substance. Long on kumbaya and short on logic and math.

Some lament the federal court decision upholding the media's right to exclude them from the televised national debate. I would too---if indeed they really did offer "a significantly different approach to governance". But the truth is, the only thing truly "Green" about this party is its name.

Nonetheless, I am told that I have no other choice--as if voting for one faction in a one-party state is morally mandatory. Wrong. I can register my disgust with this sham democracy by returning my ballot unmarked to the electoral officer. And you can do the same. Imagine a million spoiled ballots. Now that would send them a message.

Tim Murray
April 5, 2011
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Green "Vision" message:
Greetings:

Once again Canada is looking for direction and once again Greens
across the country are trying to explain that there is a real and
important change in our circumstances that requires a significantly
different approach to governance. I've tried to capture the key point
here. Of note is that by referring to the underlying issue of having
reached a physical maturity as societies (ie. our activities fill our
planet), our message of change needn't be blocked due the spin that
has brought so many to deny issues like climate change.

If this is of any use, feel free to use it in whole or in part, as is,
or edited in any way that suits your purposes. No attribution
necessary.

Wishing you strength and inspiration for the weeks ahead.

Yours, Mike N.
(Mike Nickerson, http://www.SustainWellBeing.net)
================================

Our changing times require a new approach.

Change is essential, not because food and fuel prices are rising
faster than we can afford, tho for many this is true. We need the new
approach because our governments are dedicated to an economic model
that seeks to expand regardless of the impacts that expansion has on
our planet and on the other peoples with whom we share it.

Food, fuel, forests, fish, fresh water, soil fertility - even the
ability of the environment to absorb our waste - are all being
stretched. Yet, political parties of all stripes are mesmerized with
the outdated mantra to grow, grow and grow.

Every party, that is, except the Green Party.

The Green Party was founded because the others wouldn't take planetary
limits seriously. Growth is fine, as long as it doesn't foreclose
future options. We can grow nutritious food forever - if we look
after the soil. Shelters can be developed to capture sunshine and
cool themselves without requiring large amounts of energy. Education
and preventative health care are essentially boundless because they
are composed mostly of the unlimited resources: knowledge and good
will. All these steps will require that people work at them.

We could have a well fed, comfortably housed, well educate, healthy
and employed population, without plundering the Earth, if that was the
goal of our society. It is the goal of the Green Party and we are
inviting Canadians to take the step with us toward a sustainable future.

The human family has been expanding the volume of our activities for
thousands of years. Now that we are stretching the Earth's limits,
rather than expanding consumption and waste, it's time to adopt a
mature approach and to focus more on creating a sustainable future.

Join with us to build a future that our children can look forward to.

Big capitalism and the population growth lobby force people to live in dangerously risky conditions which by tradition they used to avoid. Only by returning power to the citizens via local and regional governments can we stop the population growth and the constant increase in accidents, corruption and diminished quality of life. To return power to local citizens, we need better laws to stop media ownership residing in so very few hands and being allowed to be the default 'information' conduite for government and the principle means of publicising candidates for election.

Japan

Tony Boy's rolling update on the nuclear disaster in Japan is highly informative and stimulating because it continually raises very topical issues about the consequences of overpopulation and big scale market capitalism. Yesterday he wrote about how laws existed in Japan against building on tsunami-prone coastal areas in the 1930s, but how, probably in the 1950s, these laws were changed.

1950s confusion of cause and effect

It is typical that in the 1950s, a time of massive supplies of cheap fossil fuel and turbo-charged population growth, now falsely associated with durable democracy by growth economists and foreign aid proponents, peoples' rights to self-government were sacrificed.

Queensland, Australia

How similar to the situation in Queensland today, where a backward, growth-obsessed government not only allowed building on flood plains, but advertised for more and more people to come and live in this dangerously situated city. (See "Queensland Floods 2011.")

Without local self-government, no democracy

In a real democracy where the scale of the economy permits local populations to adjust in advance to conditions and risks, laws and projects will be responsive to local conditions. Where laws and projects are conceptualised and pushed by capital from distant places, common sense and democratic objections will be overwhelmed in a system that actually leaves people open to natural disasters. See, for instance, "Prof Robin Batterham - Australia should buy farms in Mozambique." Adding insult to injury, the same system will demand that the citizens compensate big business for its own mistakes as well as forfeit their lives and possessions. Also, due to the distorting nature of market capitalism, disaster can be turned into a profit making industry - the insurance industry. If governments compensated tax-payers for natural and man-made disasters, we could be sure that buildings would not be put on flood plains and that nuclear power plants would be rare power-sources and not placed near population centers.

Tradition, collective memory, local knowledge, value of elderly people

The cause of these problems is the scale of government and profit in capitalist economies that have grown beyond local and regional control and feedback. As Tony Boys has written, "a large part of the destruction, and the nuclear disaster, could have been avoided if the collective memory had remained intact."

Market-based capitalism always over-rides commonsense

The problem is that capitalism, by prioritising the market over the needs of citizens, will always over-ride common sense, courtesy and safety. Local knowledge, which often resides in elderly people, suffers through the deliberate diminishing of the status of the elderly in our shallow 'modern' capitalist societies. The mainstream press, as well as being a vehicle for all kinds of market-weighted information distortions, undermines the huge importance of local memory and old people. Old people, who can remember how things were offer a significant curb to media and politicians which find real information inconvenient. See for instance, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?"

Growth Lobby demand for obviously unsustainable population

We can see this in the Australian growth lobby's demand for Australia to have an obviously unsustainable population. A hallmark of this lobby is its distortion of facts regarding dependency ratios, plus its disrespect and callousness towards elderly people.

Victorian Premier, Ted Baillieu's statement "Interstate raiders buying up Melbourne properties," by Simon Johanson, David Rood, Jason Dowling, The Age, April 2, 2011, was typical of this dangerously subservient attitude to the market.

Premier Ted Baillieu said he would never ''put up the stop sign'' to curb population growth. He warned that Victorians will have to ''endure'' the problems of growth. This attitude is completely irresponsible, first in terms of putting the interests of outside investors ahead of the people he was elected to represent and, second, in snubbing his nose at the adverse impact of increasing population on environmental issues.

Population growth and capitalism are co-malignancies.

These sort of elite behaviours are indicative of the working contempt for democracy and quality of life within such systems. The only ideas that get up are those which focus money-aggregation in the short term. Population growth and capitalism are co-malignancies. The push for nuclear to maintain and increase huge undemocratic populations is a product of these unwieldy self-perpetuating systems. As the supply of cheap petroleum runs down, nuclear at any price is being pushed.

The bottom line is actually that humans are capable of allowing their populations to wind down naturally, as long as the remain in control of information, land and government. (See Sheila Newman, The Urge to Disperse(2011) If they are distributed in large artificial cities like animals in intensive farms they have no real autonomy or links to significant traditions and information on which to base building, immigration, and family-size decisions. For instance, left to themselves, Australians were on course to allow their population to diminish. But nasty elites, persuaded by a 'financial' bottom line, which is anything but realistic, have demanded and forced the country to take more and more immigrants. This is a terrible interference in peoples' rights, safety, democracy and security.

What Tony Boys wrote

Look for "Tokyo Newspaper, p.20" in
Tony's rolling update no. 2, here: but I am citing it below anyway:

"An article on p.20 mentions that a) tsunami in the Tokai region in 1498 reached a height of 15 m and killed 50,000 people at a time when Japan's population totalled only about 12 million, and that b) this is far larger than current assumptions concerning possible tsunami disasters. A second article on p.20 mentions that after the Showa Sanriku earthquake in 1933, Miyagi Prefecture issued regulations including fines or imprisonment clauses prohibiting construction (of homes and so on) in coastal areas likely to be affected by tsunamis. The regulations appear to have been rescinded in the 1950s, when the national Building Standards Law was introduced. Over three thousand people lost their lives in the 1933 earthquake and tsunami. An article I missed in the yesterday's (April 6) Akahata (p.14) describes a book published in 1995 by former public school teacher Mr Yugi Iinuma on the history of the dangers of living in the flat coastal area of Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture. A picture in the article shows the former teacher, now 80, holding the book at an evacuation center in Miyagino Ward, Sendai City. Mr Iinuma's house was destroyed in the tsunami, but he managed to escape in the time between the earthquake and the arrival of the tsunami. It would seem that people forget about the dangers of tsunamis over time. It's sad to see how a large part of the destruction, and the nuclear disaster, could have been avoided if the collective memory had remained intact."

The unreality of Japan's 2011 disasters

Of course, when I say how stimulating and interesting Tony Boy's articles on the Japanese disaster are, there is an unreal sense of irony because Tony really is living through 'interesting times' and the impetus that started him writing about this was a desire to understand the threats implied to his own life as well as a desire to stop nuclear power development. Although many people in Japan have lost their lives to earthquake and tsunami, an unknown number have lost their lives to the current nuclear disaster with another unknown number of future victims. It requires concentration to work out the true nature and severity of the nuclear power aspect of this continuing disaster. This difficulty is increased by the unreal attitude of most media resources who have begun to report the whole matter vaguely, as if in a dream. It is obvious that they are not up to the technological demands of reporting but even more than this; they are succumbing to spin that says, "Disaster and suffering are inevitable. We have to put the market first and the market has to grow so the danger has to grow." (Note that French media sources are more technologically able on the subject of nuclear, but the label (and some reality) of "Green hysteria" is being used to alienate environmental protest and the result of this is diminishing reporting of events in Japan even there.)

Arnie Gunderson's videos

If you want some really critical and easy to understand, fascinating examinations, from a nuclear engineering standpoint, have a look at Arnie Gunderson's "Fukushima Updates". Beautifully short and precise, they come from a techno-legal field and seem to be far ahead of anything you will see in the mainstream or popular 'green' media.

I was moved to investigate further when on April 5th candobetter.net received an anonymous comment, entitled, "Koala left clinging to a tree after land clearing." A link to a photograph of a koala clinging to a tree in a recently cleared paddock showed that someone had actually managed to get photo-evidence of the sickening process of koala extinction - for unwanted development - which goes on under our noses with the blessing of the Queensland Government.[1]

Development in Australia is plain scary!

The photographed koala is just one of the many disappearing (starved, run over, mauled, exposed) koalas on the Queensland Goldcoast, where greedy developments are, ironically, absurdly, destroying the beauty and space they advertise in their brochures. There are no effective laws to stop them in Australia. What is more, the State government in Queensland and the state governments in all the other states of Australia operate like land-companies, making laws to privilege development and ensuring that environmental laws have absolutely no teeth. The justification for such developments is to accommodate population growth, but it is the development lobby that causes the population growth to be politically engineered simply to keep up demand for housing, and to provide an excuse for the intolerable rate of ecological destruction.[2]

As Vivienne Ortega wrote in her admirable article, "Koalas on the edge of survival precipice" on the subject of koala extinction, "There is no way koalas can evolve and adapt fast enough to overcome roads, logging, land clearing, invasive species and pets. The only way koalas could “win” is if they had machine guns to protect them!"

Perron Group

The entity directly backing the development destined for the koala habitat in question is the "Perron Group", which describes itself as "a privately-owned Perth-based Group of Companies owned and controlled by the Chairman, Mr Lloyd Stanley Perron AM." [AM stands for 'Member of the Order of Australia'. Wikipedia describes the Order of Australia as 'an order of chivalry established by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia on 14 February 1975 "for the purpose of according recognition to Australian citizens and other persons for achievement or for meritorious service"'.]

The Perron group, by its own account, has invested more than $30m in the project which is responsible for the destruction of koalas' homes in an area where the species is severely threatened in a world already over-run with people and suburbs.

The group describes its project as "a world class example of a sustainable master planned community for future generations of Australians."

The intention is to build 3,500 houses on this precious native habitat with a long history of being protected and of continuing community support for its protection.

"Master Plan"

Let us pause for a moment and consider what the notion of a 'master-planned' 'community' must mean to the citizens in the area who may have believed they had self-government, where members of the elected council, such as Councillor Ted Shepherd, have been trying to fight for their rights and for koala and other species habitat since this development application was first proposed. Ironically millionaire Bob Anthes, in a land where money almost always means destruction of wildlife and democracy, had kept this land safe for nature up to his death in 2004. Then, according to Melinda Marshall's article, "Council bushwhacked," of March 22, 2010, a mining magnate, Ross Atkins, took over the 'management' of deceased Bob Anthes' property. Under his management the trees on the property, still zoned as agricultural, were being cut down and milled in their hundreds. What a sad thing!

Balance? What balance? Bank balance?

Mr Alston was quoted on 14 December excusing his actions by saying, "You have to have a balance of natural and human habitat," he said.

What sort of 'balance' is extinction? As Vivienne Ortega writes in "Koalas on the edge of the survival precipice,"...., "The only way koalas could “win” is if they had machine guns to protect them!"

If you want to stand up for the koalas, you can leave comments here for the Perron Group re its "Pacific View Estate." There are a few already, to the effect that just because it's 'legal' that doesn't make it alright. And there is a sad little argument to the effect of, "We cut the trees down for rural management, but we agree with you that farming isn't a good idea so close to urban development, that's why we are putting more houses there." (!)

Pacific View Estate and the Perron Group

The Perron Group consists of many 'players'. CRA, DPZ Pacific, Urban Planning Services, Ocean Park Consulting, James Warren & Associates, LVO Architecture, John Wood Consultancy Services, Bitzios Consulting, Cardno, Steensen Varming and Acoustic Logic Consultancy. On the Pacific View Estate site it says, "Pacific View Estate, a new relationship between natural and human habitats."

This description would also suit TEPCO's business in providing electricity to Japan.

God Squad vs Koalas

CRA claims (on the Pacific View Estate site) to 'work closely' with Mission Australia.

Mission Australia describes itself as having a "founding purpose inspired by Jesus Christ," and that, " Mission Australia exists to meet human need and to spread the knowledge of the love of God'. Furthermore it claims that its "vision" is "to see a fairer Australia by enabling people in need to find pathways to a better life'".

Well, maybe with 'visions' you don't need to look at reality.

Does Mission Australia really think that Jesus would endorse the desecration of the natural world, the extinction of species, the razing of forests, and the abrogation of community self-government through commercially "master-planned" communities dominated by transnational corporations?

Talk about building temples for money-changers! I won't be making a donation to Mission Australia if this is what it supports.

Other organisations involved in this Pacific .... Project.

DPZ Pacific says that its "mission" is "to design and build communities in harmony with the environment in the world’s most dynamic regions for growth." It's a bizarre mix of words, isn't it? I guess you could take it to mean that DPZ Pacific considers this region not for its biodiversity, but for its population growth trends. Thus, to be in harmony with marketed demographic projections, there is nothing wrong with paving over the trees, starving out the koalas and stuffing up local self-government. What is this? Leggoworld? Are the people and their elected representatives just some kind of transformer toys there to animate a sandpit?

DPZ Pacific: "DBIDBI Design," not exactly what you would want for a natural environment, this architectural firm, going by the photos on its website.

Urban Planning Services - UPS ... More planners.

Ocean Park Consulting: "Ocean Park Consulting Pty Limited is a Gold Coast based company that provides to government agencies and private enterprise organisations delivery management, approvals engineering, environmental planning and integrated infrastructure planning services.

Ocean Park Consulting's extensive professional experience in major land development and infrastructure projects facilitates early recognition of potential project constraints and opportunities and allows for development of effective management strategies to ensure positive project outcomes, to strive to achieve a balance between the needs of the natural environment and the human environment. "

That word, "balance" again, in such an unbalanced project of machines against nature.

James Warren & Associates is described on the site as "a specialist environmental consulting company which has been operating since 1987." It is claimed that "JWA have completed a detailed assessment of the Ecological Values of the Pacific View Estate site" and that the company has "identified the potential impacts of the proposed development on these values and have recommended various mitigation measures" and that "in consultation with the team of experts, JWA have assisted to design a concept plan that provides for the conservation of the ecologically significant values occurring on site."

Wonder what they had to say about the koalas and chopping down all the trees? Speak up, James Warren and Associates! Are you pleased or did they ignore what you recommended?

(Then again, how can anyone in this group speak up? Their livings depend on this process continuing. So someone else has to stop it.)

LVO’ Architecture ... More builders...

John Wood Consultancy Services was established in December 2000, as the Principal Recreation and Environmental Planner with EDAW (Australia) Pty Ltd. On JWC's site there is a notice which states that the operator is "a current member of the Queensland Outdoor Recreation Federation" and explains that all such members "have agreed to abide by QORF's Code of Ethics." If you go to the site that lists those ethics, which are quite admirable. It is therefore surprising to see that one of their members should be associated with a project which is now linked to destruction of koala habitat and the razing of trees on a property once known for its conservation values, now transformed into a corporate vs community battleground.

Bitzios Consulting is an Australian traffic engineering and transport planning consultancy that operates on an international scale.

Cardno: Grogan Richards Consulting Engineers has merged with transnationals Cardno, an "infrastructure services firm" which, like others on the Pacific View Estate, professes to be creating "better communities across the globe". Its "client base includes builders, developers, shopping centre owners and managers, local government, government departments, architects, manufacturers, retailers, town planners and the legal profession."

Steensen Varming - construction, engineering, incorporating "environmentally responsible features."

Acoustic Logic Consultancy - more engineering and construction of a specialised nature. "With the implementation of this wealth of knowledge and experience, ALC and the Pacific View Farm have endeavoured to ensure that this project will not have detrimental acoustic impact on the future and existing residents of Worongary."

With such a corporate army of spin-doctors and built-environmentalists what hope do koalas or democracy have? In fact the koala might well stand for local democracy because both democracy and koalas are doomed in this commercial transnational environment, with its practitioners determined to ram their steel constructions down the locals' throats with the saccharine-sugar coating of a few promised 'jobs' which may well go to imported labour.

Oh what evil in Australia is done in the name of "jobs", where once there was land and food to spare and the possibility of a just society.

Out of control

The Gold Coast Council administers a once-magnificent part of Australia and oversees a great deal of callous destruction and environmental degradation in the name of continuous population growth - which most people explicitly reject in polls.

The growth is driven by investors who only see the returns on their balance-sheets and apparently lack the wit to examine the greater costs - to social capital and local, national and global biodiversity. This tragic process which currently entraps Australia was magnified to greater heights than ever before in the mid-1990s, as the global internet took off and as the last feeble obstacles to foreign purchase and investment of Australian real-estate were removed. Policies were put in place to turbo charge the financial turnover on an international scale, leading to the so-called global financial crisis. But we are dealing with addicts here, so the crisis machine was cranked up again with public money.

The homes will be bought by outsiders mostly, with no knowledge, loyalty or emotional investment in the community - rather like the developers, one suspects.

NOTES

[1] http://candobetter.net/node/2415#comment-6239

[2] I recently talked with a lawyer who had just graduated from a post-grad course in Environmental Law. I asked her if there was anything in it. "Nothing," she said. "Absolutely nothing. It's completely shocking!" She added, "I took the course to see if my first impression was really true, that the environmental laws in Australia didn't work. And it was true! We have no environmental law!"

Sources:
Melinda Marshall, "Council bushwacked," March 22nd, 2010.

Lucy Ardern, "Koala sighting incites conservation debate," Gold Coast News, April 5th, 2011

You hear people like Rob Adams and Marcus Spiller saying there is nothing you can do about population growth in Victoria and Australia. Wrong. For a start the government should cancel the Live in Victoria website that invites people to come to Victoria and which explains how to get a visa. There is one in every state (Qld, NSW, the ACT, Tasmania[1], SA, WA, NT). They should all be pulled off the web.

Results of Melbourne population poll, added to this article on 16 April 2011.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/citys-population-explosion-20110331-1cng1.html

Having been involved with trying to save Melbourne from overdevelopment for many years, numerous conservation and environment activists are convinced that no government can manage the speed and magnitude of growth.

It's bleeding obvious.

So tell them at The Age. Comment and vote via the link supplied to a poll in The Age today. And stop buying property. That only lines bankers' and developers' pockets and gives them more power over politicians. The Age is not Melbourne's 'better' newspaper, it's just a a huge international property developer and financier. So is the Australian, with www.realestate.com.au. That's the real news. Sadly it's a long time since there was much real news in those papers.

Then tell the Feds that we want to reduce Melbourne's population so stop importing so many immigrants. For years now Victorian Premiers have been demanding more immigrants of the federal government in order to please big business. Make our leaders care about democracy.

Nothing is inevitable unless you let it be so.

The Victorian Coalition has admitted that funds don't exist to finance the infrastructure needed to stuff all these new people in with a giant shoehorn - so why do we want even more people?

The answer is that we don't want them; the property developer and financier-run government does.

Tell those parasites to get the infrastructure fixed and then ask us again and listen to the answer.

Global capital exploits overpopulation so we must regulate global capital to get democracy.

Fear of 'boat-people' coming in massive numbers will continue to be stoked by the Murdoch and Fairfax media and tv and radio. Some people will therefore continue to fear the Greens as agents of the 'boat-people' bogeyman. Others will fear them as politicians who would see their countrymen dispossessed by a strange and unaccountable rhetoric.

Vivienne Ortega's article, "No human being is illegal?" draws our attention to one of the great political mysteries of our time.

Political dissonance

The views expressed in the Greens' policy for "Immigration and Refugees," are quite extreme. If successful they would actually give substance to the grotesque threat that the media have cultivated of endless hoards of 'illegals' overrunning the country. Real 'Greens' scratch their heads and seek ideological or mystical explanations for the persistant coexistence of such policies with ordinary member expectations, but maybe they should look for more practical reasons for this enduring internal dissonance.

Some writers on candobetter.net think that the Greens and the Socialist Alliance are pretend parties, designed to confuse the electorate. Even a pretend party, however, needs an income.

Why do unpopular policies survive?

There is an old political method for working out why unpopular policies survive despite costly impacts. Look for focused benefits and diffuse costs. The people who benefit financially from population growth in Australia are well organised to keep it going, whereas the rest of us, who pay for it, lack the support of the press or the banks which are in favour of this jugganaut for inhuman reasons of profit. Using this logic and method, we can reasonably infer that if unpopular policies survive within the consensus community of the Greens, it is because they benefit some people in the Greens enough to make their time there very worthwhile.

If you look at them in that light, the Greens' unrealistic and extreme immigration and refugee policies bear the hallmarks of a strategy to attract finances from the growth lobby to the party.

Where else can you read views on immigration as extreme as this? You can read them in the writings of flag-bearers for property development.

How do corporate take-overs happen?

In fact it sounds like the growth lobby may have already taken the Greens party leadership over. It would not be difficult. It would start with bullies from socialist alliances, earth-sharers and dodgy refugee action coalitions moving in on the finances.

Indeed, we hear of this.

Later signs could be where architects, planners, and solicitors start to hold leadership positions.

In the face of this kind of anti-democratic extremism, bullying, naive posturing and studied nuttiness, reasonable people who want to preserve the environment and democracy will leave the Greens, which seems to be what the Greens want. This doesn't mean that the Greens started out like this; it's how they have become.

This exodus of bona-fide members has happened to the decimated ALP already, and probably to the Liberals as well. Toothless political parties make it easy for the corporates to run our political system.

There have been many attempts by many members of the Greens to get a rational population policy over the past two decades. Pseudo-left forces in the Greens have however suppressed these democratic attempts quite savagely and continue to do so.

I repeat that these views bear the hallmarks of a bid for corporate funding from the growth lobby. Yes, folks, I don't think this is about refugees or asylum seekers. I think it is about money and advantage from the growth lobby. Why? Because the growth lobby will be the beneficiary and democracy will be the victim.

Ironically these policies don't benefit refugees and asylum-seekers

Policies which focus exclusively on benefits to non-citizens don't make sense in a democracy. They don't benefit citizens.
The asylum seekers themselves also won't benefit because of the predictable reaction which the designers of the policy
must be aware of and which, I would argue, some of them actually courted.

The newsmedia will orchestrate a public perception that the "Green threat" of being "overrun by asylum seekers" can only be combatted by increasing "skilled migration"!

Fear of 'boat-people' coming in massive numbers will continue to be stoked by the Murdoch and Fairfax media and tv and radio. Some people will therefore continue to fear the Greens as agents of the 'boat-people' bogeyman. Others will fear them as politicians who would see their countrymen dispossessed by a strange and unaccountable rhetoric.

Children overboard

Cast your mind back to the time of the Children Overboard. (Mr Howard's time.) So-called Greens raised the alarm that asylum seekers were being discriminated against. This cry was taken up by the newsmedia, which conducted a campaign of community polarisation, so creating two largely fictitious extremes. The community was presented with the idea of an uncontrolled hoard of people from god-knows-where streaming in through our coastline demanding economic support versus a moderate stream of highly educated willing workers selected by skilled bureaucrats for the exclusive benefit of our economy.

In reality it was the numbers of legal immigrants that were out of our control and being ramped higher and higher by forces that benefited financially from this influx. It was the presence of huge numbers of legal immigrants, not that of asylum-seekers that was
pushing up the costs of land, power, water and education. The government was inviting them through advertisements in every state.

These quite viciously false pictures drove wedges between Australians, making the issue of immigration and the consequence of population growth so inflammatory that people were afraid to speak of it.

And the "Greens" cooperated with Murdoch et al by hammering in the wedges.

Who benefits?

Now, did asylum seekers and refugees benefit from this growth-lobby orchestrated electoral division and conquest?

Nauru. Christmas Island.

A situation had been engineered or a crisis had been created, probably with the planned objective of moving our sea-borders further out whilst artificially boosting demand for property and resources by importing masses of wealthy legal immigrants. Mission
successful.

Does it quack like a duck?

The concept of a Green government is a beautiful one that I personally long for. But that doesn't mean that a Party that calls itself Green has any intention of living up to that concept. Look at the evidence.

Does it look, feel, sound, smell and taste like environmentalism or democracy?

They say that patriotism is the refuge of a scoundrel. Well, these days Green seems to cloak some very mealy-mouthed growth lobbyists who are probably laughing all the way to the bank.

We need to turn away from the official political parties and their masters in the mainstream media. We need to look for our similarities, not our differences, and to eschew wedge politics. We should identify and embrace our grass-roots community activists and begin to recognise our own heros by the relevance of their actions to democracy and environmental wholeness. And we should
loudly point out those professional politicians and NGOs whose actions actually undermine our democratic voices, our shelter and our natural ammenity, for all their soothing, slimy slogans.

First the Fraser Institute was named Canada's top "Think Tank" and among the best of 25 Think Tanks in the world. Now Vancouver has been named the world's most livable city. At this rate, I suppose that soon it will be named the driest city on the continent. Who is making these judgments, a Queensland politician? Here's a tip. Before you rave about Vancouver, try living there on an average wage. Good luck.

Too expensive to live in

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. If Vancouver is the king of cities, it only slows how much the world's cities have been degraded by noise, crime, pollution, traffic gridlock, unaffordable housing, homelessness, growing wealth disparity and other attributes which drove me out of Vancouver. Show me a city that works. And if you're a Premier from Queensland try actually living in Vancouver rather than taking a few days of sightseeing and restaurant-going and then running home to tell Australians lies about how Vancouver "the model city" is "managing" growth. You'll find that spectacular scenery wears kind of thin after a while--especially if you earn the average wage. You can't eat "diversity" or "vibrancy" or anything else on the buffet of growthist cant that realtors and politicians dish out.

If Population growth is a Ponzi Scheme, Vancouver is the biggest casino in Canada

Last month a 450 sq. ft. condo sold for $302,000 and the units at the Olympic village are selling for 500,000 to one million a piece. A lot of dough for little box with a view. A derelict house on a 66 foot lot on the west side, meanwhile, sold for $1.9 million and taxes for bungalow on a 33 foot lot in Dunbar run at $7,000 a year in Dunbar. No wonder Vancouver homeowners spend 70% of their income on mortgage payments. But no worries---if you are a developer or property speculator. Immigration ensures that 30,000 newcomers---many of them rich Chinese---are pouring into the city each year, with an additional 30,000 coming from other provinces, 20% of whom are also foreign-born. Population growth is a Ponzi scheme, and Vancouver is the biggest casino in Canada. Soon the bubble will burst, and as usual, it will be the ordinary people at the bottom who will be left holding the bag. In a post carbon Canada, viable cities will not exceed 20,000 people. These vast urban feed lots that have popped up like tumours in the Age of Exuberance will come to resemble mausoleums and ghost towns.

Escaping from the Prison city of Vancouver

I left this most "livable" city nearly 7 years ago, and two brief visits "home" in that period confirmed the wisdom of my decision to leave. The irony is that as a visitor, I enjoyed more of Vancouver's amenities than I did as a resident, when, like other Vancouverites, I was too damn exhausted working to pay for the cost of living in this 'model' city to have the time or money to avail myself of them. Telling me that life in Vancouver is better than life in Sydney, Auckland or Albequerque is like telling an inmate in a correctional facility that he has the best cell in the joint. I spent twenty-five years planning my escape and now that I have had a taste of small town rural living, I wonder why I waited so long to get here.

Tim Murray
February 2011

Committee for Melbourne growthers are scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for new ways to get people to move to the hated high-rises the property development lobby has planned all over Melbourne. Mary Drost says, "Both Andrew McLeod and Bernard Salt are obsessed with growth. It is exactly this growth that is making Melbourne less liveable as everything is overstretched." Jill Quirk asks, "I wonder if Salt and MacLeod think widows Jeannie Pratt or Elisabeth Murdoch should vacate their premises for a flat in an "activity centre" or is just people who inhabit more modest post war triple fronted accommodation who are being asked to move over ?"

Committee for Melbourne

A group with an apparent interest in land speculation, with the dignified sounding name of The Committee for Melbourne, is pushing a crude barrow to get elderly people to give up their homes. It wants them to agree to be rehoused in high-density apartment blocks and thinks that if the State government lets them pay less stamp duty, they just might be tempted. This was the subject today of an article by John Masanauskas in the Herald Sun, "Lobby group calls for older couples to give up family homes," 17 February 2011.

Sardine City

It is probably not coincidence that, at the same time, Boroondara Council is trying to force 48 so-called "activity centres" (i.e. high rise developments) on its protesting residents. In a hangover from the Brumby government's human sardine policy, the council hopes to attract some of an additional 17,600 people that a few business hopefuls have promoted as likely to arrive over the next 16 years, based on shaky statistical projections.

Bernard Salt, the well-known KPMG spruiker for population growth and megacities, and the CEO of the Committee for Melbourne, Andrew McLeod, have managed to leave some unfortunate quotes for posterity.

Weird, no fun world of statistical cohorts

Herald Sun writer, John Masanauskas, gives the impression that Salt believes that middle Melbourne (whatever that is) is fraught with the probability that "dad's going to drop dead and mum's going to be living by herself in a three-bedroom home". Salt predicts that the iconic 'mum' will eventually "find that the three-bedroom home with a garden and lawn becomes too much for her and she will therefore want to downsize."

In Salt's world, like Brumby and Bracks's macho-small-minded worlds, all women are 'mums' if they aren't girls trying to overcome a 'man drought' [catch his latest book], and all men are 'dads'. One senses that they are doomed, like cabbage moths, to fly and mate, lay their eggs, then die. Some, however, live on past their use-by date and become 'empty nesters', as CEO, Andrew McLeod calls them, opining:

"If they are an empty-nester living near a school they are actually taking a role that from a society's perspective would be better taken by a family."

You get the picture. According to this kind of view, societies and their suburbs should be reorganised into age cohorts. None of this bowls club down the end of the street and the little old lady in the corner shop, or the old man sitting on his porch in the sun, surveying his tomato patch, and the children visiting the lady over the road to climb her mulberry tree and use her grown-up daughter's books and toys, while their mother heads down for a game of tennis and their father takes the dog for a long walk up to the top of the hill to watch the sun set over the bay.

Salt and McLeod seem to have an odd and naively statistical view of societies, where people are labelled according to some of their qualities, like cards in packs, and are okay about being moved around in a kind of Lego world on the whim of some boys who never quite got over playing Monopoly.

Jill Quirk, SPA Victoria

Jill Quirk, President of Sustainable Population Victoria, comments:

"I think the rhetoric from Bernard Salt and Andrew Macleod that widows and "empty nesters" should leave their homes" and move into apartments for the convenience of others who would like to buy their houses is opportunistic , sexist, vulture-like, devoid of compassion or understanding, and the language of Grandpa and Grandma and (quote Bernard Salt) "rattling around in their veneers" is belittling to ordinary people.

"I wonder what the adult children of these targets of the hovering developers and real estate agents think of this blackmail? I also wonder if Salt and MacLeod think widows Jeannie Pratt or Elisabeth Murdoch should vacate their premises for a flat in an "activity centre" or is just people who inhabit more modest post war triple fronted accommodation who are being asked to move over ?"

She adds,

"Behind the figure of ridicule, the widow, whose husband has "dropped dead" is a person in shock, in grief and who is making a huge adjustment to a major life-change.

Importantly, she perceives,

"The widow is extremely vulnerable and could well fall prey to the kind of persuasion and pressure that Macleod and Salt seem to want to institutionalise so that everyone these people meet will echo the same refrain. 'Don't rattle around in the veneer, it is your civic duty to move out of your house now and let a young family with children at Lauriston and Camberwell Grammar move in.'"

And then she asks an interesting question:

"I wonder what Barry Humphries might say about this. He ridiculed the Australian suburban lifestyle for decades but I don't think he ever seriously thought of disrupting it and breaking it down."

What next? Will Mr McLeod and Mr Salt be investing in cemeteries and urging everyone to buy vertical plots in order to squeeze more coffins in? With the baby boomer curve on course to crash over the next 20 years, it's a sure thing.

Mary Drost of Planning Backlash

Planning Backlash is the name of an umbrella group under which many different suburban groups gather to protect the rights of citizens whose environments and properties are threatened by intensification of development and the population growth that drives this. Mary Drost is their main spokesperson.

Mary says that all of Melbourne will be affected by this population growth and overdevelopment if the Boroondara Council gets away with it, and that the local people are furious that Booroondara Council is continuing a densification plan dating from when Justin Madden was Planning Minister under the Brumby government, which lost power in the last election. Densification will wreck the area, she says, and Planning Backlash is appealing to their State Member, Ted Baillieu, for help based on promises he made before the election.

Mary is actually pictured in John Masanauskas's article in a photo by Ben Swinnerton (which I have cropped above), leaning, smiling, over a picket fence, with a large sunny garden behind her.

She says,

"Both Andrew McLeod and Bernard Salt are obsessed with growth. It is exactly this growth that is making Melbourne less liveable as everything is overstretched. Their obsession is taking them to new boundaries, now they want the older people to get out of their houses to make way for the next generation. Maybe they want to euthanase us as well. I am not going to be stuck in a dog box to keep McLeod and Salt happy!"

She adds, "They would have done well at the time of the Russian Revolution, move the mobs into the big houses and let the owners live in one room. How would the grandmothers look after their grandchildren in dog boxes? What a nerve!"

As her own lifestyle shows, everyone is not a poor old used up mum or a dad pining away without purpose. For years, in a tradition starting with her mother, young couples have been living rent-free in a little flat that Mary's husband and she had made at the side of the house. In this way they "get a start in life." In return they help where they can.

"People usually stay about three years and then get their own place, after they have saved a deposit," Mary said. "Sometimes our guests have been young couples who were relatives."

At the moment, she is sharing her house with one couple, who "came back for a while." In the flat on the property there is a second couple.

She thinks and I think that this is a good way to use property. But it's not what Salt and McLeod would want, because their objective is to increase property turnover. Their guiding principle is commercial, not social.

Mary says that her brother and his wife, who have grandchildren, could not do without a big house, as they are "forever having children coming to stay and the families come home for dinner sometimes twice a week."

"What nonsense to say that we should all be moving into dog boxes," Mary exclaims. "Some no doubt want to, but I tell you this, it is the quickest way to give up and age and die. If you want to stay young then stay active. Don't forget that the government wants people to age in place and not go into nursing homes. The Dutch do this very well Australia should learn from them."

Mr Salt's residence

Ironically, Bernard Salt, who looks to be over sixty in his photographs, actually lives in a heritage house a couple of blocks from Mary. We googled the address we were given and provide a picture above. We have removed the name of the street from the picture.[1] Candobetter.net doesn't believe in exposing peoples' addresses unnecessarily, but it does seem on the face of it that Mr Salt talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk, and it is of interest to those dealing with the impacts of his marketing to see where he is actually coming from.

Since her photo and some comments appeared in Masanauskas's article, a number of people have looked Mary up in the phone book and have called her, agreeing strongly with her defense of her right to remain in her home.

[1] After an unsolicited comment which complained about this exposure of Mr Salt, we canvassed our editors and writers who all agreed that it was relevant to show how Mr Salt lived. It was felt however that the important thing was to convey how he lived, which should include the suburb (of which it seemed typical, and which was the same suburb as Mary Drost's), but not necessarily the street. Therefore we have reduced the information on the photo. Discussion welcome.

The market for Vancouver real estate has gone global in a big way. The first wave of rich Chinese buyers came in the 80s and 90s as the impending transfer of Hong Kong to mainland rule approached, and the demolition of modest homes on the west side in favour of mega-houses transformed the city. But now China itself has spawned an even bigger reservoir of affluence that is looking for an investment outlet and finding it in Vancouver property. This will complete the process of dispossession that began three decades ago. Even higher density and higher property taxes and rents will combine to make life in this city---a city frequently held up as a model of sensible planning in Australia---tenuous and stressful at best. But stayed tuned. The property bubble will burst, and these investors and the realtors who cater to them will take a well-deserved beating.

A "SUCCESS" Story That Is A Prelude To Catastrophe

Global TV BC carried a story tonight (February 9, 2011) about Vancouver real estate agents taking rich Chinese clients on a helicopter tour of Greater Vancouver in an effort to sell them on real estate investment. Apparently, they love White Rock and the fact that property in Canada is 'free hold', unlike China, where is ownership is more like a lease. Chinese millionaires can no longer buy up 10 condos in China--they are now limited to two. So BC and its prices look very good to them. And here immigration lawyer Stephen Green assured a TVO audience some weeks ago that immigrants have no significant impact on the real estate market! Oh really? And God didn't make little Green apples and it never rains in Minneapolis in the summer time.

Immigrant investors drive the property market here

In fact, in Vancouver at least, immigrant investors drive the property market. Asian buyers are recruited to prop up a Vancouver real estate market that manages to be hot in the admist of a recession which is hurting ordinary people who fall even further behind in their vain attempt to gain a foothold in the housing market. A 60 foot property in Dunbar (on the West side) with a derelict house sold for more than the asking price at $1.9 million recently, while a 450 square foot condo sold for $302,000--also above the asking price. No wonder the CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) wants the government to raise the immigration quota by 50%! No wonder Canadian bank branches are sprouting up like mushrooms all over South Asia! No wonder they send hush money to environmental NGOs like the David Suzuki Foundation to ensure their silence about the ecological consequences of mass immigration! It's good for business. But how good is it for Canadians? Canadian financial analyst Nicole Foss--unique for her understanding of peak oil---predicts a crash in the housing market of epic proportions, most especially in Vancouver where people spend 70% of their income on mortgage payments. She told me last week in a one hour conversation that if you own real estate in Vancouver, or worse, carry a mortgage on it, get out while the getting is still good. In fact, that advice applies country-wide, where Canadians spend 50% of their income on servicing their mortgage debt---but Vancouverites risk the greatest loss.

Web of interest paralyses democracy

Does the labour movement or the social democratic NDP make any noise about the big-money Asian invasion? No, because an inflated housing market has many backward and forwarding linkages. It encourages more housing construction and renovation, which is a boon for lumber yards, hardware stores, carpet stores, furniture stores, alarm companies, financial institutions, interior decoratoring consultants--to name but a few at the trough--- and most especially for construction unions and hardhats of various descriptions. Debt-fuelled real estate is the very centrepiece of the whole Ponzi scheme. No wonder politicians, economists and financial reports make mention of "housing starts" as the guage by which to judge the health of the economy and the performance of an incumbent government, civic or national. Unfortunately, when housing starts are up, food security and the environment is down---but Mother Nature is not listed on either the Vancouver or Toronto stock exchange. No matter. Even if Vancouverites are foreclosed, rendered homeless and queued up at food banks, they can eat "cultural diversity".

Precious Democracy sacrificed for transient commercial advantage

Imagine if there was a 100% capital gains tax on real estate transactions. Imagine if buying property could never be seen as a speculative investment. Imagine if foreign millionaires were not able to buy their way to a Canadian passport. Imagine if we lived in a sane and just jurisdiction! It wouldn't save us from $150/barrel oil or rising food prices, but at least we wouldn't get to hell so quickly.

Vancouver post petroleum - a town of expensive tombs?

Nicole Foss says that bubbles are inherently self-limiting. We won't need a spike in oil prices to bring this fantasy world crashing down. But on the other hand, if the people in Vancouver Peak Oil are right, "alpha" cities like Vancouver will become corrals of death, misery and starvation, and eventually, ghost towns. Strategic planner and architect Rick Belfour predicts that viable post-carbon cities in Canada will be lucky to number 20,000 citizens. Condos like that $302,000 box in a high-rise will become very expensive tombs. Maybe we can plant terra cotta Chinese millionaires in them for posterity.

Tim Murray
February 9, 2011

PS For those who do not know, "SUCCESS" is an organization---aided by federal grants--- ostensibly to help immigrant Chinese integrate into Canadian society, but in the process has become an aggressive lobbyist for more Chinese immigration. Using the money of Canadian taxpayers to promote causes dedicated to their colonization is now par for the course. Perhaps, eventually, SUCCESS will help Canadians successfully assimilate into a Chinese Canada. As the late Lillian To, former head of SUCCESS, once confided, a Chinese Canada would "improve the gene pool". Unquote. And what was UBC's Professor Henry Yu saying about rampant racism in the Euro-Canadian community? I guess racism is in our genes. We are so racist that our government awarded a massive grant to Yu to spread that message.

North American children of my older brothers' generation knew about The Shadow He was the heroic vigilante crime fighter of pulp fiction fame who made his presence felt in comic books, movies and most poignantly on radio, the centre piece of family entertainment. By the time I came of age as a boy in the late fifties, he had left the stage, but not in my imagination---- my brother Al made sure of that. He would hide in my bedroom closet as I went to sleep then awake me with a chilling rendition: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men! Only The Shadow knows! He knows that the weed of crime bears bitter fruit! I'll be around every corner---in every closet----in every room, as inevitable as your guilty conscience." Then he would follow up with a sinister laugh, "Ha Ha Haw!" To this day, I have fantasized about reprising that role, only this time as a corporate crime fighter, a shadow to the Growth Lobby, and those in the environmental movement who collaborate with them.

Some call me Tim Murray, but I answer only to the name of The Shadow!

For only The Shadow knows!

And what does The Shadow know?

The things that CBC Pravda and the mainstream media won’t tell you!

They won’t tell you that population growth cannot be decoupled from habitat and farmland loss or green house gas emissions!

They won’t tell you that Canada can’t add 350,000 consumers to its population every year without inflicting massive ecological damage!

They won’t tell you that Canada has the highest population growth rate in the G8 group!

They won’t tell you that mass immigration accounts for more than two-thirds of this growth, and that Canada has the highest per capita immigration intake in the world!

They won’t tell you that only 5% of Canada’s land surface consists of arable land, and that the best of it lies in the south and half of that in Ontario, which lost 600,000 acres in the decade after 1996!

They won’t tell you that about 20% of the more than 15,000 square kilometres of irreplaceable farmland that was lost to urbanization was classified as “Class 1”---the very best!

They won’t tell you that poor planning only accounts for half of this loss, while immigration-driven population growth accounts for the other half!

They won’t tell you that “smart growth” or the defence of green field acreage by strict zoning laws is a proven failure---as Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles demonstrated--- and it is intellectually dishonest to claim that it can! Why? Because zoning is the province of local governments and local governments are controlled by developers!

They won’t tell you that most species-at-risk are found at the perimeter of growing urban centres, a growth substantially fuelled by immigration!

They won’t you tell that Canada is a big “little” country. That like Antarctica, it has a large land surface, but not the means to support a large population! Or that Yellowknife in the North West Territories lies at the centre latitude of the country, a country of frigid temperatures!

They won’t tell you that three scientific reports—report No. 25 of the Science Council of Canada, a confidential report to the Privy Council in 1991 and the Healey report of 1997---all documented the stress that population growth is putting on ecosystems and agricultural land!

They won’t tell you about Peak Oil and the implications it has for our food security! And that even if we preserved the farmland we have, its productivity would fall drastically without fossil fuel inputs!

And most of all, they won’t tell you that mainstream environmental organizations are paid not to understand all of this! That the David Suzuki Foundation (DSF), for example, has taken money from the Royal Bank of Canada, whose chairman, Gordon Nixon, has publicly lobbied for an immigration intake 50% higher that its current stratospheric level! Or that the DSF has accepted donations from Encana, the natural gas giant, while accusing climate sceptics of being “shills” for the oil companies! And they won’t ask the BC Sierra Club why it accepts money from the TD bank!

They won’t tell you that Dr. David Suzuki told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Australia is over-populated, but has not said the same thing about Canada on the CBC—even though he has been heard to confess that in more private settings!

They won’t tell you that the corporate money trail can be followed right into the coffers of major environmental organizations, and that by some strange coincidence none of these organizations will challenge the corporate agenda of importing cheap labour and expanding the number of consumers and mortgage holders!

They won’t tell you that the CBC and the corporate media are mouthpieces for the growth lobby, and that the CBC has betrayed its mandate to fairly represent every strand of opinion found in Canadian society, but instead has acted as an employer of first-resort for the graduates of the Carleton school of journalism, a boot camp for political correctness! No wonder Canada has no Washington Post! No Johann Hari! No Christine MacDonald! No wonder investigative journalism in Canada is MIA! No wonder Canada’s corrupt money-grubbing corporate lackeys in the environmental movement get a free pass from the Canadian mainstream media!

The weed of corporate crime bears bitter fruit!

But rest assured, Dr. S, that I’ll be there, around every corner, in every room, as inevitable as your guilty conscience! Ha ha ha! (taunting laugh)

In terms of numbers, Green-Left ideologues are marginal. But they punch far above their weight. Their mission is plant preconceptions about eco-Malthusians in the minds of grass roots environmentalists and those few in the media would invite our input. Left unchallenged, this bad rap becomes conventional wisdom, and doors continue to slam in our faces. And these New McCarthyists know it. It is time we gave them a dose of their own medicine. We must expose their corporate funding sources and ask the obvious questions. Whose agenda are THEY serving? Whose interest is served by open borders? Are not the "eco-socialists" and "green" Trots Wall Street's useful idiots?

Green Left Smear Network Always Quick Off The Mark

Here we go again. Always close at the heels of our press releases, he Green-Left network smears the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform once more. http://www.dominionpaper.ca It should be apparent that Southern Poverty Law Centre does not have to set up shop in Canada to hurt us. The eco-Marxists have an international web presence, and rely upon the SPLC and a Chicago-based clone (Centre for New Community) as a clearing house for defamatory profiles of "nativists, bigots, reactionaries and hate-mongers" who allegedly use environmental issues as a screen for their wicked anti-immigrant agenda. Key to the smear strategy is the ritual defamation of opponents and the promotion of a media blacklist to quarantine their views.

Our Unearned Reputation Precedes Us

Many of us already know the experience. An upcoming interview with a television or radio journalist, initially enthusiastic at the prospect, is suddenly cancelled without explanation. Or an op-ed piece that had the green light for publication is abruptly yanked at the last moment with the lame excuse that no space was available--bumped for a trivial story about a council vote on a sports stadium. Or a weekly column that you had in an important online paper is terminated---again without explanation. You become paranoid. You smell the intervention of a Mark Potok or a Green Party hack in Ottawa or an anonymous tipster who left a link to an SPLC publication. And your paranoia is later vindicated.

Lazy Journalists Welcome Home-Delivery of Ready-Made Mischaracterizations and Misinformation

Why do smear organizations like SPLC and the Centre for New Community have the ear of journalists, editors and "progressive" movements? They offer ready-made quotable misinformation that unchallenged, have made them an unimpeachable source of objective, reliable news. In this way the threat posed by their enemies can be inflated beyond its actual scale to attract more donations.

Marxist Refugees Found Sanctuary In The Environmental Movement

Betsy Hartmann and Ian Angus are major players in this broad campaign. Hartmann's lair is New Hampshire College, which acts as a boot camp for feminist population-denialism. Angus is a victim of the puerile disorder of Trotskyism, which like genital herpes, once acquired, seemingly can never be cured. It is understandable why refugees from the ideological defeat of Marxism two decades ago found sanctuary in the warm bosom of open-borders environmentalism and anti-racism. Since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the manifest failure of command economies everywhere and the retreat of social democracy from higher marginal taxation rates, the class struggle in any guise has been a tough sell. Reframed as "anti-racism", however, it enjoys a resurrection. Now environmentalism is not about saving nature but about saving people from capitalism. It is about social justice, or as it is now called, "environmental justice". Red has hijacked Green.

The New McCarthyists Are More Dangerous For Their Influence Than Their Numbers

It is easy for most to dismiss these New McCarthyists as marginal. But it is not them that we should be concerned about, but the broader constituency they influence---like the readership of Dominion Magazine or Alternet and a spectrum of online forums that deal with legitimate environmental issues. That is where the Fem-Green-Left ideologues do their hunting. Betsy Hartmann, whose infamous article “The Greening of Hate” formed the template for this latest attack on CIPR, as it has for smears against similar organizations and personalities, offers a clinic on reflexive mischaracterizations. Our mission to return environmentalists to the foundational “IPAT” formula is depicted as an effort to beguile and mislead them , and our war on overpopulation is dismissed as a “war on women’s bodies” and an attempt to scapegoat the global poor for the sins of the rich. Why does that frighten them?

Why The Leadership Of Canada's Green Party Junked Direct Democracy

Let me give you one reason. They know that on a level playing field that their smears and arguments can be easily defeated. John Meyer, former President of Zero Population Growth Canada, took them on in October, and after a brief skirmish on Angus's "Climate and Capitalism" forum, they remained silent. They had no comebacks. The Green Party of Canada is terrified of us for the same reason. In 2004-5 they flirted with direct on-line democracy. The membership was invited to vote on policy resolutions. Guess what---- 56% of grassroots Greens voted for a policy that would make the reduction and control of immigration intakes a central part of a sustainability strategy for Canada. The response? The hierarchy shut the process down.

They scuttled their democratic experiment because they realized that if the membership was in control, they would be burdened with a policy that might hurt their career ambitions. Green Party leader Elizabeth May campaigns for an immigration intake 25% higher than the government’s to serve what she calls “Canada’s Great Multicultural Project”. We are to get more cultural diversity at the cost of our biological diversity. Immigration, she insists, is an issue of “trivial” ecological importance. We can grow our population by 350,000 every year, meet GHG emissions targets and save our farmland at the same time. Growth can be “decoupled” from environmental damage. No doubt, in Greendom, ice cream consumption can be “decoupled” from weight gain, and thirst from water.

It Is Time We Exposed The Funding Sources Of Green Orgs On The Corporate Take

Another reason that the soft Greens must prevent our penetration of the environmental movement is that adoption of our policies would threaten their corporate funding. How dare we use Trotskyist tactics on Trotskyists! How dare we turn the tables on them by pointing out who their sordid benefactors are! This is their Achilles Heel. Their smears are largely based on guilt-by-association and guilt-by-funding-sources.

Two can play this game. It is about time we shone the light on them, in the same way that Ezra Levant has exposed Greenpeace and the Washington Post has exposed Nature Conservancy. We need to make noise about Green Inc----the shameless partnerships that Big Green have formed with the Big Corporations whom they now resemble. We must pose questions like, "Why is the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy and its clones on the same side of the amnesty/immigration issue as ADM, the agribusiness lobby, Microsoft, the IT industry and cheap labour employers? Are green NGOs paid not to understand the population-environment link? Who has the hidden agenda? In connecting those environmentalists alarmed at runaway population growth with 'xenophobic' or 'racist' foundations and factions, is the pot not calling the kettle black?"

Our problem is finding a high-profile media platform to ask readers to consider these questions and invite them to connect the dots. Until then, we can only fight the Internet war in the trenches.

Tim Murray
November 17, 2010

Overpopulation conjures up many images. Most typically, one thinks of traffic gridlock or bulldozers ripping up forests or farmland to make way for more housing developments. But these images fail to impress the green wing of the Growth-Management Industry, the so-called "environmentalists" of the "progressive" coalition of feminists, eco-socialists, soft-greens and human rights advocates. For them there are always "solutions" that obviate the need to face the elephant in the room. Public transport, smart growth, green technology and good green living habits will do the trick. The trouble is, they won't. It is all a delusion. Numbers matter--the social justice agenda cannot defeat the laws of physics. And the best metaphor to make that point remains Garrett Hardin's sinking lifeboat.

Bulldozers or Traffic Jams---What Better Symbolizes Runaway Population Growth?

After the website for Immigration Watch Canada was recently re-designed, I was asked if I could think of a more appropriate image to adorn its mast ---a more plaintiff illustration of the negative ecological consequences of mass immigration to Canada. Initially, I was persuaded that a picture of ten lanes of gridlocked traffic leading out of Toronto would make our point quite eloquently. But then I faltered. On second thought, I said, a picture of a new housing development being constructed on farmland would prove more poignant. I added that given the impact of hyper-immigration, the bulldozer should replace the beaver and the maple leaf as our national symbols. But then, once again, I had second thoughts. Why?

The Soft Green Party Line

For as predictable as frost in winter, Fem-Green-Left environmentalists can be counted upon to reflexively retort with their standard objection. It goes something like this:"Gridlock is not a function of overpopulation but wrong-headed transportation policy. With disincentives for driving cars and extensive public transit in place, we could move people efficiently and economically without environmental impacts. And urban sprawl is not a function of overpopulation either. With strict land-use policy, we could house people within compact urban growth boundaries and preserve greenfield acreage. In both cases, our per capita energy consumption could be dramatically reduced. There is unexploited brownfield acreage in our cities that could be the site of energy-efficient low-rise infill housing that would reduce commuting by placing people close to their workplaces."

Betsy Hartmann A Leading Exponent of Population-Denialism

None better regurgitate this party-line more quintessentially than the Queen of Smear, Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, author of the infamous "Greening of Hate", which attempted to discredit the ecological case against mass immigration by accusing those who make it of fronting for a sinister racist, nativist and xenophobic agenda. She showcased this fallacious reasoning in her attack on Chris Hedges for arguing that we are "breeding ourselves to extinction." ("Rebuttal to Chris Hedges-- Stop the Tired Overpopulation Hysteria", Alternet March 14/2009)

"The population controllers also have blinders on their eyes when they attribute the cutting down of forests, the polluting of water supplies, and the extinction of species to too many poor people, rather than the unchecked power of large corporations to monopolize resources and ravage the land. Missing from the picture is the question of technological choice: for example, reducing the population of automobiles and investing in public transport worldwide would do much more to curtail climate change than imposing limits on family size."

Again resorting to standard green-left script, Hartmann cited the United States as the worst offender of industrialized countries who, with only 20% of the world's population, have contributed 80% of the carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the atmosphere. Instead of recognizing that as a good argument for curbing immigration and reproduction in America, she proposed that Malthusian environmentalists drop their apocalyptic act and "get down to the gritty green work of making effective and equitable environment and climate policy." By “histrionic fear-mongering” that “pointed the finger at population growth”, Malthusians would have us "alienate the Global South" and "shirk" our responsibility to find practical solutions like carbon capping, energy-saving retrofitting of existing buildings, investing in alternative energy, public transport and lifestyle changes.

Climate-Change Obsession Serves The Globalist Vision

It must be understood that for this generation and genre of “environmentalism”, atmospheric pollution is the only metric of environmental degradation that deserves much attention. The virtue of climate-change obsession is that in its call for “global” solutions that must demand “global cooperation”, the open-borders mentality finds its most convenient friend. The impertinent demand of “nativists” to protect their nation’s environment from unfettered trans-national migration can then be framed as the wrong-headed belief that the environment can be “nationalized”. Gone is the foundational injunction of environmentalism to “act locally”. Passion for what is closest to hearth and home is alien to the rootless cosmopolitan greens, who see such attachment as a parochial bond that succours a “fortress” mentality. We have no right to a “national” culture or a national environment. Thus the corporate agenda finds cover in the Trojan Horse of Green Globalism--- the world without borders they both seek.

Reducing Per Capita Consumption And Waste To What End?

This "tired" soft-green cant provokes the obvious questions. Questions like "What good would come from 'alternative energy and public transport' and 'energy-saving retrofitting of existing buildings' if there are more people consuming resources and more buildings being built than ever before due to population growth? What if you succeeded in getting everyone out their cars and into public transit while population growth continues, would not the amount of resource consumption and pollution still increase? Even if you could cut per capita consumption in half---which would be a death sentence for a great majority of people in the world and bring severe destitution to most citizens even in the developed world---what net benefit would accrue if the population doubled? Should we forfeit a sustainable future for the sake of not alienating the corrupt leaders of the "Global South"? If our very survival as a species is contingent on aggressive family planning measures in developing countries and the cessation of mass migration of the global poor to the industrialized north, should we defer to etiquette and the diplomacy of silence? If was a firefighter who saw smoke coming out of your attic, should I avoid pounding on your door or bursting in to loudly demand your evacuation for fear of alienating you? And how do you think I would feel about an environmentalist who smelled the smoke but preferred to "get down to the gritty green work" of polishing the wood furniture, admonishing me for "histrionic fear-mongering" and “shirking” my responsibility to look for effective solutions?

Elementary Physics Obviously Not A Course Requirement At Social Justice University

Showing pictures of gridlock and urban sprawl to the snake-oil salesmen of green delusions will not register because they are congenitally incapable of understanding the physics of bailing water out of a leaky boat. It is quite simple. If you don't bail out a volume of water equivalent to the volume of water that is pouring into your vessel, you are going to go for a swim, and then you are going to regret that you welcomed so many passengers on board, and that you accused those who had warned against your reckless hospitality of racism, nativism and xenophobia.

Overloading a lifeboat to satisfy the dictates of an ideologically fashioned concept of social or "environmental justice" is not only perverse and suicidal, it supremely arrogant. For there is no greater testament to human hubris and conceit than the assertion that a moral law of our making trumps a law of biophysics and the species-imperative to survive. Hartmann and the “progressive” coalition of feminists, “eco-Marxists” and soft-green growth-managers consistently fail to understand that there can be no equality, justice, reproductive or human 'rights' in world without humans.

Perhaps then, the best image to illustrate this stark truth is not a traffic jam or a shiny new subdivision atop farm acreage, but an overturned lifeboat surrounded by passengers floating face-down. The lifeboat can be Canada or the United States or any one of a hundred nations. Or it can be Planet Earth, capsized when too many passengers shifted to the more affluent starboard side to find the “justice” which Betsy Hartmann and the ideologues of delusional egalitarianism claimed was their due. It is called “slosh dynamics” and it involves a concept referred to as “the centre of gravity”, but that is another one of those laws of physics that they obviously don’t teach in Political Correctness 101, Womens’ Studies or at Hampshire College.

Tim Murray
November 19, 2010

Frodo still has pellets in the stomach. Condemnation from the Queensland government is rather shallow when biodiversity in southeast Queensland is under pressure from habitat loss primarily due to increased urbanisation, driven by population growth, a fact stated in the State Government’s State of the Region (SEQ) report.
State planning is currently based upon the fool’s dream of endless growth. Human population growth brings disfunction, social dis-ease, lack of connection to our land and indigenous species, and increased crime. Her veterinarian carers confirm they cannot remove all the pellets from her tiny body.

Shallow sympathy belies institutional callousness in Queensland

Frodo still has pellets in the stomach. Condemnation from the Queensland government is rather shallow when biodiversity in southeast Queensland is under pressure from habitat loss primarily due to increased urbanisation, driven by population growth, a fact stated in the State Government’s State of the Region (SEQ) report.

State planning is currently based upon the fool’s dream of endless growth. Human population growth brings disfunction, social dis-ease, lack of connection to our land and indigenous species, and increased crime. Her veterinarian carers confirm they cannot remove all the pellets from her tiny body.

Population Forum 7 Nov 2010 Kelvin Thomson MP from Marvellous Melbourne on Vimeo.

Film and text of speech now available inside article. Speech given at Planning Backlash Forum of 7 Nov 2010: "In July last year I made a 22 page submission to the Victorian Government titled “5 Million is too many: Securing the Social and Environmental Future of Melbourne”. So given that I think 5 million would be too many, you can imagine what I think of the idea of doubling Melbourne’s population to 8 million. Melbourne’s population is growing on a scale not seen in Australia before, swelling by almost 150,000 people in the last two years. Melbourne’s population is growing by more than 200 people per day, 1500 per week, 75,000 per year. This is much faster than all other major Australian cities. It will give us another million people in 15 years."

Text of Speech by Kelvin Thomson, Member for Wills Richmond Town Hall, 7 November 2010

In July last year I made a 22 page submission to the Victorian Government titled “5 Million is too many: Securing the Social and Environmental Future of Melbourne”. So given that I think 5 million would be too many, you can imagine what I think of the idea of doubling Melbourne’s population to 8 million.

Melbourne’s population is growing on a scale not seen in Australia before, swelling by almost 150,000 people in the last two years. Melbourne’s population is growing by more than 200 people per day, 1500 per week, 75,000 per year. This is much faster than all other major Australian cities. It will give us another million people in 15 years.

The national rate of population growth has sped up since the mid 2000s. The recent growth rate of 2% per year is faster than at any other time in decades, and faster than nearly every other developed country.

Is this population growth good? Well it’s certainly not much good for the birds, plants and animals. This year Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary was expanded by 43,000 hectares; which is roughly the size of four Phillip Islands.

This will allow the destruction of 7,000 hectares of volcanic plains grassland, and nearly 1000 hectares of grassy woodland. Since European settlement over 95% of Victoria’s original native grassland has been destroyed. I believe we should be protecting the less than 5% we still have.

And it’s hard to see how extra population is good for people, either. Expanding the Urban Growth Boundary contradicts the Melbourne 2030 Plan. Melbourne 2030 was justified in the name of stopping urban sprawl. It hasn’t. Suburbs continue to march out onto the horizon.

Property developers are having their cake and eating it too. We’re growing both upward and outwards. Melbourne is becoming an obese, hardened-artery parody of its former self.

At the current rate of car possession per household, Melbourne will add a further 1.1 million cars by 2036, or well above 3 million cars in Melbourne. Does anyone in this room seriously think moving around in Melbourne is going to get anything but harder? We presently have 2 million cars; we are heading for an extra million! And yes, we should be virtuous and get out of our cars and onto trams and trains, but, as it turns out, they’re full too.

Melbourne’s population growth is bad for the environment. We all know we need to reduce our carbon emissions, but its pretty hard to reduce your carbon footprint when you keep adding more feet.

We are using less water than we used to, but we still have to turn to energy-hungry desalination to cater for our growing population. And Melbourne’s 75,000 extra people every year undermines the value of the water restrictions we put on ourselves. Growing population puts upward pressure on prices and lowers our standard of living. Scarce resources like land, water, petrol, electricity become dearer, as we turn to more expensive sources of supply. Competition for food and housing pushes food and housing prices up.

These cost of living pressures are most clearly evident in electricity and gas prices and council rates. The most populated cities, Melbourne and Sydney, have seen the highest electricity price rises. Prices have more than doubled in the past 10 years. In real terms, Melbourne prices have risen by over 50% - 52%. So have Sydney’s – 51%.

Now you might think that more people – a growing population – would lead to economies of scale and lead to lower electricity prices, but you would be wrong.

Instead of rising population causing lower prices, it leads to a need for extra infrastructure and therefore higher prices. And the more crowded a city becomes, the higher the cost of doing business. Congestion costs kick in, and just maintaining electricity infrastructure becomes more expensive.

Rising population is putting upward pressure on water and gas prices. We’ve already got at the easy water, and the easy gas.

Augmenting our supplies involves things like desalination plants and pipelines, which come at greater expense than our present supplies. It is a similar unhappy story with local council rates. I always expected that more people in my municipality would lead to lower rate bills, due to economies of scale, and more people sharing the rate load. The opposite has been the case.

In nominal terms Council rates in Melbourne have increased by over 100% - more than doubled – from 2000 to 2010. In real terms rates have increased over 48%. Regrettably this pattern of increasing rates is set to continue. Victorians will pay an average of $79 more in their rates in 2010-2011, up by over 6% from last year, based on draft Council budgets. This is well above the CPI, and again underscores the impact of rising population on local government finances. These costs of population growth – rising electricity prices, rising water prices, rising gas prices, rising Council rates – are being borne most of all by those who can least afford them – fixed income earners and pensioners in particular.

Now the growth lobby has to concede pretty much everything I’ve just said, but they say the problems are poor planning and lack of provision of infrastructure. If you scratch below the surface, they think its all about multi-unit developments, dual occupancies, and increasingly high rise.

Now the first problem with high rise is that it doesn’t do what its claimed to do; that is, reduce our environmental footprint. The Australian Government’s State of Australian Cities Report 2010 found that, when both direct and indirect environmental impacts are taken into account, environmental impacts at the household level are associated with higher incomes and smaller household sizes.

Therefore, despite the opportunities for efficiency and reduced environmental impacts offered by more compact forms of urban living, inner city households of capital cities, followed by the inner suburban areas, feature the highest consumption of water use, energy use and ecological footprints, even when reduced car use is taken into account.

The second problem is that high rise and infill spells the death of the suburban backyard. I confess to being a fan of it. There is something intangible but important about the personal space of a backyard.

I believe the children who grow up in concrete jungle suburbs are subject to more bullying and harassment and are more vulnerable to traps such as crime and drugs. What do you call a kid with a backyard? A free range kid. I think free range kids have a better time of it than battery kids.

The third problem is that not everyone wants to live next door to high rise or multi-unit developments, but these things are imposed on them anyway. In Dick Smith’s film ‘Population Puzzle’, you will see the story of the dignified elderly widow in Sydney – I think it is in Double Bay – who refused to sell her home to property developers who wanted to build a skyscraper on it. She found herself surrounded by skyscraper developments which dwarfed her home and blocked out the sun.

The fourth problem is the issue of health. In April the Medical Journal of Australia published a study which found heart disease, diabetes, chronic neck and back pain, asthma and migraine were less prevalent among those with more green space available to them. There was a very strong correlation between lack of green space and depression and anxiety disorders. Those living in more built-up areas are at an increased risk of developing schizophrenia.

Another study found urban sprawl in Sydney was linked to a greater likelihood of being overweight or obese, and inadequate physical activity. Physical inactivity is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some types of cancer.

I want to turn now to two matters which have featured recently in the news. You know that the growth lobby says that Australia is short of workers – to be precise they say ‘Australia has a skills shortage’ for which their solution is to import more labour. Yet a fortnight ago it was reported that Broadmeadows has an unemployment rate of 15.9% - I repeat 15.9%. Broadmeadows is just beyond the northern boundary of my electorate and I know it very well.

According to the 2006 Census, of the people in Broadmeadows aged 25 and over, over 50% were born in non-English speaking countries – over 50%. And for men aged 25-44, over 47% of the Non-English Speaking Country born reported income of less than $399 per week. This is entrenched unemployment, poverty, and disadvantage.

Now if we continue running a high migration program, they might go and work in iron ore mines in the Pilbara, but the evidence isn’t promising. It suggests that significant numbers will simply get caught up in a cycle of unemployment, poverty and disadvantage, as has happened in Broadmeadows.

So I suggest, before we succumb to the wailing of employers crying “skills shortage”, we put our talents to finding work for those 15.9% unemployed in Broadmeadows who are entitled to our attention. I don’t care whether we find them work in Broadmeadows or in the Pilbara, but let’s not talk about skills shortage again until we’ve got them into the workplace.

And the second item in the news recently was the latest rise in interest rates. Australia used to be the envy of the world in terms of its levels of home ownership. It was the place where everyone could aspire to a home of their own. Now housing in Melbourne is as unaffordable as just about anywhere in the world.

During 2009 housing affordability around Australia declined by over 22% due to a massive gap between the number of dwellings being built and the number of new people wanting housing. The Housing Industry Association says Australia’s fast growing population is pushing new dwelling requirements to record high levels. It predicted around 152,000 new dwellings will be commenced in 2010, well short of the 190,000 it estimates is required to keep up with a growing population.

The inevitable consequence of this gap is rising house prices which, combined with the rising electricity, gas, water, council rates, I described earlier, pushes the Reserve Bank to increase interest rates to head off inflation.

Australians now owe financial institutions more than $1 trillion in housing mortgages, almost 15 times as much as 20 years ago, according to the Reserve Bank.

Rising interest rates claw away at already poor housing affordability and will send Australians deeper into debt.

Runaway population growth is damaging our young people’s chances of buying a home. Our children’s chances of buying their own home are fading away, and unless we take steps to tackle runaway population growth, they will disappear.

Many people – a two to one majority according to opinion polls – share my concerns about population growth. But many people think it’s inevitable, that there’s nothing we can do about it. This is not so. Our population number is a direct consequence of our level of net overseas migration, and that depends on decisions made each year by the Federal Government. If we return our net annual migration number to 70,000 – the kind of number we had quite often in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, we could stabilise Australia’s population at 26 million by 2050, instead of the 36 million it is presently projected to rise to.

The best way to cut back our migration number is to cut skilled migration, which in 1995 was 24,000 but is now over 100,000. It should go back to 25,000. There is no need to cut the family reunion program, and indeed there is room to increase the refugee program, which is presently 13,750 and could rise to 20,000.

We should get rid of the Baby Bonus, and put the $1.4 billion we would save each year into educating and training young Australians at Universities and TAFE.

In November last year I issued a 14 Point Plan for Population Reform, which goes into these matters in detail. It is available on my website.

CONCLUSION

Like a man rapidly gaining weight who loosens his belt rather than confront his weight problem, Melbourne needs to ask itself, is a population of 5 million really going to give us a better city than one of 4 million?

Accepting galloping population increase as inevitable, or even desirable, will lead to a more polluted, congested and unsustainable Melbourne. Melbourne is generating more greenhouse gas emissions, using more water, losing open space and turning into a high rise steel and concrete jungle. Planners and developers talk the talk of protecting Melbourne’s environment, but their actions have the opposite effect.

They behave as Gough Whitlam once described rowers-facing in one direction but heading in the opposite one.

We need an environmentally sustainable planning policy for Melbourne. We do not need more loss of open space, high rise buildings turning Melbourne into Shanghai or Mexico City, ever larger dwellings like the energy-guzzling McMansions, or policies which encourage reduced numbers of people per dwelling.

We must show the same foresight the founders of this city showed when it was initially designed. They left us with a city with open space, extensive tram and train networks, and liveable suburbs supported by extensive local infrastructure in the form of schools, hospitals and social services. We too should leave a legacy for future generations that we, and they, can be proud of.

I thank you for your interest in this debate. I think no issue is more fundamental to our successfully discharging our responsibility to pass on a world, and an Australian way of life, to our children and grandchildren in as good a condition as the one our parents and grandparents gave to us.

KELVIN THOMSON MP

Member for Wills.

In Growth We Prosper

There is an unrelenting media campaign to tell Canadians that we must grow our population. We need more babies and more immigrants or very bad things will happen. But there are voices that question this assumption. They are heard on the streets, in the pubs and at the dining room table. But they are seldom heard in the media. Especially not on the airways of the CBC, that vehicle of growthist PC propaganda which all taxpayers are forced to endow.

It has been quite the year.

First the host of CBC radio's "The Sunday Edition", Michael Enright, declared on his June 7th program that Canada needs immigration-driven population growth in order to "prosper". Many of us, like Brishen Hoff, wanted to know what Enright meant by "prosper". As Hoff then asked, "Does Enright think that prospering means converting hundreds of thousands of hectares of Canadian land from biodiverse ecosystems into new roads, subdivisions, clearcuts, malls, parking lots, and open-pit mines to accommodate about 250,000 additional immigrants every year? Does that make life better for the average Canadian? Has real wealth per Canadian increased?"

Then a week later the print media gave the University of Toronto's Irvin Studin, editor-in-chief of "Global Brief" a platform to promote his vision of a Canada of 100 million people-- the Superpower of the century. No submissions for op-eds of equivalent space that would contest his arguments were permitted. Not one. Not in any major media outlet. Nor were any one of several known letters-to-the editor critical of his stance published.

How the CBC Manages To Talk About Demography Without Questioning Population Growth

Then in September, CBC Radio announced that the flagship morning show, "The Current" would be featuring a series of programs about the "seismic" demographic shifts that are occuring in Canada that will "change our work, our health, our families and our politics". The series would not ask if we could resist these changes, or how we might do so. And most conspicuously, not once would they interview a guest who challenged the assumed need to grow our population.

Demographer David Foot set the tone on the September 7th program by arguing that we seek the counsel of demographers so that we may "plan" for a future, which as we are constantly told about growth, is inevitable. Population growth and change is not something we can do anything about. We just have to make the right adjustments. On September 8th, the next day, the CBC then declared that the growing ranks of centenarians was something "worth celebrating"---something re-affirmed on the September 21st segment of the series about "super-centenarians", when listeners were told of the "exciting' , albeit costly research that will help us live beyond 110 years of age. On the 16th, The Current informed CBC listeners that the government of Quebec had spent some $25million this year to cover the cost of several fertility treatments in an effort to hike the province's birth rate, which they said---without challenge--is "crucial" to the province's future. The Quebec College of Physicians made the argument that money would be better spent on fixing what is already an overburdened system---but that was an argument about priorities and not about the underlying assumption that Quebec needed to boost its population. The October 4th show dealt with the old ogre of an aging population, and two days later the burdens of caregiving to elders was discussed. On October 7th, crocodile tears were shed about how changes to the Citizenship Act were impeding the ability of overseas Canadians to pass on their citizenship to children they had outside the country. Another program was devoted to the issue of when--- not if--- couples should have their children. No one spoke of the alternative of adopting one of the 36,000 Canadian children still without a permanent home. The "Shift"---as the series was called---was all about promoting more births, extending the lives of very old people and encouraging immigration. The phrase "carrying capacity" was never heard.

Resistance is Futile. We are the CBC

Meanwhile, "The Sunday Edition", hosted by Michael Enright---remember, the host who asserted that immigration was necessary for Canada's "prosperity"--- gave Irvin Studin 23 minutes of air time to re-iterate what he said in the print media four months before. Only this time Studin was congratulated for doing his bit to grow the population after proudly announcing the birth of his child. I then twice challenged the executive producer of Sunday Edition, Marjorie Nichol, in the interests of balance--to offer equivalent time to a contrarian view, even supplying her with the contact numbers, biographies and posted arguments of three capable and articulate people in the population stabilization movement. But even that was not enough to spark their interest or wake up a journalistic conscience for fair play. But then, what should one expect. I was dealing with CBC Pravda, after all. I might as well talk to my plants.

Now, if this five-month propaganda barrage was not enought, Global TV is announced that beginning Monday evening, November 9th, they will be running a two-part segment about "Making Babies"---designed to offer help and advice to couples who want to produce more unnecessary Canadians by artificial means.

At What Point Will The Media Question Growth?

The obvious question is, "At what point in history will the mainstream Canadian media consider the possibility that Canada already has enough people on its hands?" That there is no law nor reason why any country should feel obligated to "replace" its unsustainable population level?That a 'youth quake' of immigrants or newborns will not arrest the aging of our population nor pay for their pension or medical benefits? That the infrastructure costs of servicing a growing population exceeds their economic contributions? That great majority of immigrants will lack the skills to pay the kind of taxes it takes to subsidize the provision of the government services they demand? That a country without a population plan that is not properly debated with all options on the table is like a blindfolded man walking toward a cliff?

At what point will the CBC honour its mandate to offer a microphone to all strands of Canadian public opinion, a public that pays taxes to this "peoples'" broadcasting corporation for that right? Will that point be when oil is at $200/barrel and we are at 44 million, or when it is at $300/barrel and we are at 54 million? What is your bid----64 million? 64 million, is there anyone who will say 74 million? 64 once, 64 two times, 64---wait, Mr. Gordon Nixon of the Royal Bank says 74 million. Do I hear 84? Yes, Elizabeth May of the Green Party raises her hand for 84 million consumers whose ecological impact can be "de-coupled" from the environment. Its 84 million now--- Ms. May has raised the bar so that Canada can persist with what she calls its "Great Multicultural Project". It doesn't matter if we trash the environment and reduce Canadians' per capita share of resources as long as we are more diverse in our poverty! Wait--- Mr. Studin says 94 million! Now Mr. Gordon Nixon of the Royal Bank counters with 99 million potential bank clients! Now Irvin Studin shouts "100 million"! Whoppee, the sky is the limit! We are going to the mountain top! Mr. Studin may not get their with you kids but, you'll get there! Its 100 million, going once, going twice---- SOLD!"

Studin's Mad Dream Prevails

Congratulations Mr. Studin, your mad vision of a Canada in ridiculous overshoot wins the day! As you argued on CBC radio, at 100 million we will have the political leverage to promote our progressive environmental policies to the rest of the world! We can show the rest of the world how its done! Just look how we are doing that now! We've covered 20% of our Class One farmland with subdivisions and put 500 species at risk in the process! Thanks to post-1990 hyper-immigration we have developed more square kilometres in farmland than the Alberta Tar Sands project has despoiled boreal forest! This is only the beginning---think now of our potential! Not only will we live like Ghandi, as Elizabeth May prescribes, we'll do better than that! We'll live like cavemen! Consume less and less, squeeze tighter and tighter and move over for more and more migrants! By tripling our population by century's end, we can absorb 46% of the number of people the planet adds to its burden in just one year! It all makes so much sense----no wonder the media doesn't want anyone to challenge Irvin's dream.

Tim Murray
November 6/2010

Check out: http://www.vhemt.org/aboutvhemt.htm

Climate Change Obsession A Justification for An Open Borders Agenda

Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May has frequently said that immigration has had a "trivial" impact on Canada's environment. The real damage is being done by the Alberta Tar Sands, she claims, and the only immigrants that we should worry about are immigrants like Royal Dutch Shell. This is the tack taken by the Green-Left and Eco-"socialist" groups like the ones that are connected to blogs like "Climate and Capitalism" and the "Green Left Weekly" : Focus almost exclusively on climate change, because it is in, May's words, "the most urgent problem of our time". A global issue that requires a global solution and global cooperation, something that could be hampered by all this 'divisive' talk about tightening the borders to stop a population tsunami from destroying our environment. We mustn't send our unfriendly signals to those nations we need to work with, mustn't we? We can't lock our front door and close the gate or our neighbours might not love us.

So while the Green-Left has declared war on the free and unfettered trade of capital and goods, it supports the corporate agenda of promoting the free and unfettered movement of cheap labour across borders. The workers, after all, have no country, do they? Thus the open-borders, corporate-friendly stance of the Green Globalists is marketed as a gesture of "international solidarity". Solidarity with migrants but not solidarity with the indigenous labour force whose jobs are displaced or wages suppressed by their incoming foreign comrades. The native-born proletariat can surely take a hit in the cause for "Climate Justice", can't they? Climate change is public enemy number one.

Whose carbon footprint is larger---immigration or the tar sands?

For the sake of argument, let's say it is. Let's say that overpopulation, the collapse of biodiversity services, Peak Oil, Peak Soil, and the prospect of running out of the minerals and fuel vital to our industrial civilization is small potatoes compared to the environmental damage wrought by hydrocarbons. OK. If that is the field of battle that the Green-Left wants to play on, then let's join them. The question then is, what impact has hyper-immigration of the kind that Canada and the United States have been subjected to in the past two decades had on GHG emissions? American analysts Leon Kolankiewicz and Steve Camarota already established some time ago that each immigrant to the United States, on average, quadruples his GHG emissions upon arrival. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mOpEnQvD1Y While that figure would approximate the impact that immigrants to Canada have had, another question arises. In the Canadian context, how does the carbon footprint of immigrants compare to the carbon footprint of the Albert tar sands project?

Economist John Meyer has done the math. His calculations rest on the fact that post-1990 immigration has been responsible for an additional 7 million people in Canada, and that per-capita emissions have risen very little in that period. He asserts that if a “zero-net” immigration policy (immigrants accepted equaling emigrants) had been in effect in the past two decades, the country’s population would have stabilized at 27 million. “The 7 million (inclusive of children born to immigrants) is just the difference between the 27 million ceiling that was achievable 20 years ago and the 34 million we have now.”

Nevertheless, to be conservative, Meyer works with a figure of 5 million:

"In 2006 tar sands emissions were 27 million tonnes (mt) and emissions attributed to the 5 million extra people (about 2+ Toronto's) were 120mt. Canada's Kyoto target is 556mt. By 2012, we will probably hit 714mt - over by 28% - the worst performance of any Kyoto signatory save Saudi Arabia. We will be #57 out of 58. The top countries will have cut their emissions by close to 40%. They have stable populations. Canada has the fastest growing population in the western world courtesy of mass immigration. Saudi Arabia's population is growing even faster, naturally."

"Oil sands emissions are growing faster than immigration-based emissions. By 2012, oil sands emissions will be 75mt. Immigration's will be 154mt. Although oil sands emissions grow rapidly, they will never quite catch those from immigration-based population growth because oil production will level off and immigration policy calls for an exponential grow-forever rate of 1%."

"So in 2050, oil sands emissions will be 350mt and immigration's will be 414mt. That is as close as it gets. Tars sands flatten after that but immigration-based emissions keep on climbing to 879mt in 2100. (If post-1990 immigration levels continue), Canada's population will then be 66 million.”

Immigrants did not invent our lifestyle, but they aspire to it

Meyer acknowledges that his analysis does not differentiate between the emissions of rich Canadians and those of immigrants, most of whom are relatively poor, and take a decade to climb up to the average Canadian income level. Meyer speculates that the GHG emissions of immigrants is perhaps 20% lower than the Canadian per capita average. But this is hardly an argument in favour of mass immigration, because even at 80% of the Canadian level, immigrants still generate GHG emissions, and at a rate many times higher than they did in their former countries. While immigrants did not invent our higher ecological footprint (lifestyle), they nevertheless aspire to it, as our parents or great grandparents once did in coming here. Improving one’s lot, after all, is the major and fully understandable motive for those who choose to settle here. The point is not to blame immigrants but to cite immigration as the major driver of population growth, which, contrary to green perceptions, has a demonstrably negative impact on our environment. Arguably, much can be done to mitigate that damage by more efficient technologies, more conservation measures and better planning, but it must be expected that citizens of a country with an average year round temperature of little over 5 degrees centigrade will of necessity make higher energy demands than those who live in warmer climates. Energy efficiency and conservation cannot offset population growth indefinitely.

Mass immigration has despoiled at least as much land as the Tar Sands

Mass immigration rivals the tar sands development in environmental damage in another important respect as well. Aside from thwarting the attainment of Kyoto targets, Meyer also makes the point that the land area despoiled by the tar sands development is matched or exceeded by the land area despoiled to accommodate the immigrant-driven population growth of the last twenty years---and will vastly outstrip it in the decades to come. Furthermore, Meyer notes, “... this urban sprawl has taken place on Canada’s best agricultural land---not in remote boreal forest.” He continues, "We are trained to see shopping malls and subdivisions as signs of progress but seen through an environmental filter, they are even uglier than strip mines and tailing ponds because they are huge resource consumers for their entire lives. Mass immigration creates more energy overhead and reduces the environmental base both in total and in per capita terms when we should be cutting overhead, conserving resources and expanding green energy production.”

To curb carbon emissions, we must break the taboo against talking about immigration

What is most worrisome to Meyer is that the taboo against an open and public discussion of immigration and population policy has rendered our response to a range of challenges ineffective.

“As a result of the immigration no-go zone, Canada's policy formation process has, for decades, been unable to deal effectively with a host of issues from child poverty to productivity to land use to income polarization. And now immigration is short-circuiting emissions planning.”

Meyer adds that the tar sands may be the poster pariah, but if real solutions are to be found to curb our appalling carbon emissions, "the cloak of invisibility will have to be pulled from immigration”. Immigration should be the focus of corrective action duly proportionate to its crucial impact.

Tim Murray,
October 12/2010

How is this for a coherent ideology: We can protect farmland and wildlife habitat by building zoning fences around our cities which are bursting from the mass immigration which we support. But we cannot and should not build a fence around our nation to protect farmland and wildlife habitat from that same immigrant-driven population growth. We should also densify our cities to lower per capita energy costs, but disperse people to populate our hinterlands at the same time. And we must oppose the corporate agenda of lowering barriers to trans-national movement of goods, but support the corporate agenda of promoting the unfettered trans-national movement of cheap labour. Welcome to the world of the Green-Left. Watermelon Globalists who wear a green coat to disguise a misguided and antique vision of a borderless world. A perverse globalism that markets itself as international solidarity.

It is curious that in the immigration debate---whenever such a debate is permitted to occur------the Green-Left Globalists switch horses in mid-stream.

Within the confines of our national borders, they tell us that what is decisive is not how many people we can accommodate, but where they are situated. The classic mantra is "It is not whether we grow, but how we grow". We can double or triple or quadruple our numbers so long as we steer the population to urban centres, and pack them like sardines in a can to lower their per capita energy consumption and keep greenfield acreage untouched, along with ecologically significant nature reserves. Apart from the fallacy of low-energy urban living, and the political improbabilities of wresting land-use decisions from developer-controlled city councils and regional parliaments, this argument is incongruent with their stance on immigration. At that level of discussion, they tell us that it doesn't matter where people live on this planet, it is only their numbers which should be of concern. Moving people around from country to country, or excluding them from doing so does not address the problem. It is like the proverbial futility of moving deck chairs on the Titanic, they argue. Immigration policy, in their imagination, is not a population policy. Besides, building fences won't keep the global population tsunami from sweeping over us, nor will it keep out global warming. In other words, fences inside our borders are a solution to runaway population growth driven by hyper-immigration, but fences aroundour borders are no solution to runaway global population. Confusing, isn't it?

Now get ready to be more confused. Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May, who argues for an immigration quota 25% larger than the Harper government's (already rivalling Australia as the highest per capita intake in the world), has pushed the traditional green line that "smart growth" planning can confine our growing population within ecologically benign urban boundaries. But when faced with complaints that our major cities are already strained beyond liveability by incoming migrants--- the great majority from abroad--- she has called for their dispersal to rural localities, despite the fact that people have left these regions for compelling economic reasons. So now we have a Green Party that tells us that we should squeeze tighter in urban centres, and relocate to the empty hinterland at the same time.

The Green message is now clear. Fences work, but they don't work. Cram into the cities, but settle outside of them. And if you don't like our principles---just wait---we will find other ones for you.

If that is not enough contradiction for you, then along comes the climate-obsessed Eco-Marxists. They oppose the free and unfettered passage of goods across national borders because they oppose the corporate agenda. But they support the free and unfettered passage of people across national border because they support the corporate agenda of smashing the indigenous labour force with cheap imported slave labour. Except that they call their globalism "international solidarity" with migrant workers. Native-born workers and native culture are expendable. And their idea of fighting climate change is to shift people from nations with low GHG emissions to nations of very high GHG emissions, and then look for a technological fix. Go figure.

Tim Murray
October 09, 2010

This article title is based on the title of a debate at the Municipal Association of Victoria AGM, which took place on Thursday, October 21 at Hotel Sofitel. The article itself is based on speech notes from SPA Victoria's president, Jill Quirk, for her part in the debate. Panel members were: Jill Quirk, President of Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian branch); Pru Sanderson, CEO, VicUrban; and Professor of Physiology, Roger Short, Melbourne University. The Chair was Jon Faine.

Sustainable population MUST BE THE DEAL since the alternative is societal and ecological collapse.

Sustainable means – able to be sustained/maintained without decay or degradation. Unless this is envisaged over a long period of time, it is meaningless in human terms. The previous custodians of this continent had staying power of over a period of 40,000 -60,000 years. Europeans have only made their mark- over about 230-50 years.

In other words if we are to be sustainable over any significant and meaningful time period, we’ve hardly begun.

Victoria at present does not have a sustainable population.

The State of the Environment (SOE) report 2008 reflects the simple fact that most areas of the state are highly stressed. Most natural vegetation, waterways, wetlands, coasts and rivers are reported in a parlous condition.

“Population growth, settlement and consumption patterns and climate change are the key drivers of environmental degradation in Victoria”

“Victoria’s population growth, increasing affluence and the expansion of our cities and towns, have contributed to unsustainable levels of resource consumption and waste production.”

It is clear that population growth combined with the broad practices of our society are leading us in the wrong direction. It is ultimately our environment which will dictate whether or not we are sustainable and it is therefore non negotiable. In order to achieve sustainability our environment must come before all the considerations including the economy.

To understand the seriousness of the SOE report and that with continuing population growth, if no changes are made, the situation will worsen must be also to understand that the end of our stay here is in sight.

Sustainable population must not be confused with "sustainable growth" in population which of course is an impossibility, even an oxymoron. Stabilization of our population as soon as we can should be our aim as it is necessary but not sufficient for long term sustainability

From localized to more pervasive environmental issues -

Greenhouse gases are an example of a waste product and in Australia rise in lock step with population growth.

Instead of striving to stabilize our population, which is necessary but not sufficient for sustainability, the push from those with the loudest voices is to grow as fast as we can.

Our leaders and planners need to incorporate resource depletion, including peak oil, in realistic rather than fanciful visions of our future.

In Victoria- what I hear is:

“Extension of UGB
High rise /Activity centers.”

But:

Post peak oil, Melbourne's outer suburbs and established areas will become less sustainable. Peak oil will highlight terrible problems of transport and self sufficiency.

Authorities, leaders and planners must bear this in mind.

Right now, as we cannot start any sooner –

Democracy crucial

The issue of democracy at a local level is crucial in shaping our future and needs to be protected.
We associate planning very much with local government. The role of councils ideally is as an intermediary between the rights of some and the assumed freedoms of others. At this level, the sustainability of local areas has the best chance of being protected.

As David Suzuki once said, referring to the protection of the environment, “Every victory is temporary, every defeat is permanent.”

We have no serious option but to be a sustainable population, so to me it is definitely a deal. The possibility of achieving it rests with all levels of government.

We need to acknowledge our impact, lessen our individual impact, stop seeking more, do less, and acknowledge that infrastructure is not the cure-all for runaway population growth.

We can stabilise our population. We cannot do it immediately but by mid century – yes.
We are not sustainable now.
We face oil depletion and declining environment

We owe it to ourselves and to our grandchildren and great grandchildren that a sustainable population must be THE DEAL.

Details of Event:

Audience of about 250 Councillors and Council officers from across Victoria, at MAV Annual Conference on Thursday, October 21, at Hotel Sofitel. Session title: "Sustainable Population – Deal or No Deal?"
Session Chair: Jon Faine
Panel members: Jill Quirk, President: Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian branch); Pru Sanderson, CEO, VicUrban; Professor Roger Short, Melbourne University.
Each Panel member spoke for approximately10 minutes , followed by questions and general discussion.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada has happened upon the John Howard confidence trick. In the shell game of electoral politics, it is important to get the audience to focus on the pea marked "bogus refugees" rather than the one marked "unsustainable immigration". That way corporations get the policy they paid for. The growth of the cheap labour pool and legions of new consumers. We clap our hands at the crackdown, and are none the wiser for it.

I seem to recall that Australia's one-man wrecking crew (lest we forget) John Howard, successfully exploited public anger over incoming boat-loads of refugees by making a show of his hardline crackdown, then using that stance as a screen to jack up immigration levels to stratospheric heights. Right? Well it seems that the Stephen Harper government is taking the same tack. Use the refugee issue as a decoy and a lightening rod so that an even higher number of migrants can be waived through the airport. This is not about curbing immigration to more sustainable levels, levels that would permit cultural integration and ecological recuperation from the two-decade demographic assault Canada has suffered since 1990. It is about quelling growing public anger so that it does not threaten the great unquestioned project of unsustainable economic growth, which all major parties wrongly believe is dependent on population growth.

It is not just Canada's refugee system that is out of control. Immigration is out of control. Making scapegoats out of phoney refugees and the slime who smuggle them takes the heat off an immigration policy based on economic folly and cynical political empire-building. And the Prime Minister knows it. He wants more immigration, not less. And if the opposition parties, who share his mad dream, were smart, they would accede to his inadequate bill, because it appeases misplaced public wrath. Canadians could then be given the false assurance that everything is now "under control", when in fact immigrant-driven population growth will be more out-of-control than ever. While I support the government's half-measures---as far as they go---- I wonder if by applying a band-aid we might forget that we need major surgery. We need to stabilize and reduce our population, and to accomplish that, we could double or triple the intake of legitimate refugees while slashing the immigration quota to modest and reasonable totals. Cleaning up the refugee mess is not sufficient.

Harper's comments, recorded in this news report, "Human smuggling threatens Canada support for immigration: PM"
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/101020/canada/canada_srilanka_politics_refugee_immigration, makes his motives clear.

"A failure to act and act strongly (against human smugglers) will inevitably lead to a massive collapse in public support for our immigration system.... Not only do we have relatively speaking the largest immigration program in the world; not only do we have the most generous system of sanctuary for refugees in the world -- we also have a level of public support for immigration that is unparalleled elsewhere in the world," Harper said. "And that must continue, because our economy will need even more immigrants." The strong new laws will provide incentives for would-be immigrants to enter the country through "legitmate channels".

Tim Murray
October 22/ 2010

Background stories: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Tories+take+refugee+fraudsters+smugglers/3706309/story.html
http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Laws+turn+tide+refugees/3709436/story.html

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself

Have you seen the latest TV commercials promoting the new Jeep Grand Cherokee for 2011? The theme is summarized with the slogan, "The Things We Make, Make Us". The 'manifesto' video ad, 1:01 minutes long, makes an unanabashed appeal to American pride and patriotism. Poignant scenes are punctuated by proud declarations.

"This once was a country that made things, beautiful things, and so it is again." "It was a country of colts (with the image of colts galloping across the screen) that made Colt revolvers, and Jeeps (pictures of a stream of Army Jeeps presumably poised for the Normandy invasion, then liberating the streets of European towns in the Second World War).... These things make us who we are."

The American industrial heartland will surely rise again, given the inspirational lead that Chrysler beckons us to follow. The fact that the non-renewable resources critical to this heroic enterprise will not be affordably available to sustain it is just one of life's tiny, inconvenient details that are best swept under the carpet. Pessimism, not the reality of limited resources, is our real enemy you know. What did Obama say? He repeated FDR. "The only fear we have is fear itself." God, is that all. And here I thought I had to worry about Peak Everything and the prospect of a thermo-nuclear exchange that might follow the desperate scramble for scarce resources. Or the strong possibility of biological and chemical war, but then, here I go being pessimistic again. Maybe I should look on the bright side of life, the life that these SUV ads promise me.

The reality of urban gridlock vs. the fantasy of wilderness escape

It is interesting that the product Chrysler is pitching an SUV whose production involved the expenditure of a least 400 barrels of oil per vehicle--or its equivalent--and tons of metals and minerals first mined, then transported, then smelted, then shipped to a factory to rendevous with rubber harvested thousands of miles away and fashioned into a vehicle by hundreds of employees who demand a range of products and services as recompense for their beautiful craftsmnship. Employees who fought two hours of traffic driving their Jeep to work, only to repeat the ordeal after their shift. But hey, they are Americans, like the can-do Americans we once knew, who get the job done! And once it is done, this same vehicle then is marketed as an off-road machine that is seen dashing through lush forests, across unpolluted rivers and over the vast and seemingly pristine Moab desert of Utah."Go where regrets can't follow" is the motto that subtitles the scene. Cameras don't show the getting there, however. You know, the Jeep Grand Cherokee stuck in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic on a Friday afternoon as its driver tries to make it to his weekend gettaway, cursing and honking in a vehicle built for speed but trapped in a nation of gridlock. But alas, the promised land of galloping colts, lush forests and pristine deserts, the America of our fantasies, the one advertisers play on, surely awaits us. It is quite the juxtaposition. The nasty, noisy and smoky process of primary and secondary industrial activity that heralds the resurgence of proud American manufacturing, co-existing with an apparently vast and uncluttered American hinterland.

There are more than 254 million registered passenger vehicles in America and more than 100 million are SUVs and trucks, with over 8 million of that category sold in 2008 alone. Few of them apparently know or care to know that it takes 98 tons of dead plants and animals buried for eons at seabed, lake and river bottoms to produce one gallon of gas for a nation that consumes one quarter of the world's crude oil. America isn't a country of colts but a country of dolts. How sad it is to see so many fat-ass Crocodile Dundee wanabees and redneck "chicks with dicks" lay down $40,000 US to feed a self-image manufactured by Madison Avenue when their SUV spends most of its life outside a shopping mall or in the drive-in queue of MacDonalds? How many ever see the wilderness? And of those who do, how, one wonders, do they all manage to find it---where are these huge pristine expanses in a nation bursting with 308 going on 508 million people? The answer can be found in the last line of the commercial that has dominated the airways recently:

"The Jeep Grand Cherokee---built for a world without limits"

That just about says it all. American car manufacturers and their ad agencies--- and those who fall for their pitch---really don't have a goddam clue. The phrase "Peak Oil" is notably absent from all of videos and from all the reviews. Instead, we read about "fuel economy". We are supposed to be impressed that the new Jeep Grand Cherokee can allegedly travel 500 miles on a full 24.6 gallon tank. "That's 16 miles in the city and 22 miles on the highway!". Wow. That means that when gas is $20/gallon as analysts like Christopher Steiner predict it will be, it will cost you about a dollar per mile---that is if hyperinflation doesn't overtake us. Auto journalists, like the consuming public who read their columns, are like deer transfixed by the headlights. They see all the bells and whistles and all of the specs but are blinded by the same infatuation with these toys that Americans of three generations ago had for the Model T Ford. The internal combustion engine is as inefficient as it ever was. But maybe that's a good thing, otherwise there would be more drivers driving more cars. You have to feel sorry for American capitalism, it just can't defeat those efficiency paradoxes. Especially when it encourages runaway populaton growth to grow the pool of cheap labour and delusional, manipulated consumers.

I must agree. The Jeep Grand Cherokee for 2011 really is built for a world without limits. Unfortunately, that world is not the one we live in.

Tim Murray
October 15/2010