The article stated that "A key reason that massive population growth has not led to disaster has been the extraordinary growth in agricultural productivity." Yes, the "green revolution" thanks to Norman Borlaug in the 1960s gave us a 40 years reprieve of higher productivity. He warned of the "population monster" that needed addressing. That time has finished now, and natural resources are dwindling.
People naively see science and technology will produce the black-box with solutions to global food production and ecological overshoot, but the scientists and growers aren't so confident.
The end of poverty and food security will come with population stability, and decline. We are heading into a time when the planet has never had so many people, and so few wildlife. The species biomass balance has been turned upside down. Our planet is facing many challenges, and with heavier human numbers, the problems now will only get worse.
As for anthropogenic climate change, of course population size needs to be addressed. The I=PAT equation can't ignore the major cause of daily emissions - human activities and affluence (A), technology that uses energy (T), and population size. (P) Reducing A and T while P is increasing it obviously counterproductive. (This is what a lot of environmental groups do - ignore the P!)
Comments
On Housing case
Being a landmark case, it is really a very interesting read. But I guess this kind of scenario is not applicable to some other countries especially the developing ones.
Ed. We sure attract a lot of essay and thesis writing internet services. What is happening? Do they websurf looking for information and occasionally make comments as individuals or simply to advertise their services? How much, I wonder, is candobetter.net plagiarised.
Look in the mirror
People who talk disrespectfully of "randy possums" should look in the mirror and see their reflection as part of a plague of humans. Sorry but it's the truth. The human population would look like Jupiter next to our moon or perhaps a meteor if population sizes were to be compared.Someone rang in to local ABC radio this morning with a gratuitous remark about a "buck kangaroo" chasing a "doe" somewhere in the outer suburbs of Melbourne . His complaint was that this would result in an increase of the population and that, (he continued) there are more kangaroos in Australia now than there were when "white people" arrived. What a cheek to even mention the increase in numbers of another species ,even if it were true! Australia now carries more than 20 times the number of humans as it did 250 years ago and the world population is about to hit its predicted 7 billion.
Lack of city planning
Not only would continuous urban conservation corridors be wildlife friendly, but human and city-friendly too. Rapid population growth and lack of foresight means that there are fragmented areas of wildlife habitat, and small isolated groups. Rather than being "rogue" possums or "breeding like rabbits", native animals largely only reproduce according to existing natural resources and habitats. This is unlike Melbourne's human population boom, for the real-estate market.
Former Liberal Premier, Rupert Hamer, in the 1960s wanted ensure that Melbourne would not become a monolith buildings and concrete. He planned the "green wedges", or "lungs" of Melbourne. Now, they are under threat from our present Liberal government that wants to access them for more "developments" - and profits.
The possum-friendly flora, the Eucalyptus, the Melaleucas and the acacias, are all easy to maintain and grow, and enhance our living areas. They break the contiguous concrete, glass, bricks and steel and soften the landscape.
Instead of birth control for the possums, a holistic approach to any possum problems in heritage trees would surely be the prevention of possums accessing them, not feeding them, and ensuring more native trees. Vilifying possums as a problem to be controlled is because of than lack of maintenance of trees, and lack of city planning, and lack of appreciation of urban wildlife. At least though, the Yarra City Council decided against a "cull"!
Carbon tax will be negated by population growth
If Australia takes no action by 2020 our carbon emissions could be 20 per cent higher than in 2000, not 5 to 25 per cent lower as the Australian Government intends.
Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy from Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research found 83 per cent of the forecast increase in carbon emissions from 2000 to 2020 is attributable to population growth.
It is impossible for Australia to meet the proposed greenhouse gas emissions target through domestic action. Buying permits from overseas is an essential part of the plan. This means that Australia will be gaining from other more sustainable nations.
Our target for greenhouse gas reduction is actually more like a 25 per cent reduction in per capita terms just to achieve just 5 per cent overall. More consumers means energy demands will increase, while at the same time energy producers will be trying to out-pace increasing carbon emissions with "clean" energy.
It's like trying to reduce the contents of a container of liquid while it is still being filled at the top!
The target reduction must the keep outstripping gross emissions due to population growth. With contradictory policies coming from Parliament House, how are we to really believe and embrace the carbon tax?
We should be doing some obvious things, like stabilizing our population and investing in R@D for alternative energy sources.
Fossil fuels have spurned economic and population growth, but it must be acknowledged that the carbon age has ended.
Have your say about Brimbank’s ‘Plants and Animals’ by Nov 2
Draft Biodiversity Strategy Consultation Period Oct 10 - Nov 2 2011
http://www.brimbank.vic.gov.au/News/News_and_Updates/Draft_Biodiversity_Strategy_Consultation_Period_Oct_10_-_Nov_2_2011
Tuesday 4 October, 2011
Have your say about Brimbank’s ‘Plants and Animals’
Brimbank City Council’s draft Biodiversity Strategy, which provides a plan to protect and enhance our natural areas over the next 10 years, is now available for community feedback. The strategy has been developed as part of Council’s commitment to protect, maintain and enhance biodiversity within the municipality as identified within the Brimbank Community Plan (2009 - 2030).
These natural areas which are scattered throughout Brimbank provide us with a snapshot of the plants and animals that were once widespread across the area and in fact across a large area of Western Victoria. Many of these significant plants and animals have been recognised and are protected by State and Federal government legislation.
The strategy will assist the Council to implement measures to ensure we continue to protect and improve the quality and quantity of these natural areas and look for opportunities to connect these sites through natural corridors ensuring the long term sustainability of the native species and vegetation communities. Most importantly, we will continue to foster greater community understanding and connection with our significant natural areas which will continue to create and build on the active participation and ownership already shown by the wider Brimbank community.
Get Involved
Workshop One: October 19 2011
6:30pm-8:00pm
Brimbank City Council - Keilor Municipal Offices
704B Old Calder Highway
Keilor 3036
Melway Map 14 H5.
Workshop Two: October 27 2011
7.00pm-8:30pm
Glengala Community Centre.
Corner Simmie Street and Glengala Road
West Sunshine 3020
Melway Map 40 E2.
Please note: Light refreshment will be provided.
Further Information
Draft Biodiversity StrategyDraft Biodiversity Strategy Community Consultation BrochureDraft Biodiversity Strategy Technical Reference
Provide your comments by:
Completing our questionnaire
Comments can also be made in writing by 5pm on November 2nd 2011:
Submission to draft Biodiversity Strategy
Environment Department
Brimbank City Council
PO Box 70
Sunshine VIC 3020
Or email comments to [email protected]
For further information or to RSVP for the Workshops please contact our Biodiversity Officer on 9249 4905 or email [email protected]
Why won't media properly scrutinise alternative PM's record?
When I conducted a search using the terms:
"Paul Zammit" Australia GST
... I failed to find any record of John Howard's manipulation of the electoral processes to impose the GST except for what is on candobetter and contributions by daggett and myself to johnquiggin.com. (However, as footnote in the article above shows, discussion includes comment with quote from Let's have the honest truth, once and for all of 18 August 2004 by Alan Ramsey.)
That's unfortunate because the public discontent with Julia Gillard's Government may well lead to her Government being voted out and replaced by a Tony Abbott Liberal/National Government - possibly in an early election, if the mainstream newsmedia gets its way.
This could happen in the same way that Australians' rightful dislike of then Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating caused John Howard's Liberal/National Government to be elected in 1996. After Howard was elected he took Keating's scandalous mismanagement as license to implement his own policies which were even more harmful to public welfare. This included his vicious slash-and-burn budgets which he carried out using his "discovery" of Paul Keating's $10 billion budgetary "black hole" as his excuse.
If the media wants us to embrace Tony Abbott at least it should more closely scrutinise the record of the Howard Government of which Tony Abbott was also a Minister, particularly in its early years.
A proper scrutiny would most likely convince a great many that Abbott is no more deserving of their vote than Gillard and they might start seeking real alternatives to both.
Economics, nature and government
A few questions to consider:
Henry George was writing in the context of population growth, railroad expansion, and rapid economic development and increasing manufacturing volumes. I can imagine that this would have been seen to bring wealth to U.S. citizens. He was writing at a time when population growth would have been considered a normal pattern as it is here and now in Australia. But how would Henry George’s system work with a stable population?
How does a stable population affect the cost of land?
What can make the cost of land go up?
Suggestions:
lots of people want to buy it or monopolize it
a for accommodation
b commerce
c manufacturing
b agriculture
c. forestry
d mining
d tourism
e ecological services
Where does the intrinsic value of the land fit in?
A house/land that was isolated but later is near the hub of a lot of services provided by the community becomes more valuable. Henry George would say that the owner should pay more to monopolize it. The owner then has the choice of moving on if he can’t afford the new rent, staying and enjoying it if he can or capitalizing on his block of land by densifying it and charging rent to others.
Economic rationalism- reduces everything to a dollar value
Is Georgism a form of economic rationalism?- or is it just about a fair way to collect taxes for necessary expenses for the community. It rewards industry and maximizes the $ yield from land
The areas that you mention - open space, nature, - are they areas of government responsibility where a boundary is made which says economic activity and exploitation of land and resources stops?
Can an economic system be made to take all this in? Is it reasonable to ask it to?
Candy and Sticky Fingers
Had tears in my eyes reading your story Jaylene. Thanks so much for sharing, and all the work you do caring for our beautiful animals.
Great Sharing Jaylene!
Thanks for sharing this important part of your and Candy's life. Keep up the great work Jaylene!
Anthony.
Symbol of energy efficiency
Two of my friends were discussing yesterday how they would get rid of the modest sized Hill's hoist in the yard of a new house just purchased in a Victorian country town. My thoughts were "But why? the house has the advantage of a generous sunny back yard which easily accommodates the rotary clothes line " But there was no equivocation as to its fate- it had to go! It was despised!
So much of the propaganda we have been subjected to over the last 3 decades has targeted and ridiculed the Hills Hoist such that few would now want be seen owning one. It has become an aesthetic pariah! It was seen over the years obviously as an obstacle between developers salivating at the idea of "urban consolidation" and their prey- the owners of the block large enough to accommodate the Hill's Hoist.
I shocked the Hill's Hoist cleansers with my heretical assessment of the unwanted structure. I said it was "a symbol of a disappearing universal affluence, access to private open space and a symbol of democracy as well as of supreme energy efficiency."
Afterthought: Annual energy bill for the Hill's Hoist- nil. Carbon emissions of the Hill's hoist- nil (except for manufacture and mining of components). Payback period: depends on the cost of energy v.s. rates on land in the future. (or "going forward" as politicians express this concept of time.)
To screen Triangle Wars in your community ...
If you would like to screen THE TRIANGLE WARS in your community, please get in touch to see how easy it can be.
Film hire is available to community groups for a discounted rate. Phone (07) 3262 2009 or email [email protected] for details. Screen THE TRIANGLE WARS in your community to raise debate on your local development issues or as a fundraiser event. Get inspired!
High rise is the most inefficient type of life style
The ACF is not the only report that condemns high density living as being a greater energy-guzzling lifestyle. It's like saying battery hens is "better" for the environment because they take up less room, but the cost is using the hens as an egg-laying process in a manufacturing environment. It ignores the costs of their lives, their living standards, natural behaviors, their lifespans, their health and the necessary beak-cutting they must suffer to stop "aggression" and self-mutilations.
High rise living means that per capital emissions exceed by far those of people living in townhouses or detached houses.
The implications on our live won't be so different to that on battery hens. We can expect to see increased crime, declining personal and environmental health, and the costs of living increase as we get strangled by the costs of growth.
Growth con-artistry
"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."
I can guess what the growthist lobby will say to the above - They will say, "Yes, but we would plan it PROPERLY." That's the way they operate, always pretending that in the future it will be different. True con-artist style.
U must c Triangle Wars, support GetUp Direct Democracy proposal
I saw Triangle Wars last night and thoroughly recommend it. Make sure you get to see it at one of the sessions I listed yesterday.
It's a great and uplifting story when I have become so accustomed to the welfare of the majority being sacrificed to selfish vested interests. On this occasion, residents of Saint Kilda succeeded in throwing out at the ballot box councillors of the City of Port Phillip who ignored the clear wishes of the community they were supposedly representing and tried to impose a huge development in a car park on publicly owned land on the beach front.
Not every Australian community can hope to be as organised and coordinated as were the citizens of Saint Kilda. So, far more often, the interests of developers have prevailed in Australia in recent decades. If Australia had Direct Democracy written into the Constitution, it would not be be possible for selfish vested interests and their glove puppet Councillors to impose their wishes upon the local community as they almost succeeded in doing in Triangle Wars.
Please support the GetUp proposal for Direct Democracy at tinyurl.com/3nmwwjq.
Georgism, wages, land costs and productivity
Hi Geoff,
Feel free to continue this discussion. Debating Georgism requires quite a lot of skill and I can easily trip up. Here is how I see it.
It is not just third world rental costs that Australian business cannot compete against, it is average rent and housing costs in Western Europe, in countries like France. The system in those countries taxes land-speculation and the transmission of inheritances outside family and tends to keep people movements down, agricultural land intact and businesses local. The English speaking countries all pay ridiculous prices in land purchase and rent. They are all artificially stimulating population growth to keep those prices high, and they suffer from continuous, frenetic population movement.
You write, "Obviously this doesn't solve the population growth problem, which is one of the root causes of our troubles, but reducing property prices and rents certainly wont eliminate that problem either." However, while property developers can raise the value of their land and developments by importing customers, high land values cause population growth. If you reduce the opportunity to make money out of land speculation then population growth becomes a cost rather than a source of money. If land were no longer commodified, there would be no incentive to import more customers. Henry George does not tax that kind of land-speculation. He taxes the hoarding of 'undeveloped' land that might, if 'developed' yield financial returns. This method punishes leaving natural spaces alone wherever humans might turn them to some kind of financial profit.
Your point about raising production is problematic because it requires more and more production as pressure of population raises land-costs. That assumes that it is possible to endlessly leverage production on manpower or other fuels, but that is a game of diminishing returns and if it were endlessly possible there would not be so much chiseling over wages or much need for land speculation to acquire material wealth. We are all working harder and harder for less, and paying more for less land. People now work longer hours than they did in the 1950s, yet, in Brisbane for instance, only the very rich can afford the houses on generous blocks that working families once lived in. Also, did you understand that high wages are necessary for workers to pay for high rents? Thus land costs underly wage costs.
But it seems to me that Henry George did understand the problem of high rents and how they were undesirable. His idea was that any business that would pay high rents would do so because it made higher profits due to services that accompanied high rents (roads, electricity, many clients, government offices etc). When the rents exceeded the profits, the businesses would move further out. What would happen if transnational corporations came in and drove up the rents and then caused all the small businesses to crash? Did he say anything about that?
The Henry George system brilliantly utilises population density as a factor in land values but, as far as I can see, it unwittingly endorses a nightmare situation where people can be absolutely packed in slums by rentiers (people who get the rent) in the guise of productivity of land. The renters (people who pay the rent) must then work like slaves in the widget factories to pay the high rents that come with the higher land-values associated with the high population density. The theory is that the state will claw back those profits in land-tax and then somehow redistribute them to the rest of the population. This part of the theory is the best part, but, for me, suffers from the usual problems of governments removed from localities, which always seem to redistribute any taxes to their friends rather than to the whole community, so we need some kind of democratic input here.
Democracy and natural affection for locality and community seem to be disregarded under Georgism. Under Georgism, it seems to be okay to move little old widows out of the houses they were born in, artists out of cheap garrets where they compose misunderstood masterpieces, and dreamers out of backyard sheds, to make way for widget factories. My view questions widget factories and suggests we need relocalisation and for more people to produce primary products and consume less secondary adn tertiary ones, notably the mass-manfufactured ones. Georgist values are survival values for pioneer towns, (and the same as current Australian mainstream economics ones). Neither work to facilitate climax communities where people might simply enjoy life simply and intelligently according to the ideals of ancient Athenian philosophers as oil declines and the population balloon of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries quietly deflates.
The Henry George perspective is pure economics and suffers from the problems of pure economics. That is, it seems to have no means of measuring values outside densely-populated areas and values which are barely commodifiable. For instance, it cannot take seriously intrinsic values of wild spaces, and positional values of natural ammenity. Nor does it understand the thermodynamic rules that are preserved in the natural world and on which our lives depend. Even if some very rich person or company is prepared to pay huge taxes to preserve a river or a stream, when that person dies or the company goes broke, under the Georgist system, that river or stream will inevitably be destroyed, heat islands will develop etc. Usually the stream has no chance and is the first thing to go. Georgism has no means to value other species and does not even count them. It gives materially productive output primacy at the expense of freedom not to work and freedom to enjoy life, ammenity and place. It suffers thus from the same problems of other forms of capitalism and of communism.
Its chief selling point is that it redistributes monetary wealth to the community, through the collection of taxes. Its chief downside is that it surrenders community, place, self-government and democracy to an abstract market that responds to rules that reward population density and infrastructure alone. In this it differs little from our current system.
You might point to systems that commodify trees and rare animals and tax companies to preserve them, as in Greenhouse tax schemes for locking carbon up or to promote the breeding of rare animals for legal trade. However these are very artificial and clunky solutions to problems which, in my opinion, would be much better dealt with by returning power locally, taxing land-speculation and land-commodification (see para one about inheritances.)
Henry George was right to say that his system presented a solution to poverty, but it did not return land and self-government to people who had been deprived of it in the first place; it merely made the best out of the monetized reinvention of the world as a commodity market.
It seems to me that Georgism will always nurture and defend growth. Growth is now a problem, as you say, and I don't think that Henry George would have stuck with his original recipe. He would have had to have allowed major importance for human rights and to have recognised the primacy of our ecological envelope over everything else. Pollution taxes don't do that either, by the way because people will pay to pollute and then charge their customers.
It may surprise you to hear that I used to be on the Board at Prosper Australia. It was an admirable institution in those days.[1] I have a great admiration for Henry George and Georgism. It is an intellectual challenge to work out why it does not satisfy ecologically. From the ecological perspective, it is flawed, in my opinion, because it is unable to give importance to anything that does not have monetary value and it will always preference higher monetary value over lower monetary value, even if that lower monetary value contains all the things that people love.
An example of this can be found in The Triangle Wars, by the way. The Triangle Wars is about a huge development for the Melbourne seaside suburb of St Kilda that was proposed and agreed to by the Port Melbourne Council against the objections of many residents of St Kilda. The residents objected because they valued the view that the development would block and they valued their continuing access to the remaining simple beach. They did not want to replace the relics of a 19th century Australian bohemia with a generic shopping mall. They were against higher density occupation of the area and they were against more shops. They said there was enough shopping. Henry George would have said that the residents of St Kilda should move out to Frankston (where similar developments are happening) or further out, to Hastings (where a huge development is happening). In the end under the conditions prevailing through high population growth in Australia, the residents of St Kilda would have had to have dispersed into the hinterland, half way to Culgoa to avoid major developments that sought to intensify the take from a captive population and to take advantage of established services. If they had done that, however, many of them might have lost access to their jobs and incomes. So Georgism in this case means that you have to wear the commercial impositions that accompany high population density. You do not have the right to say how your town will be run. (The residents won this battle for once in The Triangle Wars, by the way.)
Georgism needs an ecological and a democratic component that is just as strong as the land-tax concept to work. At the moment it has no such thing. It also has no respect for locality. We need to see Henry George's system in the context of when he lived. He was looking at the upside of growth at that particular time in America. We are looking at the absolute downside today. Growth is our biggest problem today. Georgism is a recipe for higher densification. It punishes the preservation of space and green. Every city in Australia is being ruined by high rates that stop people from preserving nature anywhere close to houses and businesses. And towns and cities are now linked by multi-lane freeways, lined by endless suburbs, devoid of kangaroos, devoid even of farmland. So, even if you buy a car and travel for fifty km you still may not be able to experience the refreshment of natural surroundings and the sight of birds and other creatures.
Geogism assumes that people will use land for 'production' (a thing that ecologists believe there is already too much of). However, under guise of 'production', landlords can simply rent out rooms to house dense populations at prices where the landlords will make a profit over the land tax. The people who rent the rooms will have to work harder in order to pay their rent. Making people work harder is supposed to be a 'good thing' if you believe that we need more 'productivity' but, again, I say, ecologists think we need less productivity.
To avoid greater ecological overshoot, to slow down oil depletion, to reduce pollution, we need to produce less and to become fewer. The way to achieve this is to work fewer hours and pay less for land so that we can live more peacefully, happily and less frenetically 'productively'. In Georgism services are associated with population density and you pay for the services via land tax. However, in conditions of high population density, as services become scanty, people have no choice (as in Melbourne at the moment), yet land-prices continue to rise.
I am sure that more dedicated Georgists will let me know what I have got wrong. It occurs to me that we cannot hold Henry George's theory responsible for solving everything. It is an economic tool more than a political system.
[1] Regrettably, Prosper Australia (a very wealthy NGO) was taken over by members of the Socialist Alliance, the Refugee Action Collective and The Right to Life, and promoted particularly as EarthSharing. The people involved in this takeover objected greatly to its association with Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) and threatened to demonstrate outside Prosper Australia if Prosper allowed SPA to continue to have meetings there.
Write a review of The Triangle Wars
Consider writing a review on a cinema site of this film to publicise its importance.
Here at the Classic Cinema Elsternwick internet site, for instance, you can write a review:
http://www.yourmovies.com.au/movies/index.cfm?action=movie_info&imdb_id=2049573&title_id=43402
Triangle wins Best Australian documentary award!
The Triangle just won the Best Australian documentary award!
Despite this, there are still problems getting it screened in Sydney. It did screen there yesterday in a once-only spot at the Antenna Documentary Film Festival, which is where it received the festival's Best Australian Documentary award. Of course there's an audience for it in Sydney and around Australia, but it seems likely that mass media (which invests in land-speculation and unwelcome developments) won't be anxious to let people know about it. And it is actually about stopping a huge multi-cinema complex, so I guess we should not be surprised that it isn't showing in Frankston, for instance, where a similar complex went up a few years ago, despite community protest.
Rapid population growth part of Aussie culture
Why do the Anglo-countries think that they can continue to absorb perpetual population growth?
Because rapid population growth is all Australia, Canada and USA have ever known since they were colonized. Its part of their culture, a fundamental part of their self-identity. They were founded as frontier societies. Many (most?) of their citizens simply cannot take seriously the idea that their population could ever stop growing. It is unthinkable. Look at the Australian national anthem:
"Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free,
we've boundless soil....."
I strongly suspect before the end of this century, when the Australian population is somewhere between 50 and 90 million, the growth is going to stop, and the population decline. If we are very lucky it will be like what is happening in Japan now. Very few will be prepared. The transition from growth to decline, and then at same point stability, will be deeply traumatic.
Public Rally against inappropriate developments
TOWNSHIP OF LARA CARE GROUP INC (T.L.C)
Request your presence at a large public rally organised by Green Wedges Coalition in support with other concerned groups to reinforce the message to Minister Guy to:
PROTECT SERENDIP SANCTUARY, LARA from high density housing
PROTECT LARA AND LITTLE RIVER’S RURAL LAND /GREEN WEDGE BOUNDARIES FROM THE THRUST OF INAPPROPRIATE DEVELOPMENT
PUBLIC RALLY
WEDNESDAY 12TH OCTOBER 1PM
STATE PARLIAMENT STEPS (cnr Bourke & Spring St)
We are still waiting for the Minister’s decision to overturn Geelong Council’s shameful decision approving Amend.C73 to enable development opposite Serendip Sanctuary, jeopardising not only the Sanctuary and its wildlife, but also setting a dangerous precedent for “open slather development “in our rural land.
Make your presence and voice heard.
Bring a sign/placard.
See you there….
TLCGROUP LARA
Henry George?
Land is an asset that should be considered to be the property of a nation. Henry George had some great ideas in this regard, but they are the opposite to what you propose. In essence we would introduce a better system of land value taxation based on the services society provides to a particular parcel of land (ie proximity to road & rail, water, power, population etc). People shouldn't be taxed for the improvements they put on land. People also should not be taxed on their income (land value taxation replaces income tax).
In this way, businesses are inspired to make the best possible use of the land they have available. Land speculation is eliminated or greatly reduced (being taxed on vacant land means you aren't going to hold that land in the hope of price rises). No income tax means people are more inclined to work harder, and they have more money at the end of the day.
Obviously this doesn't solve the population growth problem, which is one of the root causes of our troubles, but reducing property prices and rents certainly wont eliminate that problem either.
As for land costs to businesses exceeding wage costs as a factor in productivity, it doesn't seem very well considered. The productivity and profitability of any manufacturing operation will be related to individual unit throughput and the costs going into those units. Rent represents one component of the costs, but it can be reduced per unit by increasing the number of units produced. Wages on the other hand are tied to production, as you need more labour to increase the number of units produced.
Simplistically, produce 100 units and the rent component is 1/100th of rent. Produce 1000 units and it's then 1/1000th of that. Contrast that to wages, and if each person only produces 100 units per week, then increasing to 1000 units requires 10 people rather than 1, so your wages bill has just gone up tenfold. Labour per unit stays the same, as long as wages stay the same, but labour as a component of total profitability stays as a fixed proportion of any increase in production, in contrast to rent which is reduced as a component the more you produce. This seems to be at odds with your premise.
Cheap third world labour is always going to destroy expensive local manufacturing. The positive is that as the third world people see their incomes rise, and begin to demand ever greater incomes, and purchase more locally, and see prices rise locally as a result of their ever greater desire for higher wages they will soon price themselves out of manufacturing as well, and maybe we'll be in a third world state by then where we're happy to step in and make things for $3 a week wages.
Health providers can't keep up with demands - Austin Hospital
Austin Hospital executives, Melbourne, are calling for more beds and chairs for the emergency department. Does it take a death of someone waiting to get some funding?
The May 2010 proposal said the emergency department was treating about 16,500 more patients a year than it was built to manage, blowing out waiting times for care.
Austin's urgent plea for funds -The Age
The hospital expected to deal with 85,000 emergency cases a year by 2015 and 98,000 by 2020 because of a growing and ageing population in Melbourne's north-east. (blame the older people?)
The May 2010 figures are now considered out of date, and the Austin ED now sees over 20,000 more patients/year than it was built for, or 40% more than a safe capacity.
The Ivanhoe district is already established, but it has been declared an "activity centre" for more population growth. This means they plan on having 17,000 NEW residents in this small catchment area of the hospital in the next decades. Add all the other "activity centres" and the demands on the hospital will be compounded and escalate.
Growth is choking our city, our public transport, our parking lots, and streets and causing more and more "shortages", and rising costs.
We are in a bottleneck gridlock of growth, and funding simply can't keep up. The two industries our State government largely rely upon- housing construction and foreign students - are both on shaky grounds, and both inherently require ongoing population growth.
Policial corruption
"Sustainable" Population Minister Tony Burke duped the public with his 3 panels, consisting of many well-qualified experts, and many community submissions, to ostensibly arrive at a population policy for Australia. We we all deceived. He wasted public time and money, and used the expert advise and status of people, as well as the public, by producing an outcome that had no relationship with the input. There was nothing, except for those who benefit from growth, that actually referred to or was based on the submissions and summaries of the panels.
http://www.environment.gov.au/minister/burke/2011/mr20110513.html
"The Strategy's focus is on population change rather than setting arbitrary targets, driving growth to regional areas by attracting skilled workers and more houses to where job opportunities are, and alleviating pressures in outer suburbs of major capital cities by supporting more local jobs." It was more about skills shortages than shortages of hospitals, schools, water, land, tertiary education funding - or even looming food shortages!
Also, we have a Planning department that assumes and enforces population that defies all the scientific and economic evidence that ongoing population growth is negative, threatening and unsustainable. Managing the "nimby" element is about over-riding public concerns, the quality of our suburbs, and democratic dialogue.
Planning should be about protecting the concerns of residents, voters and creating ideal cities - for now and future generations.
Now, we have political parties as clients of the growth-lobby - the developers, bankers, big businesses and transport firms. Public servants are paid to implement them at all costs. It doesn't matter which political party we vote for. It's all a farce. Melbourne's direction and upward population growth is decided by the growth lobby, and over-rides public welfare, reason, politics and science.
State governments are exploiting the commodity of housing to the maximum, under the smoke-screen of a "shortage of affordable housing". The housing affordability crisis will never be solved while we continue to have our high population growth rate - driven mostly by immigration.
What can we do? Avoid the Stockholm syndrome that endorses the need for "affordable housing" and having to "take our share of developments". Save our Suburbs, and take a hard-line approach.
Our population growth is due to government policy, not to large families or high fertility levels. Vote for Independents and the Stable Population Party of Australia.
Triangle film
I believe the film ran for 90 minutes but it left those I spoke to wishing that it had gone on. It was riveting throughout with skilfully chosen interviews revealing the perspectives and characters of the players in this drama. Many in the audience would have identified most strongly with the protesters against the proposed overblown exploitative, view- blocking intrusive mass of buildings and concrete walkways on a tiny piece of land near the foreshore in Melbourne's colorful, crowded and slightly seedy inner bayside suburb of St. Kilda. The film captures the character of the place - its remnant natural setting, Luna Park where one can spend a few vacuous hours doing the rides, and its exotic and artistic flavour. The film highlights the values of the people who so strongly opposed the commercial development and their disdain for the assumption that shopping comes first over all other activities. We watched the decision making process of the council and could almost see the individual minds at work as they deliberated. This film well and truly transcends its time and place though as it could happen anywhere and it is about the universal theme of democracy.
Banyule House
Firstly, I'd like to posit that the anonymous respondent "Lukekul" may well have a vested interest in the proposed residential development abutting the Banyule House estate. Unless this individual is prepared to name him or her self, then one should consider the intent or veracity of their comments from a skeptical viewpoint.
Living in Frankston, I've been following locally a similar saga to that of Banyule. A heritage-listed property in Frankston South has suffered a similar defilement to that which is confronting Banyule. I refer to "Westerfield" in Robinsons Road, a house designed by the Melbourne architect Harold Desbrowe Annear in the so-called "Arts and Crafts" style, and built on a 45 hectare allotment in 1924. Surrounding the house were terraced lawns, gardens and pergola (also designed by Annear), an orchard and vegetable garden, and a now-demolished timber windmill designed to generate electricity for the house. A large area of natural bushland east of the house was retained.
The Westerfield estate is now on 14 (see below) hectares and incorporates a house, garden, paddocks, dam and bushland. The two storey house has ground floor walls of uncoursed locally-quarried granite rubble and a half timber and stucco upper floor. The plan is unconventional, with three wings radiating out from a central stair hall. The house has no corridors, and many rooms have unusual shapes.
Despite the vociferous wishes of the local community and heritage supporters - who maintained lengthy vigils at the site - 2.7 hectares (nearly 20 per cent of the property) comprising remnant native bushland were compulsorily acquired by the state government and bulldozed to make way for the new Frankston Bypass.
I post this not to distract from the problems Banyule is facing, but to indicate that unless opposition is fierce, relentless and prolonged then there's virtually zero chance of success against the predations of a corporatist-minded government or its allies. And even then, failure is more probable than not.
— Regards and good luck, Geoff.
Mulitculturalism is an oxymoron
Why do the Anglo-countries think that they can continue to absorb perpetual population growth? The USA, Canada and Australia are not the economic power-houses they assume they are, or have been.
The costs of growth are enormous and end up strangling progress and cause bottlenecks due to the infrastructure required.
Multiculturalism is positive to a certain extent, to encourage toleration and international understandings, but there are limits. It's actually an oxymoron. "Diversity" is assumed to be a community/national "glue" but it also encourages differences and division. Racism is used to quell objections to mass immigration and lack of transparency in government decisions.
Political conspiracy on imported labour in Britain - article
"... assertion was in any case a grotesque understatement — we have opened our doors to more than five million people in the last ten years, only a minority of them Poles, and they have soaked up the poorest paid jobs in the economy and, when not doing so, have been an enormous burden on our taxes, through benefits and meeting their requirements for housing, health and education. Five million! The original Treasury estimate of how many workers might come into the country was put at 13,000, by the way. And these new arrivals have driven down the wages for the very people Ed’s party was set up to protect. None of this is their fault, the immigrants, and nobody should blame them — any more than those of us who cautioned against this policy would have blamed them at the time. We knew where the blame lay: it is Ed’s fault.
Furthermore, having wrongly identified a need for low-skilled labour from abroad, the party then sought to justify its decision by emphasising the immense social benefits vast numbers of immigrants would bring. There would be — according to a government report from 2000 published under the Freedom of Information Act — ‘a widening of consumer choice and significant cultural contributions’. And so there would, for a small number of metropolitan liberal middle-class monkeys from within whose ranks — pace Harriet — the party seems destined for ever to select its leader. As the former Labour speechwriter, Andrew Neather, put it, the policy was intended to ‘rub the right’s noses in it’ and chastise them with the massed ovine bleat of ‘raaaaaaaaacccccist’ should they possibly object. And that government paper went on to state that the long-held consensus that immigration should be limited to manageable numbers (i.e. probably not 500,000 people every year) was ‘an objective with no economic or social justification’.
I hope whoever wrote that dross is out of work right now. The same paper deliberately censored ‘emerging evidence’ of immigrants being involved in criminal gangs, fighting and mugging and begging. And as we know from the diaries of the former Labour MP for Sunderland, Chris Mullin, Labour politicians were too terrified to talk about the problems associated with immigration in case they too were met with that massed ovine bleat. "
Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/all/7272448/dont-blame-immigrants-for-immigration-blame-ed-miliband.thtml
Don’t blame immigrants for immigration – blame Ed Miliband
The Spectator, October 1, p. 11
Don’t blame immigrants for immigration – blame Ed Miliband
The Spectator, October 1, p. 11
Those who helped conceal JFK murder conspiracy oppose US wars?
Thanks, Sheila,
One clue as to for how long the supposed Trotskyist/Marxist 'far left' has been as rotten and corrupt as it now can be clearly seen to be is that it also covered up evidence of the conspiracy by the US military-industrial establishment to murder President Kennedy on 22 November 1963.
The leaders of the 'far left', supposedly opposed to the same Vietnam War that JFK tried to end before he was murdered, could not have failed to notice the glaring holes in the US establishment's account of how JFK was supposedly murdered by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.
They did nothing to point this out to the American public and did nothing to help New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison bring to justice Clay Shaw, one of those who conspired to murder JFK. (Even after this story was revealed dramatically to the world in Oliver Stone's JFK in 1991, the supposed 'left' continued to ignore it. Phillip Adams, a supposed 'bleeding heart' used his voice on Late Night Live to turn listeners against Oliver Stone, shortly after the release of his film.)
How much easier it would have been to put the case against the Vietnam War to the American public had they been told that their slain President had also tried to stop that war?
But they did not, and, instead, helped to perpetuate the myth that JFK himself wanted the war to continue, whilst going through all the the motions of being seen to 'build' the anti-war movement.
They have also conceal evidence of conspiracies to murder two other great American leaders of the 1960's, JFK's brother Robert and Martin Luther King. [1]
Martin Luther King understood how population growth and high immigration undermined the wellbeing of black people and, unlike the 'far left', used his voice to speak out against it. (I thought evidence that MLK opposed high immigration existed but could not find it. Instead I found a number of articles claiming that MLK favoured high immigration. An article about the effects of immigration on black welfare is "Another MLK Day With Mass Immigration Working Against The Black Underclass" of 17 Jan 2011 by Roy Beck. One who did oppose high imigration was US Latino labour leader, Cesar Chavez.)
The fight to end the US's direct intervention in Vietnam lasted until 1972 and cost the Vietnamese at least many hundreds of thousands more lives than it need have.
The Vietnamese finally removed the US-imposed regime in 1975, but at the destruction inflicted upon Vietnam and the rest of IndoChina was so immense that any chance to build a just and prosperous future for IndoChina and the rest of South East Asia had been lost as subsequent history has shown.
If 'Trotskyists' are somehow able to depict their intervention in the mass movement against the Vietnam War as a success, the same cannot be said of their interventions since then. As examples the mass movements to stop the illegal US wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 demonstrably failed in spite of overwhelming evidence that the US claims ('incubator babies', WMD's in 2003) against Iraq were fraudulent.
A closer inspection of the intervention of the "far left" in the anti-war movement and other progressive causes will reveal that they undermined many of those causes.
Footnotes
1.
I thought evidence that MLK opposed high immigration existed but could not find it. Instead I found a number of articles claiming that MLK favoured high immigration. An article about the effects of immigration on black welfare is "Another MLK Day With Mass Immigration Working Against The Black Underclass" of 17 Jan 2011 by Roy Beck. One who did oppose high imigration was US Latino labour leader, Cesar Chavez.
Ponzi economic strangles our progress
No merit in the argument that "..immigration will lead to the collapse of Australian services and infrastructure".
The Ponzi economics of Australia means that the costs of infrastructure are a prohibitive bottleneck to advancement, and rising, along with the costs of living.
Germany has the world’s third most powerful economy, with its free-market system tempered by generous welfare benefits. Germany's affluent and technologically powerful economy is the fifth largest national economy in the world.
Germany has one of the world's most technologically advanced telecommunications systems as a result of intensive capital expenditures since reunification.
Germany experienced an economic boom immediately after unification.
Germany, not the United States, is the world's biggest single exporting nation.
The German chancellor announced early in April plans to boost state-controlled day-care facilities in the hope of boosting the German birthrate, one of the lowest in the world. Germany's population is characterized by zero or declining growth.
While most of their migrations had an economic background, Germany has also been a prime destination for refugees from many developing countries, in part because its constitution long had a clause giving a 'right' to political asylum, but restrictions over the years have since made it less attractive.
The new German Immigration Act, which came into force on 01 January 2005, provides for highly qualified persons to be granted permanent residence and permission to work from the outset, rather than five-year work permits as was previously the case. They must have a concrete job offer and get permission from the German Employment Agency. This is hardly the mass immigration Australia has - encouraging students, family reunions and basically having universities relying on foreign income to subsidize their existence.
Germany would prefer to stay the more powerful nation, for their own interests, and have Australia strangled by greed and population obesity as the result of our Ponzi economics.
Australians need better history education to detect S.A. poseurs
I appreciate your comments, Geoffrey. I think that few Australians have much idea of these matters, due to the appalling lack of history in schools and universities. The corruption of socialist groups here is so obvious in this light. They are actively apologists for the growth lobby. They are only able to recruit people because of our very poor education system.
SBS promotes CIS-Hartwich propaganda too
Fair Dinkum Researcher. I sympathise with you non-growth lobby researchers. No-one funds you. Thanks for drawing attention to Hartwich and Brown's lobby-serving froth.
Now I see that SBS is promoting more from the same so-called "independent" mob (CIS) and Hartwich "researcher" mentioned above:
"A German researcher says there's no merit in arguments that immigration will lead to the collapse of Australian services and infrastructure. Dr Oliver Hartwich, a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, is one of the authors of a new report on population growth and its implications for Australia. Dr Hartwich says the negative arguments currently dominating the debate on immigration are a cover for government policy failures, and the product of what he calls, an immigration fear culture."
(By Kristina Kukolja, 06 Oct 2011)
What a patronising piece, eh?
More at http://www.sbs.com.au/podcasts/Podcasts/radionews/episode/187689/Australia-suffering-immigration-fear-culture
Baby Bonus
I prefer to call myself "childfree" rather than childless. I made the decision as a very young person to remain childfree and have never regretted it - am not all that far off 70 years of age.
Someone suggested celibate communities. Why? We have excellent birth control methods.
How about the government paying me my non-baby bonus for the ten kids I chose not to have?
Marxism is the other side of Capitalism
Marxism is a reaction to Capitalism and has the same values and beliefs about progress and material wealth, just differs on distribution. Marxists, like Capitalists, believe that humans can always find what they need through new technology.
They are industrial-scale movements that find their power in cities and do not value localities and environment any more than they value local self-government.
There was a third way, led by Bakunin, called Anarchism, which tried to defend local lands, traditions and populations, but it fell under the wheels of the other two behemoths.
Communists could have stopped the rise of Nazism but infiltrators interfered. They could also have stopped Hitlers' forces in Italy and Greece, but the allies (Brits etc) failed to help them.
I personally feel that relocalisation is our only hope. That is really what anarchism is although most people have been indoctrinated with a very wierd idea of what anarchism is.
Relocalisation relies on emotional and geographical closeness to locality and the right to local self-government with delegation of power in cooperation with other communities. Such a system can preserve environment where industrial systems simply overlook it.
Sheila Newman
Geoffrey Taylor's reply has been adapted to become the article All humankind loved by population growth pushers ... except Libyans?. - Ed
Humans need protecting from their reproductive urges
"How did apparently progressive greens and defenders of the underprivileged turn into people-haters, convinced of the evils of over-breeding among the world's poor?"
- overpopulation is misanthropic - and the plight of the Horn of Africa and the threats to Tuvalu are warning signs
- as for people-hating? The human urge to dominate, spread, consume and reproduce to unrealistic levels is a sign of collective self-annihilation. It's a self-destructive gene, inherent in our DNA, that needs to be reined in, for our benefit.
- either we as humans control our numbers, or let Nature do it for us. The first is confronting, but the alternative is ugly.
- The conflict between the environmental conservation and/or people and their reproductive urges should be renewed and revisited to one of cooperation, co-dependence and harmonious cooperation.
Marxists and environmentalism don't mix
Unfortunately much of the environmental movement seems to have been taken over by Marxists and Marxist thinking. That even seems to include the mainstream Green party. Marxism and environmentalism are wholly incompatible. Principally, Marxists seem to believe more people are always good, the world is almost empty and can support many more people, by science and technology nature must be remade so it can support more people, the strength of the working class is in their growing numbers and that population control is a plot by the wealthy classes to weaken the working class. That's the impression I get from perusing Marxist literature, I'm sure someone who has studied this in detail could explain further.
Overpopulation a cause of environmental destruction refuted(?!)
From links.org.au, web-site of Green Left on 4 October 2011:
Too Many People? provides a clear, well-documented and popularly written refutation of the idea that "overpopulation" is a major cause of environmental destruction, arguing that a focus on human numbers not only misunderstands the causes of the crisis, it dangerously weakens the movement for real solutions. No other book challenges modern overpopulation theory so clearly and comprehensively, providing invaluable insights for activists and environmental scholars alike.
Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism, an online journal focusing on capitalism, climate change and the ecosocialist alternative. His previous books include Canadian Bolsheviks and The Global Fight for Climate Justice.
Simon Butler, a climate justice activist based in Sydney, Australia, is co-editor of Green Left Weekly, the country's leading source of anti-capitalist news, analysis, discussion and debate.
Reviews
"This excellent book is steadfast in its refutations of the flabby, misogynist and sometimes racist thinking that population growth catastrophists use to peddle their claims. It's just the thing to send populationists scurrying back to their bunkers."
—Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved
"How did apparently progressive greens and defenders of the underprivileged turn into people-haters, convinced of the evils of over-breeding among the world's poor? How did they come to believe the 200-year-old myths of a right-wing imperialist friend of Victorian mill-owners? It's a sorry story, told here with verve and anger."
—Fred Pearce, author of Peoplequake
Japan's warship will be used against "protected" whales
The "protected" whales in the Antarctic will be facing patrol boats with a speed of 46 knots, three gun housings, and surface-to-surface missiles. They will be facing a warship. Another class, the long-range Shikishima, carries a helicopter that could also be used to spot whale pods.
Japan has accused Sea Shepherd of "violence" and "eco-terrorism" but now the conflict has gone past annoying tricks and rancid butter to the use of lethal weapons.
There is a dark prospect of Japanese military action in Australian and New Zealand citizens in waters that we have declared an Australian whale sanctuary. The Antarctic has been the most peaceful place on the planet, but this will be changed forever.
Despite the tragic tsunami and earthquakes devastating Japan, they will invest $400 million towards bogus whale "research" and an extra $25 million so the slaughter is not obstructed.
15,000 people died and over 125,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged in the March arthquake/tsunami. Others are still homeless, and landscapes dangerously wiped out.
Sea Shepherd is a not-for-profit organization that receives no government funds.
The Australian government donated $10 million to Japan's Red Cross and Pacific Disaster to support the victims. Massive donations were sent to the country, a first-world nation, to help with their recovery.
Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd, said that Japan is financing its whale hunting for the most part with donation money it received after the earthquake and Tsunami disaster earlier this year.
We should question giving aid to governments that obstruct justice and divert the funds.
Australian climate change refugees
Vivienne, I don't understand why, when much of our own population lives in low lying coastal areas which will be innundated, Australians are led to think that this country will be in a position to take climate change refugees from elswhere. Could someone explain to me this perception that Australians are somehow invulnerable to flooding? Imagine Brisbane as the sea rises, or Melbourne. Is any city safe from sea-level rise in Australia? Canberra maybe.
Social justice priorities?
While "boat people" consume the immigration debate, they contribute no more than 2% of our immigration numbers, and refugees less than 5 %. The rest of the 95% are ignored - "students", skilled, family reunion are conveniently clouded over with "racist" accusations.
Social justice needs to start here, not focused so heavily on the overseas displaced. It is distorted to prevent society being too introspective, too analytical, too un-politically-correct.
So many people are falling behind economically, and one accident like the above can be the tipping point when people are over-committed economically and time-wise.
This is a tragedy and these silent social-injustices are being ignored by the main-stream media.
India is vulnerable to sea-level rises that could devastate coastal communities and threaten an influx of millions of climate refugees from low-lying neighbour Bangladesh.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it.
Australia won't be able to ignore the "climate change" refugees from the Pacific.
The Greens call upon the Pacific Island Forum at its 42nd meeting in Auckland next week to develop immediate plans to ameliorate the extent and effects of climate change, including:
to map out a migration programme for those who, because of the effects of climate change, can no longer remain in their home countries in the Pacific.
Social justice cannot over-ride domestic social justice issues, be used to over-burden us with ethical responses, or override or our own environmental/economic "carrying capacity" - and domestic social injustices.
Overpopulation will take a heavy toll on humanity, and social justice should not be an excuse for inaction on climate change, or resort to the "we are a wealthy nation" so that we are forced to take on a disproportionate number of a coming and potential new category of refugees - climate change refugees!
Future generations will suffer from corporate-run governments
Developers have had excessive influential buying-power within our State governments.
Both our Federal government and State governments are up-sizing Australia's population to a "big" one. We need, apparently, to keep up to the massive population sizes of Asia - for competitive wages, and defence.
This means denying all the science, and the technological evidence, that our natural resources can't keep up with human demands.
Governments need to keep up the facade that we must adjust to our population "boom" despite the fact that our population growth rate is not actually determined by our reproductive levels, or family sizes, but largely through government immigration policies.
Whether we want a "Big Australia" or not, and despite the fact that most people are being disadvantaged and overwhelmingly worse off, those with political and economic powers have the greater influence.
Big buildings, big projects, big debts and big donations is what our State governments are running on now. We are being run for the sake of the economy, rather than the contrary.
This addictive cycle must be broken, and government policies need to be returned to the people, the voters. Future generations will be handed a massively over-populated Australia, with debt and tremendous challenges - due to poor leadership and greed in these current times.
Injured NSW worker unable to pay mortgage, left impoverished
The following comment was posted to the forum discussion which followed SBS's Insight program of Tuesday 4 October Vote 4 What at 7.30PM:
I am homeless 3 years thanks to NSW Labor due to work place injury and being on 'work cover' being afforded little support and no protection from Star city casino rehabilitation scullbuggery and no thanks to Federal Coalition when in government as I had to let go of my mortgage as they wouldn't assist me in paying it as you would get 'rental assistance' renting when I on Centrelink payments, the Greens never return contact asking for assistance also, I will be just spoiling my ballots next elections.
Japan owning enough overseas property
Sheila,
Basically, I agree with you, but I do not believe that owning farmland overseas will actually help any country solve the food problem that will come as part and parcel of the coming fossil energy resources shortage. Once oil/NG shortages really begin to bite, how will any country manage to grow large amounts of food and then transport it back to the 'home' country? I think the whole idea is very short-sighted, but then one could say the same thing of the whole economic project of the past century or so, including nuclear power...
Monbiot is entirely correct.
Monbiot is entirely correct. Hundreds of studies demonstrate the worth of the modified I=PAT equation and the importance of affluence and technology variables therein. I was taught this stuff by National Academicians in the States in the 1980s and hold the relevant degrees, including a PhD in Sahelian drought and livelihoods analysis that required several years residence in African villages where I monitored growth rates along with socioeconomic and environmental variables.
I was at one of the early Campaign for Political Ecology meetings in London where overpopulation was the theme. Speakers, from the UK Green party in the early 90s, presented an overpopulation mantra that was straight out of the late 1960s, including the wildly inaccurate projections of Norman Myers that have never been proven on climate refugee numbers. A young Monbiot, by then carless, getting famous, and active in social movements and starting journalism, stood up and offered a blistering critique of their barely credible data. Monbiot, like me, has spent a lot of time in Africa and observing first hand. He also cites credible literature, unlike Optimum Population activists who look at websites. The Machakos Story (More People Less Erosion, Tiffen and Mortimore, 1994, book now available online through ODI) puts to bed the Malthusian myth about African overpopulation. They cite Boserup, who had it right when she argues people create environmental affordances, rather than the reverse. Mike Mortimore has some articles on drylandsresearch.org.uk that are based on 28 years continuous residence in West Africa and are pretty sound on the need for higher local population to meet labour demand, etc. the population-environment network at Columbia U, that I am associated with, also has frequent seminars on such topics held online.
Malthusianism has taken a long time to die, is kept alive by a few (often elderly) residents that think their nations have too many people, and fail to address the major driving forces of change - politics and economics and influence on overall impact. The debate in Australia and in Melbourne is just embarrassing - quite racist, and no credible scholar has emerged arguing we have a population crisis based on numerical analysis alone.
I also see a 9-11 conspiracy above - no thing has emerged there, either.
Shameless propaganda from Brown and Hartwich of CIS
This is a good place to post something that proposes itself as research, yet is clearly propaganda. The authors actually insist that "Population growth is not a project driven by the business lobby or politicians." How ridiculous does that statement look here?
It's a classic. Teachers should use it in primary school as an example of unclear thinking and bland misinformation with the usual biased bogies - shrinking European population [sensibly getting ready for petroleum decline] vs vibrant multiculturalism [40m under poverty line in the US and growing homelessness in Australia??].
Call it propaganda, call it paid journalism, but don't call it research because it's an insult to researchers. There is just too much of this junk around and the reason seems to be because population growth is a project driven by the business lobby and politicians, or these writers wouldn't get hired:
"Why a Growing Australia is Nothing to Fear."
Jessica Brown and Oliver Marc Hartwich | IA125 | 28 September 2011
Free download
Australia’s population is growing because our economy is booming and our society is confident about the future. Population growth is not something to strive for in and of itself, but it is not to be feared either.
A growing population presents us with challenges and opportunities. Population growth, and the skilled migration that fuels it, helps our economy grow - giving us the resources to support our ageing population, build better infrastructure, and protect our environment. A growing, pluralistic society makes us socially richer too.
Population growth is not a project driven by the business lobby or politicians. It is a fact. Australia’s population is growing, and our demographic structure means it will keep growing.
Rather than pretend population growth is not happening, we should be actively trying to harness the benefits.
Jessica Brown is a Research Fellow in the Social Foundations Program at The Centre for Independent Studies.
Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich is a Research Fellow with the Economics Program at The Centre for Independent Studies.
http://www.cis.org.au/publications/issue-analysis/article/3547-why-a-gro...
Danes tax saturated fats
Denmark has just imposed a tax of 2.15 Euros per kilo on saturated fat in food. The aim is to prevent obesity. (French News report, France 2, October 3, 2011.)
France maintains ban on gas fracking despite new techniques
More from France on gas-fracking reported on Le JT en Video, France 2, Monday 3 October 2011.
Government unconvinced by the latest techniques proposed by fracking concerns. All permits have been cancelled.
Developers are running and ruining Melbourne
Developers are running our State government! They are assuming that we have this massive population boom and we must all shove-over and accept the inevitable loss of back yards and typical Aussie living standard, for the benefit of all. This is not correct. Our fertility levels are slightly below replacement levels at 1.9. Our population growth is due to government - State and Federal - policies. It is totally in their control. Melbourne is suffering too from a disproportionate number of immigration arrivals. We don't have "skills shortage" but lack of investment in education and training. Population growth always outstrips funding for maintenance and infrastructure, and costs of Council Rates and utilities continue to rise. Our Ponzi-economic growth-based economy is unsustainable - environmentally, socially and economically. We elect government to act on our behalf, not for a few political clients who benefit.
I was at the Informa population conference and confirm
I was there at the conference. Yes both the DPCD and Housing Association spokespersons would prefer that residents who object should be silenced. AS I have lived for a period of my life with a Russian family in S t Petersburg and know what that totalitarian state does to the psyche of the people, asked DPCD if that is the society she would like or maybe she would prefer the Chinese type which in the paper that day showed people in bloody revolt against the compulsory take over of their farming land by government for development. WE still are a democracy and have the right to object to bad development.
On the other hand we do not object to good development, but most development is opportunistic and motivated by greed not planning.
Mary Drost
2nd Annual Population Australia Summit
Informa
2nd Annual Population Australia Summit
26th- 27th September, 2011
Rendezvous Hotel, Melbourne
Summary of some speeches - my comments in italics.
Dr Bob Birrell, Centre for Population and Urban research, Monash University
Building approvals for 2010-11 (9 months to March 2011) Melbourne - 35,128 Australia - 117,052 30.0 - Melbourne's share.
Melbourne is getting about 24% of net overseas migration to Australia but has 18% of our population, Why?
(only heard the last bit)
If people can't afford housing, no matter how many people are flowing in they won't buy.
Number of building approvals has expanded. Growth is heavily in 3 plus storey apartments. Expansion to 3 and 4 and 6 storeys is way ahead of demand. Are people adjusting? Consequence of investors/developers investing in growth will continue, in the CBD, Docklands etc. It's an overbuild situation, and a product of this boom.
Excessive houses and units on the market means the Bubble could implode. Investors are about 1/3 of purchases. With no capital gains, they must sell.
Young people think the prices will go up, and won't buy.
California – the pricking of the housing bubble and the fall in employment is serious. The human service industries will be very busy. Picking up the pieces of debris left by the growth-pushers and their Ponzi-economic style?
Prof Graeme Hugo, Director GISCA and Professor of Geography, University of Adelaide
Was on the panel for Minister of Population. There is a long history of population enquiries. We have no policy on population. 2010 there was a vigorous debate. There were 3 panels and 80 submissions. Published July 2011/
Graeme Hugo was on the panel: Demographic Change and Liveability.
A complex issue, and badly services. The challenge is to do something now. No “silver bullet”. There should be a policy that feeds into a wide range of other policies.
Population strategy needs to consider the implications and impacts of demographic changes across 4 domains.
- Economic Growth and Productivity
- Environmental Sustainability
- Liveability
- Social Inclusion .
Population policy must not stand alone – it must be integrated with economic, social, environmental and foreign policy and serve to facilitate and assist achievement of key national objectives such as enhancing prosperity, productivity, equity, sustainability and national
security.
Bulk of planning is for people already here, not for future populations.
The cost of not doing anything? We need behaviour changes for the whole population. There has been a substantial change in the use of water.
89% of Australians live in areas of declining rainfall.
There was little impact on the final report released by Minister Tony Burke that was influenced by the panels. No effort to discuss interventions to influence . Future population outcomes not resolved. Disappointing result. He still accepts that we must grow
Dr Katherine Betts, Adjunct Associate Professor, Sociology, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology
Public opinion and the politics of immigration. Why continue with growth?
Policies aren't always popular. Some policies are made by governments on our behalf, even if it isn't in public interests, such as population growth.
Why do politicians insist on growth?
Why do they continue?
Shouldn't politicians do what the voters want? Few voters have the information. Client politics means that some groups benefit. They are a small number, but it pays off. It means more customers for businesses, cheaper labour, economic growth. The public get worse off, but it's thinly spread. (Freeman's Theory).
Most people worse off, a few people are better off. Forces for and against growth stack up. The spokespersons, lobby groups, are the commercial media and governments. Environmental groups are reluctant to speak out. Greens – nothing about numbers as they don't want to appear “racist”. SPA speaks out, but it's hard to promote stability. The only organised group. Most people are ill informed about asylum seekers. 90% of the migration debate is on the asylum seekers. 2050 numbers is not a useful strategy. Environmental and labour-marketing modeling need to be done together.
Complexity has to be accepted.
Minister Tony Burke's Population Strategy document : a massive disappointment. No articulation of submissions and panels. It just summarised existing government policy. There were ne discussion of migration, demographic issues and ageing.
Current document can't be a blueprint. It was badly served by tow sides of the population debate. Conclusion: we must accept growth?. A 30 year plan.
1980s, many voters were unhappy. We had high unemployment. Satisfaction on population growth relates to employment levels. 2009 - “too many” people.
Polarised attitudes. Large numbers don't want substantial growth. Bipartisan support for growth. Problem – new university graduates keep clear. Class, status and identity influence opinions. “new class” left wing. Progressive cosmopolitanism appeals to the Left. Debate leads swiftly and logically to Pauline Hanson. We have a North-South cultural dimension. Paul Kelly and progressive cosmopolitans= north, Social conservative, patriots in the South. There are few articulate spokespeople in the South. Conclusion: the growth-lobby is influential.
Mark O'Connor, Professional poet, Author of Overloading Australia.
At a growth rate of 1.6%, we will have 93 million people by 2010. We must get off the graph. Indonesia's growth is lower. Big businesses lobby for growth. More customers and cheaper labour. We have crippling house mortgages, divorce and congestion. Other species are going. It costs $250,000 per person for infrastructure and lasts 50 years. 1% more population adds 50% more for infrastructure. Social justice – it means the loss of jobs and training at about $34,000 for immigrants in the first 10 years over the benefits of immigrants. Rudd's “big Australia” went to free-fall. Strong inverse relationship between government stability and population growth. With 180,000 net migration, we are on course for a “big Australia”. Ken Henry questioned 35 million. It means loss of biodiversity. Doctors for the environment also speak out. Dick Smith – 36 million and then what?
I=PAT
Gormless Green equation. CSIRO – Australia's oil will by gone by 2010. common sense says we should lower immigration and stop paying baby bonuses. Norman Borlaug mentioned the population monster - no oil, no fertilisers etc. People are in denial. Growth can't go on forever. Shortage of labour considered more important than energy. Peak oil – our economy is in an oil-noose. Folly.
Anglo-Celtic countries based on growth. What do our cities produce in return? Dense cities have more car journeys. Dense cities can collapse in scarcity. They are sitting-ducks in war times. Nuclear? We have already seen the WW2 and tsunami in Japan. We can't reduce populations fast. We must never overshoot.
Planning – empty arguments. Vested interests collide with reality. They think that God or technology will “save” us.
Take -home message – of history – problems are always resolved? Empires and civilisations pass by. The Assyrian empire still doing well?
Optimism? – there are very powerful growth lobbies. Complex, and a cop-out. Growth is not inevitable. ABS – twice the deaths as births. Fertility at 1.9%. Our natural increase could go negative.
10 richest countries - balance with resources. Only riskier and shady businesses rely on growth. Urban Task force, Committee for Melbourne, UDIA - “authorities”, CEOs, (ie hidden growth pushers). Mark's speech was logical, supported by facts and data, and scary!
Kirsten Larsen, Policy Research Manager, Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, University of Melbourne
FAO says that 70% more food will be needed by 2050. 42% more by 2032. Meat and dairy demands will grow. Up to 30-40% of the food produced sold and taken home by consumers in the UK and USA is thrown away. Land loss to urban development, and genetic and species losses to population growth.
90% of food comes from 4 food species.
Peak oil is denied. Nitrogen fertilisers are derived from natural gas. Big limiting factor. “Limits to Growth” 1972, by the Club of Rome. Dismissed.
Phosphate fertilizers are derived from phosphate rock, which is finite and expected to ‘peak’ in the near future. Peak oil is unavoidable. Availability of a nutritious diet must not be taken for granted .
CSIRO – limits to growth not addressed in 30 years.
Food security – access to food. At 36 million by 2050, we will have more refugees.
According to Kirsten, we have a moral obligation to “share our lifestyles” with those from overseas, contradictory if we don't have food security.
Prue Digby, Deputy Secretary Planning and Local Government, VIC Department of Planning and Community Development.
Volume of growth to remain growing. Planning is responsible for research and demographics. A reality analysis. Relationships between Councils and industry. Refinement of policies, regulation. NOM is important in Victoria. Historically, immigration responds to a strong demand for labour. We need an acceptable growth in the labour force.
3Ps
-Population
-Participation
-Productivity
86,000 new people in Victoria each year. Mixture of dwelling types:
Greenfield expansion
Redevelopment in each suburb
Infield – existing suburban block with townhouses
30% is infield
40% greenfield
25% redevelopment
40-50% of new houses in growth areas. “Released” land for housing. 30 years supply of land for housing as yet. Melbourne will expand 40 km north, 50 km east to Pakenham. Cost of infrastructure substantial. Grattan institute: 72% of people want a detached suburban house. Increased demand for apartment will continue.
“nimby” culture – reject all forms of change limits future generations.
Population and economy will growth. Refinement - continual improvements. We are also adaptive to new innovations. Regulation – planning reforms in more clarity. Key reforms will mean less red-tape. Councils need to reconfigure resources for strategic objectives. Anticipate and manage change is a mammoth task.
Nothing based on science, facts or data. Just about fulfilling government growth policy, under damage control and minimizing harm. Zero gain for the general public. Population growth is inevitable and not debatable. The “nimby culture” is more about democratic principles and social cohesion and community protection rather than a negative force.
The Hon. Tom Roper, President Australian Sustainable Built Environmental Council
Buildings are responsible for very high energy use. Carbon price will make a difference but not significant. Almost on difference to our current emissions. The Great Barrier Reef is dying. Number of days 30 degrees plus will increase, and effect liveability. New buildings won't cope by 2050. No longer use the past to predict the future.
We must design and build for future climates. I don't recall that he mentioned about how more people are "choosing" to live in high density apartments, with higher per capita emissions. How can greenhouse gas emissions be reduce while we have a contradictory growth-based economy? There are limits to energy efficiency.
Graham Woofe, Chief Executive, Housing Industry Association
Proposition – we are in an era of unprecedented change. Reason for affordability fall. Home ownership out of reach. Increase 2001 – 2008 very large. Baby boomers – result of a high fertility period. Children reached home-buying state. 70% of investors are mum and dad. House prices increased significantly. 1990 – 17% interest 2000 NSW was declared “full” by Bob Car. Higher prices for land and housing.
2008 – housing affordability a problem. Taxation played a major role.
Australian population growth – 2004 immigration lower. Costs of materials tracks CPI. Principle reason for growth of prices – inability to supply affordable houses. Governemnt inertial needed. Australia will require 1.6 more dwellings, 14 hotspots in NSW, 23 in Victoria. Areas at risk of housing shortages building at the current rate.
Melbourne will have a high oversupply. 6 groups of unprecedented change.
Horse-carriage manufacturers must have bemoaned the loss if their industry with the invention of motor vehicles. So with the housing industry boom times – they must end as limits to profits are faced.
Councilor Geoff Dobson, Mayor, Greater Shepparton City Council
Approximate population 62,000
Shepparton/Mooroopna growth 1.8% (2009-2010)
Council will next month consider adoption of the new ‘whole of Shepparton’ strategy to grow University education in this region . No limits to growth considered, high rise must be accepted in a rural area, and nothing about the fallouts of crime, and costs of growth.
Greece's "ageing population" blamed for exacerbating their woes
It's wrong to consider the ageing population in Europe as a "problem". Health is invested in to maintain good live spans, and then longevity is then considered an economic threat! Older people then are considered a drain on government resources for their healthcare'', according to RBS Morgans partner Simon Bond.
This is a shallow and narrow, if not callous, regard for the elderly. One dimensional assessments of demographics is bound to be ill-informed and discriminatory.
On the contrary, older people bring stability and wisdom. They help in child care, caring for the ill, and often do volunteer work. Vilifying the elderly for social unrest and economic pressure is unwarranted.
Young people are actually a "drain on government resources" as they need much more investments and infrastructure.
The modern-day economic threat of an "ageing population" is misconstrued, and unbalanced.
A demographic "bulge" of older people is about heading towards sustainability, and offers a challenge for innovation and investment in knowledge-based industries.
Rapid population growth means increased expediture, resulting in people tightening their belts to survive.
Many Greek businessmen created factories in the Balkan countries and thousands of local businesses in Greece closed. The Greek shipping lines and the merchant fleet, that was once the most important industry of Greece, today flies under the so-called ‘cheap flags’ with 90% of the crew consisting of foreigners mainly from Asian countries.
Farming, herding, fishing, seafaring, commerce, and crafts were the historical mainstays of the economy. Industrial manufacturing contributed 18 percent to the GDP in the 1990s and employed 19 percent of the labor force. The international balance of trade has long been negative.
Greece’s imports now exceed its exports by more than 4 percent of its GDP, the largest trade deficit among eurozone member countries.
No one mentions the true cause of its difficulties, the trade deficits with other euro countries, particularly Germany. It has to pay for its imports in euros. As a result of chronic trade deficits, countries have to deflate prices, including wages, to make their goods competitive in world markets and countries with surpluses like Germany are supposed to inflate their prices and wages to make their goods less competitive.
Increased imports and less domestic production in a country slowly brings down the employment and in turn the gross domestic products also comes down.
It's a cruel irony to blame the ageing population for a nation's woes when rapid population growth consumes excessive resources, social disruption and rising costs.
Illegal immigration isn't slowing. Refugees don't care if Greece is in trouble, they only intend staying long enough to find a way to get to the "promised lands" of Germany, Britain or Scandinavia. It is an alarming situation that there are 2.5 million illegal immigrants living in Greece and another one million are in transit to enter the country.
The "promised lands" should close their doors and batten-down against the tide of displacements and opportunism. Illegal immigrants have already been living from hand to mouth with the earnings available from occasional labour opportunities.
Read more: The Age: Greek society unravels as despair deepens
Re: More on normalisation of large families
Thank you Sheila. I know people in all cultures love their children dearly and I find the idea of a society where the child mortality rate is routinely well over 50% to be discomforting. I hope your theory is the correct one.
But we hear, over and over, that in agrarian societies people absolutely need large families to work the fields. Looking at the growth rates in pre-modern times (essentially flat) this cannot be so. One way or the other small families were the norm, and they did not need large families to get by.
Oz Growth Lobby pushing for nuclear
The Germans are not looking into a future of rapid population growth, so they can look forward to an easing of pressure between 2020 and 2050, as the babyboomer population declines. They have biomasse for fuel and canals for transport. Conservation will become progressively easier because there won't be the need for the same amount of goods, there will be less pressure on land and infrastructure. Ditto for Japan, however, as you have explained in other writings, including your chapters in the Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto press, 2008, UK, even though Japan's population is declining, it cannot decline fast enough not to run into self-sufficiency problems in time to mitigate the effects of peak oil. Disasters are likely to intervene unless Japan owns enough overseas property to produce food. The nuclear disasters are symptomatic of a population which has grown too large to access enough power safely. However, at least Japan has ceased to grow its population.
Unlike Australia, where many signs can be found that the growth lobby is pushing population growth because it wants to invest in nuclear power and build cities in more places, using nuclear. Doesn't matter at all about the danger or the expense, or even the unliklihood that we could build all the plants it wants. The growth lobby speculates and asks questions later. Here is the candobetter 'nuclear' page with quite a few growth lobby and nuclear articles: http://candobetter.net/taxonomy/term/795
Do we really have to ask?
Hi Nimby,
Thanks for your comment. Sure, nuclear is an energy of the past; we "should" not be relying on it now. Besides the fact that it is too dangerous to justify, the problem of what to do with the nuclear waste that's piling up around the world ought to be a good enough reason for shutting down all nuclear reactors now. Meanwhile, there are approximately 440 commercial nuclear reactors in use around the world today. Stopping, decommissioning, dismantling and getting rid of all that radioactive material safely is going to be the fight of the century.
Yes, the energy crisis is ramping up. And what are "we" going to do about it? The quick answer is "life lifestyles that use less energy," but that's about as useful as saying "plonk your fingers down on these black and white keys to play the piano." Are we even entitled to hope that some solution will be found before the whole economic system comes crashing down around our ears? At least the German people have decided that they will make energy conservation one of the main pillars of their energy policy to make up for what they may have "lost" through deciding on a nuclear phase-out. That's a start. The next thing we have to figure out is how to live a decent lifestyle while ramping down fossil fuel use.
Mad Alpha Apes' and overpopulation - theory 2
Dear Quark,
Here's my take on it.
It could be that you mistaken market for society. Consider that the market has become external and independent of social interests. We now dance to its peculiar laws. The market only rewards financially profitable decisions, ignoring socially profitable ones that do not make money. Power resides in the market and only the rich can influence the market. Alpha apes, which would normally be subjected to organic rules of peers and challengers within limited territories and local populations, are artificially able to rule over as much territory as their money can buy in the global market economy. Since the market economy overarches and virtually ignores human society, they are able to operate in an abstracted social space where they receive very little correction from social pressures, and only respond to financial constraints and the magnified and abstracted mass media messages about their behaviour, which come from an imagined peer group created by hack journos for some of the biggest alpha apes - the mass media moguls. Apes in government have for some time ... um ... aped...the market apes, because they too are motivated by the pursuit of power and are not immune to the reward system of the market. They talk a sort of social talk, but they walk the market walk. They make laws that the market wants.
The market rewards population growth financially and therefore channels behaviour into supporting and coercing population growth, despite all social feedback objecting to it.
The globalisastion of Alpha ape territory can only be combatted by relocalising economies. Alpha Apes will only respond socially to people they can see and who can have an effect on them, withholding what they want, or punishing them for evil deeds, or demanding restitution and reparations for damages done. As long as our economy remains an abstract global market, and the law its servant, a kind of hypertrophied Alpha Ape will continue to cavort and rampage in the pursuit of power and money, convinced that nothing real exists to stop it, totally self-involved, unaware of environment and limits.
I think this is the nature of Alpha Apes; they don't have many mental or emotional brakes. They are gung-ho, status-prioritising, seat of the pants operators. If they were operating in the real world in real localities, they would have to depend on their communities like ordinary humans, and the sociopathic ones would quickly be challenged and killed or chased out of the community.
Just to reiterate, the apes at the top of Australian society at the moment get a lot of money from population growth and don't have to wear any of the nasty consequences or are rewarded enough by status and power (drunk with power) to ignore those they can see. They have a really cooperative mass-media which employs journalistic hacks to write copy justifying the actions of the mad alpha apes. Lots of intelligent apes who would be Alpha Apes in normal societies without global market economies overruling them, try to challenge this silly growth-lobby stuff but alpha apes only take notice of market-based alpha apes and what ordinary people (called patronising names like 'mums and dads' by the mad alphas) think or feel just does not count.
We occasionally find that the mad market alpha apes do surveys and appear concerned about our objections, but that's only because we are getting in the way a little bit and the mad apes, who are all incredibly vain, then try to 'educate' us round to their opinions, often using the term, "we" like the royal plural. They like to imagine that everyone is really like them, minus a few thousand dollars. "We" are all millionaires - or wannabes. Do you remember when John Howard was talking about a $90,000 plus 4WD once, as if it were the kind of vehicle most people could afford? Well, that is a symptom. So is the way that media people talk about how great it is that house prices are rising. They are playing "let's pretend" and excluding all the people who don't invest in houses, but just use them for shelter. They are excluding the people who leave their children in care and go into debt to buy cars so they can go to work very long and boring hours in jobs with salaries that don't even cover the principal on their debts.
The mad market alpha apes can insulate themselves in big houses and hide behind tinted windows in limosines and they can survive in the short term, better than the apes they trample, but the society cannot survive them and when the society breaks up into little pieces as oil declines, there won't be any global market. Also, of course, the mad apes take each other down every chance they can. Just look at the weapons market. They are blowing each other up just for profit. The only thing that stops a nuclear holocaust is because that would stop profits from smaller arms, which are a mainstay for the mad apes. Blow up the world, you stop the arms-trade. Overpopulate the world and the arms-trade picks up. The mad apes reign over a society of which the laws are divorced from reality, but reality is still out there and the mad apes are psychotic. Hence they chase money and ignore overpopulation.
Has anybody bothered to ask
Has anybody bothered to ask why the Germans are winding back nuclear power, and, why are Siemens getting out of reactor construction all together?
As the world’s biggest energy groups – GE, Alstom, Areva, Abengoa and Siemens (which has abandoned nuclear) – focus more on their solar technologies, and invest billions in new projects, Australia needed to accelerate its deployment and knowledge to export it.
The size of Spain's economy is similar to ours. They have reasonable solar resources, though less than ours.
Like us, they have had the advantage of a lot of cheap coal. Unlike us, their cheap coal is running out, and it is getting expensive, so their need to find alternatives is a little higher than us.
As in Australia, nuclear power is not popular - neither the government or major opposition parties are pushing for more nuclear power.
Nuclear Power isn't going to happen soon, simply because no government will make that decision. Labor, for the moment, are pushing for the carbon tax, and the Coalition would never initiate building one.
This year was the 55th annual gathering of the 151-nation International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) at the UN body's headquarters in Vienna. With just a few exceptions, most notably Germany, governments have moved to reassure themselves that their nuclear power is safe and that its two main advantages remain: it is not fossil-fuel based, and it is cheap.
Germany decided to switch off all reactors by 2022 after Fukushima, Italian voters voted 'no' to atomic energy in a referendum while Switzerland aims to phase out nuclear power by 2034.
The Swiss upper house yesterday backed an exit from nuclear energy recommended by the government, which had earlier frozen plans for a new construction program after Japan's Fukushima atomic plant explosion earlier this year.
Global support for nuclear power is declining, and the energy crisis is ramping up.
Are the most intelligent powerful or influential?
I hypothesize that those who get to the top of the pile in our society are the ones with most of the characteristics of what it takes to survive. In a nutshell- those whose behaviours can be described as go-getting, cunning, planning within a limited time frame, confident, assertive, opportunistic possibly charming, willing to deceive within reasonable or legal bounds if in own interests. I even wonder if in a society such as Australia's which is nominally a sort of "meritocracy" based on democracy inevitably turning into a plutocracy that this may be the only possible outcome.
Those who concern themselves with long time frames- well beyond their own spans and who consider the common good rather then self interest display a greater capacity for contemplating and engineering long term survival than do the other group and they are probably the more intelligent. But if this capability- of looking at distant time frames and wider welfare and survival issues were an advantage for their own medium term survival they would be greater in number and might have more influence. I hypothesize that their intelligence would be adaptive if humans were more solitary creatures. However, we live in groups and are interdependent. Because we don't need to think a long way ahead for immediate or medium term survival then these qualities are not a distinct advantage and could even be a slight disadvantage. I think this interdependency makes it more likely that the dominant go-getting types get to the top than will the long- term thinking, precautionary. analytical types. In other words I believe that humans are led by other humans who fall in the normal range of intelligence and are probably not at all deficient, but are not the absolute cream of our collective brain power either. I think human interdependence generally ensures this pattern and probably prevents further evolution of human intellectual functioning as there is no immediate survival advantage to being extremely intelligent.
More on normalisation of large families
There is a lot of evidence that modern society greatly exaggerates birth and death rates of stable societies prior to colonisation. The family sizes and death rates went up when the societies were disorganised. Prior to this time, one of the main ways that societies held down their birth rates was through the Westermarck effect and incest prohibition, which meant that you could not marry close relatives but you also were expected to marry within your tribe (related clans) to preserve your local people identity and your local people territory. This limited 'fertility opportunity'. The breaking down of these conventions, plus modern transport, meant that local peoples lost the integrity of thier endogamous and exogamous boundaries (which have inherent organising principles) and came in contact with many new, unrelated marriage/mating candidates. These disorganising principles were accompanied by loss of traditional territory (land loss). The dispossessed and disorganised members of once self-sufficient societies, then had to rely on their labour alone to find work outside the traditional economy, for wages. The only way they could improve their incomes was usually by having more children who could also bring in incomes in economies that did not ban or enforce bans on child labour. The elites of such economies usually encouraged people to have lots of children. (And still do.) What is more they then rewrite history to normalise large families in 'traditional cultures'. Of course the traditional cultures have been broken and large families are a symptom. So are high death rates.
One of the reasons that death rates could not be very high in stable traditional societies with stable territories is that the people there had been exposed for many generations to the local diseases and had adapted. Furthermore, through endogamy within the tribe, the great majority of members were likely to share the full range of immunity and thus to remain healthy. In Virolution the author tests a related hypothesis that viral components of DNA adapt to local populations and are dangerous to newcomers.
Virginia Abernethy's theory of the Fertility Opportunity gives a good alternative explanation (to the benign demographic transition ideology) for big and small families. People have big families if they believe that economic signs are propitious. They have small families if they believe that the outlook is dim. Of course, if you are misled by propaganda to think that circumstances are propitious even when they are not, you will also go ahead and have more children. Once again, however, there has to be some belief as to what number of children is desirable or reasonable anyway. Also, if you get quick financial rewards for having children in a near-starvation economy, you will have them because you know that you will improve your immediate income.
FCOL please elaborate your points
FCOL, please feel free to say how you see the matter, in as much detail as you wish. All we know at the moment is that you don't have Greg's priorities. Let's hear what yours are and why.
Media Inquiry - ABC nat interest story
I recommend listening to the audio linked below. It is an episode of ABC Radio National's 'National Interest program discussing the merits and the opportunities within the media enquiry now underway federally.
Of especial interest is the guest's views upon opportunities for nurturing expansion of media diversification.
The quality and accountability of the media is probably one of the most significant factors bearing upon the population debate and all other issues relating to the sustainable and equitable use of our resource base. The dominant corporate media have developed an extreme capacity to promote self-harm within popularised community attitudes/beliefs. We let this political corruption continue at our peril. There is likely to be opportunity for public input to his review process. We should not miss that opportunity.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/nationalinterest/stories/2011/3330042.htm
Why Diss Marriage and Other Important Issues?
@ Greg Too sensible for an essentially emotional issue 01/10/11
My understanding of your comment in direct and plainer speak is that it is quite deliberately dismissive of the “'equal rights' marriage” issue and other” matters of prominence within popular political contention” quite overly simplistically as not worthy of discussion naming loss of ‘remnant bio-diversity’ as the only issue that matters in life. If my understanding is correct I regard your dismissive opinion as inanely unrealistic, an affront to common sense and quite offensive toward any individual possessing the intelligence to approach life realistically.
Does immediate self-interest stop growthists thinking through?
So, CSI, are you of the opinion that there is a kind of prevailing low intellect among the power elite and the media who actually believe their own propaganda?
Or maybe they have adapted to a rationale?
Maybe they have that self-serving moral kind of thinking where they believe that anything that benefits them personally must be good? So, property developers, bankers and growth-lobby friendly ministries of planning etc and those they employ will adapt their thinking to serve the immediate purpose of getting a salary? And simply shelve analysis of the negative impacts on the wider environmental supports they really rely on, and avoid any negative moral feedback from people they walk all over?
I heard the other day that a speaker from the Ministry of Planning recently demanded that the recording of a talk she gave at a forum on population be wiped from the record after the audience showed disapproval of the policies her talk appeared to support. Apparently she refused to answer a question about whether the Department had a policy of 'densification'. Her reply was that the audience member should ask the minister. Then she left the stage.
Does anyone know any more about this incident? I believe it happened at an Informa conference.
I would be interested in some further discussion of the psychology of people who work for, promote or otherwise belong to the growth lobby and the industries that benefit from it, and people who identify it as socially beneficial, whether or not they derive immediate benefit.
Universal large families recent invention
Up until relatively recently, large families were rare in these countries. Women had many children, but the mortality rate was so high less than 3 on average would survive to adulthood. Much is made of how large families are traditionally a traditional part of agrarian societies, but they are not because if you look at the population of many of these countries up until the 19th century they held fairly steady. Large numbers of children, yes, but most of them died in childhood.
Reducing mortality is a good thing, but it must be accompanied by reducing birth rates. Unfortunately the tradition for large numbers of children is very strong, because up until recently this was necessary to hold the population steady.
Most people believe resources are infinite
At present our society is based on the assumption that resources are infinite. That as time goes by the magical black box of science and technology will always unlock more and more resources, and that this will continue until the end of time. Almost all business leaders believe this absolutely, most politicians and most everyday people as well. Once you realize this, a lot of decisions made regarding population and economic growth make sense.
For example, if resources are finite it stands to reason that population growth will end eventually. Attempting to increase the population to support older people, to pay for past growth or whatever makes no sense because when the population growth ends, all those problems you've been putting off will have to be dealt with.
However if resources are infinite the population growth need never end. Its logical then to increase population forever. The more people, the more resources you can grab.
Our business leader, politicians, almost everyone in power now believe Australia has effectively infinite resources and can support an effectively infinite population. They have the tacit support of most everyday people who tend to assume everything will continue as they have been, and that growth is normal and will never end.
Population driven by immigration
Our population growth is driven by immigration. Our fertility level has increased recently, due to immigrant groups having large families. Traditionally, Australians have 2 or 3 kids and a low replacement level. However, the bulk of our population growth is from immigration - a government-tweaked number. Our population growth rate is then treated as the status quo, something natural that we must accommodate, make plans for, and adjust too. It's so sublime that people are unaware, and think that this is the "norm" rather than policy. Our city and suburbs are under pressure to soak up the growth, and take their "fair share" of developments. It's our public duty!
There's nothing "fair" about it, and politicians want a pay rise! Australia has declining living standards, soaring costs of living, and on an economy based on growth that can't be maintained or sustained.
Australian families should not feel guilty about having a family when the source of growth is immigration. Not having children will make no difference to our overall population growth.
The sooner this daft
The sooner this daft government stops paying people to breed the better...$5000 for each newly dropped parasite is absolutely despicable...and I who choose to remain childless have to pay for these breeders to keep reproducing..
Pet food companies use kangaroo meat
Pet food company Purina, producer of brands such as Purina One, Beneful, Ruffs, Supercoat and Bonnie, has come under fire for using kangaroo meat – a ‘product’ of the largest land based wildlife slaughter on the planet.
Animals Australia campaign
The industry is cruel. Spotlights are used to scare mobs of and shot at. Kangaroos are stress prone and have strong family bonds. Many of them are not hit outright and die slowly. The young and baby kangaroos are bludgeoned to death or left to die of starvation slowly. This is horrible and not a way to treat our wildlife. Up to one million joeys are considered acceptable collateral damage by tis industry. We do not want to support it.
The public need clear labeling on pet food to avoid inadvertently supporting this shameful and cruel industry.
Contact ACCC:
ACCC online form
OR
phone: 1300 302 502
Marriage Poem and More
Thankyou Sheila for a far more meaningful comment and an interesting perspective on marriage and transition of property.
That being said in my understanding property inheritance by default in our current system as a result of a marriage and a deceased partner is for the most part of greatest relevance when the person dies intestate. In the case of gay couples it is but one of many arguments put forth for the changes being sought.
What really jumped off the page at me (in your second comment Oct 1st ) though nothing new to me is the fact that marriage is many different things to many different people. I wholly agree; this is factual and will never change. But is one reason why I lean toward retaining ‘marriage’ in this country to define a sole male & female union. Gay couples are fundamentally different and will always be so to hetero, so I fail to understand why they seek so strongly an identity that has always been a hetero term. Using your example of property inheritance between gay couples but also applicable to any other ‘benefits, rights or consequences’ attached to a marriage such aspects can undoubtedly be afforded to gay couples with a “marriageesque” style relationship but a distinctly different terminology by drafting appropriate legislation.
If gays are openly so with nothing to hide and proud of themselves and their relationships I cannot understand why they would not accept a unique terminology and cherish it.
Whilst it is not necessarily my opinion (still undecided) I have seen it proposed that gays seek legitimate use of the term “marriage” in preference to an alternate terminology because it may afford a greater ‘perception of acceptance’ in broader society of their homosexuality.
I am sure there are gay people out there with views on this issue I would like to read their opinions as well.
As to the poem, I didn’t like it, found it extremely hard work, tedious & extremely long, though the length assessment is closely linked to the enjoyment factor. But that is just my taste.
Too sensible for an essentially emotional issue
Sheila, I feel, sadly, that your position on this vexed issue of 'equal rights' marriage (equal rights to what exactly?) is far too dispassionate and practically sensible to allow for its perception within the popular spectrum.
As with so many of the matters of prominence within popular political contention, the dominant narrative pivots upon fraught notions of sectoral identity and deservedness. Definition and degrees of acceptance of these identities variously enable or limit one's respective potential for advantage and (potentially fatal) dispossession within an enormous and cannibalistic socio-economic hierarchy.
This grand social honeycomb has no capacity for humane intimacy or social security. Succeed individually or perish is the silent code embedded at the core of this insane social trajectory, now rapidly passing the zenith of it's 10,000 year ascendent trajectory. Once upon a time social clans evolved to nurture and protect the constituent members. Now a burgeoning social labyrinth exists to feed upon vast lower orders and pass the consumed energy upwards. The symptomatic pain of the myriad victims, expressed in divergently competitive voices, serves to obscure and distract due attention from the core problem.
Your exceptional contemplation upon the conceptual and practical essences of the matter are unlikely to gain much traction within its vexed political stage-play. If only this were not so. We could then all deal with the matter swiftly and sensibly and thence free our concerted commitment toward the more genuinely pressing issue of per capita levels of remnant bio-diversity.
Marriage poem and marriage laws and property
I like the poem and it is about marriage. A point one might make about the poem (which I admit I didn't make) is that marriage is many things to different people and that marriage comes in many forms with many purposes and people have very varied expectations of it. The primary impact of marriage is the transmission of property to children or to spouses. In the Roman law system of continental Europe (with exception of Portugal), default is that property is mostly transmitted to children, parents, grandparents first, uncles and cousins before any spouse might get a look in. [Sarkosi unfortunately recently changed this to a part of the inheritance going to the spouse.] In Anglo-law default is that property transmits to most recent spouse often leaving children high and dry. Gays getting married in continental Europe doesn't make much difference, except the gay might get the right to remain in a house before his/her partner's children take it over. In Australia however, previous partners and children would lose out (as they do currently to second and subsequent wives) when a man marries another man. At the moment if a man lives with another man, when one of them dies the surviving parter is guaranteed nothing - to my knowledge.
I personally think that Anglo-law should be reformed so that it becomes impossible to disinherit children. Then men and women would come to marriage each with their inheritance, and therefore much less reliant on getting property from a surviving spouse, at the expense of the children. There is a huge systemic problem with the anglo-system in that it causes the aggregation of large amounts of property in a few private hands and leaves a large body of people without property, having nothing but their labour to survive by, and at the mercy of the state and renters.
You see, I am not in favour of default where property goes to the spouse, but I can see why a homosexual spouse would want that under our current rotten system.
We would all be better off if our parents and the state provided for us rather than relying on our spouses. There would have to be laws requiring parents to leave their property to their children. Many of us might not marry then at all. Would that be so bad?
So I am in favour of scrapping our current system and installing roman law with civil codes including prescriptive inheritance ones.
My perspective is probably completely unfamiliar to most people in this discussion of homosexual marriage, but I think that we should all be far more aware of how our system starts out by impoverishing most of us and then gets us all fighting for scraps as adults.
Big Australia back on the agenda, says Craig Emerson
Dr Emerson said that we shouldn't be afraid of a growing population and of talking about where that population is needed! Our country's environmental sustainability should be the basis of our population size, not economics.
On the contrary, we have every reason to be afraid of a growing population. Australia's ability to feed its growing population and the fate of the Murray-Darling are intertwining issues. Food security cannot be guaranteed without environmental sustainability, careful protection of our natural resources and biodiversity.
Julia Gillard lied to the public when she said she didn't want to hurtle towards a "big Australia". Her declaration was nothing but political spin. We are heading towards a "big Australia".
Dr Emerson is an economist, not an ecologists, agricultural scientist or a demographer.
Norman Borlaug, the "father" of the green revolution, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said: Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the population monster . His forty-year reprieve is over, global populations are reaching historical levels, and we need to become more preoccupied by the impending collapse of food-securing ecosystems.
Central to his proposal is advocacy for increased permanent and temporary immigration directed to areas where it is needed -- including mining states and rural and regional areas that he believes have the potential to boost food production to serve growing Asian markets.
Big Australia back on the agenda
Dr Emerson was an advisor to former PM Bob Hawke. In an interview with Andrew Denton ENOUGH ROPE (14th July, 2008) he said: Population is exploding. We’ve got to do something about you know getting a sustainable population level and of course this gets back to poverty, it gets back to the education of women and so on. We’ve got the problems of food supply, of global warming, massive increases in the population. Now these are not the figments of Bob Hawke’s imagination. These are facts. Ah you’ve got you know over a billion people in the world of over six million now living in absolute poverty and half the world’s population living in very meagre situations.
Bob Hawke as a Prime Minister was a strong advocate of high immigration and set a precedent for multiculturalism. Hindsight is an excessive luxury!
A Poem About Marriage. So What?
Regarding Poem about marriage posted On September 30th, 2011 by Sheila Newman
Yes it is a poem about marriage, Greg Corso’s expression from over 50 years ago. Whoopee!
Though I fail to see any particular relevance or what if anything it contributes to the preceding discussion of whether Gay couples should be legally recognised in Australia as ‘married’ if they choose to, etc.
The party posting the poem offers no more than simply posting the poem. Are we to assume the poem is wholly an expression of the contributor’s own viewpoint? Or perhaps a particular aspect within the poem the contributor identifies as particularly poignant.
The poem’s author is long deceased. If another party wishes to reference it in expressing an opinion that is fine by me but please EXPRESS AN OPINION, any opinion, make A POINT, any point, by providing even a mere snippet of your own opinion to let us know what that may be, please don’t just post someone else’s work online and leave it at that.
I don’t see the relevance of this post at all without further information from the contributor. If the contributor reads this please provide YOUR opinion and tie in the poem’s relevance if any, with a supplementary comment. Until then I consider this post a waste of bandwidth.
Sincerely
Anonymous
• as OP of
Marriage? Does Equality Need Constitutional Change? Posted 28-09-2011
coalportal
The use of sophisticated software systems for coal mining (thermal coal, steam coal and metallurgical coal) that is mostly burnt for power generation and steel production and adds to the greenhouse effect is valid for western countries who may allocate resources and funds to alternative and more greener sources of power. Some of the alternatives may be "safer" than the traditional mines. Unfortunately, coal reports and coal statistics show developing economies are more likely to increase their use of thermal coal & metallurgical coal in coming years because of its affordability and to meet increasing demands for electricity and steel. Whether they will embrace and utilise sophisticated software systems that no doubt add to the cost of production is yet to be seen. Cherry of www.coalportal.com
Candobetter ED.
"coalportal®.com is a subscription based publication and coal price index service for the international coal market. Subscribers can download publications, reports and key price indicators covering key coal producing regions such as Australia, China, South Africa, Indonesia, North & South America and India."
Recent posts to candobetter from Cherry at coalportal are quite interesting and pose valid cases for assuming that the use of coal in its cleaner and its dirtiest form will prevail unless something else as cheap comes up (which has not happened yet). Candobetter values would say, then we must do everything to rein in production and population growth which cause ever growing need for coal and other forms of fuel that cannot be provided via flow energies.
The problem with our capitalist society is that anything that makes cash will be pursued, even if it kills us and makes us miserable. That goes for population growth, growth itself, and coal.
It would be good to have a thoughtful article about this from Coalportal, if they are able to think beyond investment values there or to translate those trends in to projections on how much coal really is out there and how fast it is disappearing. Or something else related to coal which may not have been canvassed widely yet.
coalportal
The investment into alternative power generating technologies such as nuclear energy may need to be measured against the potential cost when things turn against you as unfortunately happened this year in Japan. The use of thermal coal (steam coal) that is mostly burnt for power generation may be valid for other countries who may not be able to allocate resources and funds to alternative and more greener sources of power. Coal newsletters and coal statistics show developing economies are more likely to increase their investment into & their use of thermal coal & metallurgical coal in coming years because of coal's affordability and ability to quickly meet increasing demands for electricity and steel. www.coalportal.com
Candobetter. ED.
I think you are probably right, Cherry. All the more argument for diminishing production, redistributing land for self-sufficiency, and discouraging population growth by educating people in the realities of energy depletion, don't you think?
Ministry of Truth asked for details of claims about Gaddafi
This was first posted to Johnquiggin.com at 9.38am this morning, but is still awaiting approval as the episode of The Book Reading referred to in the comment is being broadcast. , It will be repeated tonight at 11.00PM. JS, 2:19pm, 30 Sep
Episode 20, the final episode of 1984 is to be read today on ABC Radio National at 2.00PM today (and repeated tonight at 11.00pm). Those who have comprehended the news that the war, which we were told was launched against Libya in March in order to save the lives of Libyans from brutal oppression by Muammar Gaddafi and which has cost the lives of 20,000 Libyans so far, is to be further extended will, no doubt appreciate how well Orwell anticipated the future (if he was out in the date given by 25 years).
I would appreciate it, if a spokesperson for the Ministry of Truth were to be following this discussion, if he/she could substantiate and quantify the claims of Muammar Gaddafi's abuses of the human rights of Libyans which made the war against Libya necessary.
Poem about marriage
Marriage by Gregory Corso
Should I get married? Should I be Good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustaus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky--
When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap--
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?
Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son--
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?
O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just waiting to get at the drinks and food--
And the priest! He looking at me if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on--
then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climatic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of
bigamy a saint of divorce--
But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting by baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust--
Yet if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear not Roman coin soup--
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon
No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking--
No! I should not get married and I should never get married!
But--imagine if I were to marry a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and highball in the other
and we lived high up a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days
No I can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream--
O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes--
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and--
but there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All in the universe married but me!
Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible--
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait--bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.
Australia's population at 22.5 million
Australia's population is now 22.5 million. Immigration is boosting our numbers as more people call Australia HOME.
In 1900, our population was just under 4 million. By 1923, it was over 5.5 million. By 1923, it was nearly 9 million. By the 2000 Olympic games, we had just over 19 million people.
Governments control our population numbers through immigration. It's done for our own good, without any democratic input.
At a growth rate of 1.4 % per annum, it sounds like nothing to be concerned about. Humans fail to comprehend the arithmetic of growth. It means a doubling every 50 years.
With climate change, our food security is expected to decline and we may have to import more food than we export. Import from where?
We are facing population growth when multiple indicators of our "carrying capacity" are declining. We have peak oil, loss of soil quality, limited fertilizers, fisheries collapse, species losses and climate change.
Our governments are more worried about skills shortages and the GDP than food shortages and ecological collapse!
Ditto. Marriage should not be meddled with !
reply to Protect Marriage September 29th, 2011
I agree almost entirely with everything you have to say and I thank you for expressing it so succinctly.
From what I have seen of this debate, gays and their supporters argue that x number of countries already recognise so called ‘Gay Marriage’, ‘Marriage equality’ and like terms.
The trite arguments are also frequently put forth that homosexuality has existed for thousands of years, as long as marriage has, was practiced in ancient Greece and many other ancient cultures and I have seen a claim that it was practiced and culturally acceptable in some quarters of indigenous Australian culture before white settlement, though have not researched it’s validity.
Frankly as a very proud Australian I care little what occurred in ancient Greece or what other countries have chosen to do currently in regard to this issue. We teach our children “ If Johnny jumped of a cliff, would you do it to?” so why should we Australians as a nation blindly follow trends of other countries. As to longevity and existence in ancient cultures, things such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, witch hunts, genocide and slavery have been omnipresent too but that does not necessarily make such practices right nor acceptable.
It is evident that marriage holds different meanings to different people. For some it has deeply seated religious ties to others religion plays no part , but to all genuine participants it is a legally binding contract and expression of commitment and in our Australian culture since Federation and even prior as a British Colony has always been a union of one male and one female.
I see no valid reason at all in the arguments I have encountered thus far to change the perception or meaning of “Marriage” in this country to be anything other than what it has been for so long, a union of one man and one woman.
Even if an acceptable form of homosexual union was practiced in Australia by some indigenous peoples ( not saying it was or not) prior to white settlement/invasion call it what you will it is not recognised in our current law and has not been so since imposition of British rule. Like it or not our current society has moved substantially in that time from sole indigenous sovereignty and history cannot be rewritten. So long as our Australian nation can continue to repel invasion our current citizens should be afforded the right to choose how our society develops from this time forward. I support a plebiscite on this issue as I feel the matter far too important to leave in the hands of a bunch of politicians. I strongly support retention of “Marriage” of its current legal interpretation of a male/female union. If variations on that definition are to be legally recognised then ‘Unique Names’ should indeed be applied.
We need to go towards renewable energy
"Cleaner" coal? Something that is a carbon emitting fossil fuel can't inherently be "cleaner"! It doesn't "help the environment" and nor do we want its "longevity". The "green house effect" is what we want to avoid. The energy lobby has lots of interests in extending this industry. Beyond Zero Emissions have a viable plan to to 100% renewable in 10 years, and after that it will be free. However, this is not what is desirable economically.
http://beyondzeroemissions.org/
The coal portal has exposed their contradictory position.
Marriage should not be meddled with
Marriage by definition is the union between a husband and a wife, and the cornerstone of families. Such an age-old institution should not be meddled with by politicians. Some criticize it as being too exclusive and gay couples want to be included. We need to recognise the legality and rights of gay couples, but "marriage" should be reserved for what it is.
Biology means that gay couples are excluded from having children together. While some heterosexual couples need a help from technology to conceive, due to their pathology, gay couples can never produce "their" children - whatever they claim.
Allowing gay couples to claim "Marriage" as their legal union will impinge on its traditional meaning and change it forever.
Marriage should remain as it is. We could later regret such changes. Gays should have their own legal union, and their own unique name for it. They shouldn't try to emulate traditional Marriage and dilute forever its meaning.
Coal Portal
Coal Statistics shows that there are many companies answers to the call of a cleaner coal to help the environment preserve it's purity and as well as the coal industries longevity. Both must work hand in hand to see the sky rocket success in the coal market news and green house effect. Cherry of www.coalportal.com
Coal Portal
While for some an ideal world would see no reliance on thermal coal (steam coal) to produce electricity, coal statistics would suggest the commodity isn't going anywhere. Coal reports show if we have to live with it, we may as well reduce the impact of coal and CCS seems to be the best solution found to date. Cherry www.coalportal.com
Marriage? Does Equality Need Constitutional Change?
Many same sex couples desire “marriage equality” but what defines a “marriage” in our society?
Many people consider the term ‘marriage’, as a legal term in Australia; is reserved for couples consisting of a male and female only. The word marriage appears in our constitution but when it appears there what does it mean? Does it hold the same meaning in general usage?
Does our Government even have the power to change the marriage act to recognise same sex couples equally or does the issue firstly require amendment to the constitution to define marriage and consequently a referendum? This question was raised recently in the Bendigo Advertiser (see links below).
Should same sex couples be permitted to “marry” or should they be afforded equality of rights with a different terminology?
Disregarding the question of constitutional definition or possible need for amendment should these issues be put to the nation as a plebiscite for determination democratically in any case?
I am interested to hear what others think.
Links
http://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/news/opinion/letters/general/marriage-is-founded-on-principles-not-passions/2297026.aspx
http://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/news/opinion/letters/general/time-for-one-poll-to-settle-gay-marriage-issue/2303096.aspx
Also related
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rn/2001-02/02rn17.htm
The carbon tax will do little
Addressing climate change is something we should do. However, the carbon tax will achieve little to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. It will help us feel good about doing our bit, and our Government will say they put in the policy framework to cut our emissions, but when it doesn't achieve the desired result, they will be able to blame market forces. With an economy based on growth, profits and consumption, unless the fossil fuels are replaced by renewables, then legislation will do little. The "big polluters" will pass on their carbon tax costs to the consumers - already rising due to the costs of infrastructure that growth demands.
The carbon tax would be more embraced by the community if is was sincere, and we all were required to share the "pain". However, there are so many glaring anomalies in government direction, it's simply nothing more than window-dressing.
The densification of our cities means something like a doubling of our per-capita greenhouse gas emissions, yet this is the direct being hoised onto us through population growth. As MP Kelvin 'Thomson says, while we may be able to reduce our individual carbon footprints, our government keeps adding more feet!
Green-house gas emissions from animal farms are a major contributor to global warming. Enormous amounts of water and plant food is required to produce meat. It is estimated that about 100,000 litres of water, 100 kilogram of hay, and 4 kilogram of grain is required to produce just one kilogram of meat. While the "elephant in the room" of livestock industries are exempt from the carbon tax, it's insincerity is exposed. Governments know the power and economic dependencies on livestock and won't touch it, or our meals.
Climate change mitigation requires more LOCAL people power
[Apologies for poor expression below, but I lost this post three times on account of stupid keyboard shortcuts on a strange computer.]
I personally have little faith in the current approach to climate change, which piggy-backs on this refocus from local to international. In this way we leave the fate of the earth in the claws of corporations, bankers and bland government representatives of greed. By awarding trust to this distant mechanism, we take away from the much greater importance of the efforts of locals to stop far reaching changes at local level.
At a local level we could be so much more effective than we can ever be at international level on environmental problems that cause or mitigate climate change.
The removal of trees causes loss of transpiration and alters storage in water tables and water output from treetops. This impacts on heat and water exchange between earth and atmosphere. Densification of suburbs increases hard surfaces and run-off and decreases water storage in the earth. Both the removal of trees and the increase in hard surfaces cause the formation of heat islands in built up areas. There can be no denying that these factors increase overall warming of the surface of the earth. The natural, traditional way of government was for people to make local decisions based on their experience of local conditions, notably limiting building permits in line with local water catchment, environmental ammenity, preservation of food production areas and common areas. It is obvious at local level that removal of shade increases local heat. It is obvious to locals that removal of trees causes water to rise upwards, bogs to form, then for the water to evaporate, leaving salts and heavy metals on the surface, to run in every direction at the next rain. Objections on social grounds were also part of the parcel, with the community able to decide whether to admit a person permanently. Permission might be refused, for instance, when that person's business threatened a well-established and well-liked business. If these rights had been preserved in Maleny, Queensland, for instance, Woolworths would never have been built.
The loss of these local rights means that we are powerless where it really matters. Wider rights depend on delegation from local areas. The corporates that have overtaken our governments have seen to it that most people have been educated to believe that they are spectators to the doings of greater beings. The 'greater beings' are the oafs that currently sell off our public assets for cash prizes and who authorise suburban development in the place of forests. In a society where people controlled their social and physical environment, most of the major players in our governments would be in prisons and no-one would take them seriously.
My experience tells me that the complexities of carbon taxes will only be used as a way of channeling taxpayer money and other charges to corporates, without any true mechanisms for stemming climate-impactful activity. Indeed the real focus of anti-climate change intergovernment strategies seems to be to guarantee growth at any price, the cost to be footed by individuals with the normal rights attached to their citizenship much reduced. The aim of big business is to sell to more people at greater cost per unit. Big business and government are organising to continue and encourage population growth as a guarantee of corporate profit growth. Big business aims to produce more, not less and they are using complex climate-change agreements to formalise this.
Linking higher education to immigration is a rort
The whole educational export industry has become a rort. Under the Colombo plan, students were sponsored to study in Australia, and then ultimately had to return home so that they could contribute to their countries' welfare and economic development.
"Students" should remain students and not be able to morph into residents. Students should not be able to bring non-student spouses. Students should not be able to use marriage with an Australian resident as a route to PR.
With world poverty and numerous threats increasing, Australia will be targeted as an easy country to enter due to our permeable borders.
While the "immigration" debate remains on asylums seekers, the other entrants are being safely and conveniently ignored.
Universities should not be allowed to entice foreign students with quick visa approvals and the right to two years of work after graduation, as suggested as part of a reform package. Universities are about higher education, and should not be linked and confused with a back-door to residency and citizenship to Australia.
Having international students in our universities is a fine as an export industry, and it also helps broaden our ideas and assist in the development of neighbouring countries. It strengthens cultural understandings and diplomatic ties. However, students should be here to study as their main aim, and not lured by the "carrot" of being able to settle here.
Universities should be about higher learning, education, research and development, ethics and the promotion of ideas and innovation. Being linked to immigration is about selfishly enticing the best and brightest from developing nations to fill our own, but questionable, "skills shortages".
The primary source of our future professionals should be our own domestic students - many of whom are struggling to find suitable jobs and positions.
Scale of social focus is a management technique
I agree with you regarding the problematic condition of losing our useful sense of reality amidst a scale of consideration that is too large for us to comprehend, and certainly too large for us to respond to. However I think this condition has been insinuated upon us rather than it being one that is natural to us or one that we necessarily choose for mental/emotional relief.
Local knowledge, connection and autonomy has been significantly stripped away from us and replaced with a largely national and global view of politics, sport, celebrities, etc., delivered via an increasingly corporatised and centralised media and marketing structure. Even the notion of looking after one's backyard has been vilified as selfish and small-minded. Whenever we might cite and pursue outcomes upon local concerns we are likely to have the relative global conditions pushed upon us, either through the lens of a notional 'greater good' that our parochialism is compromising, or in a context of the inherent hopelessness such grand challenge.
Thus we are cultivated to perceive events at a scale that overwhelms our senses and disempowers our impulse to respond. Co-incidence. I don't think so. Nonetheless many people certainly do welcome the evasion of accountability and narcotic relief such perception enables.
The world is an enormous patchwork of myriad backyards. Global health is the sum of the health of each of these backyards. If enough people commit to the well-being of enough of them, the world at large will become better. The only people who have the power to affect global-scale outcomes have been hopelessly corrupted by their journey to that level of influence. We are all doomed if we rely upon them for salvation.
Thanks for the compliment on the writing. You're right that it's too long for most in today's hectic treadmill. Hopefully though there's still some room left in such a busy world for diversity in approach.
Calls for $36m for koalas' conservation
Canberra Times by Rosslyn Beeby
Calls for a $36 m for koalas' conservation
A Senate inquiry has called for a $36million federal funding boost for koala disease research, and new ''koala friendly'' national guidelines for road upgrades and construction.
It wants speed limits in koala habit zones, tougher controls to curb urban dog attacks, and government grants to help people protect koala trees on their property.
In its 178-page report, the inquiry urges the Federal Government to take ''a much stronger leadership role'' in koala conservation, saying there appears to be ''little commitment'' at present.
However, the driver of such horrific losses to our iconic and endemic animal is rampant human population growth and developer-driven profits from land acquisition and urban planning. People settle in new urban sprawl, meaning that trees and bushland must be bulldozed. They bring their pets, cars and heavy impacts.
Koalas are collateral-damage as the result.
Humans are doing what all species do - by trying to increase their territories and advance their own herd/group at the expense of others. However, humans just to it better. Koalas are not only slow-evolving animals but they are also slow movers. They don't have an evolutionary chance against the massive technology and rapid changes brought by the aggressive spread of human populations.
Australians are not the clever country, or even the Lucky Country any more. We are the country with the highest mammal extinction rate of the modern world, and increasingly being known as the cruel country with an abysmal animal-rights record.
Population growth - a government decision
To imagine that we have governments acting on the behalf of the majority, the voters, is an old-fashioned idea, a relic from the Liberal Hamer government that created these green wedges. All is determined by profits, growth and consumption now. Conveniently, they are supported by political correctness not to mention our boosted population growth. Australia's fertility levels have risen slightly, but most of our population growth is avoidable and decided by adjusting immigration levels. At a net immigration rate of 70,000 per year, we could manage to cap our population to under 30 million by 2050. However, control has been lost. Unless we address the root cause, unsustainable population growth, and have a population policy, we can expect to see increasing environmental losses, lifestyle losses and a greater diversity in asset/wealth/land and home ownership.
If our government was sincere about climate change, we might all be willing to share some of the carbon tax pain, but as there are too many anomalies, and an economy based on growth, the carbon tax will achieve nothing. Any reduction of ghg emissions will be negated by population growth.
The single most complex and pervading problem for our planet today is population growth, but being largely denied by the media and our political leaders.
Fake Refugees
Australia First Party
Handy Guide On How To Resist
The Official Policy On Fake Refugees:
The Community Strike!
It is possible to take passive resistance against the refugee policy of the government. You can do it as an individual as much as a member of any organized group. You are not alone and you stand undefeated. You have pride in your identity and you wish to stand up for the future of Australians – our youth, working men and women, senior citizens, the unemployed and homeless.
Your cause is moral and correct.
Australia First Party proposes to you the model of a Community Strike - which means organized passive grassroots resistance:
Your aim must be to make the support networks put in place to push the refugee program, increasingly unmanageable, expensive and mis-focused, while at the same time serving your Australian Community and the ordinary Australian.
So: there are things NOT TO DO, and things TO DO.
Rules Of Engagement: Negatives
1. No Australian should collaborate in any way with any government agency or private organisation which operates refugee services. That means: answer no question, give no information render no assistance of any description.
2. No Australian should accept any employment arising from the intrusion. Sometimes jobs are offered by different outsourced companies or by agencies: reject the offers! Sometimes contracts are advertised. refuse to tender. Blacklist to your friends anyone who breaks the rule.
3. No Australian should let a school-child participate in any refugee-awareness program. Schools now have officially sanctioned propaganda sessions which you can object to. If your school operates any regular so-called education programs, withdraw your services from all school activities. Subtly persuade your friends to do likewise.
4. No Australian should attend at any church or community group that supports the refugee invasion. This means refusing to donate to any charity or program operated by your church or community group You should make your feelings known. In the case of the churches, you should approach members of your congregation to cause difficulties for the misguided faction in whatever way you judge proper.
5. No Australian should communicate with any so-called refugee save in the most extreme of circumstances.
6. No Australian should buy from any company or person who supports the refugee intrusion.
7. No Australian should associate with any Australian or other person who violates these rules.
Rules Of Engagement: Positives
1. All Australians should show direct charity and support to any Australian truly in need of assistance or care.
2. All Australians should take and destroy all pro refugee propaganda distributed by your union, community group, church, university etc.
3. All Australians should work to preserve or establish our own community networks and groups such as your family and community groups that underlie your heritage as Australians – your ANZAC commemorations, your local historical societies, clubs and sporting groups. You are no ‘boat person’, but a native of the soil and you must teach that to each other and to your children.
4. All Australians should collect information which exposes any aspect of the refugee program and turn it over to your favoured organisation for political use.
5. All Australians should counsel other Australians as to the real significance of the refugee program – that is part of the cultural and ethnic dispossession of Australians and also, the actual physical deprivation of our People through misspending on refugees.
6. All Australians should take whatever opportunities there are to create dissent: talkback radio, voting out incumbent politicians, talking to fellow Australians, organizing your own letter-writing group (for newspapers), making vexatious complaints. You should advise young people to read the Internet book, The Camp Of The Saints by Jean Raspail, [http://www. jrbooksonline.com/PDFs/Camp_of_the_Saints.pdf], which explains the psychosis that underlies support for refugee admissions.
7. All Australians who can should display National Flags or Southern Cross Flags – houses, clothing, cars etc.
IF YOU DON’T FIGHT - YOU LOSE!
Australia First Party
PO Box 593 Rockdale 2216 PO Box 103 Crows Nest 4355
PO Box 223 Croydon 3136 PO Box 129 Collie 6225
National Contact Line 02 8587 0014 email: [email protected]
Voting for other than Australia First is just a waste of time
Doncaster residents rally against high-rise development
http://manningham-leader.whereilive.com.au/photos/gallery/doncaster-resi...
Finally the tide of the "development" tsumami is being over-turned by protests and "nimbys".
Unless we stop the flow of people - all of whom ultimately need housing - this basic need will continue to be exploited as a profit-making commodity until Victoria's livability and environment is destroyed. We can't have perpetual population growth, keep up the "green" facade, and reduce greenhouse gases while our economy largely depends on population growth and "developments".
Content of YouTube broadcasts should be transcribed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsKx7kbvkJA
I think that talks like this should be transcribed onto pages with images of stills included. That would greatly increase the already wonderful utility of YouTube. Once a video is viewed once there is not a lot to be gained for the extra time that it takes to watch a video for a second time or third time, but if all of this was transcribed into text, and put on a page, that page, in conjunction with the original broadcast would be an enormously valuable resource. As one example, if all of Mahdi Nazemroya's talk was transcribed as text it would be that much more easy to quote content from it in articles and online debates. In fact, we have already done that with another (somewhat smaller) YouTube broadcast, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-fZsJVV8BI , at http://candobetter.net/node/2566. If anyone would like to help in creating a service to transcribe such talks, please leave a comment there.
Oscar's Law support rally
On September 18, around 5,000 people rallied on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House. Speaker after speaker took to the microphone to condemn puppy mills and factories.
Breeding dogs are kept in cages to churn out puppies for pet shops. The breeding animals live in poor conditions.
Once the thrill of the impulse purchase wears off, many young dogs find themselves at the local pound.
Regulation is poor, as authorities aren’t easily able to keep breeders in check. There's few regulations about bedding, shelter, maximum number of litters and staffing.
The RSPCA encourages Australians to consult the Smart Puppy Buyers Guide on the RSPCA website before purchasing a pooch. The guide outlines how to check whether a breeder is responsible. With shelters over-flowing and "death row" a sad reflection of society's throw-away mentality, it's better to go to a shelter to adopt your next pet.
The “law” is named in honour of Oscar who survived five years as a stud dog, and was rescued twice by Debra Tranter, the driving force behind Oscar’s Law.
The Spring Street steps were full of people, placards and paws calling for the end of inhumane puppy farms, where dogs are bred in often filthy and cramped conditions.
Video of the rally provided by Phil Wollen.
Culling Them??
I cant understand the love affair between the left-liberal chattering class, and rich, wheeling-dealing muslim arab boat people.
Is admiration for islam cultural cringe mark 3 -- just another way to feel embarassed by our christian anglo-celtic heritage?
The big picture is pretty simple -- a plague of homo sapiens -- spreading like slime over every corner of the earth.
Of course the rich will wangle their way to richer, emptier, cleaner countries by air or by boat or by foot.
I have found a high-speed shark cat ($40K) that is faster than Australia's customs and RAN navy patrol boats. Would anyone finance me to set sail, to meet the boat people before the military does. Then video them, shoot them and sink them?
More diversity in the media needed
"That's what the fourth estate is about! It's about creating profits built on other peoples' suffering. It's about creating ever-increasing profits, irrespective of the human, social and environmental costs".
This sounds like an apt description of what our government's politically-driven population growth agenda is about. The ideology of perpetual population growth, for the benefit of large corporations and economic-groups, means crushing of the public, and imposing economic, environmental and social strain in an effort to pay for and accommodate more people into Australia. We don't need more "diversity" in the population, but in the media.
The "news"papers, instead of imparting dispassionate and impartial news and information, are actually the basis of forming public opinion! They have the power to distort, to bias and present only one side of any political debate. We need diversity in the news and media, and that's why sites like candobetter.net should become increasingly important - for balance, exposure of the truth, and freedom from vested interests.
Astroturfing could easily be stopped by human web administrators
My previous comment and one other which raised, in passing, the media disinformation about Syria was apparently labelled 'astroturfing' by another contributor when he wrote:
Incredible! Now we have astroturfing about Syria on a message board about a program on astroturfing! It's all around us!
Below is another comment I posted to that forum in response. Further below, in Appendix 1, I include the other post seemingly labelled 'astroturf' which discusses how real astroturfing is being used to mislead word public opinion to justify NATO's planned invasion of Libya.
Two comments out of the eleven prior to yours so far on this forum, which mention Syria and which run counter to the lies peddled the mainstream media and astroturfers elsewhere, constitute 'astroturfing'?
Stop wasting our time!
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Thanks Susan (18 Sep 2011 11:27:40am) for alerting me to the way real astroturfers are helping prepare world public opinion to accept NATO's planned invasion of Syria after it completes the installation of the TNC regime that will allow Libya's former coloniser, Italy as well as France, the UK and others to plunder Libya's oil wealth.
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I think one lesson from this is that it is high time we began to evaluate the true worth of web services such as Twitter. Anything which which allows postings without human moderation and which can so easily abused and used to undermine free speech, democracy and peace as Twitter has done should be spurned by decent Internet users.
Nothing is posted to the site I contribute to (candobetter.net) that is not either posted by trusted account holders or moderated by human administrators. I am fairly certainly that very little, if anything, of what has been posted there is astroturf. Furthermore, the administrators have very rarely resorted to censorship. They will only refuse to publish posts which are illegal, personally abusive, obscene, not relevant to the topic at hand or overly verbose. Even then they will normally allow the intending poster to post a link back to the material if he/she has already posted it elsewhere so that any site visitor can form his/her own judgement.
If all web-sites with discussion forums were administered in similar fashions the problem of astroturfing would surely disappear overnight.
Appendix 1: Contribution by Susan
Thanks for a great program. My fear is that astroturfing is being used in the media war against the Syrian government. Tweets from "Syrian activists" are informing at least one ABC journalist and I guess, as a consequence, they are informing reporters and program presenters because it is very rare to hear balanced reporting on Syria, despite the efforts of people in the Syrian community to be heard face-to-face or on paper. I guess it has something to do with our attraction to simplistic narratives, and our wanting to be able to attach ourselves to the "goodies" in a voyeuristic sense. So in regard to Syria it is a battle between 'human rights activists' versus 'regime apologists'. Tweeter is the best possible ground for such a battle. But with the US and NATO fighting the 'regime apologists' it is a very uneven and complex battle for those of us deeply concerned about the future of a country of 23 million people.
Censoring web administrators, astroturfers threaten free speech
ABC Radio National's Background Briefing program of Sunday 18 September Don't trust the web was most interesting and informative. However, it did not cover the reverse side of the coin, that is, censorship, which is hardly less of a threat to free speech and democracy on the Internet.
A Truthseeker's Code of Conduct proposed here, if widely adopted, could make it much harder for web-site adminstrators, who refuse to publish opinions which demolish the views they are trying to uphold, to get away with their suppression of free speech. However, preventing astroturfing may pose a considerably greater technical challenge.
Below is a comment I posted today to the Background Briefing web page. This is, in part, a response to a contribution by TMA1 included below as well as to Megan also included below.
In fact, it seems to me that people's rightful objection to astroturfing and other less automated forms of Internet abuse has been used as pretext to prevent the expression of much truly original and insightful thought on the Internet.
If this is not so, then can someone tell me on what Australian web forum (let alone in the conventional mass media) can anyone find the case against NATO's bombing and invasion of Libya in recent months?
I haven't found any discussion anywhere (except on the site I contribute to) -- and it is not for want of attempts on my part to post material.
Check out for yourself Larvatus Prodeo, or Web Diary or John Quiggin's web site. Let me know on how many forum web-sites on the case against NATO's war against Libya (and soon Syria) has been fairly discussed in Australia.
The censorship, in so many places on the web of informed and insightful views by real people, makes the repetitive posting of the same dishonest ideas attributed to phony contributors by astroturfers doubly criminal.
TMA1 is right. It should be possible to end much of the harm done to free speech and democracy by astroturfers if the vast majority of Internet users with good intentions are sufficiently motivated and vigilant.
Appendix 1: Contribution by Megan
I find it hard to believe that Q & A use software to filter out astroturfing. Seems like what's being filtered out is genuine comment and all the dross is left in.
How else to explain the same talking heads and corporate media shills bobbing up every week on that annoying twitter feed?
Flight of the Conchords is now a much better option on Monday nights!
Appendix 2: Contribution by TMA1
While it is true that the Web is now virtually overrun with opportunists trying to fool, misinform or hoodwink the public in one way or another, there are ways to mitigate the risks. The onus is now on the public to ensure that these charlatans are exposed and removed from what still is the greatest tool for social integration ever devised.
I have been involved with online development and e-business since 1994 (when most people did not know the internet) and I have seen the parasites crawl out of the woodwork from that time on. There is only one approach that works with these types - exposure. I run a website for a special interest group (UAV systems developers) and even in a highly specialised area such as this one I have found opportunists attempting to set themselves up. Caveat Emptor
Dingoes need to eat
The most basic requirement of the dingoes of Fraser Island and any other animal including ourselves is is food. If all acceptable opportunities to obtain food are shut off, the dingoes are not just going to give up on the idea of food and passively do without. It is imperative that they eat. Anything they do to obtain food when in dire need is normal behaviour, surely? It seems to me that the Department involved is acting in bad faith, pretending it can have control by not addressing the plight of the animals and having stupid rules that don't makes sense and do not work at all with the reality of the situation.
On girls losing their personalities after adolescence
I strongly relate to the reference to Mary Pipher's observations in the article about girls losing themselves or their personalities after adolescence. I remember a sudden shift in perspective when I changed schools at the age of 13 and a half and finding myself in a class of girls who were extremely sophisticated and seemingly (but not) 3 years older than my previous classmates .The realization came to me in a flash as I took in at a glance the deliberate hair styles and hints of mascara on my new classmates -that now I had to compete on a “looks level” and that I had a lot of catching up to do. This day introduced a new long phase of self consciousness, self doubt and inhibition. The whole game (of life) was now different and very competitive. A lot more energy had to go into how I came across, how much I knew, how I appeared Reading the article makes me wonder if girls are much worse off than they were in those more sedate days when they had to wear crinolines. Theoretically, girls can do so much now. Recent newsletters from my old school show girls rowing, abseiling, skiing, mountain climbing; far more adventurous activities than we did 40 years ago. But is this the whole picture? Do all these activities give girls a chance for time out from the preoccupation with their appeal and physical acceptance or are they an added pressure? Do girls have to look good doing them?
There is a paradox that both boys and girls are more attractive when they are unselfconscious but the pressure to be desirable if one succumbs to it makes this impossible. The current rise in popularity of children’s beauty pageants seems a to be development in the wrong direction .Surely it robs girls even of those early years of pure childhood, of just being themselves, playing and interacting with their environment rather than the mirror.
Coastal council, Phillip Island, minister at odds
PLANNING Minister Matthew Guy has been accused of opening the floodgates for development along the Victorian coast with a surprise decision to rezone seaside farmland for housing at Phillip Island.
The Age 16th Sept.
Mr Guy's rezoning of about 24 hectares of farmland on the outskirts of Ventnor for residential development is not only undemocratic but short-sighted and ill-advised. The Mayor of the Shire says the change is contrary to the council's structure plan developed with the local community, and the recommendations of an independent planning panel.
Obviously the only people who would support it are the developer and the real estate agent who sells the land. With public opinion against such an outrageous and undemocratic planning proposal, this rezoning should have been shelved long before reaching the Planning Minister Mr Guy.
Not only are these development plans contrary to democratic principles and processes, but it is set to destroy farming land at a time of food security and climate change threats. It's reckless and short-sighted-ness at its worst.
There's no infrastructure in the area, and Council ridiculed the idea.
Phillip Island has limited job opportunities, public transport and educational infrastructure. The increase in population will mean Council rates will rise, and retirees and holiday houses will be priced out of their area.
Only one submission (from the owner) supported rezoning of the property - contrary to all the objections and the logic of it.
"Development" has become a euphemism for an environmental disease causing degradation and sterility to sensitive coastal areas, farmland, natural wildlife habitats and the end of coastal recreational/retirement resorts.
Tks so much Lucinda. Pls