The article about SPPA in today's Australian (20 April 2010) is an indication of the profile public dissatisfaction is giving the population issue. The Australian is a self-admittedly big population advocate, and so it is interesting to see how the new party, Stable Population Party of Australia, has been reported.
Predictable but unacceptable slurring
The online version is quite acceptable, but a printed edition this morning uses the headline 'New party slams immigrants'. See, Stephen Lunn, "New Party slams immigrants," (April 20, 2010).
William Bourke says that this in no way represents either the article or his lengthy discussion with Stephen Lunn yesterday.
It looks like that Mr Murdoch's editors are trying to paint him in a certain way.
The Australian got the Party's name completely wrong
The Australian did not get the name of his party correct either. The name of the party is not the 'Sustainable Population Party', but the Stable Population Party of Australia. The newspaper apparently cleared this up later in the online edition, but all those people who only read print media will not be able to find the party which they may desperately wish to find. And a lot of people who otherwise might join may not because of the way the Australian has represented the party.
The article itself covers the basic facts about the party, notably the population stabilising policy of balancing emigration with immigration. It also quotes William's factual statement that "population growth might be a single issue, but it cuts across national policy agendas from health, housing and education to water, climate change..." but over-emphasises the fact that it also cuts across immigration.
Why can't the Australian be more positive about what the people want?
In fact the article could be saying so many positive things, such as how the Stable Population Party, by trying to stabilise our population at as low a level as possible, offers hope of an amnesty on starving out and breaking indigenous animal populations, of mortgage martyrdom, of anxiety about old age and rising costs, of a consolidation of community and democracy, and ultimately, as the baby boomers begin to die off in 20 or 30 years, of green space and freedom becoming available to Australia's growing population of cage-reared children, sedated and bloated with fast food.
The Australian is - unfortunately for Australians - interested in marketing Australian property to the world, through its property dot com, realestate.com.au, so positive reporting here would conflict with their business policy.
Dick Smith, FOKE, and Stable Population Party of Australia in Sydney last week
The Party leader encountered a very positive reception at a venue last week.
On the night of the 15th of April 2010, population campaigner Dick Smith spoke to the Friends of Ku-ring-gai Environment (FOKE) group where they had gathered at an environmental event on Sydney's North Shore.
FOKE's main concern is inappropriate development in their suburbs (high rise etc).
The event was packed with 170 seated attendees and a similar number standing.
Dick spoke well and introduced William Bourke of Stable Population Party of Australia to the crowd near the end.
Mainstream media were in attendance including 60 Minutes (who had been with Dick Smith all day), SBS TV, and North Shore Times (News Ltd).
William Bourke was interviewed by SBS TV and around 50 people came up to him after the event for a chat. Most of them departed after getting a SPPA membership form.
Looks like Dick Smith is leading the democratic population policy campaign and helping Australia find political alternatives to the growth lobby.
Makes a good counterpoint to Murdoch's mammoth Australia campaign.
Comments
John Marlowe
Wed, 2010-04-21 21:59
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Liberals want more babies
Abbott wants more babies, fewer people
[Lenore Tayor, Sydney Morning Herald, 10th April 2010]
Liberal Opposition leader 'Tony Abbott hopes a Coalition government's family-friendly policies will boost Australia's birth rate but at the same time says projected population increases - fuelled by a baby boom and high immigration - are not sustainable.
Over the past five years Australia's fertility rate has jumped from 1.7 births each woman to 1.9 births, but Mr Abbott told the Herald that raising the birth rate even higher was "a desirable goal" and getting it above two births each woman "would be a very good thing".
Mr Abbott has promised more assistance for families with children, who he describes as "the new poor", on top of his generous policy of offering six months' parental leave.'
Labor and Liberal are different factions of the same growthist ideology.
Both ignore local social downgrades of Australian standards of living because they are both 20th Century in thinking and aloof from the social problems.
Peter Bright
Thu, 2010-04-22 08:42
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More babies
John Marlowe
Thu, 2010-04-22 10:55
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A Muslim majority in 20 years?
Many new migrants are having babies and retaining their culture of origin - language, religion, customs, laws, food, way of life, values and attitudes.
'Figures from demographic consultants Macroplan Australia show record overseas migration and an ageing population mean migrant families will overtake the number of locally born residents by 2025 - far sooner than previously imagined. The Australian-born family will become a minority group within 15 years - outnumbered by a surging wave of migrants from Europe and Asia.'
Read We'll be a nation of new migrants
In this article, our omnipotent Bernard Salt materialises again justifying: "It all adds to the cosmopolitan nature of modern Australia," KPMG demographer Bernard Salt said. "It means our views become less blinkered, and we become more tolerant, confident, engaged, opportunistic and optimistic because we are open to new ideas, not obsessed with keeping things the same."
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Statistics show that Belgium could be a muslim majority in 20 years? Could Australia follow?
Brussels: A Muslim majority in 20 years
Are Australian-borns feeling 'more tolerant, confident, engaged, opportunistic and optimistic' about becoming a minority and swamped by 50 million by 2050? Mmmm, Cronulla rising.
Sheila Newman
Thu, 2010-04-22 11:32
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Letter to the Australian re Stable Pop Party
Daniel (not verified)
Thu, 2010-04-22 18:30
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Immigrant Backlash
John Marlowe
Thu, 2010-04-22 21:00
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Australia actively recruiting offshore
Thanks Daniel,
While your warning is tongue in cheek, the examples you provide underscore the truth of what is happening.
As for Telstra Customer 'Care', try phoning Telstra's national fault number 13 22 03 as I have recently done. It's Russian Roulette you get an Australian, but the blanks are a Philippino operator with a strict spiel and poor English.
Row erupts over Telstra's 'outsourcing' to Indian companies
[2nd April 2003]
This very day back on 22nd April 2003, the ABC 730 Report reported as follows:
Australia opens exam centres in India to recruit doctors
"No one is surprised these days if a telephone inquiry to a big company takes them to a call centre in some other part of the world. But revelations today that Telstra is importing IT contractors from India to work in Australia has given the globalisation debate here a renewed intensity. The union movement quickly condemned the practice, claiming that cheaper Indian workers were taking jobs from Australians and undercutting hard-won wage gains. Telstra, which has shed thousands of jobs in the past few years, maintains it is just doing business in a world economy and the best advice from the experts is "get used to it".
Since 2008, the Rudd Government has been actively recruiting doctors from India:
"Sydney, Oct 21 (IANS) Australia is set to open five examination centres in India to recruit overseas trained doctors, desperately needed to meet the acute shortage of medical professionals in the country.Indian doctors, who have applied for migration to Australia, will be able to sit for a multiple-choice exam that will test their medical knowledge at one of the five centres in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai, The Australian newspaper reported Tuesday.
The first exams are scheduled to be held as early as Nov 17-19.
Until now, Indian doctors had to sit for the exam in testing centres set up for the past few years in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai or London.
The Australian government, under the MedicarePlus reforms introduced five years ago, had pledged not to actively recruit or in other words poach doctors from developing countries such as India.
“There has been a very careful review of the situation in India, and we have been given instruction that they are no longer part of these sensitive areas,” Australian Medical Council Chief Executive Ian Frank told The Australian.
“We are permitted to go back in there now. We don’t think it’s going to make a significant difference to the number recruited, it will just make it a bit easier for the candidates,” Frank told The Australian.
India is perhaps the biggest single source of overseas trained doctors migrating to Australia. About 6,500 foreign doctors come to work in Australia each year, most of them from the Indian subcontinent, Britain and South Africa.
However, in the aftermath of the much publicised botched terrorism case of Indian doctor Muhammad Haneef, the number of overseas trained doctors coming from India had plummeted.
The Australian health system relies heavily on foreign doctors, particularly in regional and remote areas where Australians don’t want to work. Forty percent of all doctors in Australia were overseas trained and a large proportion of these doctors hail from the Indian subcontinent. Almost 15 percent of overseas trained doctors in Australia are Indians.
The Patel Lesson
In recent years, there has been lot of talk about making tests more stringent for overseas trained doctors and also formally assessing knowledge and skills of medical professionals before they arrive on the shores of Australia, especially after India-born US doctor Jayant Patel’s case came to light few years ago.
Patel has been charged with 14 offences, including three counts of manslaughter, two counts of grievous bodily harm, and fraud, relating to his employment as director of surgery at regional Bundaberg Base Hospital in Queensland between 2003 and 2005. He will face court for a committal hearing in February next year. It is said to be probably the worst medical-negligence scandal in the country."
Australian standards - what are they?
Rudd's a rotten traitor.
Sheila Newman
Thu, 2010-04-22 22:13
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India needs 600,000 more doctors: Plan Panel
Milly (not verified)
Thu, 2010-04-22 23:00
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head-hunting educated from developing countries
John Marlowe
Fri, 2010-04-23 09:43
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Vocational training benefits are outside election cycles
My cynical but pragmatic answer to Milly's question above: How does our government justify head-hunting the educated from overseas, especially doctors where they are needed?
Vocational training benefits are ouside the timeframe of election cycles. Our current Labor Government is currently only interested in getting its health deal to win voter brownie points in time for the next election.
But it takes ten years to train a medical doctor through internship to being a GP. Australian governments typically marginally in power are so desperate for the swinging vote that they focus on election sweetening programmes in four year cycles. But Labor, Liberal, Nationals or Greens lack any long term policy or funding programme that matches the employment needs of the health industry to targeted vocational training of Australians to fill GP, nursing and health care worker positions in Australia in say ten years time.
It takes about five years to build a new hospital as the new West Australian example suggests: #10;http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/newshome/6833253/childrens-hospital-built-by-2015/">Nedlands Children's hospital built by 2015 We are behind building new hospitals in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, where the Federal Government forecast millions more people to be living over the next few decades. Brisbane is planing to merge the Royal Children's Hospital and the Mater Children's Hospital but this is not adding a new hospital to the mix. The Liberals in Victoria claim they are considering a new children's hospital in Melbourne's southeast, but has stopped short of fully backing the plan. Sydney is doing nothing.
Australian government culture at all levels is short sighted and immature and the Australian mainstream media are part of the problem.
In Australia, successive Liberal and Labor governments have allowed a chronic disconnect between growing employment needs in both the private and public sectors, and targeted vocational education. Employers have reneged on training their workforce. Workplace training has been abandoned because employers have been allowed to adopt the habit of recruiting skilled people rather than train their existing people.
Eventually, the local talent pool dries up, so employers look overseas and governments help them. It is a short sighted bandaid solution that ignores the vocational training needs of Australians.
In my industry, IT, Australians are being left behind in technology skills. Indians and Chinese dominate IT because language and cultural fit is deemed less vital than other fields and so many thousands of them are qualified in software - read to 'plug and play'.
It amounts to job invasion.
James Sinnamon
Sat, 2010-04-24 00:48
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Election cycle argument too charitable to our political rulers
Sheila Newman
Fri, 2010-04-30 11:42
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Oz Population Parties report in Indian internet-business-news
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