Baby Boomer to Gen Y on home ownership

Dennis's comments in italic bold mine in regular font.

"It may not have been asked for, but it was the outcome."

My response to this first statement is to want to distinguish between what was up to 'the babyboomers' and 'what was not'. As I just developed from a comment by Anonymous, ("Who is the leader of the Babyboomers?") they are [nothing but a pack of cards! as Alice said] a statistical cohort of people extending across two decades, separated by time, household, education, structural divides which included a changing rural/city divide, increasingly geographical infills via immigration, and, especially lately, professional wedge politics: Lib/Lab/'Green'/vs the rest, ably promoted by a duopoly mass media of Murdoch-Fairfax and Government-ABC.

My second response is to treat this as an existentional question. Existentional in the sense that argues that political engagement is how we define ourselves, recognise eachother and become socially alive. Without political engagement, humans remain isolated and confused, unwell, depressed, impotent... I think you may be right to accuse the babyboomer statistical cohort of containing a significant number of existentionally disengaged members. The cultural cringe that Edna Everedge lampooned portrayed a set of somehow still immature elderly people reduced to communing with garden gnomes, their only identity material assets and mementos of sparse initiation ceremonies, like weddings and RSL membership.

Such a bizarre change from the times preceding, of convicts and rumcorps, scientists and explorers, gold-seekers and bushrangers, Federation politicians and poets, pre-WW2 artists and writers.

A number of the Post WW2 lot seem curiously conformist to superficial but rigid standards, with the sexes separate, the men obediently employed, the women detached.

Engagement is very difficult when you are structurally disorganised.

Think about it. You and I probably came from very different places, backgrounds and experiences, by reason of sex, age, location and social class. Even though we may both be babyboomers, there could be 25 years difference in our ages; we may belong to different generations. I may have been too young for Vietnam and you might have been conscripted or even volunteered. You may be religious; I am not. This may be the first time we have met and talked about this.

"I can ask for a lot of things, but the things I ultimately agitate for, determine the outcome. This is what you are missing. When you put an idea into motion, the outcome isn't the outcome that your ideology says should happen, but the outcome that nature says will happen."

I guess you need to state the natural rule you think applies here.

My perception is that there was a failure (due to political-economic and structural problems that disorganised many Australians) to engage, to agitate for anything much amongst the wider, disorganised public. However you feel that people did agitate. During the 1960s and 1970s it is true that some Australians were very engaged in agitating for particular political outcomes. Some of these were the multiculturalists, the Communists and the B.A. Santamariarists, the latter who both arose in relationship to the Australian unionist and protectionist movement of Federation - which was a much more engaged period, I think. Mark Lopez, author of The origins of multiculturalism in Australian politics 1945-1975 finds that multiculturalism was pushed by a very few people through skilful lobbying. In his paper, The Politics of the origins of multiculturalism: Lobbying and the power of influence," (2000)[Referenced in [1], he writes,

"[...]The ideology of multiculturalism was developed between 1966 and 1975 by a small number of academics, social workers and activists initially located on the fringe of the political arena of migrant settlement and welfare, a political arena that itself was not large, despite the fact that these issues affected the lives of so many. " [Al Grassby was not initially inclined to multiculturalism but one of his speechwriters was a multiculturalism activist and Grassby profited from having clear concept and direction from this.] [...] "The decisive shift towards multiculturalism in public policy occurred during the first Whitlam Labor Government (December 1972 to May 1974), even though there was no preconceived or planned introduction of multiculturalism and it was not part of the Labor Party platform. Multiculturalism became accepted as a basis of ethnic affairs policy during this period largely as a result of the successes of the multiculturalists as lobbyists. The appeal of the merits of multiculturalism was never sufficient in itself to ensure its acceptance as public policy: it was necessary for the multiculturalists to vigorously and strenuously promote it, often in the face of indifference or sometimes stiff opposition from those who supported other approaches." [...]"Fraser adopted it as a model and, using his authority as the Opposition Spokesman, he introduced it into the Coalition platform for the May 1974 federal election; the first inclusion of multiculturalislm in the immigration policy of a major party. This development also established a degree of bipartisanship sufficient to protect this new ideology from the rigours of adversarial parliamentary politics." [...]"By the end of 1975, the influence of multiculturalism was evident in five federal departments: Labour and Immigration, Social Security, Education, the Media, and the Attorney-General's Department. Despite their efforts from 1973, the multiculturalists' breakthrough in influencing the union movement was delayed until May 1976, when they established a Migrant Workers' Centre in the Victorian Trades Hall. "

"Take immigration for example, how many boomers in the 60's and 70's wanted immigration restrictions? How many wanted immigration laws loosened? If I remember correctly, a few at Vic First prided themselves on loosening standards. Now they are complaining about the outcome. How else do you end a 'white Australia', without mass immigration? What did this person expect to happen?"

If you interpret the expression of a high rate of desire for better assimilation as a sign of not wanting immigrants from non-English speaking countries, then it seems that most Victorians, at any rate, objected to non-British immigrants.[1] (A lot objected to British immigrants as well - those of Irish stock, for instance.)

There is little documentation on whether most people objected to the idea of a much bigger Australia, but I know that ever since the first million there have been people wanting to keep Australia small.[2] Since Australia was founded due to Britain's overpopulation and Malthus's theories were popularised in our early history, there were a lot of Malthusians in Australia. Charles Darwin's visit in the 1850s reinforced this, although it also reinforced the presence of the Catholic Church, as the pope weighed in. The main political tension was that of wage earners and small business wanted protection and big business wanted open markets and a big local population, although Britain preferred a smaller population in a commodity economy to provide her factories with raw materials. In Federation agreements towards the constitution, workers succeeded in stopping slave imports (blackbirding) and also in stopping slave-wage-earner imports through the exercise of the White Australia Policy which attempted to screen immigration out from large dense populations associated with low-wage labour. [3]

Environmentalists in the 1970s were particularly against big populations, especially after the first oil shock, which caused concern about scarcity. Leone Sandercock recorded in her books[4] citizens' anger at inflated land-prices in Victoria under the Hamer government, and at the rapacious development and destruction of green spaces. This overdevelopment was related to the rapid population growth of the 1960s and 1970s - composed of high natural increase plus high immigration, even though immigrants were initially housed in special facilities, in part to avoid anger at housing unaffordability.

As to whether people should have interpreted 'ending the White Australia policy' as meaning mass immigration, I seem to recollect there was quite a lot of fear about this at the time, but it was managed by propaganda. People who expressed antipathy to asian immigration were ridiculed - for instance Bruce Ruxton. Ruxton, as I recall, was a working class passionate returned soldier advocate, lacking in sophisticated airs. The Vietnam War and conscription protests also helped to make him an easier target. What he stood for were largely the values that the government of his day had promoted, but fashions had changed and he was tarred as an anachronism.

It was, however, still okay to disapprove of overpopulation. And people, especially environmentalists, talked with concern about overpopulation all over the world; in France, in the US, and in Australia. US presidents endorsed this concern, as did Whitlam.

I think that the people who supported multiculturalists by militating for the end of racially discriminatory immigration were mostly middle class people or intellectuals who trusted the government; they did not think that they would lose control of policy. So they accepted or were persuaded to accept non-racially discriminatory immigration, but they did not think that they were going to have to accept a massive increase in numbers.

It seems highly likely that other Australians who did not identify with the middle classes or intellectuals (as Katharine Betts intimates in her book, Immigration Ideology) were not so trusting of government. But their ideas were unfashionable and criminology tells us that the middle classes and fashionable intellectuals can rarely imagine how poor people fear 'the authorities'. Because middle classes and fashionable intellectuals rarely go to prison, they assume that the system is fair and impartial. Another, obvious reason that non-professionals and unskilled and semi-skilled labour were against high immigration was that they knew their jobs were easily filled by new immigrants, even if those immigrants had poor English. This was not a problem for the doctors or lawyers, for instance. The doctors had a very protective union and the law is a very local specialty. (Now even the doctors have been disorganised.)

(Did the quality of the Australian education system also decline? Because it seems that many people never acquired enough knowledge of their own country to even realise what reasonable population numbers were. At Sustainable Living Festivals a few years running, some environmentalists ran surveys to see what people understood about population. What they found was that, at those festivals at any rate, most people had no idea of the size of Australia's or the world's population. They were so innumerate and geographically ignorant that, even if you gave them a choice, they would get it wrong by millions, in some cases billions (even for Australia!). These were, for example, people in suits with jobs who strolled through Federation square in their lunch hours.)

The immigration numbers did not increase immediately

In fact the numbers did not increase much until John Howard, according to my observation of them; they stayed around 80,000 p.a. averaged over the years. Net Overseas Migration (with the exception of Bob Hawke's Tiananmen square year) until Howard. But 80,000 p.a. net was far too many, and, by the 1980s environmentalists groups had formed, notably Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP) - now called Sustainable Population Australia (SPA). AESP seemed to be fairly confident of eventually succeeding in lobbying government through sheer power of reason. They based this on the belief that Australia was a democracy and that citizens opinions counted, especially if they were supported by scientific authority.

Something happened in the meantime.

Why did AESP form, though? It seemed to be largely a response to the retreat by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) from its constitutional requirement to support efforts to keep Australia's population small. This disquieting retreat by the ACF was dramatised when it attempted to pull out of an agreement to fund a book about how the looming environmental problems of continuing population growth in Australia. Ultimately it must have given in because the book was published as R. Birrell, D. Hill and J. Nevill, Eds., Populate and Perish published by the Australian Conservation Foundation and Fontana, 1984. Nonetheless, future events would show that that old environmental flagship, the Australian Conservation Foundation, had been captured by the growth lobby.

Around this time a political party that was against a big population for environmental and social reasons, formed. This was Australians Against Further Immigration (AAFI). Initially they were welcomed as allies of the environmental movement against overpopulation. But then some of them came out against multiculturalism and specifically against Chinese immigration. They were then hounded down by the press and government spokespeople and stigmatised as racist.

Organisations who defined themselves as purely ecological were careful to distinguish themselves from AAFI in public situations.

This was my own first experience of 'wedge politics', where it does not matter if you have some things in common with another group; if that group has unfashionable ideas as well your group will be punished by the press and other social police for associating with it. This weakened the environmental movement against population growth because a lot of its members would also have been concerned about the social effects of multiculturalism and those people could not express their concerns in the environmental organisations.

It is very unhealthy to create a situation where people in the same country cannot discuss important issues, but are instead expected to be rude to anyone who seems to have a different opinion. It is natural for people to be curious and want to know all about important social issues, to explore every angle - but this is strongly discouraged in Australia these days. The way that immigration is treated is as a religion, if you define a religion as a creed where some things cannot be discussed because it is against the rules and you have to have faith. This is not much different from the political differences between sunnis and shiites when neither side can safely evaluate the other's point of view. This kind of wedge politics makes us ripe for manipulation; it is a great way to limit citizens' knowledge and stop them from organising.

I was never bothered by different races/ethnicities; I was raised with neighbours of various origins and played with bush aboriginal children. It was numbers that bothered me - until - I stumbled over in the Multicultural Foundation of Australia big business connections linked to the nuclear industry, to property development (engineering) and more. Most astounding was the membership of the Foundation - almost entirely composed of past and present prime ministers and opposition leaders. It was founded by bob Hawke in (from memory) 1985. Its has hugely financial national and international network although almost no funds, as far as I can work out. I have been writing about this now for a few years and my articles get thousands of reads, but no-one know how to tackle this or where to take it because of how high it goes. It's something that all Australians need to see for what it is, but of course none of the mass media would ever look at it; they know where their bread and butter lies. See Multicultural foundation tag

"Others at this meeting warned for lack of social cohesion and were booed! Booed! Yet I bet these same people will complain about lack of social cohesion and infighting..."

I don't understand what you mean here. Do you mean that those same people will complain elsewhere about lack of social cohesion etc? I was at that meeting too, but I thought that Kelvin Thomson's view was (a) the multicultural horse has left the stable so closing the door is no longer effective and so it is a non-issue, and (b) the concern of Victoria First is numbers, not ethnicity. Thomson had already announced this and for me the logical thing was, if people wanted to have an organisation about what kinds of immigrants Australia takes, then they would be welcome to form one and to invite people to join it.

It seems to me that there are two concepts here: One is How many immigrants and the other is What kind of immigrants? It seems to me that the first one has precedence.

"Or smaller homes. How many people back 30 years ago said we need to share our wealth, that we have too much? How many people even TODAY say we should share our wealth and space. I heard this 20 years ago any ANYONE who objected was pilloried as a 'racist'. Any one who said "no room" was a bigot."

The business about sharing the wealth comes from the same place that the innumerate estimates of Australia's population come from. People are very poorly educated. They can be born and bred here and not even realise that they live at the edge of an enormous desert. They think cities begin and end with the buildings; it doesn't occur to them that huge moving machines called 'farms' and mines cover half the countryside in order to support them. They read often enough in the Australian and the Age or hear on TV or the ABC that we are a big, empty, wealthy country and they believe it. That's the power of authority; the authority imbued in the press. People believe what the media tells them more than they trust their own eyes.

Yes, you are right. People were taught to fear the consequences of expressing unfashionable opinions about multiculturalism. In fact they were terrified. It does seem that probably a majority of people do dislike multiculturalism and a high immigration flow particularly if it is from very varied origins, however they have been taught not to express this.

How were they taught? Well, the treatment meted out to AAFI was pretty awful, but what happened to Pauline Hanson was frankly terrifying. As she gained in popularity, the major parties treated her as a serious threat and they don't treat serious threats with kid-gloves. Wedge politics came out in force and people simply did not dare to attend her meetings for fear of being outed. Those who did attend her meetings (arguably very brave people with the courage of their convictions) were physically attacked by thugs from the Socialist Alliance etc. The photographs of people attending the meetings were also published in the press, which meant their neighbours and employers would recognise them.

Middle class people and intellectuals do not get involved in that kind of thing and, besides, they were sympathetic to multiculturalism; they held, as Katharine Betts argued in her Immigration Ideology, 'cosmopolitan values'. There was a great divide between them and the majority of Australians, it seems.

Despite this a lot of people continued to attend those meetings. Finally, John Howard made noises as if he was quite sympathetic to the reasons that people supported Hanson. This probably caused a lot of Hanson supporters to direct their preferences to him over the ALP. Then, in the wake of the Port Arthur Massacre, he banned guns. This endeared him to the middle classes and fashionable intellectuals who had formerly hated him because he seemed not of their class and because he had been sent into the political wilderness years before for expressing anti-Asian immigration ideas. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that he managed to bott quite a large portion of Hanson's support base for a while.

I can't remember if he massively upped immigration before or after Hanson was imprisoned, but it must have been very convenient to have her locked away, along with one of her political associates. They were both exonerated after several months in prison but, their political opportunities had come and gone whilst they were locked up.

Perhaps more important, what did people seeing what happened to Pauline Hanson learn? They learned that, not only could you be embarassed and even beaten up if you tried to fight high immigration because of your social values, but that the Australian Government would have no qualms about throwing you into prison for it.

But, infinitely worse, infinitely shocking, so bizarre and unthinkable that people may wonder if they imagined this, our current Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, raised the money to prosecute Pauline Hanson which permitted her to be prosecuted and sent to prison.[6]

"And speaking of "racism", the term which any anti-growth advocate is deathly afraid of, was it not demanded that racism not be tolerated? That xenophobia has no place in Australia? Wasn't one of the BIG "achievements" of the boomer generation 'breaking down barriers'? So now the property lobby can use it and scare the population away from our cause. Nice."

I was not aware that this was a 'baby-boomer' achievement. I thought it was a cultural change engineered by successive governments. I always thought that racism in Australia was grossly exaggerated, and used as a label to gloss over other more acceptable objections - like wanting to protect your job, or wanting to stop more housing developments. Certainly calling people racist has been used often to try to shut people up who objected to overdevelopment. These days they even intimidate people into saying, "We're not against 'development', just 'poorly designed developments' etc. as if it were somehow unreasonable to be against having everything covered by infrastructure.

I think that the property lobby was in on this from the beginning. They have funded a ton of pro-big population and multiculturalism literature from academics for years now. There has been no-one to fund the counter-arguments. The property development and business lobby have done this in Australia and in Britain for centuries. The Liberal Party was founded by immigrationist forces around the time of Federation.[5]

No-one knew about this except the people who benefited directly from it. Even Neville Hicks in This Sin and Scandal, Australia's Population Debate 1891-1911, Australian National University Press, Canberra, ACT, 1978 (a history of the anti-birthcontrol movement in Australia) misinterpreted the valuable data he accumulated, which showed me that property speculation united the powerful to prevent contraception and to promote mass immigration in order to save their investments in property and to prop up the banks. Maybe also he misinterpreted it because of the times he wrote in. His interpretation was to take seriously the rhetoric of the businessmen and politicians who tried to suppress abortion and contraception. This led him to believe that they were motivated entirely by religious convictions and prurient obsessions. Somehow he overlooked the fact that they were all on boards of organisations that faced bankruptcy if the land they had invested in did not regain value in the 1890s depression.

What has happened recently is that the internet has permitted a huge globalisation of the property market at the same time as we have lost almost all protection via the National Foreign Investment Board. In a country like Australia where there is no decoupling of work permits from immigration and where permanent immigration means real-time permanent, rather than just a year as it does in most of Western Europe, this means disastrous loss of control.

"Both partners having to work. Feminists were rallying against the "patriarchy" and insisting women should have the same opportunities as men. Now, like men, they can enjoy having to work to keep the family going. I grew up being told that suggesting that women perhaps would be better of at home instead of working was sexist and bigoted."

What happened was that the market charged whatever it could get and it went after both salaries. In other words the market profited from a social change that was clamoured for as a benefit. Of course, it wasn't really the "market" it was a government of land-speculators making rules whereby they helped to inflate the price of property. But you are talking to a land-tenure sociologist here and I know that women all once had land, just as female bears do. We lost it in many cultures, but not all, along the way, and overpopulation was part of the reason. In a socio-economic system where most citizens don't own much property, being able to earn a wage is a means to some freedom, and why would women not want to be free? However real freedom is owning land and assets and having a home to stay home in, IMHO. I personally would like fifty per cent of seats in parliament to be for women (not for 'women's issues' but for women's bums on seats) and I personally want our inheritance system to be reformed so that male and female children cannot be disinherited by their parents in favour of the spouse; so that male and female children all have the possibility of inheriting assets, preferably land; so that there would be no need to compensate a widower or widow for their partner's decease because the widow or widower would have their independent fortune. (This is the Napoleonic or Roman system that is in almost all European countries and similar systems prevail in many places. The Anglophone systems are very disempowering.)

I don't think people saw this coming, any more than they saw most things coming, because of their ignorance of how big business and government work together, because of their naive faith in an entirely false belief that they lived in a democracy and were empowered, and because they emotionally followed fashions as they humanly sought identity and political engagement. It was easy to mislead a bunch of disorganised, poorly educated, disaggregated, statistical cohorts who suffered from cultural cringe and an absence of historical knowledge.

"Bill Clinton in the 90's, said that white people would be a minority by 2040 in the USA and that this was good, and the crowd went wild, not with anger! I remember, and it still happens now, many people saying how great the world would be when "we" are not the majority, or mixed out, or whatever. That "we", these idiots didn't realise, that were being displaced were their children and grandchildren. Now they are complaining about their children and grandchildren not having a place after fighting people trying to secure it!"

I think our system will dispossess anyone, white or brown. I believe that what is happening to Australia is the same thing that happened to Africa and India, the Solomans and Easter Island - disorganisation, dispossession, loss of self-government through colonisation by superior numbers and or forces. I don't believe that changing colours will make all that much difference, but you probably don't either. What really changes is one's social organisation; one's real empowerment through clan and territorial connections. See Demography Territory and Law, The Rules of Animal and Human Population, Countershock Press, Australia, 2013. (Kindle) Also available as paperback here: Paperback edition. My book is all about this.
The fact that I think the British-inherited system we live under is totally wrong means that I am not a person who believes that a solution for us lies in British immigration (as Pauline Hanson did, I believe). I think we need to allow our population to decrease, but I have already written a lot about that.

"I'm not leveling this at you personally, as I will give you the benefit of the doubt."

I was personally always shocked by the injustice and judgementalness and the sheer disregard for democracy meted out to people who tried to stand up for their rights as they perceived them. I was disgusted and dismayed at the impact of wedge politics which seemed to use these differences of opinion to corral people into very narrow associations and to demonise people who, at time of Federation, would all have talked civilly together. I saw what was happening as the destruction of democracy. I made a decision that the message I wanted to get out was ecological; it was the disappearance of green spaces and freedom to move, of biodiverse surroundings. To get that message out I could not afford to get involved in defending specific peoples' rights, however I did get to expose what was happening, as I am doing now. I also received a lot of poor treatment myself by people who mistakenly thought that I was fighting for discriminatory immigration policies.

"In ALL those examples, there were plenty of warnings. In all those examples, honest appraisal would have hinted at this outcome. But this wasn't allowed, because it didn't fit with the ideology. Because any opinion that didn't fit the morality was just wrong. It COULDN'T be right. There is this thinking that something which sound offensive must be wrong. Not just morally wrong, but scientifically wrong and logically wrong."

Yes, you are right; it did not fit with the ideology that the middle classes and fashionable intellectuals casually absorbed or that was taught to them from kindergarten through primary school and secondary school. As to why people did not imagine what could happen further down the track in terms of huge populations, skyrocketing prices and loss of human rights - it seems to me that most people responded to herding. They were afraid of what would happen to them if they resisted going in the direction they were being pushed and they accepted with more or less relief any rationale that the dogs herding them gave for forcing them into ever-narrowing choices, rationales that suggested that Australia was a big rich land, that we would all get cleverer, that sacrifices must be made for 'progress' and that 'progress' was an evolutionary pathway of a chronologically forward nature which always led to more and better stuff and to freedom and power in the end.

"Now, so it doesn't appear that I'm just attacking boomers, I'll use a Gen X example, because I acknowledge its not a unique generation thing, its just most VISIBLE in that generation."

I can't comment on where it is most prevalent. I was counselling a 30 year old mentally ill man recently who lived in utter precarity. He had a one room flat in public housing that he was too afraid to sleep in because someone had died in it before he moved in and their imprint was still on the carpet and the level of violence in those flats was terrifying. He said, "I'm tormented by my racist thoughts of resentment towards all the refugees that have public housing and contribute to the difficulties and violence." This was the first time I had thought about the impact that refugees (including accepted asylum seekers) might have on public housing demand. Until then I had thought that the number of refugees is so tiny that they pale into insignificance next to economic immigrants. However if there is an accumulated concentration of several thousand refugees over a few years in a limited quantity of public housing, it is obvious that there will be an impact. It's a fact that a lot of poor refugees do finish up in the public housing system and that it is full of violence. This guy did not feel that he could speak up because to him his resentments seemed to have a racist basis. So he could not formulate a statement that he had a right to decent housing as a citizen and if that right was being negatively affected by numbers of immigrants, then he had a right to demand a reduction in immigration. His solution was to couch-surf and sleep on benches, as he slid towards suicide. You will not be surprised to hear that he felt entirely worthless.

"Gen X still want tolerance, no hate, for a diverse society of all races to live peacefully. As a result, we've had to limit free speech and begin policing people who's thoughts might upset this. NSA have a massive surveillance program in place. I'm sure Australia has the same. The UK do too, they used it to arrest people who threaten 'tolerance'. They use it AGGRESSIVELY, but none of these people who object to a growing police state protested this."

As I have written, if they saw it coming, they were afraid, or, if they fought it, they were made to suffer. It helps that generations now have lived in cities and have no idea of how all the other creatures depend on their local ecology remaining intact. And that we do ultimately as well, and that you cannot self-govern via the global market.

Now, in the future when my daughter finds out that she's living in a 1984 style world (maybe), she's going to blame Gen X/Y, RIGHTFULLY. We'll say (not me, we), "Oh, we fought AGAINST that. WE didn't ASK for surveillance, for video cameras everywhere". But its NOT true. We lauded those who used surveillance to dob in 'racists' on public transport. We demanded that hate speech not be tolerance. We said, time and time again, there are LIMITS to free speech. To make this happen, you need surveillance. We overlooked when police arrested someone for something they said in private.

I guess you bring me back to reality here. I do not believe that I ever did this. However I have seen groups revel in righteous indignation and the pursuit of people they thought were political outlaws. Once people did this to the tribe down the track when they had a bone to pick. Now our 'tribes' are temporary alliances, like brands, formed through identification with marketed values etc; and our loyalties and controls are easily manipulated; there are very few real sources of orientation. In an industry where I work, I have seen over 20 years, a degrading of trust and work conditions, a kind of dog-eat-dog ethos, a psychopathic pursuit of power and the reduction of normal people into cowards and tell-tales. This seems to me to be the result of bureaucracy and the abolition of the seniority system, which at least gave a lot of organic social structure to industry before, tempered the naked ambition and brought stability and safety. The majority of people, as far as I can see, don't want this, but they don't know how to get out of it. I think the way out is to talk about it, as we are doing here.

NOTES

[1] "[...] opinion polls on immigration found widespread disapproval of the source countries that contributed the most to ethnic and cultural diversity. An Age Poll of July 1971 produced close to a majority for severely restricting Italian and Greek migrants, with only three to four per cent believing that the government should recruit them." Mark Lopez, "The Politics of the origins of multiculturalism: Lobbying and the power of influence, Paper at 10th Biennial Conference of the Australian Population Association, Year 2000.

[2] "A history of politics and population in Australia: Thomas Malthus in Australian thought"

[3] "Overpopulation, immigration, multiculturalism and the White Australia policy"

[4]Leone Sandercock, The Land Racket (1979) and Property, Politics and Urban Planning (1990).

[5] Chapter 6 of Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby and its Absence, RMIT Thesis, 2000.

[6] "Yes it is true. In 1998, Tony Abbott, John Wheeldon (former ALP Senator) and William "Peter" Coleman (a former NSW Liberal Opposition Leader and father-in-law to Peter Costello) established a trust fund (aka slush fund) titled "Australians for Honest Politics" with the express purpose of raising funds to fight against Pauline Hanson and One Nation, who were at the time drawing traditional Coalition voters away from the Coalition.

The slush fund raised around $100,000.

Tony Abbott has always refused to reveal who was behind the funding of this slush fund, although in 2003, ABC's Lateline revealed that Western Australian businessman Harold Clough was believed to be one of those who contributed funds.

You can view a copy of Abbott's trust fund here.

It should be noted that this was a particularly grubby chapter of Tony Abbott's political life, and has been partially covered here.

If you are interested, there is an excellent timeline of events relating to Tony Abbott and his slush fund covered here." Source: "Tony Abbott FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)"