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The government needs to listen to the electorate. Consecutive public community polls have shown that Australians are very concerned about the ongoing rapid rate of population growth and density of development, food security, and social disorganisation in poorly serviced new suburbs.
Today, 20 June 2012, Jill Quirk, President of the Victorian and Tasmanian branches of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA), said that the public should not only 'have their say' on urban expansion and population growth, but they should be listened to and heeded.
She strongly criticised the Baillieu government’s move to further extend the urban growth boundary around Melbourne.
In addition, she pointed out that consecutive public community polls have shown that people are very concerned about the ongoing rapid rate of population growth and density of development that is causing traffic congestion, crowded public transport and environmental pollution in Victoria.
“Extending urban growth further into green wedge is not the solution” she said “as it is creating unsustainable communities without adequate infrastructure and services, heavily dependent on motorised transport. There are also food security concerns as more and more food-growing land is being lost under concrete construction and roads.”
Ms Quirk said
“Planning Minister Mathew Guy has failed to act for future sustainability and instead has responded to pressure from property developers and land-banking speculators who are the drivers of high population growth”.
The history of Victoria's began with historically well-planned open and natural space, in contrast to the cramped living conditions of overpopulated Britain. In recent years large swathes of public land have been sold off and truncated, with Melbourne's Royal Park among the most notable. Green wedges were identified for protection broadly following rivers in Melbourne, but these are being ripped into by government supported developers in defiance of public opinion.
“Earlier governments strongly endorsed the preservation of green wedge areas beyond Melbourne’s fringe as essential for healthy communities” President Quirk said “ but we are now losing those areas to the detriment of future generations who will be left with just ribbon suburbs.
We firmly believe it is time for a referendum on population growth.”
"There is one announcement in the budget which I cannot in all good conscience overlook and with which I strongly disagree. The government has increased the permanent migrant worker program from 125,000 to over 129,000. This is heading in absolutely the wrong direction. We should be cutting the number of migrant workers, returning it to the level it was in the mid-1990s —around 25,000. This is because, firstly, Australia has big cost-of-living and congestion problems arising from our rapid population growth, and increases the number of foreign workers only makes these problems worse." Kelvin Thomson - see last four paras this article.
Mr KELVIN THOMSON (Wills) (19:34): I rise to speak in support of the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2012-2013 and cognate bills, which help create a budget that continues the Australian government's tradition of sound economic management, assisting those who are most in need and supporting those sections of the economy struggling under the pressures of a high exchange rate and a two-speed economy.
This budget has taken the tough decisions needed to balance the books. Its core theme of economic responsibility stands in stark contrast to the shamelessly shallow budget reply delivered by the Leader of the Opposition—an unflattering commentary both on his economic illiteracy and on the quality of modern-day political debate where spin doctors come up with one single proposal designed to occupy the airwaves for 30 seconds and draw attention away from the absence of any serious, detailed, costed budget alternative. On this occasion it was the proposal regarding languages other than English, but frankly it could have been anything. Anything will suffice so long as it distracts attention from the total absence of numbers in the opposition leader's response—a budget reply without numbers or figures. It reminded me of the pub with no beer!
The opposition leader treats the Australian people as fools prepared to trust him as Prime Minister without the faintest idea of which government programs and benefits he would keep and which ones he would axe. The opposition leader's budget reply shows the Liberal Party is still besotted by the free market and globalisation. But, as John Quiggin has identified in his book Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, the assumptions behind neoclassical economics have been laid bare by the global financial crisis. The extra investment generated by more favourable tax treatment is supposed to be allocated efficiently so as to produce higher rates of long-term economic growth, but the economic crisis has shown that success was built on sand. Much of the extra investment went into real estate or into speculative ventures that collapsed when the bubble burst. Having cut taxes drastically, governments were left with inadequate financial resources to convince now-cautious investors that their bonds were a safe investment. More generally, the global financial crisis has exposed the view that incomes accruing to different groups in the community are an accurate reflection of their marginal contribution.
The opposition leader talked about deficit and debt.
He did not tell us that Howard government policies resulted in the spending of 94 per cent of a $330 billion increase in tax revenue from 2004-05 from the mining boom mark 1. This in turn forced the hand of the Reserve Bank, which pushed interest rates higher to contain inflation.
The opposition leader raised the deficits of the past four years. Again, he conveniently overlooked the global financial crisis, and the effective measures undertaken by the government to protect Australia from that crisis. The OECD has found that Australia's fiscal stimulus measures were amongst the most effective in the OECD in terms of stimulating economic activity and supporting employment. The Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz lauded the Labor government's stimulus spending, saying:
Not only was it the right amount, it was extraordinarily well structured, with careful attention to what would stimulate the economy in the shorter run, the medium term and the long term.
When I look around the world, it was, I think, probably the best-designed stimulus program in the world and you should be happy that in fact it worked in exactly the way it was designed to work.
In fact we are in a better budgetary position today than we would have been had unemployment risen, as it would have done had Joe Hockey been Treasurer.
The budget is in better shape than it would have been because the largest item on the revenue side—the pay-as-you-go taxes—has defied the trend of falling revenue. Personal tax collections are, in fact, stronger today than Treasury thought they would be at the depths of the GFC panic in early 2009.
The opposition talks about net public debt. The budget papers outline that net public debt will peak in 2011-12 at 9.6 per cent of gross domestic product. Most countries, and every large Western economy, would love this result. By comparison the average net debt position of the major advanced economies is expected to be around 93 per cent of GDP in 2016 and 2017. Our public debt is trivial compared to the OECD average.
Other countries would love to be in our shoes.
The strength of our public finances is a key reason behind Australia receiving a AAA credit rating with a stable outlook from all three major rating agencies for the first time in our history. We are one of only eight countries that currently meet this standard. Returning to surplus sends a strong message of confidence to the est of the world during a period of heightened global uncertainty.
I want to particularly welcome those initiatives that support manufacturing, invest in the nation's universities and enhance skills training. The pattern of growth in the Australian economy is uneven, with the resources and resource related parts of the economy growing strongly. Business investment as a percentage of GDP is expected to reach a record, with companies planning to invest $120 billion in the resources sector in 2012-13, or around 150 per cent more than two years ago. The resources and resources-related sectors of the economy are likely to average growth of nearly nine per cent per year over the next two years, accounting for 15 to 20 per cent of total GDP. Let me note in passing that this makes a nonsense of those predictions of doom and gloom in the mining and resources sector over the mining tax and the carbon price made by some big mining businesses and their Liberal and National Party puppets.
In stark contrast, the non-mining part of the Australian economy is forecast to expand at an average annual rate of just two per cent over the same period.
Manufacturing is facing challenging conditions, which I know of first hand from the recent pressures on components manufacturers in my own seat of Wills. Manufacturing employed 997,000 Australians in November 2010, but this fell to 945,000 by November 2011, a fall of over 50,000 workers or over five per cent of the industry's workforce.
Although the relative decline of Australian manufacturing has been a multidecade trend, its contraction has accelerated in recent years. Eighty-six thousand manufacturing jobs were lost between mid-2001 and mid-2011. It would appear the loss of manufacturing jobs is gathering pace. Total employment in the industry fell below one million in May 2010 for the first time in decades. Of the 86,000 net jobs lost in the industry in the past decade, 69,000 were lost between February and August last year. This is a troubling picture. The decline in manufacturing's share of employment has been more rapid in Australia than in most other developed countries.
The ACTU has concluded that it is conceivable that Australia will soon have fewer workers employed inmanufacturing, as a proportion of total employment, than any other developed country. I regard it as incredibly important that we stop this from happening.
There has been plenty of research to show that manufacturing is essential for economies.
Manufacturing provides better-paid jobs, on average, than service industries, is a big source of innovation, helps to reduce trade deficits and creates opportunities in the growing 'clean' economy, such as recycling and green energy. These are all good reasons for a country to engage in it.
Technological innovation is important to growth in manufacturing. Advances in computer integrated manufacturing can increase productivity by saving businesses time. Increased efficiency is not the only benefit of computer integrated manufacturing.
In addition, Australian innovators can license their technology for local or overseas use. Improvements in CIM can also reduce geographic constraints, allowing Australian companies to operate more effectively through global supply chains. The NBN is an important development for further improvements to compute integrated manufacturing.
In the budget the Australian government has recognised the importance of innovation in manufacturing by investing $30 million over four years to establish a Manufacturing Technology Innovation Centre to bring our brightest researchers and manufacturers together to drive innovation through new and improved industrial products and processes.
It will establish sectoral collaboration to support major manufacturers, small and medium enterprises, industry bodies and research agencies to create solutions in their production lines. It will help them realise new market opportunities through harnessing new technologies, business processes and technical knowledge.
The Manufacturing Technology Innovation Centre is consistent with the Prime Minister's Taskforce on Manufacturing, and demonstrates this government's commitment to facilitating the transition of manufacturing to 21st century technologies and processes. This stands in stark contrast to the opposition, who would pull the rug from underneath the manufacturing sector and allow it to wither and die.
Manufacturing is important to our economy. Without the initiatives of the Labor government, the high Australian dollar will see manufacturing continue to retreat, and we will end up with a two-state economy.
Queensland and Western Australia will benefit from the mining boom, but other states, like my state of Victoria, will not.
The ACTU has concluded that it is conceivable that The budget's $714 million loss carry-back scheme will Australia will soon have fewer workers employed in help support businesses that are not in the mining fast lane of the economy. In 2012-13, companies will be able to carry back losses incurred in that year of up to $1 million so they get a refund against tax previously paid. From 2013-14, companies will be able to carry back losses for two years. This means a manufacturing, tourism, education, retail and construction business which is currently profitable and paying tax will know that, if it undertakes investments in 2012-13 that initially result in a loss, they will get a tax refund of up to $300,000 when they lodge their 2012-13 tax return.
This measure will provide assistance to nearly 110,000 companies.
Higher education teaching and learning will also see an increased funding commitment, of $38.8 billion over four years from 2012-13. Government funding to the university sector in 2011 was around 30 per cent higher than in 2007. Training more students will help Australia meet emerging skills shortages and deliver a highly skilled, productive and innovative workforce.
There is one announcement in the budget which I cannot in all good conscience overlook and with which I strongly disagree. The government has increased the permanent migrant worker program from 125,000 to over 129,000. This is heading in absolutely the wrong direction. We should be cutting the number of migrant workers, returning it to the level it was in the mid-1990s —around 25,000. This is because, firstly, Australia has big cost-of-living and congestion problems arising from our rapid population growth, and increases the number of foreign workers only makes these problems worse.
Secondly, it is not true that we are short of workers.
We have 600,000 people out of work, and the budget papers indicate that unemployment will go to 5.5 per cent this year—that is, it will rise. Furthermore, it is government policy—and I totally support it—to lift our workforce participation rate, bringing people who are presently on pensions into the workforce. We are short of jobs rather than short of people. The idea that we are short of workers is wrong.
To give the House an example of what I am on about, there has been a debate between Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart about where workers for their mining companies should come from. Gina Rinehart wants to bring them in from overseas. Andrew Forrest wants to find local workers, particularly Aboriginal workers. I think Andrew Forrest is right and Gina Rinehart is wrong. But, for as long as we continue to run a massive program of migrant workers—permanent migrant worker numbers are up from 24,000 in 1996 to over 129,000 now, and temporary migrant worker numbers are up from less than 40,000 a decade ago to more than 90,000 last year—Gina Rinehart's view will prevail, and the mines will employ foreign workers, not local ones.
In conclusion, the 2012-13 budget spreads the benefits of the mining boom to help families on low and middle incomes with the cost of living and provide much needed help to small business while still balancing the books as we need to do. This budget also supports businesses in meeting the challenges and opportunities of the mining boom through a loss carry-back reform, while support for skills training and our universities will help us adapt to the structural changes in our economy and facilitate innovation. It continues the foundation for lower inflation and lower interest ates than we had under the opposition, and lower unemployment than we would have if they were to be returned to government. I commend the bills to the House.
Too often we fail to see the connection between the ecological destruction and cultural genocide of so-called "developing" nations and the lax immigration policies of those nations like Canada which play host to both the victims and the perpetrators of the tragedy. A look at the relationship between Sarawak's plight and the inflation of real estate values in Ontario, Canada and elsewhere should give us a better understanding of how plunder abroad promotes in-migration here. Canada, by offering an outlet to dirty money and the people who profit from it, must be seen as a willing accomplice and silent partner to a vast money-laundering operation.
I had a friend, "David", over for 3 hours this past Wednesday night. David, a serious Christian, and an individual of outstanding character, was a CUSO worker in Sarawak four decades ago and returned for a three month visit this winter to re-connect with old friends. Upon his return he treated me to a travelogue more enlightening and thorough than anything you would find on National Geographic program. Among his major concerns was the alarming growth of the Islamic population which is being favored by the patronage of the province's corrupt Minister, and the ominous potential that demographic shift might have for the liberty and security of non-Muslims. Coincidentally, two weeks after listening to David's account and seeing hundreds of his beautifully graphic pictures, I came upon a television documentary about the politics of this region, and invited David to view the recording. It was the 20 minute documentary that Global TV did on the Chief Minister of Sarawak, Abdul Taib Mahmood, and his kleptocracy. David confirmed the truth of most of what was said in the documentary, and was very pleased that two environmental activists in London, England were following the labyrinthine money trail from "Daddy" to his daughter Jamilah Taib Murray, the wife of Canadian Sean Patrick Murray.
I was able, in the second viewing, to record several fascinating facts about Jamilah and Sean Murray's real estate investments in Canada, which ironically began in Ottawa. What I found ironic is that Ontario's 'green' Premier Dalton McGuinty, darling of David Suzuki, leads a government with 11 Ministries who pay $4.9 million a year in rent to the Murrays for office space in their building(s). The Murrays---through their "Sakto Corporation"---- own six major commercial properties in Ontario worth over $100 million , money which has its origin in the criminal rape of Sarawak's rain forest and its conversion to palm oil plantations. This is a catastrophe of global significance. One square mile of Sarawak's rainforest contains more biodiversity than all of North America. More than that, in clearing cutting an area the size of England, the logging companies---owned by Taib's family and their political allies (largely ethnic Chinese)----they have obliterated the culture of the Penan people, one of the last nomadic tribes in the world. Many Penan protesters have been overtly killed or have simply disappeared. One of them, now a Canadian resident, spent a month in solitary confinement just for participating in a blockade to stop logging trucks. He walks the streets of a Canadian suburb like a disembodied and broken spirit, stalked by memories of a life spent in a tropical heaven, a heaven that is now rapidly being transformed into hell. As he spoke to the camera, his face was concealed in darkness---a testimony to the ability of Sarawak's "mob boss" to intimidate even the people who, one would think, should be beyond his grasp.
As the logging has proceeded, the Taib family has grow richer and richer. At least 84% of the shares of Cahya Mata Sarawak (CMS) , a Sarawak-based construction conglomerate with net assets of $760 million (US) are held by Taib’s late wife and his four children Mahmuc Abu Bekir Taib, Sulaiman Rahman Taib, Hanifah Taib and Jamilah. According to Malaysia’s Anti-Corruption Commission, CMS ,“has a track record of receiving untendered public contracts worth millions of dollars and holds a cement monopoly in Malaysia’s largest state...and has also massively benefited from the Bakun dam construction which has been labelled by Transparency International as a ‘monument of corruption’”. A CMS subsidiary “Similajau Industries” has also formed a connection with Rio Tinto Alcan to oversee the an aluminum smelter with the scope to produce up to 1.5 million tons per year.
When Jamilah was a foreign student in Canada in 1983, Daddy the Godfather and Piggy Bank, gave her $23 million to play with, and so began her real estate acquisitions in Ottawa, now extended to America, Britain and elsewhere. In fact the British government is currently looking into alleged Taib family money-laundering in the UK and British offshore financial centres. Through “Ridgeford Properties”, Sean and Jamilah Taib Murray hold luxury properties in Central London estimated to be worth several hundred million pounds. Jamilah is also currently a Director on the boards of some 63 Malaysian companies.
It warms the heart—doesn’t it---to know that it was Canada, the land of opportunity, which allowed this enterprising immigrant to launch a business empire stretching almost across the globe, fuelled by monies obtained by crony capitalism and the wanton destruction in a faraway tropical land, home to so much biological and human diversity. How ironic that diversity can be destroyed in Sarawak to feed real estate development in a country that brags about its “diversity”.
Dalton McGuinty too can take pride in helping her to grow her business and reward Minister Taib for his program of relentless rainforest destruction. Whatever initiatives McGuinty has taken to reduce carbon emissions in Ontario have been more than offset by the deforestation that has enabled Jamilah to build her empire. With the destruction of this magnificent jungle, the world is not only losing a unique culture, and untold species---including the orangutan---but a carbon sink of similar scope to the Amazonian forest. And Canada, it seems, must make itself a haven for refugees fleeing from these kinds of tragedies, but for the perpetrators and their ill-gotten gains as well. Is this an effective remedy for a problem that is all too common in the "developing" world? In many ways, Sarawak is a microcosm of the world. Greed, corruption, economic disparity, religious friction, environmental degradation and the displacement of indigenous peoples---it is all in play. Perhaps we can attack the problem in another way. A way that would assist both Canada and those who we would want to protect from persecution. Rather than open the door to untold millions of refugees, maybe we should slam the door to the forces of greed, corruption, and destruction that drive them out. Could we not embargo their exports, most especially their exports of corrupt politicians, their family and their fortunes?
Clare Brown --the London-based environmentalist determined to expose Taib's corruption---has been able to shine a light on Taib's activities by pouring through the paper trail of investments. This, I think, is the key to discrediting any group. Thanks to Vivian Krause and Sun Media TV's persistence in showing the fraudulent nature of the David Suzuki Foundation's "charitable" status, Suzuki has been forced to distance himself from his own foundation. And the public is finally waking up to the corporate corruption of environmental groups. The Conservatives--to their credit--- seem determined to prevent green NGOs from taking donations from foreign-owned corporations. Our project, however, is to make the point that environmental NGOs should not be able to take money from ANY corporation, foreign or domestic. Shining a light on the big three (the DSF, the Sierra Club and Nature Conservancy ) and their practice of taking corporate money should be key to our effort to question their failure to address the profoundly negative impact of mass immigration---and their integrity. How does this smell: the Sierra Club of Western Canada has accepted money from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RFB) to protest the oil sands development and Enbridge pipelines. How interesting. Jay Rockefeller, a major donor to the RFB, is the long-time Governor and now senior Senator of West Virginia, one of the biggest coal-producing states in America, supplying coal for electricity generation to two dozen other states. According to Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, the burning of coal is 40 times more impactful than the burning of oil in terms of green house gas emissions, not to mention its medical effects. It seems that environmental groups are willing pawns of a corporate game that is less motivated by genuine concerns about the environment than deflecting attention from the damage they are doing in their own backyard. Shades of the East India Company, which supported Wilberforce's campaign to end slavery in order to undercut their chief rival in tea production---the West Indian slave plantations.
Scratch a noble cause and you find a mercenary motive.....
It is high time that the public come to understand that Green Inc. and the corporations that fund them are first and foremost a business. In return for the funding that maintains their paid bureaucracy and sustains their relentless quest for more and more donations, environmental NGOs give corporations what they crave---ecological dispensation, the seal of approval that they can wave on their websites and brochures as proof of their corporate "responsibility". Meanwhile, they can lobby for higher immigration quotas and aggressive outreach initiatives to recruit the foreign labour they want to fuel their drive to drill, mine and develop at an ever quickening pace----secure in the knowledge that they have bought the silence of their 'kept women' in the DSF and the Sierra Club and Nature Conservancy.
Canada is the Chicago of the 1920s writ large. It's bipartisan immigration policy is like a numbers racket where everyone from the cop on the beat to the politicians at City Hall get a "piece of the action". Environmental NGOs must be regarded as key constituents of the Growth Lobby, every bit as important to the team as are the slimy immigration lawyers, the cheap labour employers, the big banks, the Puppet Intelligentsia in academia and the CBC, which like the ethno-cultural organizations, feed off the taxpayer tit while they tirelessly work to undermine our country. Together they form a stew of putrid slime that has no equivalent except what one would see while peering through the hole of a outhouse. Next time you're in a Provincial Park and nature calls, take a whiff. That, my friend, is the foul stench of Canada's Immigration Industry---an industry that is fully complicit in the rape of Sarawak and regions like it across the world.
Tim Murray
May 4, 2012
Despite their claim to oppose the Wall Street agenda, pseudo-environmentalists remain supportive of one of its key elements----the unfettered migration of cheap labour across borders.
Where did Avaaz go in 2012?
Hopefully to hell.
They tried very hard to prevent Sun Media from gaining a licence to enter the Canadian cable/satellite TV market---for good reason. Sun Media has been to present politically incorrect truths that the Smear Network (Avaaz, Common Dreams, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, SPLC and CNC) have tried to prevent Canadians from hearing. At long last, people are learning about the corporate funding behind the David Suzuki Foundation, the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy and other green orgs on the corporate take. All of these organizations share one common thread. They are all "population-deniers" . None seem prepared to concede that if human activity causes climate change, then the number of "humans" must have something to do with human activity.
Read this month's issue of the Social Contract and you will learn part of what has been going on. The Green-Left are not our "friends". Their aim to is to exclude, isolate and marginalize population activists from the environmental conservation. Despite their claim to oppose the Wall Street agenda, they remain supportive of one of its key elements----the unfettered migration of cheap labour across borders. Despite their fixation on climate change, they fail to mention that immigrants, on average, quadruple their GHG emissions upon arrival to this continent, and that since 1991, immigration has been responsible for four times as much GHG emissions as the entire Alberta tar sands project, which Avaaz et al reviles. And when a couple in British Columbia gave birth to their 18th child, not one constituent of this fake green coalition thought to use it as a "teachable moment" to educate Canadians about the carbon legacy of having children.
The failure of Avaaz and their ridiculous petition to thwart Sun media was the highlight of my year. The CBC monopoly has been broken. The truth will out.
The idea that in gratitude for our support, greens will one day embrace Malthusian concerns is forlorn. Suzuki is a classic case in point. When it came to the crunch, on October 31st, on the eve of arguably the most significant day in human history----the birth of the 7th billion human---he wrote to say that population growth was not so important. So don't hold your breath for Avaaz.
The Lebensborn program was a completely demented creation of Hitler, overseen by Himmler in Nazi Germany. The aim was to create a 'super-race' by organising 'superior specimens' (many who were SS men) to produce children with more or less willing German and other completely unwilling women in occupied countries. The German women apparently agreed to surrender any infants to the German government, where they were raised in orphanages.The Lebensborn program was a completely demented creation of Hitler, overseen by Himmler in Nazi Germany. The aim was to create a 'super-race' by organising 'superior specimens' (many who were SS men) to produce children with, more or less willing German and other completely unwilling women in occupied countries. The German women apparently agreed to surrender any infants to the German government, where they were raised in orphanages.
On 27 March 2012, France2 news presented a report on the Lebensborn program, a completely demented creation of Hitler, overseen by Himmler in Nazi Germany. Although most people are aware of some of the horrors of Hitler's regime, and might have heard vaguely of such a program, to see concrete evidence is vastly more shocking. The aim was to actually try to create a 'super-race' by organising 'superior specimens' (many were SS men) to produce children with, more or less willing German women. The women agreed to surrender any infants to the German government, where they were raised in orphanages.
Apparently, in other countries, including France and Norway, which were occupied, women were forced to participate and children were kidnapped. Even worse things happened.
The French news report shows some bizarre pictures of hundreds of babies squalling together in mass nurseries.
Horribly, when Germany lost the war, these mass nurseries were abandoned and the children left to starve and die of exposure. Some survivors were taken care of by the Red Cross.
In the French news report, a 69 year old woman who had her origins in this bizarre and disgusting program, told of how she finished up being saved and raised (until she was adopted) by the Red Cross along with Jewish children who had been destined for euthanasia.
There was at least one such 'creche' in France. There were others elsewhere.
The victims of these terrible social experiments have been torn between the normal longing of an orphan to know who its parents were and the fear of discovering that they were monsters.
The woman interviewed in this French news report said that she was horrified to realise that, in the worst case, she had been conceived in a mad plan to create a master-race to destroy other people.
I guess that the good news is that the children of these deluded parents do not seem to have inherited their awful characteristics after all. These people were truly innocent victims.
According to some reports (see below) children were also kidnapped, experimented on, and euthanased or simply left to starve, even before the war was lost.
Read more in a well written but chilling article by Ron Laytner, "Super Race Babies."
What is very disturbing even to this day is that America and Australia turned a blind eye to former Nazis as immigrants when some advantage was perceived in this. Australia as "Sanctuary for Nazi War Criminals Told".
There is so much to be suspicious of in wholesale immigration programs and population engineering, both of which are occurring in Australia as I write. Our country is degenerating into fascism in the sense that our governments openly seek advice from and do the bidding of big business over the democratic wishes of ordinary Australians. We are in the grip of an ideology of 'nation building', imposed from above by power elites.
With regard to the ill-treatment of children, we have a very recent example of the English child-migrants, who were brought out here by Catholic organisations, placed with abusive priests in a monastery, and deprived of education and any knowledge of their real parents, who they were often told were dead. Their own parents frequently did not know what had happened to them and did not give permission for them to be taken out of the country. The film, Oranges and Sunshine, does a remarkable job of exposing what happened.
Anyone seeing this film would then find it relatively easy to believe that Aboriginal children were also stolen from their parents in order to provide cheap servants.
Tim Murray reports on a recent Canadian census and the public reaction in a voting poll to uncontrolled population growth. He asks why politicians seem to do the opposite of what the Canadian voters actually want.
Meanwhile Politicians And Media Clap and Environmentalists Remain Silent
In the wake of the just released Canadian Census Report, the Vancouver Province asked readers what they thought of continuing and rapid growth in their community.
83% said that either growth was "ruining" their communities or that growth "was not something they were crazy about".
That is 83% who said "No!" to growth.
Yet we have all four main federal political parties and all three provincial parties saying "Yes!". Yes, let's throw more coal into the furnace and keep our runaway growth train hurtling toward the cliff. Of course, there are some civic parties who want to "manage" growth by packing more and more people more and more tightly together. They even are so deceitful as to call this project "green". But how do you "green" a city by reducing per capita consumption, waste and land consumption while adding more and more newcomers? Cut consumption and waste in half but double the population? How much sense does that make? How much sense does it make to grow Canada's population by deliberate government policies? Does population growth make us wealthier? If it increases the GDP does it increase our PER CAPITA GDP?
If growth creates more jobs does it actually reduce the unemployment rate? If it expands the tax base does the extra tax revenue offset increased infrastructure costs of servicing more people?
If 80% of New Canadians are unskilled, do they earn a high enough income to pay the taxes necessary to offset the cost of social services they consume? If the answer is no, then what does that say about the commonplace belief that immigration is needed to "support the aged"? And what happens when the immigrants we accept to allegedly support the aged themselves become aged? Do we bring in yet more immigrants to support them? Canada already has the highest per capita intake of immigrants in the world (sorry Australia) and the highest population growth rate of all G8 countries. Do we increase this rate exponentially ad infinitum to chase the tail of increased tax revenue?
Do we need more and more immigration to fill the shortage of skilled labour so we can grow the economy? Does not a growing economy create even more skilled labour shortages? Are we sure that we need to import skilled labour? Have we taken a proper inventory of our labour requirements? Have we done enough to train our own youth, particularly Aboriginal youth, many of whom live on reserves with unemployment rates over 75%? Why do we seek foreign labour while we turn our backs on this vast untapped pool of potential talent, wasting away in despair and hopelessness?
Do we need population growth to grow the economy? And if continuing economic growth is desirable, or necessary, is it possible? What if advancing resource constraints make continuing economic growth IMPOSSIBLE? What if there are LIMITS TO GROWTH?
These are the questions that policy-makers and politicians won't answer. They won't answer because their jobs depend on avoiding the questions. And they are not the only ones who refuse to face the raging monster of growth.
Do you hear that? Listen. Listen carefully. Do you recognize that sound? It is the sound of silence. No one is talking about growth, no one, that is, except those ordinary citizens who have had enough and cannot take it anymore, but whose complaints cannot get a hearing on the CBC or with any political party in Canada.
The public silence about growth in Canada is DEAFENING. And, oddly, when the topic of population growth threatens to make itself heard, the quietest place you would find in Canada would be in the offices and meeting rooms of Canada's mainstream environmental organizations------ who remain MUTE about the manifestly negative and massive ecological impact of our country's population explosion. Their silence is stunning given that over the last two decades, mass immigration has generated four times as much Green House Gass emissions and despoiled three times as much land as the Alberta oil sands project--- not boreal forest one might add, but for the most part, prime farmland.
Ah, but greens say, urban sprawl is not a function of population growth but "bad planning". The problem though, is that, to the contrary, on average half of sprawl is driven by population growth, 70% which in turn is driven by immigration. And since land-use planning is under the control of developer-controlled local councils, stopping sprawl must require stopping growth, not managing it. That is the raw reality that the talking heads of Green Inc. will not acknowledge.
The release of this latest Census report should have given the environmental establishment the opportunity to blow the whistle on the government's immigration policy. It would be the ideal "teachable moment" to restore "population" to the position it once held in the environmental discussion, and to resurrect the call for the development of a Population Plan for this nation. But once again, as happened in 2007, they have nothing to say. Not a word. Not a peep. Just what their corporate benefactors want to hear.
Tim Murray
February 14, 2012
February 9, 2012. 2:50 pm • Section: Opinion http://blogs.theprovince.com/2012/02/09/editorial-yeah-were-growing-but-are-we-happy
Should Greater Vancouver just keep growing until it resembles New York City? Is that what we all want? (MCT FILES)
Population figures from the 2011 Census didn’t tell us much that we didn’t know already, at least in a general sense. B.C. and its large, Lower Mainland communities are growing at a brisk clip.
The population of the province increased seven per cent from 2006 to 2011 — above the national average of 5.9 per cent. Some 4.4 million of us now call B.C. home.
Lower Mainland communities expanded even faster:
Surrey’s population grew by 18.6 per cent, downtown Vancouver grew by 11 per cent, with Burnaby (10 per cent), Coquitlam (10.4), New Westminster (12.7) and Port Moody (20.0) showing big population gains.
Developers, who stand to profit, and most politicians, who equate population growth with success and more power, champion all growth as wonderful. And while it’s true that growth means jobs and greater economic activity, it also means more crowded communities, more traffic, greater pressure on public facilities, higher costs on local government to provide services, and usually higher housing costs.
How dense we want our communities to become, and to what extent we should preserve current neighbourhoods, are questions in a discussion that all citizens should join. VOTE:
Thank you for voting!
. . . fantastic, and creating much more dynamic and interesting communities. 6.52% (6 votes)
. . . OK, I guess. 3.26% (3 votes)
. . . not something I'm crazy about. 19.57% (18 votes)
. . . ruining our communities. I wish I could live elsewhere. 63.04% (58 votes)
. . . inevitable and there's nothing we can do about it. 7.61% (7 votes)
Total Votes: 92
[Editor: More have voted since this article was written.]
· Citizen of the West - 3 days ago
The answer is NO we should not keep going until we resemble New York as your editorial asks. The beauty of the Vancouver and BC that I grew up in is the laid back quiet beauty, not the expensive, densified unfamiliar place we are starting to become. We are told to expect another million people in the next couple of decades or so. They told Toronto that also, and then they got a million more, and another million .... you get the picture.
· http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/87d0cbea244e1ca8482de11c35b5135b?s=54&d=http%3A%2F%2Fi0.poll.fm%2Fimages%2Fno-user-54.png%3Fs%3D54
TruthandJustice - 3 days ago
If anyone actually believes that such high immigration is necessary they are very naive. No other country with a similar birthrate has experienced such massive changes. When did we ask for our communities to become concrete jungles and for us long time residents to become alienated? Such change is unnerving.
The release of Canada's latest Census report should have given the environmental establishment the opportunity to blow the whistle on the government's immigration policy. It would be the ideal "teachable moment" to restore "population" to the position it once held in the environmental discussion, and to resurrect the call for the development of a Population Plan for this nation. But once again, as happened in 2007, they have nothing to say. Not a word. Not a peep. Just what their corporate benefactors want to hear.
“The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology or land-use management is sophistic.” E.O. Wilson
The results of the 2011 Census Report were released on February 8th of 2012, but the silence from official environmental quarters continues. How could that be?
If there had been a major oil spill on the BC coast that day, do you think the Green NGOs would have said something? If the federal government announced that it was going ahead with the Enbridge pipeline regardless of what came out of public hearings, do you think the Green NGOs would have said something? If the government announced that it would approve mining, logging or drilling at Banff National Park do you think the Green NGOs would have mentioned it, at least in passing?
Damn rights they would! In fact, they would be screaming to the heavens about it. And they would be right in doing so.
Yet two weeks have passed since the 2011 Census Report was released they still have nothing to say about the biggest ecological disaster to afflict this nation since the last ice age, Canada’s silent killer, the cancer of rapid exponential population growth, 70% of which is driven by hyper-immigration, a policy that has been responsible for the addition of 7 million people to this country since 1990, when it began. Its environmental impact has been enormous. It has generated four times as much GHG emissions as oil sands project and despoiled three times as much land. Not boreal forest, but precious prime farmland for the most part, which has been converted to housing. In Ontario alone, according to Ontario Farmland Trust, some 600,000 acres of very good farmland was developed between 1996-2006, a period of very high immigration rates, which incidentally match Australia’s as the highest in the world. The province’s then Environment Commissioner, Gordon Miller, warned that if this intake was not curbed, the “Golden Horseshoe”, site of some of the best farmland in Canada, would have to accommodate another 6 million people in the next two decades.
Between 2001 and 2006, Canada’s population grew by 5.4% or 1.08% per year. The fastest population growth rate in the G8.
Between 2006 and 2011, however, that growth rate picked up steam. It was 5.9% or 1.18% per year.
Once again, Canada had the fastest population growth rate in the G8-----for ten years running.
In 2006, Canada’s official population was 31,612,897. By 2011, however, it was officially 33,476,688. In other words, Canada added 1,863,791 more people to its numbers over 5 years, or 372, 758 per year. Put another way, since 2006 when Halifax had almost 373,000 people, Canada has added a Halifax to its numbers each and every year. In total, Canada has added the equivalent of Hamilton and Edmonton to its population level since 2006. And this doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of residents with temporary visas. The verdict is in. We are growing at a torrid place.
Had Canada retained its relatively high population growth rate of 1.08%, experienced between 2001-2006, our population would double in 65 years. But now, with an even faster population growth rate of 5.9%, we are on target to double our population in 59 years. This means that by 2071, Canada would consist of 66 million people---and this assumes that we will not be called upon to accept tens of millions of refugees fleeing the impact of climate change and crippling resource shortages and the conflict which will ensue from it.
We cannot allow this to happen. Someone must speak out. Someone who commands attention. Someone like David Suzuki or the Executive Director of the Sierra Club. What is holding these people back? Why won’t they break the silence? Are they telling us that adding 1,863,791 more consumers to our society in 5 years is of negligible ecological impact? Are they saying that pipelines cannot be built before they are vetted by ecologists and biologists and subjected to public hearings, but there should be no environmental impact assessment of population growth as a deliberate government objective?
The hypocrisy of Canada's Green Pharisees is breathtaking. While the house is burning they vigorously polish the wood furniture. Our cities are bursting at the seams and sprawling over arable greenbelts and they are missing in action. I cannot find words adequate to vent my rage at these pretentious fakes, so I will invoke the scorn expressed by Jesus in Matthew 23:23:24 when spoke of the hypocritical high priests of his time:
"You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel"
Tim Murray
February 22, 2012
Mark O'Connor (famous co-author of Overloading Australia) asks, should environmentalists resist Big Australia - and the densification of Melbourne? "In the long run, unless we can stop the endless growth of population and consumption, all environmental battles will be lost. Yet powerful vested interests distort our news and media to make us think growth is inevitable, and that we should live in ever more crowded cities. Mark O'Connor discusses how environmentalists can identify and defeat these forces." Look for the Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian Branch) stall there as well - all weekend and Friday.
Time:
Feb 17th 2012 Sustainable Living Festival, 4 pm
Place:
At one of the Talks Tents that has been re-named The SHED, Yarra Bank/Birrarung Marr near Flinders St Station
Title: Sustainability versus Australia's growth lobby.
Mark O'Connor asks Should environmentalists resist Big Australia -- and the densification of Melbourne?
In the long run, unless we can stop the endless growth of population and consumption, all environmental battles will be lost. Yet powerful vested interests distort our news and media to make us think growth is inevitable, and that we should live in ever more crowded cities. Mark O'Connor discusses how environmentalists can identify and defeat these forces. Mark, a widely-published poet, is also co-author of Overloading Australia, a book that re-ignited the population debate, and which Dick Smith sent to every Australian State and Federal politician. He blogs at http://markoconnor-australianpoet.blogspot.com/
How Governments and the media dither and deny on population
(Click book image for purchase details.)
Author: Mark O'Connor and William Lines
ISBN: 978-0-85881-224-6
Greenhouse gases going up. Oil and gas depleting. House prices exploding. Overloading Australia explains why – and how to stop it.
The press of numbers on this continent affects us all – those living, as well as those yet to be born. To talk of saving the environment or of climate change is meaningless if we won’t address population – a subject some think too hot for public debate. In a score of punchy chapters, authors Mark O’Connor and William Lines challenge the myths, expose the facts, and dent the denial industry.
They blow the whistle on population-foolish policies that lead to clogged roads, water shortages, scarce food, and no place for refugees; then provide new and fair ways to think about the issues and to limit Australia’s future population-size.
This is a book that will revolutionize the green debate, and the political debate, on population.
Price: AUD$19.95 (incl. GST), 248pp
It is logically contradictory for pro-immigrationists to argue that immigrants should be afforded all the rights that people in their adopted country enjoy, then to argue that they do not have the same right to insist on a sustainable population. Do people in a theatre forfeit the right to complain that the theatre or restaurant manager has allowed it to become too crowded, that the number of patrons has obviously exceeded safety?
A great many immigrants have come to understand that mass immigration is bad for Canada, but feel constrained in making their feelings known in deference to a common refrain: “So now that you’re here, you want to pull up the ladder.” One long-time middle-aged friend, whose mild mid-Atlantic accent betrays the fact that he moved to Canada with his parents as a twelve year old, is particularly sensitive to that charge. I don’t think he should be. And I don’t think anyone is right to reproach him for having what they believe to be an “I’m-alright-Jack” attitude.
I don’t think an immigrant with or without a foreign accent should be disqualified as a credible critic of immigration policy. Arguments of that nature are the inverse of Groucho Marx's famous remark that he would not belong to any club that would accept him as a member. They don’t make sense. If you were admitted to the club, you are a club member and should have all the rights, privileges and responsibilities of other club members. There should be no second-class club members. And all club members should have the right---and the responsibility---to shape and revise club policies including who should or should not be able to join in the future. Maybe club facilities are already over-used. Maybe the club can no longer pay for them. Maybe the club should raise its admission standards. Those are decisions which all club members should have the right to participate in.
It is logically contradictory for pro-immigrationists to argue, on the one hand, that immigrants should be afforded all the rights that other Canadians enjoy, but on the other hand, to argue that they do not have the same right to criticize immigration policy as other Canadians have. Do people who enter a theatre or a restaurant forfeit the right to complain at some point later that the theatre or restaurant manager has allowed it to become too crowded, that is, that the number of patrons has obviously exceeded the number the fire marshal has determined as safe? And do not people who feel sorry for those left standing outside in the rain have the option of giving up their seat and leaving the premises so that one of those outsiders may come in and take their place? Who is being hypocritical here?
There have been times when I found myself in an elevator that was packed with so many people that my face was almost pressed against the wall. On some of those occassions, when I was within reach of the panel, I pressed the "close door" button in an attempt to prevent more people from trying to enter. Was I being a hypocrite? After all, I too was once standing in the lobby, wanting to get into the elevator, and aspiring to reach a higher floor. How could I have something against aspiring elevator passengers? As I said, I was one myself. Or my father or grandfather once aspired to be passengers of the elevator too, and the door was open for them. All of us, we are told, are from "the lobby" or are descended from people who came from the lobby. We---Canada---- are an elevator of former lobby occupants, as we are reminded over and over again. So we don’t have a moral right to close our doors to people who wish to follow us. Or so goes the reasoning.
But the point is that once on board, I have a right to safety, and if more people were allowed on the elevator, it would not serve their interests or mine to have the cable snap. And for the record, I am not against passengers who just got on board. I am against any policy that would keep the elevator door open to allow more passengers than the elevator can handle. How many people an elevator can carry is a question that should be informed by scientific analysis. In Canada, 25 of Canada's top scientists---the Science Council of Canada---determined in their Report No. 25 that future resource constraints would make it unwise to go much beyond 30 million people, that we should slow our population growth rate so that there were not diminishing economic returns with each increment of population growth. And in 1997, another group of scientists, led by UBC's Dr. Michael Healey, concluded that Canada needed a "Population Plan" so that our growing urban centres did not inflict the same kind of ecological damage that his team of researchers found in the Fraser Basin. But alas, those warnings have been ignored, and Canada, according to the last two Census reports, has for the last decade, been packing its elevator at a rate higher than any other country in the G8 group.
I am for closing the elevator door. But what if I closed the door because I noticed that most of the people in the lobby were non-white? What if I closed it because I am a bigot? That may be a bad reason, but it wouldn't discredit the most relevant one----that the elevator has a limited carrying capacity. Bad character does not preclude correct judgment. The right decision can be made for the wrong reasons by wrong-headed people.
Imagine though, if someone had a vested interest in cramming as many passengers as they could into that elevator. Imagine if some were able to charge elevator entrants a fee. Imagine if some on board were salesmen who thought that they would have more opportunities to sell more of their products if more potential customers were allowed to come in. Imagine if some were temporally blind and thought that the elevator had more space than was safely available or that they couldn't understand that the law of gravity and other biophyical laws trumped all other considerations . Imagine if some believed that there might be a technological advance that may increase the capacity of the elevator. ("Some one will think of something, after all, they always have..). Imagine if some were Greens who told us that the elevator could take on more people if only we weren’t so greedy and went on a crash diet and lost weight. ("Move over, squeeze tighter, and keep on squeezing so that more and more people can share our bounty") And imagine further if these people with a vested interest in packing the elevator with more people noticed that most of the people in the lobby were non-white and that the best way to get them in was to accuse me and those like me who would close the door of being right wing looneys, racists , xenophobes or bigots.
You really wouldn't have to imagine that scenario, would you, because as a resident of Canada with a ring-side seat to political correctness, censorship, blacklisting, character-assassination, guilt-by-association, and the social ostracism of those who challenge orthodoxy, you would realize that you are seeing it unfold before your eyes. Our political culture is inimical to reasonable discussion and education in the fundamentals of math and logic.
The truth is, in Canada it is socially outrageous to state that, like elevators, theatres or restaurants, Canada has a limited carrying capacity. There is a limit to growth. And somehow, when immigrants say that, it seem s even more outrageous. It shouldn’t be. Speaking the truth never should.
Tim Murray
February 11, 2012
This advertisement from Kuala Lumpur shows how development companies are not only selling Australian houses in Asia but are offering Australian taxpayer-funded government grants to further entice Kuala-Lumpurans to buy here. These grants were intended to help young Australians get into the housing market but instead the developers are offering them to foreigners. The ad is for housing in the Whittlesea area of Victoria, but the reality is that the same thing is going on all over Australia.
How can politicians tell us we have a housing shortage? If we did, they could sell the houses here and not have to go to foreigners. Why is the government allowing this land way out of town to be built on at all and then sold to foreigners?
We are being taken for fools.
This ad has been sent to Matthew Guy, the Victorian Minister for Planning, and to a local federal mp. How about sending it to your MPs as well, if you feel it is wrong.
The advertisement says, "Hurry, get the AUD$13,000 Australian Government Grant." Foreign buyers can also save on stamp duty.
Whittlesea is just north of Mill Park, where wildlife activists and residents unsuccessfully tried to stop government slaughter of displaced kangaroos last year. To get to Plenty Road from the city you pass through some of the densest populations in the world, and then past endless suburbs, many of them only built within the last two to five years. Wildlife activists have deplored the fate of wildlife as the greedy developers and complicit state governments have turned a blind eye or aimed a gun. Residents have watched in horror as completely undemocratic decisions have been made to maim and mutilate the countryside, overpopulating it, rapidly increasing demand for services and resources, driving their prices beyond the reach of all but the well-off. At the same time, salaries are not increasing but job insecurity is increasing. Australians have little slack and nowhere to turn except to demand that their MPs start to represent them and stop this abuse of the system.
Whittlesea residents need to take out an ad in the Kuala Lumpur paper where this offensive ad for Whittlesea land and housing was run. The ad should politely inform Kuala Lumpurans of the situation and that Australians did not agree to have their taxes used to facilitate foreign investors making the situation worse for wildlife and for the homeless and the mortgage-burdened.
Contact your local MP and ask him/her what he is doing about this further pressure on the green wedges and on housing prices and this funelling of Australian taxes into foreign purses. Then write to candobetter.net as a comment to this article and tell us what your MP's answer was. We will publish it. Exert pressure. The situation is unacceptable. It is scandalous and has population impacts which may lead to ordinary Australians becoming destitute due to inflated power, land, and housing costs within the foreseeable future.
Martin Collacott from the Fraser Institute looks at whether meaningful immigration reform is finally coming to Canada - video newslink.
Canada has even higher immigration numbers than Australia and its refugee rules are almost open house. These problems have been known for years, but, due to the presence of a huge growth lobby, almost all democratic demand for a slow down has been suppressed, unrepresented and sidelined.
Wednesday 21st December 2011 - press release from Kelvin Thomson, MP.
You can reply here and you can reply on Mr Thomson's blog.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that, with the exception of Singapore, during the last 5 years Australia ran far and away the biggest per capita migration program in the world – 11.1 migrants per thousand people per year. After us came Italy, with 6.7, Canada 6.6, Sweden 5.8, Hong Kong 5.1, the United States and the United Kingdom 3.3, and New Zealand 3.1. In fact we could cut our migration program to 74,000, rather than 174,000, and we’d still be running one of the biggest per capita programs in the world – as big as the UK, Italy and Sweden, and bigger than the US and New Zealand.
I believe the Australian people are instinctively generous and good-hearted, but their tolerance has been stretched to breaking point by the quadrupling of the skilled migration program over the past 15 years, which has generated competition for jobs and housing and put pressure on family living standards.
As a consequence the debate about asylum seekers is very divisive. It is doing nothing for our sense of national unity and respect for each other.
We should not expect the Australian people to accept an increase in the refugee intake in isolation. It should be part of a package where skilled migration is cut by 50,000. There are many good reasons to cut our migration program, and one of them is that it is likely to lift public support for an increased refugee program, which I think it’s something we have to bring to the table when we are working with our regional neighbours on the asylum seeker issue. Furthermore the Australian people have said over and over that they think our migration level is too high, so cutting our massive migration rate is giving the Australian people what they want.
In fact we could cut our migration program to 74,000, rather than 174,000, and we’d still be running one of the biggest per capita programs in the world – as big as the UK, Italy and Sweden, and bigger than the US and New Zealand.
Mary Drost of Planning Backlash and the Marvellous Melbourne website has picked up Matthew Guy's 'challenge' on population growth and comes back with the figures and this statement. We look forward to Matthew Guy's response.
Minister Matthew Guy’s Challenge to me was that
"Figures show that Melbourne would still increase by 500 a week even if there was no immigration. So what do we do about that?"
Firstly, I understand Melbourne is actually growing by more like 1,800 a week (90,000 a year) so natural increase is less than a third of the problem.
This Challenge needed a response using figures produced by others than those representing big business, since they often present only those figures that suit their push for growth and development. Therefore I have consulted with the top names in Australia who have been studying the growth of Australia and Melbourne and below are their findings. I challenge the growth lobby on their biased stand, as evidenced by the fact that they appear to have given you only a misleading fragment of the picture.
The CPUR has prepared new projections for household growth in Melbourne. Given recent demographic developments (including the decline in overseas student enrolments in Melbourne). It is likely that Net Overseas Migration to Melbourne will average around 35,000 a year and that fertility will fall because of the record high price of entry level housing.
Given these assumptions, the number of households in Melbourne will increase by around 750,000 over the next 30 years.
Over the next decade (2011 -2021) the number of households in Melbourne will increase by around 286,000.
Less than a third of this would be needed with balanced migration (zero net migration), which is the world’s average.
There are two sources of growth in the number of households. One end is the young who want to get into the housing market. The other end is the growing older group as the baby boomers replace the currently much smaller number of retirement aged residents. But most of these older households will stay in their houses even though they become 'empty nests' and partners die.
High rise does not solve the needs of young families. They will want family oriented housing, preferably a detached house or if not possible a town house or unit in a suburban setting. Therefore the current forest of high rise apartments will be left high and dry, or will be filled with unwilling and discontented residents. Most of these younger families will have no choice but to move to the fringe because that is where affordable detached housing is likely to be located. Those who want to live in established suburbia will have to compete with immigrants for the limited dwelling units available, because most are occupied by baby boomers.
The burden on cities like Melbourne can be relieved by reducing Australia’s immigration quotas; otherwise the crisis of housing affordability young people already face will get worse. Further the burden on any government trying to solve the overloaded infrastructure problem while population grows freely is enormous.
PROJECTIONS OF AUSTRALIA’S POPULATION GROWTH to 2050 show that for the Big Australia projection (assuming net overseas migration of 180.000 a year – which is around the current outcome) will mean an increase from 22 million now to 36 million in 2050. Of this increase,
4 million by 2050 - will be from natural increase alone
10 million by 2050 - immigration plus children of migrants born in Australia
Natural increase is high at present because the baby boomer generation’s children are now in child bearing age. This is projected to decrease after a decade or so and eventually will stabilise so that births will equal deaths. So it is a short term issue. The biggest problem is the high rate of migration. State governments have a duty to point this out to Canberra. Handling even Melbourne’s current 20-25,000 a year natural increase strains its resources, so the federal government should be encouraged to reduce immigration.
Hence to claim that "growth is inevitable even without immigration" would be dishonest, unless one also mentions that the growth produced with balanced (net zero) immigration would in fact be temporary and fast diminishing.
Mary Drost
This information has been obtained from the current studies being undertaken by Dr Bob Birrell of Monash University and including discussions with Dr Tony Recsei of Sydney, Mark O’Connor of Canberra, author of Overloading Australia, Jill Quirk of Sustainable Population Australia and Kelvin Thomson MP.
See also Marvellous Melbourne
Reflecting upon the events of the past year (2011) in Canada, the travesty of our democracy remains salient. Mother Nature was not allowed on the ballot, and none of the five major parties were prepared to support her cause. None of them---not even the Green Party----were prepared to say that Canada's runaway population was killing biodiversity, paving farmland or raising carbon emissions. Why? Quite simply, the environmental movement had failed to create a large constituency of support for population reduction in Canada. Nothing underscores that failure better than a look at Nature Canada and its campaign to encourage supporters to ask the Harper Consevative government what it thought were penetrating questions about protecting the environment.
Take a look at Nature Canada's website http://www.naturecanada.ca/election2011.asp, and their "questions to ask " politicians in this federal election, and then you will understand what is wrong with Canada's environmental and conservation movement. They have taken the "P" out of the IPAT equation---the foundational formula of the environmental movement in the 1970s. Nature Canada, Nature Conservancy, the David Suzuki Foundation and the Sierra Club, the Green Party of Canada and the fake greens in the NDP all would have you believe that we can add 350,000 consumers to our population every year, year after year----in other words, one metro Toronto every decade---without negative ecological impacts! And if challenged, they will tell you that we can shoe-horn tens of millions more into this country by strict land use planning--- aka "smart growth",----preserve greenfield acreage and minimize their energy use. Aside from the fallacy of this contention, it is intellectually dishonest. Land use planning is in the hands of local government, and as Professor Robert MacDirmid of York University has documented in "Funding City Politics", local governments are controlled by developers.
1. Why won't you---Canada's green NGOs---- make public your corporate funding sources? Why do you hide your sordid corporate benefactors from your own members?
2. Why do you---Canada's green NGOs------ accept money from corporations like RBC, the Toronto Dominion Bank, the Walton Group, Encana, Atco etc etc? What do they want from you? What have you not said or advocated in return for their patronage? What is the going rate for your silence? Does not the stench of the corporate money that Big Green accepts rank with the "dirty subsidies" that governments provide Big Oil?
3. Can you explain the 'coincidence' that you have not taken on immigration-driven population growth in Canada when that is a major goal of corporations like RBC who fund you?
4. Can you seriously argue that we can "decouple" population growth in Canada from environmental degradation, from farmland and habitat loss and carbon emissions?
5. Why have you not pushed for an environmental assessment process for the government's immigration and pro-natalist policies? Do you honestly believe that renewable energy can be "scaled up" to meet the demands of a Canadian population that grows at over 1.08% per annum? Do you understand what exponential growth is? If you think a population level of 34 million is for Canada is sustainable, at point would you concede that it isn't? 44 million? 54 million? 84 million? At what point along the road to ruin would you be prepared to call for a Population Plan for this country? Hello?
Canada's environmental movement sure smells like a movement. Their population-myopia is an outrageous omission that smacks of political correctness and outright corruption. Species loss is not something that only happens in some distant wilderness. The real killing fields are right here on the perimeters of Canada's growing urban centres. That is why Walton International---a land banking corporation, finds that it makes good business sense to give donations to Nature Conservancy for high profile land acquisitions far away from the farmland that Walton likes to purchase at the edge of cities like Calgary. When that land is rezoned to 'urban' use and housing development---Nature Conservancy stays mute, as it has when other patrons like RBC underwrite urban sprawl or bankroll the tar sands. Then, when Nature Conservancy "saves" a wetland or valley 500 miles away, these corporate donors can share the bragging rights. The new parkland is then declared parkland "forever". Forever, that is, until oil hits $250/barrel or minerals critical to our economy are in desperate shortfall. Until then, however RBC, the TD bank and Shell Canada can show off their credentials as good green citizens and paragons of corporate social "responsibility".
Nature Canada implores us to "vote for nature" in this election. But where, on any federal election ballot in any constituency, can "nature" be found? The counterfeit "Greens", along with the NDP and the Liberals, actually want to hike Canada's immigration quota from its current 285,000 to 340,000!!!! Canada already vies with Australia for the dishonour of having the highest per capita immigration intake in the world, and has the highest population growth rate in the G8 group! Privately, David Suzuki has called this process of converting third world immigrants to "hyper consumers" in Canada as "madness", but will not say so on a major media outlet. He has, however, bravely gone on ABC radio in Australia to tell Australians that Australia is overpopulated. But Australia already had Tim Flannery and the Australian Conservation Foundation to tell them that. Will we have to invite an Australian environmentalist here to say the same thing about Canada? In what way has Canada not overshot its carrying capacity to the same degree as Australia? Why the silence, Dr. Suzuki? Why be frank 'down under' but be seized with demographic lockjaw in your own country? Does the DSF customize its policies to suit its benefactor, RBC, whose Chairman Gordon Nixon has lobbied for an immigration intake of 450,000?
Nature Canada is right in one important respect. In their words, "we cannot afford to allow nature and the environment to be ignored." So why are they ignoring population growth?
Tim Murray
April 7, 2011
Nature Canada's statement:
During this year’s election, we cannot afford to allow nature and the environment to be ignored.
Ask the Candidates:
Canada is not enforcing its own laws to protect wildlife, according to several Canadian and international investigations. What will you do to make sure Canada does a better job of enforcing our laws to protect wildlife like caribou, whales, and migratory birds?
I am concerned about plans to allow oil and gas drilling in national wildlife areas, marine protected areas and other places that should just protect nature, period. How will you make sure nature is really protected in all federal parks and protected areas?
I am concerned that we are losing so much of Canada’s unique wild lands, waters, and oceans. What will you do to protect more lands, waters, and oceans for nature and future generations?
I worry about environmental disasters like oil spills and mining waste accidents. How will you do a better job of using federal regulations and environmental assessments to prevent environmental disasters?
I am angry that my hard-earned tax dollars are going to subsidize big oil and gas companies and our Canadian lakes are being handed over to mining companies to dump their waste. What will you do to end these dirty subsidies?
Everyone says that Canada is not doing its fair share to fight climate change. What is your party’s plan to really move Canada to a green economy powered by renewable energy?
Canada urgently needs an ambitious national plan to protect nature for wildlife, for us to enjoy, and for future generations. What will you do to show national leadership and give Canada an ambitious vision and a plan to protect nature for all?
Tell Canada’s leaders where you stand – vote for nature in 2011!
Paul Cleary’s book Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia’s Future, is a timely appraisal of the dramatic economic and social impacts, as well as the political ramifications of the current resource boom.
(The reviewed work covers much of the same ground as Dirty Money of 2011 by Matthew Benns, which I am currently reading and can also recommend.) This review of Paul Cleary's book by Professor Kerry Carrington, Head of School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology was originally published on theconversation.edu.au on 25 November. It is being reprinted here with her kind permission. Professor Carrington asked that this review be republished as widely as possible.
Paul Cleary’s book Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia’s Future, is a timely appraisal of the dramatic economic and social impacts, as well as the political ramifications of the current resource boom.
Cleary argues that the resource investment stampede is squandering Australia’s precious non-renewable fossil fuels, leading to a high dollar, inflation and interest rates, at the expense of manufacturing, education and tourism industries.
There is, he argues, a strong case for a more measured approach to harvesting these resources in the long-term interests of all Australians through better taxation, saving and regulation of the resource sector. This book is not anti-mining and does not argue that resources should be left in the ground, as Stephen Kirchner would have us believe.
Cleary coins the phrase “investment stampede” to capture the seismic shifts at work. The sector is growing fast – too fast – at 15% per annum, with a pipeline investment of $174 billion. Global demand especially from Asia has fuelled this boom. Current economic returns for the mining corporations and their shareholders are staggering.
Cleary coins the phrase “investment stampede” to capture the seismic shifts at work. The sector is growing fast – too fast – at 15% per annum, with a pipeline investment of $174 billion. Global demand especially from Asia has fuelled this boom. Current economic returns for the mining corporations and their shareholders are staggering.
In August 2011 BHP announced an annual net profit of $23.5 billion, while earlier in the year Rio Tinto had announced an annual profit of $14.3 billion.
Cleary’s book analyses an array of adverse impacts resulting from an investment stampede, including the growth of fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) workforces. Until the 1970s, mining leases tended to be issued by governments subject to conditions that companies build or substantially finance local community infrastructure, including housing, streets, transport, schools, hospitals and recreation facilities. Townships and communities went hand in hand with mining development.
Not any more. The haste of this extraction process has become increasingly reliant on a continuous production cycle of 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, and one increasingly reliant on fly-in, fly-out or drive-in, drive-out (non-resident) workers who typically work block rosters, and reside in work camps adjacent to existing rural communities.
There are estimated to be around 150,000 non-resident workers directly employed by the resources sector, anticipated to rise to around 200,000 by 2015, but no government body appears to be counting and projected growth is equally elusive.
This is an odd oversight given the rapid growth of reliance on non-resident workers in the resources sector carries significant impacts for individual workers and their families and host communities, as evidenced by the many submissions to the Australian Parliament House inquiry into FIFO/DIDO work practices, chaired by the Independent MP Tony Windsor. Some of the significant impacts include:
These impacts undermine the long-term sustainable community development of rural Australia. It is troubling therefore that dramatic socio-demographic processes have been unleashed by this boom without concerted attempts to accurately research, measure or account for the numbers of non-resident workers involved and their nation-changing impact on the Australian society and economy.
Just as the number of non-resident workers is not being researched or counted, Cleary draws our attention to how the rapid depletion of natural non-renewable resources is not being counted either. Again, the long term social and environmental costs, including the time value of Australia’s natural resources and the opportunity costs of squandering them through an investment stampede are not being measured.
Instead, the gaze of most state politicians in particular has been transfixed on the short-term economic benefits shared by so few. Cleary draws attention to the dominance of a short-term economic view which frames the current resources boom – a view to which Kirchner appears wedded.
The real challenge for a government of and for the people – and not just a government at the beck and call and in the pocket of the powerful mining industry lobby – is to recalibrate the frame of reference for assessing and responding to the social and ecological impacts of the mining boom in the long term interests of the nation.
The corporate power of the mining industry, especially to lobby governments, state and commonwealth to influence policy making in Australia is alarming. As Cleary points out, “Not only did the miners change the prime minister and change government policy, they went on to brag about how their coup had stopped similar schemes from spreading around the world.”
State governments who grant mining licenses and regulate the industry also earn a share of the minerals extracted through royalties. Last year Queensland and Western Australian governments collected around $6 billion.
The Queensland government’s endorsement of the BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance proposal at Moranbah to allow up 100% of workers to be non-resident is a more recent example of Cleary’s complaint about the impact of corporate power. It even contradicts Queensland’s own resource sector housing policy that workers should be allowed the choice where the live and work industry. The Moranbah mining community, with its long history of communal solidarity, is now destined to become surrounded by thousands of non-resident workers housed in dongas.
While the Queensland government introduced social impact assessment processes as part of the Environmental Impact Assessment approval process in Sept 2010 in part to address these concerns, it has failed to regulate the long term cumulative impacts of resource development. Why? State governments have a fundamental conflict of interest in setting themselves up as the arbiters in disputes over access to agricultural land, the granters of exploration licenses and the approvers of environmental and social impact statements, precursors to project development consent from which royalty payment to the state flow
Cleary’s book offers a much needed critique of the collision of self-interest between state governments and mining companies which both profit handsomely from the speedy extraction of resources.
Given the state governments’ conflict of interest and susceptibility to being courted by corporate power, the need for a commonwealth power to over-ride state powers in the interests of the more effective long-term regulation of the mining industry is long overdue. This week, Australia got one thanks the insistence of independent MPs Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who supported the Mineral Resources Rent Tax (MRRT) in return for the overhaul of the environmental approval processes and legislation.
Given the state governments’ conflict of interest and susceptibility to being courted by corporate power, the need for a commonwealth power to over-ride state powers in the interests of the more effective long-term regulation of the mining industry is long overdue. This week, Australia got one thanks the insistence of independent MPs Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who supported the Mineral Resources Rent Tax (MRRT) in return for the overhaul of the environmental approval processes and legislation.
Too Much Luck can be credited for fanning the shift in public opinion and political climate in support of the MRRT. We are at a critical moment in the boom, when strong, not weak, Australian Government leadership through the policy-making processes of federalism are absolutely vital, if, to use one of Cleary’s metaphors, Australia is not to look like Nauru, “but on a continental scale”.
How ironic. A party that poses as the vanguard of democratic reform denies its own membership the chance of greater democratic participation. Why?
What’s this? A political party that has always claimed to be the spear-head for the democratic reform of Canada’s electoral system junking an experiment in internal party democracy? A political party that has argued for proportional representation in parliament but has abandoned a process that would ensure proportional representation of all strands of opinion within its own ranks as reflected in party policy? A political party that prescribes more democracy for Canada but not for itself?
Welcome to the Green Party of Canada (GPC). A party that in 2004 set up a participatory Web-based process for broad-based policy development that would invite and permit rank-and-file members to determine party policies. Forget stacking meetings and microphones, forget slate voting for convention delegates, forget the standard sordid trademarks of traditional party politics. At long last, here was a political party that would give ordinary party members a direct say in choosing the policies which their party would run on. The initiation of this “Wiki’” process---as it was called----was a de-facto declaration by the GPC of trust in democracy, of faith in its own members, best summarized by Chairman Mao’s famous invitation to members of his Chinese Communist Party. “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand thoughts contend.”
The trouble was, when the people spoke, the leadership didn’t like what they heard----so they pulled the plug on democracy. Obviously the people need to be “educated” before they can be trusted. The party leadership knows best.
In 2004-5, the Green Party brass discovered that “empowered” members can use their new-found power to vote for politically incorrect and inconvenient policies. And none was so politically incorrect and inconvenient than a policy that was articulated in a position paper entitled “A Strategy for a National and International Canadian Population Policy”. It was a policy that would have required the GPC to “provide the strong political leadership needed to create a credible population policy” for the country “and undertake an initiative to educate Canadians about the acute dangers of overpopulation and to build public participation and support for a population policy.” Particularly incendiary was “Position 5”, which stated that:
“The Green Party of Canada should advocate steps to slow the growth of population in Canada pending the development of the information base on carrying capacity and the completion of public consultations, and press for measures to increase international aid to those overpopulated countries that have or are willing to adopt policies to lower fertility but need assistance to develop and implement such policies.”
The paper also offered the view that It went on to argue that “As Canada will have a very slow natural population growth rate without immigration for about the next fifteen years (Statistics Canada), one measure to slow population would be to bring immigration to levels in place prior to 1989” when “Canada adjusted its intake of immigrants according to its ability to absorb and provide suitable employment.” The paper noted that since 1990, when the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney aspired to match the Liberal Party target of one percent annual population growth for the country, immigrants fared significantly worse than other Canadians, while prior to that, the reverse was true. “This”, the authors observed, “may suggest that Canada has reached its carrying capacity. For as long as an ecological surplus exists, additional population seems to increase wealth, but when carrying capacity has been exceeded added population causes a rise in poverty levels.”(William Catton).
Bottom line: “Canada needs to develop a population policy that links human numbers in Canada to the long-term carrying capacity of Canadian lands and boundary waters taking into consideration the needs of other species and the biodiversity required for a healthy ecosphere.”
This was dangerous stuff to the party hierarchy----but apparently not to the majority of participating party members, who voted 56% for its inclusion into party policy. It was that fact, rather than the policy proposal itself, which scared the pants off those who feared that their career prospects would be sunk by a democratic torpedo from their own membership. As Tony Cassils, the chief architect of the collaborative effort to formulate this policy, recounted,
“Recommendation 5 caused some unease, especially among the members of the GPC who were candidates in ridings because they feared, probably correctly, that they might be pilloried by other parties for seeming to favour a slowing of immigration. By early April 2005, fearing that the population plank might win approval, they came up with an idea to sever the population plank and make a separate one on immigration. ....Eventually , the GPC simply shut down the Wiki process for policy development. I fully understand the anxiety that Recommendation 5 engenders in GPC candidates and I believe that this is the reason that any thought of population stabilization in Canada is suppressed by the GPC. ...Elizabeth May shuns any mention of limiting population growth.”
In retrospect, this suffices to explain why in November of 2008, following the federal election, Eric Walton, Erich Jacoby-Hawkins and others in the ruling GPC clique reacted with reflexive alarm when they learned that all those who had stood as GPC candidates were recipients of a questionnaire sent out on behalf of Biodiversity First ---an organization (of which I was ‘Vice President’) that challenged mass immigration-driven population growth in Canada for its negative ecological impacts. They were quick to advise these candidates not to answer the questionnaire nor to communicate with BF, interpreting it as a classic “divide and conquer” strategy. But given recent history, when a majority of GPC members had indicated support for BF’s aims in the Wiki experiment, it would probably be more accurate to say that party heavyweights were desperate to quarantine our views because they perceived them as a deadly virus that might infect their membership should they be exposed to our perspective. After all, the fact that just three years earlier 56% of grassroots participants approved of a plank to limit population growth---including immigration, was proof enough to them that our ideas would have traction in the Green Party at large.
This fear pre-dates May’s ascension to the GPC leadership, but her arrival certainly gave it impetus. It is clear that May’s leadership fits perfectly with the ruling clique’s determination to make political expediency and political correctness---rather than ecological correctness---the priority of the party. Elizabeth May was tailor-made for this crew of fake greens, as she auditioned for the role when she lead the Sierra Club of Canada and passed the screen test with flying colours. When Paul Watson and a group of dissident Sierrans threatened to restore the goal of sustainable population for America to the policy books of the Sierra Club of the United States, May threatened to change the name of her sister organization in Canada if they were successful. Since then she has consistently characterized immigration concerns as "trivial" in importance and maintained that urban sprawl fed by exploding population growth can be cured by good "land-use" planning, despite the fact that local zoning is under the jurisdiction of local governments bought and paid for by developers, as Professor Robert McDermid has documented in "Funding City Politics". She remains oblivious to the fact that mass immigration has, in the past two decades, accounted for four times as much GHG emissions as the Tar Sands development, and clings to the delusion that population growth can be 'de-coupled' from carbon emissions and ecological degradation.
Despite May’s make-over of the GPC, it still is not a cohesive and monolithic bloc. Large pockets of the party are not afflicted by population-denial and the opportunism of their leaders. Nevertheless the ruling clique have succeeded in enveloping the party with a cordon sanitaire of filtered information and are slowly but surely creating a party in their own image, much like the Pods in the sci-fi classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” succeeded in replicating the form and shape of human victims. It looks like a Green Party and walks like a Green Party, but when you look into its eyes no one is home. Its policy pronouncements give the game away. This party is Green in name only. Those who would reveal themselves as unassimilated by the governing ideology, who would attempt to play the population card, are destined to be marginalized and driven out with discouragement. As Erich Jacoby-Hawkins told one of them on March 6th of 2008, “...you’ll find the existing progressive consensus (beyond the Green Party) is towards more open immigration, not tighter, so you are bucking the trend on this issue----so to follow your own Lakoffian advice, you would need to be the one to acquiesce at this point.” Translation: Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
The hijacking of Canada’s Green Party by population-denialists is more than a tragedy for the GPC. It is a tragedy for Canada. For if the Green Party will not be truly green, who will?
As that policy position paper of 2005 stated, “Canada needs leadership for the age of ecology from the green parties, not the myopic managers of the old-line parties who act like it is “business as usual “, while paying lip service to the notion of sustainability and to other environmental issues.”
Tim Murray
November 25, 2011.
The shocking death this past summer of Canada's newly-elected Leader of the Official Opposition, Jack Layton, forced me to put the following article on hold. Mr. Layton's sincerity, persistence and bouyant optimism in the face of encroaching cancer was inspirational even to his political enemies. Nothing could attest more to his universal appeal than the fact that a state funeral was held in his honour. Nevertheless, respect for the man should not mean that criticism of his policy direction should be suspended or that his ideology---the ideology of his party----should enjoy indefinite immunity from critical examination.
For those who do not follow Canadian politics, the New Democratic Party is now Her Majesty's Official Opposition, thanks to its stunning success in the recently held federal election. On the weekend beginning June 17, 2011, the triumphant party held a national convention in Vancouver, and party leader Jack Layton once again attempted to present the NDP as a clear alternative to the reigning Conservative government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The main order of business, it seemed, was semantics.
Mr. Layton assured party members that the proposal to rid the preamble to the party constitution of the word "socialist" reflected the intention to merely modernize the language of the party---- not revise its values. The NDP would still be the party that would restructure Canadian society in a fundamentally different way. But what way would be fundamentally different? Consider this prominent portion of Layton's speech (emphasis mine):
"You are the reason that New Democrats are Canada's Official Opposition – fighting for the values we cherish.....Canadians elected the NDP to be the Official Opposition, but also to propose ideas, not just to oppose the government.It's up to all of us in this room to live up that responsibility – to provide Canadians with a positive alternative and to build a strong and united country. To grow our economy, create new jobs, and always put the needs of everyday families first." http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/06/17/pol-ndp-friday.html
This stated party objective was something that Layton has repeated on numerous occasions, including his victory speech on election night when he vowed that "We must focus on economic growth and environmental sustainability". Some three years ago—in a speech given on May 22, 2008 to “The Shepherds of Good Hope”, Layton had declared that the problem with growth was that its benefits were not fairly and equitably shared. “Today we are seeing a very disturbing trend in Canada: the growing gap between the rich and everyone else. More wealth (sic) is being generated than ever before—but that does not mean that everyone is better off. In fact, the opposite is true. The reason is pretty clear---the benefits of economic growth (sic) are not being shared equally among all Canadians.”
It is a theme that provincial NDP leaders have emphasized as well. Then BC NDP leader Carole James told delegates at the party convention in Penticton in November of 2009 that we needed to "grow the revenues" to support the social services that the party hoped to extend and maintain for the benefit of the province. The current leader, Adrian Dix, remarked during his bid for the leadership that the NDP were better economic managers than the incumbent Liberal government because the growth rate was higher during its decade of office than was the case under the last ten years of Liberal rule. Former Saskatchewan NDP Premier Lorne Calvert had peddled the same line, arguing that growth was needed to grow the tax base and that the party's mission was to ensure that all citizens benefited from the process. Of course, all of this economic growth could exist side by side with "strong environmental protection", a contention made less credible by his government’s record. After seeing his province’s Green House Gas (GHG) emissions by 60% since 1990, Calvert still had the cheek in 2006 to promise his audience that “while continuing to grow the Saskatchewan economy, we will stabilize the absolute level of GHG emissions by 2010.” The Manitoba NDP, for its part, once declared on its website that "We want Manitoba to be a place that promotes sustainable growth and a place that recognizes our lakes, rivers, and forests as our greatest assets." Great assets to be preserved---or developed? Since then, they used the 2010 throne speech to brag about the province’s “unparalleled growth”. http://todaysndp.ca/search/node/sustainable%20growth For New Democrats, as for other parties, growth is the measure of success.
Ironically, following Layton's speech, a TV interviewer spoke to the party's environment critic, MP Fin Donnelly of New Westminster. He spoke of his determination to stop oil tanker traffic down a sensitive part of the BC coast, but when asked about the contradiction being opposition to the tar sands development and the party's commitment to protect the jobs of "working families", he admitted that the issue was difficult and then launched off into an explanation of how it was important to develop a "sustainable" energy policy. Too bad Doris Day is not still alive to sing the NDP's theme song. "Growth and the environment, growth and the environment, go together like a horse and carriage---- you can't have one, you can't have one, no you can't have one without the other."
No doubt further research would yield a hundred other examples of this kind of double-talk. Initially it was my belief that it reflected a sinister attempt at manipulation and obfuscation, but then it struck me: Canada's social democrats have swallowed their own greenwash. They have no idea that they their statements are oxymoronic. The NDP has indeed, as Jack Layton said, "modernized" its language. It is the language of confusion and deceit. The language of people who are, in the most profound sense, ecologically illiterate. People who believe that we can put one over on Mother Nature simply by changing our language. Not comfortable with "economic growth"? Fine, then we will call it "sustainable" growth. Don't like that? OK, then we have sustainable "development" waiting on the bench ready to jump over the boards and join the play at any time. As Garrett Hardin said, in “sustainable development” growth-mongers have won a moratorium from the painful process of thinking.
The truth is, the NDP wouldn't know what "sustainability" was if it leaped up and bit them on the ass. The "alternative" vision which they represent is the vision of the 1960s, when conventional wisdom had it that "the environment" was a luxury, an externality that would be nice to have as soon as we could "afford" it. Only by growing the economy, and becoming "prosperous", can we afford to "clean up" the environment. "Hey honey, look. I know you would like us to buy new furniture and paint the house, but we have to finish the addition first, and pay down the mortgage." This line follows the same kind of logic that would argue that only by fostering a strong tobacco industry can we gain the revenues necessary to build cancer clinics.
Look Jack, whether you call yourself a socialist or a social democrat is of no relevance. If you say that you want to make things ‘fair and equitable’, we’ll take your word for it. The issue, however, is not how we can grow the pie and divide it equitably, but that the pie is shrinking while you’re inviting more diners to the table. At least the father of Canadian socialism, J. S. Woodsworth, understood that you need to turn the immigration tap off when the economy is in a tailspin. Adding more consumers to the stew will not grow the supply of cheap non-renewable resources. And as Dr. Peter Victor of the University of York observed, growth is not particularly effective at eliminating poverty, creating full employment, or safe-guarding the environment either. Since 1976, as both the GDP and the greenhouse gas emissions have gone up consistently, levels of unemployment and poverty have bounced around.
Here is a news flash for socialists--- Oops, I mean "social democrats" (by all means let’s be modern): The economy is a fully owned subsidiary of the environment. No environment, no economy. (Eg., no cod, no Newfoundland cod fish industry). At what point in history will that truism sink in? We don't expect Conservatives to get it. After all, they are Conservatives. They are in love with capitalism, and debt-capitalism and growth work hand in hand. But the NDP is the “Opposition”, and don't we elect opposition parties for a reason? Aren't they supposed to offer an another option? A genuine choice?
For some, continuing economic growth may seem necessary, even desirable---if you don't care about undercutting our life-support system. But what New Democrats don't understand is that even if continued economic growth is necessary and desirable, it is not possible. Our industrial economy depends on the unsustainable use of finite non-renewable natural resources, which by definition, cannot be used indefinitely. That is why they are called "non-renewable". "Renewable" energy cannot be scaled up to anywhere near our requirements. To believe otherwise is to reveal a kind of mystical thinking which is informed by a blend of shallow research, wilful ignorance and false hope. A dozen credible sources could be cited but a local one will do. Just read what Canada's foremost energy expert, David Hughes, has said. His motto? "Beware of scale".http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.06-energy-an-inconvenient-talk//?ref=2009.07-environment-an-inconvenient-talk&page=
There are lots of alternatives on the drawing board, but they won't take us where we need to go. Not even close. And even if energy needs could be met, no replacements could be found for all of the 69 metals and minerals that analyst Chris Clugston identified as critical to the operation of an industrial system and which have already ‘peaked’. Metals and minerals which, like oil, will always remain in the ground but which at some point soon, will not be able to be affordably extracted. In other words, at some point, there will be a net energy loss in procuring them. http://www.wakeupamerika.com/papers-and-essays.html
We are entering an age of what Clugston calls "continually less and less". Our industrial economy will keep shrinking. Economic "stimulation" will only feed the demand for increasingly scarce and expensive natural resource inputs whose rising, prohibitive cost will eventually choke the economy. In other words, these "job-creating" efforts will only accelerate our remorseless drive to the cliff. Them's the facts, m'am. And what is First Officer Jack Layton's advice to Captain Edward John Smith (aka Harper) on the HMCS Ecological Titanic? "Full steam ahead sir. We can go faster if the ordinary working people in Third Class are given a fair share of the perks on board this great vessel. And by the way sir, we need to pick up more passengers---at least 340,000 immigrants a year---to keep this ship ‘vibrant’ and growing.”
It is astonishing that even an articulate man with a PhD who claims to represent a brand new change of direction for the country is evidently unaware of our extreme predicament. Don't politicians spend any time reading and thinking outside the CBC Matrix? Or are they content to believe their own bullshit? Apparently.
New Democrats are not an "alternative". They are what Jan Lundberg described as "Team-B"---a “group of cheerleaders for a different shade of growth mongering. In this camp are some politicians and organizations that many progressive people would prefer to love unconditionally. After all, fundamental change, however overdue, is nice to put off or to pretend that it might be smooth....Accommodating more people as part of population growth or immigration solves nothing, but fattens the wallets of the growth industries responsible for urban sprawl and increased consumer spending.” http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/197/65
It seems that everyone has heard about petro-collapse except the politicians and the media. No one can talk about the impending collapse and the reckoning except, as Lundberg puts it, “on fringe websites or in our living rooms. Or at the bar. Or in the woods. In the streets.” Certainly not, however, in Canada’s House of Commons or on the CBC. And obviously not in the NDP caucus.
Put on a happy face. Think positive. Wishful thinking and wilful ignorance will banish those recession blues forever. The New Jerusalem that Tommy Douglas spoke of awaits you. We can have our cake and develop too. It must be true---I heard on the CBC.
Tim Murray
June 19, 2011
This article describes an example of the serious and inhumane impact, in the form of crisis involving several individuals, and a specific suburb and hospital system, of Australian immigration policy. The government is maintaining a policy of high mass immigration contrary to the wishes of the majority of citizens. Citizens have no useful outlet and no effective parliamentary representation on this.
The mass media covers matters in a manner that keeps the arguments circular and without constructive democratic outlet. For this reason candobetter.net serves an important purpose in expressing peoples' views and in exposing the impacts of the government's undemocratic and environmentally and socially harmful policy.
In this article the push by universities to get students from overseas to make up finance shortfalls that once were supplied from taxes comes under the spotlight. The article looks at the cost to Australian students deprived of places and the cost to foreign students of maintaining their places. It also looks at how Victorian hospitals' bed shortages are a direct result of the effective push by the growth lobby to have more and more people in this country.
There is little revealed in the media of foreign student struggles, their impact on university courses and standards, their access to residency, and scams. Universities have become another industry, outsourced globally for economic benefits rather than institutions that aspire to quality education, learning, ethics and research – and a way to ensure our young people are able to reach their potential equitably.
The Federal government migration program, designed to attract thousands of young, highly skilled students to fill Australian jobs, has been "corrupted" by a Melbourne man who created a sophisticated scam that rorted the already dubious system.
Carmine Amarante made tens of thousands of dollars, and was expecting more in the future, by manufacturing hundreds of fraudulent documents for international students to ultimately become permanent residents.
The student scam also allows “students” to enter Australia without sufficient financial support, without tickets and money to pay for their air fares to return to their countries.
We have experience with an international student we were in contact with, from a country in South America. I will call her “G” so not to identify her.
We helped her find accommodation and we have invited her to join us for a few social and cultural events.
G has been under terrific stress - no job, no money, failed exams, not being able to pay rent, and then she developed a mental health issue - paranoia, delusions, crying and became suicidal.
She started a fire in the rented house she is in, and burnt her clothes and linen. She suffered bouts of paranoia and called the police three times, thinking she was being assaulted or raped.
G asked for help. We took her to a GP and he referred her to the local public hospital - one of the biggest in Melbourne. We stayed with her for 12 hours in the hope of getting a bed.
After my partner spent many hours with her, not long after he left she was released by the hospital, to another “student” who arrived at the emergency ward last moment. He had no money, was almost illegal himself, with inadequate accommodation and no car.
She had to be picked up at the station. She was threatening to escape, and she vowed she wasn't going to take “drugs”!
She was using her acquaintances and friends to borrow money. She had no job, her rented room was almost expired, and she wasn't welcome where she had been living.
This kind of situation has occurred before, with very serious consequences, such as when Huan Yun "Allen" Xiang, a 46 year old Chinese student with little social support, shot several people in his class at Monash university in 2002. Although Xiang might have developed paranoid schizophrenia anyway and was presumably a permanent citizen, since he ended up indefinitely at Thomas Embling Hospital for the criminally insane, he seems to have been isolated by language difficulties. As he began shooting, it was reported that "People in the classroom were initially confused by the noise and by Xiang screaming 'You never understand me!' from the desk he was standing on."[1]. He would would also “curse the lecturer constantly in Cantonese” from the back of classrooms.[2]
It should be recognised that the stress of being away from one's family and compatriots and studying in a new language, without adequate finances or whilst acquiring large debts, is guaranteed to increase health risks. If Universities are to have foreign students they should be responsible, caring and hospitable towards them and liaise with the Department of Immigration and the students' embassies. In the days of Columbo Plan students, foreign student welfare was taken seriously, but this caring attitude has fallen away as foreign students are now simply seen as cash cows.
Our recent crisis was made worse by Victoria's hospital bed shortages. The impact of high population growth means that there was no bed for G at the local hospital. Despite overcrowding in this hospital already, the Victorian government is planning to greatly increase population and housing density in the surrounding suburban area. The “shortage” of beds is due to not the number of beds dwindling, but to our population boom!
G is not illegal at the moment as her visa has not expired. She was given more time to pay the university fees that she owes. If this time expires, so will her visa. There are no funds coming from her family. They live in poverty, and G was actually expected to sent money to them!
After ringing up “Immigration dob-in line,” I was informed that it is quite legal to stay in Australia unless the visa has expired, or there is some evidence of fraud. This is despite students being without income, accommodation, or not being able to pay for study fees. Even illness can't force them to be deported.
In Continental Europe, not having suitable accommodation or funds are grounds for being refused entry or sent home.
The Immigration Department won't do anything about students in need, or those causing problems to themselves or others until they are illegal! They don't even have to have money or ticket, (depending on the student visa type) and if they don't manage, Australian authorities generally do nothing! G can be destitute here and there is no duty of care from our government. The department of Immigration suggested that I should contact charities! Already our charities are over-used.
Foreign students are silently allowed to “fall through the cracks” of social support, but any criticism and exposure of them is based on “racism”?
The embassy of the country G came from was not interested in her difficult situation in Australia. They had no funds, despite the Ambassador being on a salary of $20,000 per month, with an office in Canberra!
The university tried to contact her, but got no response. We don't know where the money for her ticket home is coming from.
She is now in a public hospital ward in a psychiatric unit.
Governments are reluctant to pay for the costs of educating Australians, and to give them the support they need. The growth of demand from international students, most of them from Asia, is a way of filling a potential gap in university enrollments which are now beyond the means of most Australians to pay. Foreign students are willing to pay for their own education, at full costs, at no expense to the Australian government.
Education has become Australia’s third largest export earner, after iron ore and coal.
Universities Australia has reported that one in eight Australian students surveyed by them told of regularly going without food or other necessities because they did not have enough money. According to the National Union of Students the maximum Youth Allowance benefit that an Australian student under 25 and living in a share house can receive is $245 per fortnight, which is 38% below the poverty line ($645.15 per fortnight). No wonder students are struggling.
Population groups which may be at particular risk of food insecurity include homeless people, those on low income or living in poverty, including people on pensions and benefits, unemployed people and students - including international students.
Universities Australia’s most recent survey found that one in eight students regularly go without food or other necessities because they don’t have enough money. Money Help’s financial counsellor Brian Kerr says, most of the students I’ve helped are international students who find themselves in financial difficulty. Students are on such a low income but the cost of being a student is so high.
Tips and services to keep you above the poverty line
Overseas students getting as little as $6 an hour to work in local Asian restaurants are too afraid to complain for fear of losing even the meagre wages paid by their unscrupulous bosses.
They are here as cash-cows, to provide willing, cheap and flexible labour to businesses.
There is very little in the media about the problems of international students. It's a hidden industry, and the costs to our already strained charities is ignored.
The implications of universities being starved of funds and having to rely on international students has impacts on Australia's job market, especially for local students. Education here has been globalized, to our detriment.
Amarante admitted he was paid between $500 and $1000 for the 777 false work experience documents he created and had paid employers, some who were friends, some from referrals and others he approached on the street. This exposed “student” scandal further compromises our GSM (“general skilled migration”) program.
Of the 375 visa applications lodged under Amarante's false documents, 34 were granted permanent or temporary visas, 67 were refused, 217 remain pending and 57 were withdrawn.
Students coming to Australia should be interested in education, not residence in Australia. Learning and qualifications should be the motive, not living in Australian. Mixing immigration and education leaves this scheme open for corruption and distortion. It assumes that we have insufficient job applicants and ignores our population growth, our youth unemployment and underemployment levels, and displaces more further Australians from housing.
[1] Jamie Berry, (2003-09-12)."Student believed Monash killings were 'his destiny,'" The Age.
[2] Jamie Berry, "Student 'hosed' room with bullets, court told,"The Age, September 13, 2003.
Post-script - G, motivated by her estranged mother, wants to "sue" the people her helped her for "emotional abuse" (trying to get rent payments from her) and "kidnapping" (after admitting being suicidal to the local GP and taking her to hospital) in order to acquire funds to pay her fees and stay in Australia!
The 1951 Refugee Convention is a Post-WWII international agreement that sought to deal with the humanitarian consequence of a global war.
It has become a means for the 'have-nots' to economically migrate from the Third World to the perceived First World 'haves'. But the definition is relative.
Worse, the problem is not solved, just shifted geographically. Emigration is a consequence of a failure to contain and resolve internal humanitarian problems. It is easier to remove a nation's people than to solve a national social problem, but the human burden is simply relocated.
The UN has proven to be an abject failure, repeated in every incident of national unrest. Too little, too late, default reliance upon charities like the Red Cross and Medicines Sans Frontiers. Recall Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and now Syria. No one would leave their country of birth if they had a choice for a safe and prosperous life. Yet is does precious little to curb the international arms trade. Where did Gadafi and Syria obtain their military hardware? - from the Chinese Government.
'CHINA appears to have offered to supply massive amounts of weapons to the crumbling Gaddafi regime during Libya's civil war, violating UN sanctions and casting serious doubts on its public switch to support the rebels after it saw they were winning.
The revelations including the proposed sale of rocket launchers and anti-tank missiles may prove problematic for China as it tries to protect and extend its investments in the Libyan oil sector following the country's leadership change'. [Source: Sanction-buster China caught out offering to sell Muammar Gaddafi arms].
The peoples of the First World have been made to feel guilt-ridden by their wealth, and so obligated to open their home country to the world's people, unconditionally.
Britain has. German has, France has. What is the consequence? Who is measuring the economic, social and environmental results? Who is the watchdog of such 1951 policy? Sixty years later, is anyone questioning its merits or evaluating it?
The Refugee Convention does not set limits. It talks in humanitarian terms of persecuted individuals, not what happens when hundreds of thousands of such individuals seek asylum in First World countries. It arrogantly fails to set a quota, so by consequence imposes no limits on intake.
What is stopping the entire population of the horn of Africa, fleeing famine and persecution, from applying for asylum in Australia - all 100 million of them?
Australia has signed the Refugee Convention so OneWorldists like Sarah Hanson Young of the Australian Greens will make us all feel guilt ridden if we don't open our homes to the world's hoards! In their ideal vision...'local forgo local rights', 'my backyard is the world's commune', irrespective of how hard I may have worked for it. Private property becomes the world's property.
We are told that the new world order is a global village with no borders!
Then we give the the baby bonus and all Australia's infrastructure is overrun. Human population sprawls over remnant islands of habitat of threatened species of wildlife.
Such ecological compromise has afflicted the Australian Greens since the OneWorldists infiltrated and sidelined its foundation environmentalists.
The Refugee Convention ignores the rights of the people in the recipient countries to have a say.
It ignores the UN responsibility of containment of social unrest, instead allowing it to spill over to become a global problem.
It ignores the carrying capacity of recipient countries and any performance assessment of social receptiveness by recipient nations, of refugee social/economic adjustment, of maintenance of social cohesion, of cultural assimilation.
Like most Departments of Immigration, the Refugee Convention is an idealistic protocol that conveniently ends at Customs, without pragmatic long term settlement solutions and imposed undemocratically on society's that are expected to adapt to foreigners , not respectfully the other way around.
The Refugee Convention is big brother and right out of George Orwell's 1984.
By making wealthy nations guilt ridden, risks repeating the reaction of the Treaty of Versailles.
Tolerance in our time. Any wonder extreme right groups are re-emerging. Such open door immigration is fueling their membership of disaffected, unemployed locals.
The Refugee Convention is simplistic utopian Left Wing extremism. Like all extremism, it is fanatical and incites political polarisation and eventually a pendulous swing to the extreme opposite.
Conservatives wake!
Most people these days won't know of the famous last words of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in September 1938, but some learning of history would help us not repeat its failings.
Chamberlain said unto to the people of Britain outside 10 Downing Street:
"My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time."
A year later Britain and Germany started World War II.
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
How many other "solutions", detention centres, unaccompanied children, unidentified entrants and money must be spent on failed policies to address the asylum seeker issue? The government is trying to please too many lobby groups - those who want the economic benefits of population growth, and those prefer to act with compassion and humanity.
The High Court made permanent injunctions preventing the removal of asylum seekers to Malaysia.
Immigration minister Chris Bowen conceded that there would be more "boat people" after the High Court was convinced to block the "Malaysian Solution".
We have had many failed "solutions" to control asylum seekers arriving randomly on our shores? The size of the "welcome mat" to take risky voyages and increase people smuggling has become larger.
Julia Gillard needs to show some leadership on our behalf. The reason for all the detention centres, unaccompanied minors, armed guards and the processing of claims is because we are enslaved to a relic of a different era with our agreement to the 1951 Refugee Convention.
We are a sovereign nation, not a colony subservient of the UN, and we should be free to make our own policies, and decide who and how many people come here. Malaysia is not a signatory.
The flow of "boat people" is a political smoke-screen to hide the real source of our population boom - economic immigration.
Prime Minister John Howard claimed to have "stopped the boats", but there was no mention of any plans to increase overall immigration numbers, or whether the meatworkers and fruit pickers, skilled temporary workers, were given preference over those with professional qualifications, like trained doctors or accountants.
Back in 1988 Howard said he didn't want to see the rate of Asian immigration increase any further.
Howard also said: To an extent greater than almost any other country, we are a nation of relatively recent immigrants. Immigration has been at the heart of the Australian story because, without it, the country we now know could not have come into existence. What was the "heart of the Australian story" should not become an epic, or tomes to fill a library! Our early childhood experiences and memories don't have to be lived and recreated throughout our lives as we reach maturity. What was beneficial in our infancy is not necessary to continue, and can be detrimental. It's like trying to relive childhood, and retain the benefits of it instead of moving on to maturity.
Growth is only one stage of a community's or nation's lifecycle. Malignant growth continues.
All evidence shows that Australia as the “Lucky Country” has already gone into history. No politician is considering reviving or reliving this part of the “Australian story”.
So while Australians felt secure that our borders were tightly protected from "boat people", polls showed that they were relaxed and comfortable about immigration despite the substantial increase in the intake from under 100,000 to over 200,000 a year during Howard's era. The impacts weren't immediately noticeable, and the use of asylum seekers as a smoke screen to disperse the economic immigration debate worked successfully.
By contrast, the return of significant discontent intensified with the Rudd Government’s further expansion of immigrant numbers to over 300,000 a year, relative reduction in the skilled proportion of the intake and, perhaps most significantly, loss of control over unauthorised boat arrivals. Kevin Rudd's popularity severely plummeted when he unapologetically supported a "big Australia"!
John Howard never wanted to talk about his booming immigration program. Kevin Rudd didn't want to either. Why not? Because it just doesn't fit. Immigration adds to the demands for labour as well as supplying it, and these families need food, clothing, shelter and all the other necessities. They also add to the need for social and economic infrastructure: roads, schools, health care and all the rest – requiring public funding.
It's actually very easy to obtain PR in Australia. The immigration
figures speak for them selves. We have the highest population growth in the developed world, and of course this is a magnet for those seeking a new country.
We already have our own displaced in Australia, with growing homelessness and poverty
The "immigration" debate is largely about asylum seekers, while the real source of our population growth is economic immigration - students, skilled workers, and family reunions.
Australia could easily disband on the UN's outdated refugee convention, and manage the surge of asylum seekers ourselves. We could slash or disband our discriminatory economic immigration policy and increase our humanitarian intake – off-shore.
Our of our net migration of 185,000, only 14,500 are humanitarian - selected off and on-shore - yet they consume the "immigration" focus.
The government is trying to please too many lobby groups - those who want the economic benefits of population growth, and those prefer to act with compassion and humanity.
Our government only wants the ready-education and well-off to provide willing casual workers, and people to buy into property - not the displaced, unskilled, needy and poor.
In light of the riots in Britain, we are publishing an article based on some correspondence from the "Trotskyist", "socialist" and "revolutionary" UK group, Workers' Liberty[1], first published in 1995 at http://www.workersliberty.org/node/4900 on 30 September, 2005. The correspondence calls into question, especially now, different attitudes on the likely consequences of high immigration and population growth in Australia and Britain among other countries mentioned. Describing himself as still a socialist internationalist at heart, James Sinnamon writes that, however, "today the ideal of unconditional internationalism is an unachievable pipe dream, and, in fact, dangerous [because] that ideal has been subverted to suit the needs of globalised capitalism."
The correspondence below began as a private exchange in 2005 between James Sinnamon and Martin Thomas, and so its appearance on the Workers' Liberty site came as something of a surprise to James at the time, as he was not asked permission or told it would be used to construct an article. The correspondence actually originated after James spent an evening with Martin Thomas at Thomas's invitation. During that evening they put their respective views about politics which, as the article below, shows, differed quite markedly. This experience caused James to compose and send an e-mail to Martin Thomas to explain more precisely and in greater detail, his differences with Martin Thomas and, among other things, why he felt that continuing high immigration served the needs of capital and was against the democratic and human rights of the receiving countries and international socialism. The published correspondence includes a letter from candobetter site contributor James Sinnamon, who agrees that he had indeed posted that letter to Martin Thomas in 2005. It was published on the Workers' Liberty site during a past stay in Australia by Martin Thomas. Thomas was a qualified teacher and able to teach both in Australia and the UK. During one of those stays in Australia in 2005, Martin Thomas contacted James in order to re-establish his previous contact when from 1984 and 1985 when James had been an active supporter of the Australian group affiliated to Workers' Liberty, then known as "Socialist Fight."
Sinnamon expressed his opinion that open door immigration policies would give rise to dangerously high immigration and population growth. He warned that, whilst benefiting rich globalists, for everyone else, rapid population growth carried high risks of poverty, linked to fuel shortages and the socially unsustainable inflation of housing prices and basic natural resources, like water and land. He argued that this outcome would be environmentally dangerous to survival. Martin Thomas expressed the view that unlimited immigration was an overall good and that if receiving countries did not embrace it, they would be invaded forcibly, under threat of nuclear war, by sending countries like India and China.
A number of other writers responded to the views of James and Martin, and we also include their correspondence below. It all makes interesting reading.
The correspondence below talks about the rights of sovereign nations to defend themselves generally against the ravages of global capitalism, which also deploys high immigration (in open-door policies) as a weapon against democracy. Whilst thus utterly failing to support the right of peoples to self-government and self-determination, phony socialist organisations continue actively to waste the energy of their many young, enthusiastic and trusting supporters by diverting their attention to phony progressive causes.
The correspondence published below throws some light on the attitudes associated with undemocratically high levels of immigration and population growth and the problems it creates for self-government and self-determination, resource depletion and inflation.
For more about the publication, Workers' Liberty, see footnote [2]
Hi comrades,
Further to last night's conversation. Towards the end I frankly expressed my thoughts on what have been taboo subjects within socialist circles, that is, population levels and immigration.
These issues are an aspect of a question which, as I have said, has been avoided by almost the whole socialist movement, that is the finiteness of this planet, and how we can hope to create a stable basis for a sustainable society within the constraints of the physical limits of our planet, given the unprecedented population levels of well over 6 billion.
If we can't achieve this, our future may be too awful to contemplate.
As I said in less than two hundred years, less than a blink of an eye in human history, we have dug up and burnt off energy stored in carbon, which took tens or hundreds of millions of years for the earth to accumulate thorough biological and geological process (I wrote this in a letter which was printed in March this year in The Canberra Times and The Australian)
This, to me, is an astonishing and frightening fact.
We have increased global populations because we have squandered what should have been treated as a priceless resource for this and future generations.
In our discussion, it didn't strike me that you fully appreciated this fact and all the implications of all of this.
In Australia, we are close to exceeding the carrying capacity of this country if we have not already. As just one example, planners don't know how either NSW or South East Queensland can establish sufficient supplies of water to satisfy the needs of the current population, let alone the additional 1,000,000 (that will be allowed to move here by 2025 in order to satisfy the needs of the property speculation 'industry').
Many informed people believe that the current population levels are already well in excess of this country's carrying capacity, especially if you take into account that our economy largely depends on non renewable petroleum. Coal may be a possible alternative, but an expensive and dirty one, which is also finite. In any case it may increase CO2 levels in our atmosphere to unacceptable levels. Even if Peter Beattie's recent claim that we have 300 years worth of coal left in Australia is true, that is still a blink of an eyelid in terms of overall human history.
No socialist current has ever given a clear answer as to what it thinks the population levels of this country should be and hence what the levels of immigration should be. Your response last night is that firstly you still supported open door immigration and that you didn't believe that that many people would want to come here anyway, so it is not really an issue.
With one billion on the planet in dire poverty living in shanty towns on the outskirts of cities (see New Left Review Article, "Planet of Slums") I would suggest that the potential for Australia's current population to be easily overwhelmed many times over if an open door policy were to be adopted is beyond doubt.
Which one of these one billion people, do you believe would not come to a county like Australia if given an opportunity?
And let's not forget 100,000 largely wealthy business migrants who are already coming here every year. The surest way to gain resident status these days is to have money to buy a house and thereby to add to the already obscene levels of housing hyper-inflation.
Of course I am not being judgmental about these people. They are only doing what I would do, if I were in their shoes#fn_1" id="text_1">[3], and I dare say if they were in my shoes they would in all probability adopt the same attitude that I have adopted.
Already the increased levels of population have clearly had detrimental effects for the existing population : housing costs gone through the roof (property speculators are open about this, if your read their literature), the quality of life largely destroyed in cities like Sydney, water supply crises as I mentioned earlier. These are just not even broached in any socialist literature that I have read.
In my heart I am still a socialist internationalist, but today the ideal of unconditional internationalism is an unachievable pipe dream, and, in fact, dangerous. As a friend put it so well a few months ago, that ideal has been subverted to suite the needs of globalised capitalism.
For the past generation, the whole of the left has had no answer to the developments that have not only harmed the interests of ordinary Australians, but have threatened our sustainability: off-shoring of jobs to countries like China and India, privatisation, deregulation, lifting of limitations on foreign investment, allowing foreigners to buy and speculate in Australian property, with disastrous consequences for ordinary home buyers. To have raised objections to these developments would incur accusations of nationalism and sometimes, even racism.
We need a serious answer to this and that answer must be a pragmatic compromise between socialist internationalism and the recognition of our own collective interests as a national community.
I hope that you all will all come to understand the sense of what I am saying, and quickly ditch the cornucopian baggage carried by the socialist movement up to now. If you do so, then I think there is a hope that you will be able to contribute positively to the future political development of this country, and even the rest of the world, if not, I believe that you will continue to be regarded as irrelevant by all but a small minority of our population.
If you cannot do so right away, please at least start to acknowledge these questions in your newspaper and try to refute what I have said.
Dear James,
You raise two issues: the threat to human life on the planet Earth from the exhaustion of fossil fuels, and the threat to conditions in Australia from increased openness to the world, including immigration. You draw two conclusions: global reshaping of human society to reduce the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels; and immigration controls (tighter than the present ones, if I have understood you right) for Australia.
I think your two lines of thought contradict each other. On an ultra-optimistic scenario such as some neo-liberals project, it would make some macabre sense to support tight immigration controls. They could serve as a way to avoid disruption and "jumping the gun" - to keep order in a queue from which everyone will eventually reach a Californian middle-class lifestyle.
If rural China, Bangladesh, and Nigeria will all in the due course of industrial development reach that Californian level, then their people, or at least enough of them, may be willing to wait.
But if humanity faces ecological catastrophe, then it makes no sense to argue that the people of the regions which will "go under" first will lie down to die quietly while the people of global "gated communities"
continue to live in plenty.
China and India, after all, have nuclear weapons. If in a few decades' time, they face mass starvation, while Australians continue to live comfortably behind a big wall inscribed "Yellow and brown-skinned people, keep out!", then why would any conceivable Chinese or Indian government not use those nuclear weapons to break down that wall?
Presumably your support for barriers to protect relatively advantaged countries applies generally, not just to Australia. It would apply, for example, in countries with land borders. It would apply in South Africa, for example, where hostility to Nigerian and Mozambican immigrants as a supposed threat to conditions is already widespread among black as well as white South Africans.
But if the prospect is not just for Nigeria and Mozambique lagging behind South Africa, but of human society collapsing - and for sure it would collapse in Mozambique and Nigeria a long while before it collapsed in relatively well-off South Africa - then how would any restrictions imposed by any South African government hold the desperate human tide?
Global catastrophe would not happen through peoples quietly dying off one by one, each dutifully taking its turn. If, in the run-up, the richer countries had been trying to seal themselves off as "gated communities", the first step towards extinction would be world war in which the peoples of the poorer countries sought, quite literally, space to live in.
The greater the risk of global ecological catastrophe, the greater the need for human solidarity and cooperation in dealing with that risk - and the more disastrous a policy of "looking after number one" will be.
I agree that there are grave ecological dangers. More urgent than the threat of fossil fuels being completely exhausted is the threat of disruption through global warming arising from their use; but both threats are real. It is not possible, even if it were desirable, for the whole world population to live in big air-conditioned houses, eat highly processed and packaged food, use clothes dryers and dishwashers, go round in four-wheel drives, take frequent trips by air, etc. - any more than in the 19th century socialists could think that in the future everyone could live in houses with teams of domestic servants.
It is even arguable (I'm not sure about this) that ecological sustainability requires converting more of the population to a vegetarian diet.
But we know that capitalist consumerism is not an unavoidable part of human nature. There have been societies where out-consuming your neighbour is considered foul, not a cause for pride. Many studies have shown that people get happier with increasing material wealth up to a definable point - but that beyond that point, already passed by the Californian middle class, they do not.
In a society of solidarity, people could live in "abundance", on a rule of "to each according to their needs", with comfort and some luxuries - while accepting that some sorts of consumption must be restrained for ecological reasons. But only in a society of solidarity! In a capitalist society, both capital's drive for profit and the consumerist drives instilled in the mass of the population by the workings of commodity fetishism make impossible the development of any such collective responsibility for the sustainability of our society.
You agree in general, I think. You write that some form of socialism is the only sustainable future. But if the ecological problems are global, then, more than ever, this socialism must be global - based on a recognition of a common humanity, and a common human interest in sustaining the Earth's environment - not a socialism of "gated communities".
And, in any case, how can we possibly hope that working classes preoccupied with keeping up the barriers around their relatively favoured patches of the Earth's surface, or wondering how they can possibly jump those barriers to escape their earlier-doomed patches, will ever achieve any form of socialism? If the working classes of the world are turned towards that way of thinking, then there will be no socialism.
I think I have a less catastrophist view of future energy supplies than you do, if only because I have no objection to the development of nuclear power with safeguards of democratic and working-class control. Its risks are far less than those of continued escalating use of fossil fuels, or of leaving a large part of humanity without electricity.
Nuclear fission draws on finite resources, but with a much longer span of availability than fossil fuels. Nuclear fusion - if it can be developed workably, and a prototype nuclear fusion power station is already under construction - can draw on practically infinite resources.
Of course I am also in favour of the development of renewable energy sources - hydroelectric, wind power, tidal power, solar power, etc. At present none of these sources has the portability and the capacity to produce energy round the clock which fossil fuels and nuclear power do.
But I agree that there are real ecological threats. Only, I conclude that to tackle them we need a global working-class solidarity, and moves to raise higher barriers between countries run directly counter to that.
But, you say, open borders are unworkable, even if they might be desirable. Open the borders of Australia and tens or hundreds of millions of paupers would flood here the next day, creating social disaster.
In the first place, such immigration as has been allowed to come to Australia has clearly benefited the people of this country. An argument could be made against that immigration, that it consists of robbing many poorer countries of some of their most educated and energetic people, but for Australia the immigration has plainly been beneficial.
Working as a high school teacher, I can see this every day: the higher proportion of immigrant kids in a school, the better the education, the lower the level of social despondency.
Even where immigration is less selective than in Australia - in Britain, for example - the benefits, both in bringing new productive person-power and in cultural enrichment, are clear.
If there is a level at which immigration becomes unworkably disruptive, we are certainly nowhere near it now.
Would "open borders" bring us there? Well, the USA had open borders up until 1921. A transatlantic boat trip, or a journey across the Rio Grande, was more expensive and difficult than analogous journeys today, but not prohibitive even for very poor people in Europe and Central and South America. Millions of people migrated to the USA, many of them fleeing starvation or extreme poverty in countries like Ireland and Italy. The result was the richest and most dynamic country in the world.
Argentina and Brazil, which also received mass transatlantic migration, also developed - as capitalist economies, to be sure, with all the cruelties and inequalities that implies, but they developed.
They did not collapse.
Today there are "open borders" within the European Union, a population of 460 million. There are still some restrictions on the movement of people from the poorest EU countries in Eastern Europe, but some richer countries, the UK for example, do not apply those restrictions, and in those that do apply them, like Germany, the restrictions are easily evaded.
National income per head in Luxemburg is six times what it is in Latvia, or five and a half times what it is in Poland. Will opening the borders of Luxemburg to all those Latvians and Poles lead to catastrophe? On all the evidence, no. In the UK, we have a lot more Poles in London since Poland joined the EU, but no catastrophe at all.
The USA does not have open borders, but geography makes it practically impossible for it to police its southern border. The US government estimates that the USA has at least seven million illegal immigrants living it. That they are illegal creates a heap of problems. As workers, they have no usable legal rights. But on the evidence, the fact of having seven million more people, doing jobs otherwise hard to fill, benefits their fellow-citizens rather than harming them. If the border were made legally open, rather than just practically hard to police, things would be better.
Israel has had an "open border" for Jews since 1948, and as a consequence its society - a mere 650,000 Jews in 1948 - has received large and unpredictable inflows of Jews from the Arab world in the 1950s and after 1967, and from Russia and Eastern Europe after 1989. On a tiny patch of land with few energy resources and scanty water supplies, its population has been increased to 6.5 million. Israel has had to build desalination plants to extract fresh water from the sea (a technology used more extensively by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states), but it continues to develop.
It would develop much better, to be sure, if it would cease its oppression of the Palestinians, withdraw from the Occupied Territories, and recognise the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own. But its policy of unlimited immigration has not wrecked it.
Germany has "open borders" for anyone who can claim German origins.
In 1945 west Germany had to deal with some 13 million Germans forcibly expelled from Eastern Europe. After 1990 it received a new flood of immigrants from the East. Again, no catastrophe.
According to Nigel Harris, author of a recent book arguing against immigration controls, "Thinking the Unthinkable": "There were up to two hundred econometric studies done in the United States in different localities at different times in order to try to detect whether there was a decline in wages or an increase in unemployment of native workers as a result of a significant inflow of immigrants and in general they could find no trace whatsoever. And that is because the immigrants are moving into the jobs that the native workers won't do..."
In Britain, according to Kenan Malik, "a Home Office study published last year concluded that 'the perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, or that immigrants depress wages of existing workers, do not find confirmation in the analysis of the data'."
Teresa Hayter, in her pamphlet "The Case Against Immigration Controls", pursues the argument:
"There are many who say that the abolition of immigration controls is a desirable goal, one they themselves would like to see achieved, but that it is politically impossible in a world in which there are severe international inequalities. But the argument that, without controls, there would be 'floods' of migrants who would overwhelm the rich countries some of them go to is little more than scaremongering.
"The fact that there are huge international inequalities in material wealth does not mean that, as neo-classical economists might predict, there would be mass movements of people throughout the world until material conditions and wages equalised. It is true that if there were no controls there would probably be more migration, since the dangers and cost of migrating would be less; how much more is impossible to estimate...
"[But] most people require powerful reasons to migrate; in normal circumstances they are reluctant to leave their countries, families and cultures. When free movement was allowed in the European Union, some feared there would be mass migration from the poorer to the richer areas; the migration did not happen, to the chagrin of the proponents of flexible labour markets. The great desire of many who do migrate is to return to their own countries, when they have saved enough money, or if conditions there improve. Immigration controls mean that they are less likely to do so, because they cannot contemplate the struggle of crossing borders again if they find they need to".
History backs up Harris's and Hayter's arguments. And the urgency of global solidarity also means that it is urgent to fight against immigration restrictions.
Best wishes,
Martin
Submitted by Anonymous on 11 December, 2005 - 16:03.
Martin's argument seems to be that the third world will invade the first world unless there are open borders. He also implies that high rates of immigration in the US and in Germany are overall beneficial and manageable. His opinion is also that Australia's schooling system benefits from a stream of immigrants to that country, which he implies would be depressing without that stream.
He gives no evidence for this opinion. It is merely his opinion apparently that no stable polity can be a happy place and that all communities must be in constant turmoil to be cheerful.
He relies on worker solidarity to engineer a future low consumption economy. He does not mention how workers have been consistently seduced to consume and endebt themselves in the process, thus contributing to the upkeep of their opressors and the upkeep of our tragic gobbling up of fossil fuels and cooking of the planet.
My conclusion is that the benefits from the current situation outweigh the negatives for Martin, and that he has decided that what is true for him must be true for others.
James discloses a quite different point of view, which he came round to after living for a while a Martin perspective.
My view is that human population has only been able to outgrow its dependency on trees and dung for fuel since coal and oil. This overgrowth and outgrowth that we call the Industrial Revolution started in England around 1750 and was the first time that human populations began to grow unsustainably on a very large scale. So far those countries which were able to gain power over fossil fuel resources have been able to feed their vast populations, but most indicators of quality of life and standard of living, industrial rights etc, and rate of endebtedness, have been falling.
The poor have been the losers in the West as in the third world. I do not see any prospect of the third world rising to meet the first world. All I see is an international clique of rich people organising the poor to serve them. In Australia this movement is very pronounced.
I think that the socialist movement, to restore credibility, must support the rights of the poor in Australia, by refusing to support immigration until such time as industrial law protects all workers equally - imported and locally born.
This is not the current outlook.
Martin seems to be suggesting that we should let things get worse and worse and then that the workers will rise up. In the mean-time the capitalists are reconquering the land, purchasing water and power. The workers have less and less access to land, which is the only thing that can ever make them independent of capital.
I don't see business as usual, i.e. economic growth, an employer/employee society with no protection for workers, and high immigration as sustainable or fair. I don't think the revolution will bring about justice either. I think it is too late.
I would like to see the natural world protected as much as possible and permaculture to be taught along with self-sufficiency. The capitalist/labour paradigm seems to be nearly dead in the water. We have the corporate/slave paradigm waiting in the wings.
Let the peasants have their land back.
Sam
Submitted by Arthur Bough on 11 December, 2005 - 17:46.
I thought this was an excellent discussion to which I would like to make just a few points. The first point is in relation to earlier emigrations say to the US. I remember asking Sir keith Joseph when he made a visit to my old University how he reconciled his belief in the free market, including the free movement of labour with his support for Immigration Controls. He had no good response to make. However, in response to this point when I have debated with US Libertarians they do have a response which is we have no objection to open borders as a means of free movement of labour, if it is combined with the abolition of welfare payments so that the influx of labour reduces wages to absorb the increased supply of labour, and so that this influx does not just consume more benefits leading to increased taxes etc.
The US, Brazil etc. at the time of the large emigrations not only had a lot of land that could be settled, but also had no welfare payments.
The argument is not really comparable with the situation today where welfare payments, minimum wage agreements etc. are in place.
Consequently, where immigrant workers do come in to do jobs that indigenous workers will not do there is a base put underneath the level to which the wages can fall. To a certain extent this reduces the attraction of bringing in foreign labour for anything other than the most unpopular jobs, or leads to the kind of abuses of illegal immmigration and slavery whereby those employed never appear on the official statistics, and can therefore be employed at whatever wages the gangmasters see fit. The other area where immigration arises, for example with Poles coming to Britain, is where the worker has a specific skill, for example as plumbers, which either is in short supply and normal wages would be significantly higher than the minimum wage, or where the worker can become self employed in which case minimum wage regulations do not apply.
I can envisage conditions in which a socialist society might wish to have immigration controls, just as it would want to have a monopoly of foreign trade. But the aim of such a society would be to work with workers in other countries to raise their standard of living and to try to plan co-operatively the movement of labour along with the planning of other aspects of economic activity. But that is no reason for promoting immigration controls under capitalism. For one thing, it sends out the message that economic problems (or environemntal problems) are caused by immigration rather than capitalism.
As far as global environmental problems are concerned as martin argues the best means of solving this problem (if we are not already too late) is by international workers co-operation and solidarity to develop means by which the living standards of everyone on the planet can be raised to a decent standard by means which do not threaten its very existence. I'm not sure I agree with Martin about nuclear power because every economic study shows that its cost is greater than its benefit, but I do believe that a socialist society would be far less wasteful than capitalism and so energy and resource use would be lower in relation to the quantity of use values produced. Moreover, the use of technology to produce bio mass or other renewable energy close to its point of use (30% of electricity is lost in transmission), the use of individual power generators such as windmills on every home, heat exchangers etc. could vastly reduce energy production requirements, along with the use f fuel cells, clean coal technology etc. mean that energy requirements should be capable of being met. The individual electric cars which run on a track being introduced at Heathrow Airport also seem to me an excellent means of combining the requiremnt for meeting the individual need for flexibility with the public need to reduce resource usage, energy production, and congestion.
I think we have the basis for resolving all the problems of humanity in the 21st century, but capitalism will only employ them if it is profitable to do so. Only a socialist society based on co-operation can begin to introduce the changes necessary, and the basis of that has to be international working class action, not allowing the ruling class to divide us by artifical boundaries.
Arthur Bough
Submitted by Arthur Bough on 14 December, 2005 - 10:01.
In reference to Martin's points about vegetarian diets, and the possibility of needing to convert people to them for sustainability I read the following today in the Daily Reckoning e-letter, by Dan Denning.
"- "Ninety-five percent of the nitrogenous fertilizers used in America are made out of natural gas," observes
Jim Kunstler in his book, The Long Emergency, "and so it has become indispensable to US agriculture."
- What happens to global agricultural production,
therefore, when natural gas soars to an all-time high, like it did yet again last week? Let's query the experts...
- "A world of 6.4 billion people, on the way to 9
billion or more, needs more protein than the planet's croplands can generate from biologically provided nitrogen. Our species has become as physically dependent on industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer as it is on soil, sunshine, and water," writes Stan Cox, a scientist
at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
- "Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor at the
University of Manitoba...has demonstrated the global food system's startling degree of dependence in nitrogen
fertilization. Using simple math[s] - the kind you can do in your head if there's no calculator handy — Smil showed that 40 percent of the protein in human bodies, planet-wide, would not exist without the application of
synthetic nitrogen to crops during most of the 20th century."
- "That means that without the use of industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer," he concludes, "about 2.5 billion people out of today's world population of 6.2 billion simply could never have existed."
- Simply stated, therefore, no cheap natural gas, no cheap fertiliser, less food. Or to put it another way,
- For some background, let's talk about protein. "Proteins are made up of smaller units called amino acids," the Vegetarian Society explains. "There are about 20 different amino acids, eight of which must be present in the diet. These are the essential amino acids. Unlike animal proteins, plant proteins may not
contain all the essential amino acids in the necessary proportions."
- "Protein quality is usually defined according to the amino acid pattern of egg protein, which is regarded as the ideal," the vegetarians continue. "As such, it is not surprising that animal proteins, such as meat, milk and cheese tend to be of a higher protein quality than plant proteins. This is why plant proteins are sometimes referred to as low quality proteins. Many plant proteins are low in one of the essential amino acids. For instance, grains tend to be short of lysine whilst pulses are short of methionine."
- It's clear human beings need protein. We can get it from plants or we can get in from animals. Most of us get it from both. And China, lately, has been getting an awful lot of protein from soybeans, many of which are grown in North and South America. You might say, as Jim Kunstler implies, that China's rise would not have been possible without the oil boom of the 20th century. No natural gas, no soybeans. No soybeans, no extra protein boost for factory workers working longer hours.
- China's soybean imports for the first 9 months of 2004/2005 (October-June) have jumped more than 8%. Obviously, this is good news for soybean producers and exporters, the biggest of whom are in the United States and Latin America. Chinese demand, by itself, provides very solid support for a soybean bull market, even before one considers the supply-limiting impact of rising natural gas prices.
- Following a similar line of thinking, Steve Belmont, Senior Market Strategist for the Rutsen Meier Belmont
Group in Chicago, also suggests a bullish position in the soy market, specifically soy meal. "Asian affluence, bullish seasonal patterns and low prices mean it's time to take a look at the long side of soybean meal," Belmont suggests.
- "Livestock and poultry operations the world over depend heavily on soybean meal as a key source of feed, especially since the threat of bovine spongiform encephalopathy [Mad Cow Disease] has sharply curtailed the feeding of rendered parts [ground up offal]. Not surprisingly, Chinese consumption of soybean meal has been rising rapidly."
- Soybean production is dependent upon copious amounts of nitrogen fertiliser. Nitrogen fertiliser is made from natural gas - which as we write this, is trading at roughly 3 times the price fifteen months ago.
- "Cheap nitrogen fertilizer fuels the big yields that
have made soybeans and by extension, soybean meal, cheap. Remove the nitrogen fertilizer or make it prohibitively expensive for farmers and soy meal supply could be negatively-affected."
- "Soy meal's portion of protein feed demand has increased markedly since the early 1990s, rising from less than half of global demand in the 1993/1994 growing season to well over two-thirds today. We expect solid demand from the growing nations of Asia and the potential for lower soybean yields due to expensive nitrogen fertilizer to provide soybean meal with long-term support."
- "But that's not the only reason to like soy meal...Similar to soybeans and corn, soybean meal has a seasonal tendency to make important lows in the winter and rally during spring and early summer. Soybean meal is unloved and oversold. Therefore, we believe it may be a good time to pick up some call options."
- The world needs protein as much as it needs oil...and with oil over $60 per barrel, protein is about to become much more expensive."
Further details of Daily Reckoning articles at
Arthur Bough
Submitted by seanysean on 14 December, 2005 - 20:06.
My diet is vegetarian + fish. I choose this diet because I believe its unfeasable for the world's population to consume large quantities of beaf, pork, lamb, etc. and people are going hungry in the third world so the west can gorge itself on meat. I also don't trust the meat industry to put food safety before profit. Lastly, I couldn't bring myself to slaughter an animal so I'm not comfortable with the idea of eating one.
I'm not sure what is the point of the above post. Is it saying people should be vegetarians? Or is it saying being vegetarian will get more expensive? Furthermore, soya is not the be all and end all of vegetarianism. Guess what! There were vegetarians long before people started eating soya protein.
Submitted by Arthur Bough on 15 December, 2005 - 14:44.
What it is saying in short is that all food is going to get much, much more expensive as a result of diminishing supplies of oil and natural gas, and consequently of nitrogenous fertiliser. As the article argues a considerable amount of agriculture is now dependent upon such fertiliser in order to produce the quantities required. Without that fertiliser, or with the cost of that fertiliser increasing dramatically the cost of agricultural products will rise considerably.
Firstly, plant sources of food will increase in price. Secondly, because animal production is dependent on the production of plant feedstocks the cost of animal protein will rise considerably. Finally, because China has increased its consumption considerably and relies on Soybean production as animal feedstock the cost for the type of animal protein most frequently consumed in China, poultry, will rise considerably. Given China's position as workshop of the world, increasing food costs for China will also have considerable knock on effects for the rest of the world economy.
Arthur Bough
Submitted by seanysean on 16 December, 2005 - 17:18.
...does this mean people should consider converting to vegetarian/low meat diets? Or has it got nothing to do with that?
I am asking because you say at the start of it you say "In reference to Martin's points about vegetarian diets, and the possibility of needing to convert people to them for sustainability..."
Submitted by Arthur Bough on 16 December, 2005 - 23:33.
Yes, it does mean that. Although as the article says meat protein tends to be of a different type to plant protein, the nutrition obtained from a certain quantity of plant food is greater than that obtained from animals which have had to be fed on plant food in the firt place. To make that clearer a loss of nutrition occurs as a result of feeding plnts to animals and then eating those animals compared to consumin the plants or their equivalents that were fed to the animals.
If everyone had a vegetarian diet, therefore, more nutrrition could be obtained for the same amount of cost, and resource inputs. However, what the article is also pointing out is that whether such a switch occurs or not the cost of food is likely to rise substantially, both in terms of meat, and of plant food for the simple reason that one of the primary input costs - nitrogenous fertiliser - is going to become much more scarce, and its cost is going to rise.
My personal view is that the world could produce a vast quanity of food in excess of what it produces now, if the world's resources were used rationally, even without massive use of fertiliser, or GM plants.
Vast swathes of potential agricultural land are not used in underdeveloped countries, because of the structure of world trade, and the impossibility of small farmers and peasants in these reas epanding production. That is not even taking into consideration the fact that a number of studies has shown that the biggest increases in agricultural output result from simple capital invetsment such as better drainage etc.
But it is not in capitalism's interest to do that. World Trade remains dominated by the interests of the most powerful capitalist nations, and agribusiness is now a powerful force within those countries. High prices go with relatively stable longer term business plans that these businesses need in order to plan investment. They also form the basis of high profits for these businesses. It is not in their interests to introduce competition into this process from potentially lower cost producers in underdeveloped countries, who can utilise extensive rather than intensive farming methods.
Ironically, it is probably not in the interests of consumers in the Wrest either. There is an economic theorem called the cobweb theorem.
It shows that for products such as agricultural products where supply can only respond to price with considerable lags i.e. if the price of potatoes is high now, it will encourage farmers to plant potatoes but those potatoes will only become supply next year, then instead of the price mechanism acting to bring about equilibrium it actually acts to create greater and greater disequilibrium. Prices rise farmers plant that product in great quantities at the expense of other products. Next year the result is a glut of this particular product and shortage of other products. Prices of that product collapse because of the glut, and rise for other products now in hsort supply. The collpase in the price and increase in price of other goods causes farmers to abandon growing the product and switch to others. The following year there is no supply and prices rocket, and so on creating greater and greater disequilibrium.
It is the reason most countries intervened in agriculture, and the reason for the CAP.
Arthur Bough
[1] The included article was originally published on 30 September 2005 on the web-site of the UK group Workers' Liberty
[2] More about the publication, Workers' Liberty: Although the organisation which produces that publication describes itself as a socialist organisation, and says it is against the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which is an expanding military alliance of capitalist governments, it has nonetheless supported NATO's current war against Libya. This amounts to Workers' Liberty supporting the furthering of the interests of capitalism in British and US private profit military industrial complexes. (See "Left-wing" groups and "social movements" support US war against Libya?! of 9 July.) This support for an illegal war against the sovereign nation of Libya, whilst surprising for an organisation that purportedly champions the rights of poor nations against capitalist domination, is only the latest in a line of confusing alliances with global capitalist causes for Workers' Liberty . These include failure to question the false flag terrorist attack of 9/11 in New York which continues to be used to justify the NATO occupation of Afghanistan and indirectly, by sleight-of-hand, the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Workers' Liberty has also fallen in with the mainstream line which dismisses the achievements of US President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, which include his prevention of global nuclear war on at least three occasions. Workers' Liberty also has consistently failed to seriously discuss important evidence of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy in 1963.
Their overt stance in support for the war against Libya formally distinguishes Workers' Liberty from most other 'socialist' organisations. Informally, however, the silence of other 'socialist' groups on the rights of Libyans, must have an equally devastating effect on the people of Libya. Such a stance utterly fails to support the right of sovereign nations to defend themselves against the war.
#fn_1" id="fn_1">3 [#text_1">back] Having given some more thought to this some years later, I don't necessarily agree that I would necessarily only do what intending immigrants would do if I were in their shoes. Whilst, obviously, I now, in many ways, prefer the more materially affluent (if wasteful and ecologically damaging) lifestyle of the country I live in to the lifestyle of most third world countries in which many intending immigrants live, I would also want to do what I could to help solve the world's ecological, social and economic problems. That would almost certainly be far better served if I were to remain in the third world country in which I lived and do my best to solve the political and ecological problmes of my country and bring about population stability than if I were to migrate to an industrialised nation.
In 2001, the UK had the second highest child poverty rates in the European Union. Ten years on they have grown into angry disaffected youths
.
The police brutality issue and the case of the police killing of Duggan is a legal issue and likely a police cultural problem associated with the UK riots last week.
But Duggan's killing belies broader and deeper social problems across English urban societies. The rioting thus far has been in England (London's underprivileged Tottenham, Hackney, Croydon, and working-class English cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Liverpool and Wolverhampton). It has not spread to Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or Northern Ireland yet - why?
Rioting though has also copycatted to the more rural privileged English towns of Cambridge, Gloucester, Bristol and around County Kent - why? What is the common denominator? All riots involved youths and Y-Gens committing break and enter and burglary of retail shops and communicating with social media mobile devices, notably Blackberry's.
It is convenient knee-jerk ignorant simplism by the English government and the media attributing blame to just 'criminals', poor-parented youth, opportunistic hooligans, and gangs.
Poor understanding of social problems by any government will not enable its social problems to be addressed. Inept media analysis also confuses the situation.
Prime Minister Cameron, with his elite background is distant and aloof to England's urban social problems. His ideological mindset as a Conservative is centred upon national economic prosperity, which presumes social good flows from economic growth and prosperity. He seems incapable of recognising the disconnect between the parallel economy of the 'haves' and the 'have nots'.
Cameron is narrow-minded in his reading of the situation. He has said in Parliament last week that what the nation had witnessed was criminality "pure and simple". He said his government would do "whatever it takes to restore law and order". How easy and simplistic it is for Cameron to blame criminals? He sees it as a matter of parental discipline and a lack of responsibility in society. Cameron rejects the suggested underlying causes of underclass and poverty in Britain. He says: "This is not about poverty, it's about culture...a culture that says everything about rights, but nothing about responsibility." Impressive words, but when the leader of country is in denial about the causes of widespread urban riots being more than criminal opportunists, the root causes are ignored and the problems risk getting worse.
Cameron clearly has inherited a depressed and debt-ridden economy from Labor and the GFC. He came to office with an economic mandate to restore sound economic management and this has necessitated severe austerity measures reducing government public service delivery. But by simplistically focusing on addressing the economic ills will not auto-address social ills. Economic and economic policy is a subset of sociology and social policy. Societies don't magically become healthy by delivering on economic policy. Did Blair's Labor window of opportunity for social reform deliver to British have-nots? If not, how could British 'have-nots' have appealed to opposition Conservatives for recognition through the Blair years? What political party was listening to the plight of British underclass who probably voted informally anyway?
David Cameron, like his counterparts in Greece and Italy, are "flat-footed, reactive, trapped in double-talk, these are second-rate political creatures unprepared to deal with those responsible for the crisis". Even Barack Obama has been spineless. Hence the blunt words of Jacques Delors, three times president of the European Commission: "We don't just need firefighters; we need architects too."
A British blogger responding to the riots in Britain agreed: "WTF is going on with this government? Are they deliberately trying to rub our noses in it, or do they just have a tin ear? What a frightening bunch of amateurs."
With injustice now the blighted face of democracy, cynicism and fatalism gain ground. "What's the best way to deal with this crisis?", runs a popular Japanese joke. The answer: "Let the system collapse." The panacea looks more plausible by the day.' [Professor John Keane, 12th August 2011].
Cameron needs to get out more and listen to the ordinary citizens of urban England. He is sending an arrogant classist message by taking foreign holidays in Tuscany, while England's poor and unemployed are suffering abject downtrodden hopelessness. The public's perception that the government has let the banks and financial gamblers get away with rampant insolvency and handballing the corporate debt to the State is not helping matters.
England's and Britain's demographic been allowed to radically alter as a consequence of open door immigration. Whilst the country side may be relatively similar, Britain's urban demographic has little similarity to that of the 1960s or even the 1980s. Immigrants are a dominant characteristic of British urban society. What was the population policy plan and intended outcome? Where was the social investment in making multiculturalism work? There has been none. Since Thatcher economics has been rather liberal and laissez faire. Problem is the same approach has been taken of changing urban society. Economic theory is inappropriate for social re-engineering. Much of urban England and Britain is characterised by inter-generational unemployment, truancy, child poverty, broken homes, domestic violence and street crime.
What causes thousands of people in multiple urban centres to riot, commit violence, arson and loot shops? Recognise no single one cause. Many are clearly opportunists. Not all are disaffected underclass. But as to the underlying causes, start where people see injustice. Examine the social problems in England urban centres over the past twenty years. Who sent the messages inciting the riots? Controlling street violence is essential in the short term, and I am sure we will see the water canon armoured vehicles in London reminiscent of their use in the Northern Ireland riots of the 1970s. But water canons can't prevent riots and can't address the causes.
In 2001, the UK had the second highest child poverty rates in the European Union. [Read More]
Well those children are now adolescents and many have nowhere to go and no hope for the future. And dangled in front of them and in the media constantly is the government's Olympic decadence.
Cameron's Olympics do not have a happy outlook. English urban society has a far bleaker outlook.
London 2012 Olympics logo - it may well become a legacy of English society divided
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
There has been another sizable drop in employment. Greedy employers continue to put out claims that there is a terrible shortage of labour in Australia, because they know that the larger the pool of unemployed the less the market rate for labour will be. (Also, by pushing up immigration on the false plea that we are short of labour, they hope for more customers, more extreme house prices, and other changes by which the big fish benefit over the small.)
Big business has long abused its influence with the media, and has also taken advantage of various well-funded lobbies,fronts, and think-tanks (Committee for Melbourne, Urban Task force, Australian industries group, and other names for disguised lobbies) as well as the pro-business stance of the Murdoch Press and other media, to spread this disinformation.
Yet ordinary Australians know this is untrue, particularly if they have a teenager in the family trying to get his or her first job, or an older person who is been retrenched. (Employment agencies say it's hard even to get a job interview for anyone over 35, and if approaching retirement almost impossible, because employers are so spoilt for choice.)
Australian Employment drops by record number in July to 10,802,000 (DOWN 418,000) as Australian workforce shrinks, and unemployment rate is up 0.6% TO 7.6%
* In July 2011 Australia’s total unemployment as measured by Roy Morgan was 885,000 (7.6%), up 40,000 (0.6%) from June 2011, and up 148,000 (up 1.3%) since July 2010.
* The Roy Morgan July 2011 ‘underemployed’* estimate was virtually unchanged at 859,000 (7.3%), down 3,000 (but up 0.2% as the workforce shrunk) from June 2011 and down 81,000 (0.8%) since July 2010.
* In total in July 2011 an estimated 1,743,000 (14.9%) of Australians were unemployed or ‘underemployed,’ up 36,000 (up 0.8%) on June 2011 and up 66,000 (0.5%) since July 2010.
* As stated, there was a large drop in the Australian workforce in July, down 378,000 to 11,687,000 which is virtually unchanged from a year ago (up 42,000) and slightly higher than in March 2011 (up 23,000).
* Overall full-time employment in Australia for July is 7,421,000 (down 219,000 since June 2011 but up 30,000 since July 2010) and part-time employment is 3,381,000 (down 199,000 since June 2011 and down 136,000 since July 2010).
Gary Morgan says:
“The July 2011Roy Morgan employment estimates was down 418,000 in a month to 10,802,000 with the falls consistent across both full-time employed — 7,421,000 (down 219,000) and part-time employed — 3,381,000 (199,000).
“This month’s fall in employment followed four straight months of rises and takes Australian employment back to the levels of February (10,770,000) and March (10,800,000) as school-leavers began to join the workforce after Summer holidays at the beginning of the new financial year.
“This is the biggest monthly fall in Australian employment ever recorded by the Roy Morgan employment measure and shows that the RBA’s decision to ignore commentators calling for an interest rate rise this week was the correct one.
Unemployment now stands at 7.6% (885,000, up 40,000) while underemployment is virtually unchanged at 7.3% (859,000, down 3,000).
This is an overall level of unemployment and underemployment of 14.9% (1,743,000, up 36,000).
“In addition employment in July is now down 106,000 on a year ago in July 2010. This is the first time employment has fallen year-over-year since October 2009 (10,385,000) which fell compared to October 2008 (10,400,000) — when the Global Financial Crisis began and dropped employment.”
For Full Tables & Release: http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2011/4692
The Centre for Population and Urban Research (CPUR) has recently released a major new report on immigration and on Australia's alleged need for labour. It shows that there is no real problem with supplying labour for the Resources Boom -- even if you accept the government's assumption that we need to export our resources as fast as possible.
(For the view that we don't and shouldn't see
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/29145 --but the CPUR report shows that even if we did, there isn't a problem.)
Authored by B. Birrell, E. Healy, K. Betts and T. F. Smith, it's called
"Immigration and the Resources Boom Mark 2."
It says that the government's immigration decisions in the 2011-12 budget show that the PM has walked away from her implied promise to stop Australia "hurtling down a track to a 36 million or a 40 million population," (interview with Leigh Sales, Lateline 28/6/2010).
Among its explosive findings:
There is no real labour shortage. Half of current Net Overseas Migration (NOM) would still produce 1 to 1.7 million extra workers by 2025.
A Skills Australia/Access Economics study that the government relies on, which appeared to show that we would need high migration to provide enough workers, was circular. It assumed a much higher population, such as only high immigration would produce, and then deduced that we need high immigration to provide that population's workforce!
The government has given in to the vested interest of big business.
As Dr Katharine Betts, Sociologist, puts it,
"The Gillard Government has yielded to the demands of the business lobby for a big Australia of 36 million plus by 2051.
This decision was also influenced by the level of aggregate growth in GDP that the government wants to achieve. The government is not managing the economy to increase the people's welfare; rather it is increasing the number of people in order to boost an arbitrary measure of aggregate economic growth.
Projected increases in per capita GDP are miniscule. They will in no way compensate citizens for increased congestion, inflated costs of housing and loss of amenity.
The report also shows that arguments about the the need to import immigrant skills to fuel the resources boom are weak to the point of falsehood. It demonstrates that it would be possible to halve annual net overseas migration from 180,000 to 90,000 with no adverse effects on export-oriented industries."
Here is the Executive Summary:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Contending pressures
Two contending pressures have shaped the Australian Government’s population policy. One reflects employers’ desire to sustain a rapidly growing workforce and a high rate of population growth so as to maximise aggregate economic growth. They want to maintain net overseas migration (NOM) at 180,000 per year or above. The other is urban sustainability. This reflects voters’ concern about the implications for their quality of life if NOM should continue at 180,000 or above. They fear ever-growing congestion, loss of urban amenity and dwindling housing affordability
.
The Australian Government’s decisions on the immigration program were detailed at the time of the 2011–12 Budget announcements. These show that the employers’ concerns have prevailed. As a result, NOM is likely to track at 180,000 or higher into the medium term and the population will grow to 36 million or more by 2051. If this happens, the ‘Big Australia’ that politicians promised to avert at the 2010 election will be unavoidable.Why do the government and employer groups want continued high migration?
The case for higher migration partly rests on estimates of the number of skilled workers that employers require. The most widely quoted source on the scale of this need has been prepared by the government’s workforce advisory body, Skills Australia. It concludes that, Australia will need an extra 2.4 million skilled workers by 2015 and an extra 5.2 million by 2025. Such enormous numbers cannot be achieved without very high net migration.
However, these forecasts were determined by the assumptions that the econometric modellers (Access Economics) were required to work with. These included that NOM would grow from 220,000 in 2010 to 250,000 by 2025 and that Australia’s aggregate GDP would grow at nearly four per cent per annum over the period to 2025.
These extreme assumptions meant that there would have to be rapid workforce growth. Moreover, Access Economics assumed that productivity growth would be very high, and that this would result in a more skills-intensive economy. This meant that new entrants to the workforce were assumed to be more skilled than in the past. In other words, the Skills Australia projections are based on a circular argument, grounded on the assumptions fed into the model used by Access Economics.
Sustaining aggregate economic growth
The Australian Government’s immigration policy is also influenced by the level of aggregate economic growth that the government wishes to achieve. Currently, this is 3.25 per cent per year. This target requires NOM to be around 180,000. Though this is little known, the government is explicitly setting its immigration program so as to achieve pre-set targets for aggregate economic growth.
This policy is strongly supported by business interests. What matters for their bottom line is the number of workers and consumers in Australia. The higher these numbers, the more rapidly their businesses will grow. This is why there has been a scare campaign by lobbyists that Australia’s workforce growth will dry up in the absence of high migration.
For instance, Bernard Salt claims that 2011 is a watershed year. After 2011 the number of people entering the working ages will fall below the numbers exiting them. This claim is wrong. Even with zero NOM, we would have to wait until 2042 before the numbers entering the ages 15 to 24 fall below the numbers exiting the 55 to 64 age group.
We provide two workforce projections, both based on a NOM of 90,000 per annum. These indicate that, contrary to this scare campaign, there is likely to be substantial growth in the Australian workforce in the medium term even with NOM at half its present levels.
The first assumes that current workforce participation rates by age and sex will remain unchanged and the second that these will increase to match those achieved in Sweden by 2005. In the first scenario, Australia’s workforce grows quite strongly by 950,000 between 2010 and 2025 and in the second by 1,700,000 over the same period.
Per capita productivity will not be lower if aggregate economic growth slows.
Our workforce projections confirm that, with NOM at 90,000 per annum, workforce growth will be well below what it would be with 180,000 NOM. However, it is not the case, as is often argued, that Australia needs high NOM to offset an inevitable decline in per capita economic growth as the baby boomers retire. When this cohort, now aged 55 to 64, leaves the labour market, Australia’s labour-force participation rate will fall and thus per capita economic growth will decline as well. However, recent research by McDonald and Temple and by the Treasury shows that this decline is only marginally affected by the size of NOM. Australia’s per capita economic growth will be determined not by the level of immigration but by the extent to which residents participate in the workforce and by how productively they are employed.
Could NOM of 90,000 deliver the skills needed by the resources industries?
The key finding is that NOM at this lower level could satisfy the skill needs of the resources industries. Most of Australia’s current migration intake has little to do with the skills needed by these industries. ABS final figures for NOM show that when NOM peaked at 315,690 in 2008, 203,820 or 65 per cent derived from temporary-visa holders —students, temporary workers (457-visa holders), working holiday makers and visitors. Apart from the 457-visa holders, most of these migrants work as casuals in metropolitan semi-skilled jobs. And, most 457s are employed in service industries by metropolitan-based employers. Concessions granted by successive Australian governments have opened up pathways to permanent entry visas for all these temporaries. This encourages them to stay on in Australia and thus generate a continuing surplus of arrivals over departures in the NOM counts of temporary visa holders.
The great majority of permanent-entry visas in recent years have also been issued to persons working in metropolitan areas.
There have been major changes to the rules governing both temporary and permanent entry access to visas. We examine whether these new rules have produced an outcome better targeted to the needs of the resource industries. The conclusion is that further reforms need to be adopted.Permanent migration
The analysis is based on a review of each of the three categories of visas for economic migrants: the points-tested, state-sponsorship, and employer-sponsored visa subclasses.
The share of the skilled visa program allocated to the points-tested visas has been reduced and priority is to be given to applicants with good English and skilled work experience. These visas have been heavily used by former overseas students. A result of the changes is that the number of visas issued to former overseas students will fall sharply, thus largely removing the incentive to study in Australia as a pathway to gaining permanent residence. However unpublished statistics show that tens of thousands of former overseas students will benefit from the transitional arrangements in place. Applications for permanent residence from these students will crowd out better qualified applicants for several years.
The state-sponsored visa subclasses have also been reformed in ways that will improve the English language proficiency and skill level of the migrants sponsored, but not the targeting of skills needed in the resource industries. Moreover, the legacy of past policies remains, notably the propensity of some states to use this visa category to pursue population building objectives. Reflecting this legacy, South Australia and Victoria retain an undeservedly high share of the visas to be allocated. For 2010–11, South Australia has been allocated 4,900 visas of the 23,000 visas available and Victoria 4,500, almost as many as Western Australia (6,000) and far more than Queensland (2,990).
The Labor Government is giving the employer-sponsored visa subclasses priority and these visas have seen the most growth in numbers. They also offer the greatest potential for cut backs. This category gives no priority to jobs crucial to the resource industries, and its policies for assessing credentials and testing English-language abilities are weak. They are far less stringent than those applying to the points-tested and state-sponsored visa subclasses.
A smaller, better-targeted permanent migration program could provide for much of the skill needs of the resource industries. There is also ample scope to tighten the rules governing the length of stay of temporary visa holders and to reduce their current large contribution to NOM. If these reforms were implemented, it would not be difficult to achieve a NOM of 90,000 per annum.
Temporary-entry migration and the construction needs of the resource industries
There will be a high demand for temporary workers in the construction (or start-up) phase of the mineral boom Mark 2. This demand should be satisfied, at least in part, by an increase in the number of workers recruited on temporary-entry 457 visas. This is appropriate as long as local workers are not excluded and as long as the extra temporary workers really are temporary.
A new scheme is to be introduced, the Enterprise Migration Agreements, to allow resource projects of at least $2 billion to recruit 457-visa holders on concessional terms, including the right to recruit semi-skilled construction industry workers. The government intends to allow all of these extra 457-visa holders to be eligible for permanent residence if they can find an employer to sponsor them. This could have serious social repercussions if Australia has to absorb large numbers of semi-skilled construction workers in the post-mineral boom Mark 2 era.
The government asserts that these temporarily recruited workers will ‘only be a temporary solution’. But recent history belies this assertion. In 2005, the government liberalised access to the permanent-entry employer-sponsorship visa subclasses for 457-visa holders. Currently, nearly half of them eventually gain permanent residence visas, and the great majority of those sponsored by employers are former 457-visa holders. The result is that the 457-visa program is becoming a pathway to permanent residence, rather than a temporary solution to Australia’s skill shortages.
The downside of population-induced economic growth
Most migrants locate in the Eastern metropolises, where they are the main contributor to the current city-building and people-servicing boom. The result of this influx is competition for scarce skills, particularly in the construction industries, and for public funds as these cities clamour for subsidies for their infrastructure and public services.
Victoria is a clear example. Thirty-six per cent of all job growth in Australia between March 2009 and March 2011 occurred in Victoria, yet Victoria’s share of Australia’s population is only 25 per cent. Most of this job growth was in Melbourne, where it was largely driven by growth in the construction and people-servicing industries. Links between this growth and the nation’s resources industries were minimal.
Australia risks wasting the fiscal dividend from the resources boom in this city-building process. With more modest population growth, this dividend could be far better spent on investment in education and the development of knowledge-intensive industries.
Melbourne people can hear MP Hon. Kelvin Thomson speak at the A.G.M. of Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian branch) on July 16th at 2.00p.m. The topic will be, "The population issue in Australia - post Population Strategy." The title refers to Minister Burke's recent "Population Strategy." In this article we talk about why this meeting is so important for Victorians and Australians and discuss events leading up to it, from Barry Jones's Australia's Population Carrying Capacity Inquiry (1994), through the Bracks Population Summit (2002) and Tony Burke's "Population Strategy" (2011). We at http://candobetter.net hope that subsequent events in Victoria will maintain and support SPA Vic's promotion of a better population policy for Australia. (Inside: Link to Steve Vizard's surprisingly good program contrasting Jones Report with Burke Report.)
Australia's population is now rising by a million every three years. It used to grow by only 200,000 a year. The increase has not been driven by natural increase, refugees or family reunions. It has been driven by an increase in skilled migration from 24,000 in 1996 to over 100,000 now. (Kelvin Thomson - Member for Wills electorate, Victoria, Australia)
The source of this article is a Speech by Kelvin Thomson, delivered to the House of Representatives on 24 May, 2011, in response to the Government's Budget. You may find the original source here: House of Representatives Bills, Appropriation Bill 2011-2012, Second Reading, Speech, Tuesday, 24 May 2011, House of Representatives Chamber Speech, Mr KELVIN THOMSON (Wills) (19:48): Note that we have included several paragraphs which time constraints engineered by the [Liberal] opposition caused to be cut off the end of the speech.
I do not [...][2] agree with raising the skilled migration target for the 2011-12 financial year to 125,850-a record level.
I have seven objections to increasing skilled migration.
The first is that it is the principal driver of Australia's rapid population growth. Only recently our population used to grow by 200,000 a year; now it is rising by a million every three years. The increase has not been driven by natural increase, refugees or family reunions. It has been driven by an increase in skilled migration from 24,000 in 1996 to over 100,000 now. This is the main reason net overseas migration is now 180,000 per annum and the main reason Treasury is using net overseas migration of 180,000 per annum to project that Australia's population will rise to 36 million by 2050. That is, it is giving us big Australia.
I have set out in numerous speeches in the parliament and at public meetings my objections to big Australia: cost of living pressures and pressures on food,water,land and energy supplies, carbon emissions, housing affordability, traffic congestion, species extinction, loss of open space et cetera.
My second objection to increasing labour force migration is that there are people in Australia who want work and we should be getting them jobs. There are 500,000 people on Newstart allowance and 800,000 on disability support pension. These people should be our first priority. In the last decade the numberofpeople receiving disability support pension grew around six per cent per annum in real terms.
As Budget Paper No.1 outlines: Past growth … reflects increases in the number of beneficiaries arising from population growth and changing composition of the population … Population growth will continue to contribute to sustained real growth in the cost of this program.
As I mentioned earlier, I support the steps that seek to move people from these benefits to employment, but there needs to be jobs for them to go to. Cutting back workforce migration numbers will ensure there are jobs for them to go to.
Included among the people who are out of work and are deserving of our attention are quite a few skilled migrants already in Australia who are either not working at all or not employed in areas for which they are qualified. As reported by Michael Quin in the Melbourne Times Weekly, a local newspaper which circulates in my electorate, four out of five skilled migrants in Melbourne are unemployed or underemployed, according to a recent survey. The article outlined the case of Preston skilled migrant Natalia Garcia, who has applied for 17 engineering jobs in the past four months without getting an interview or feedback, despite speaking advanced English and holding an engineering degree and seven years industry experience in Colombia.
Ms Garcia said: We were told Australia was desperate for engineers and that we would find a job in a maximum of two months, Ms Garcia is working as an office cleaner, and said most skilled migrants she knew were doing the same.
It is highly revealing that a qualified engineer with seven years industry experience should be working in Australia as a cleaner. I suspect that quite a few of the business leaders who bang the drum incessantly about skilled migration know about this kind of outcome perfectly well. They are not so much interested in the skills of migrants as their potential to provide cheap labour in occupations such as cleaners and taxi drivers and in providing personal services like house cleaning and chauffeuring at cut price rates. So my third objection to the skilled migration increase is the treatment of, and outcomes for, many skilled migrants.
My fourth objection is that the skills shortage is overstated and is abused in ways which undermine the wages and conditions of Australian workers. National Secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, Dave Oliver, believes the skills shortage issue is overstated and that successive federal governments have failed to deliver an adequate labour market testing system, which means employers can exploit the system. The AMWU has launched a skills register to give skilled workers and young people seeking apprenticeships the opportunity to register for work before employers are allowed tobring inworkers on 457 visas.
As Dave Oliver has said: "We do not deny that skills shortages exist in some areas, but they are being exaggerated by employers seeking to use 457 visas to undermine local wages and conditions and avoid the cost of investing in apprenticeships."
With apprenticeship completion rates below 50%, the long term answer to our skills problems cannot be importing workers from other countries on a temporarybasis. Employers can't complain about skills shortages while they are dropping their investment in training.
I encourage people who have skills which are not being made use of to make contact with the AMWU to get their details put on the skills register.
The fifth objection I have to increasing skilled migration is that we have become addicted to it.
We need to do more to educate and train our own young people. Going back two or three decades, governments and employers dropped the ball on training.Governments closed technical schools and cut back on technical education. Private employers lost interest in taking on apprentices. We started outsourcing our requirement for training. This has been an addictive, self-fulfilling circle and we need to break the habit. Those countries which do not run a big migration program put more effort into educating and training their young people, and they have better participation rates as a consequence.
The sixth objection I have to increasing skilled migration goes to the claim that this is necessary to avoid capacity constraints and bottlenecks in the resources industry.
The truth is that running the resources boom as fast as possible has a number of economic consequences, not all of which are positive. Using the resources boom as a reason to ramp up skilled migration and staking a lot of our economic prosperity on Australia's high terms of trade overlooks some of the negative ramifications of the two-speed or multispeed economy. For example, as reported in the Australian in early May, hundreds of fruit processing workers face the sack if Coca-Cola Amatil goes ahead with plans to close parts of its SPC Ardmona division and capitalise on the strong Australian dollar by importing food from Indonesia.
CCA chief executive Terry Davis has said one or two of SPC's three plants in central Victoria could be closed due to the strong Australian dollar putting pressure on the business. He said that the current strength of the dollar severely limits the potential for SPC Ardmona's export business, which produces some of the country's best-known canned fruit brands.
The strong dollar has been cited by the Reserve Bank as impacting adversely on manufacturing and tourism.
A report in 2006 by the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance on the previous mining boom used modelling to determine its impact on non-mining states and found that there were adverse consequences for Victorian exporting and import-competing firms.
Their modelling results showed that the Victorian and New South Wales gross state products were about half a per cent lower. Most industries in these states contracted, apart from the mining industries.
I believe the relentless rise of the Australian dollar as a result of the resources boom presents a real challenge to the Australian economy. The current mining boom mark 2 represents the highest terms of trade in 140 years, so the pressure on manufacturing and other trade exposed industries not directly benefiting from higher commodity prices is severe. Retail, manufacturing, building and tourism are labouring under the weight of subdued sales, weak profits and low orders. We need to ensure that we do not become a one-trick economy and that the structural changes that occur as a result of this boom do not leave ordinary people behind.
If the resources boom generates growth levels that cause the Reserve Bank to lift interest rates, then many Australian households and small businesses will suffer.
As a nation, we need to be more sophisticated than simply trying to run the resources boom full throttle.
The seventh and final objection I have goes to the question of the morality of skilled migration. Last week I participated in a debate[3] on Sky News TV Channel on the program known as The Nation, with the Member for Mayo, the former Member for Cook, and Geoff Gallop, the former Western Australian Premier. We were talking about migration, and Geoff said he thought it was a moral issue, that Australia had a moral obligation to take large numbers of migrants from poor countries. Now Geoff is a great guy, a fine Australian who has made a very valuable contribution to this country. But skilled migration is not a moral duty.
It is not about Australia being unselfish. It is about us being utterly selfish, taking the best and brightest from poor countries and denuding them of the people most likely to lift them from conditions of poverty. When we take a poor country's doctors or nurses, we damage their health system. When we take a poor country's engineers, we damage their capacity to build infrastructure. It is a moral question alright, but there is nothing moral about what we are doing.
In closing I welcome the measures in the budget on improving workplace participation but I am concerned that the government has bowed to industry calls for higher migration.
We need to ensure that the right policy settings are in place that will not leave behind those industries, individuals and households who are not benefiting from the mining boom mark II, and avoid short-term policy 'fixes' that cater to the vested interests who shout the loudest.
Kelvin Thomson MP Federal Member for Wills
[1] In order to focus quickly on Kelvin's incisive contribution to critical analysis of Australian economic policy, this article has left out the beginning of the speech as delivered to the House of Representatives. Here is the text we left out:
"I wish to commend the Australian government on this budget, which continues our tradition of sound economic management. It stands in stark contrast to the opposition's troubling lack of insight on this core issue.
Peter Costello is on the record as saying that an opposition leader's responsibility consists of going through the budget saying what the opposition agrees with and what it does not agree with; putting forward alternative tax proposals and saying when they would start and how they would be paid for; and saying what the opposition would do if it were bringing down a budget. Peter Costello was scathing of any budget reply speech that was short on detail or full of motherhood statements and cliches, which he believed let the Australian public down. What, then, are we to make of the opposition's budget reply?
The opposition say they would bring the budget to surplus sooner than Labor, yet they oppose and run interference on all of our savings measures, they produce no savings measures of their own and they even come up with more spending measures. They are not serious. Family payments is a classic example. The government will maintain higher income thresholds for certain family payments at their current levels. When the government announced similar measures two years ago, the opposition leader said they were soft and wanted the government to go harder. Now he wants to talk about the 'forgotten families' on $150,000 or more!
Analysis by Commonwealth Securities suggests that, on an Australia-wide basis, families with incomes above $150,000 are among the better-off families in the country. The average male income is currently around $57,500, with the average female income just over $38,000. Only three per cent of all taxpayers have an income above $150,000. In 2012-13, the number of people who will cease to be eligible for family payments will be less than two per cent. You would think, based on the scare campaign of the Leader of the Opposition and shadow Treasurer, that the government is running an assault on all families' standard of living.
As Tom Dusevic identified in his article of 14 May in the Weekend Australian on the coalition's position:
Abbott and Hockey have lost the plot on the basic tenet of Liberalism. Unlike Menzies, who saw government handouts as helping hands to the destitute, the Liberals became the chief advocates for unsustainable middleclass welfare, which grew out of the revenue boost from the first phase of the mining boom.
Absolutely right.
I would like to acknowledge the measures in the budget to boost workplace participation and expand the economy's productive capacity. I agree with the Prime Minister that we do not want to see a situation where the economy is booming but where we still have long-term unemployed people who do not have a job and people on the disability support pension who want to work, who do not have the opportunity of a job.
And the Treasurer is right when he says, 'Our economy can't afford to waste a single pair of capable hands.'
In my electorate of Wills there are at present 1,397 very long-term unemployed people who have been without work for two years or more.
To help them prepare for and find work, the Labor government has provided in the budget an additional $2.7 million over the period 2012 to 2015 to support local employment services in Wills. This will provide them with training and work experience. Additional funds have also been provided for a wage subsidy to support employers who give the very-long-term unemployed a job.
An investment of over $1.6 million for Australian Disability Enterprises in Wills is also welcome. It will support the work of the Brunswick Industries Association, North West Employment Group, the Trustee for The Salvation Army Victoria Property Trust, and Yooralla.
The budget initiative establishing the $558 million National Workforce Development Fund will assist in responding to the most critical emerging skills needs facing Australian industry. This will deliver 130,000 new training places over four years. The fund will be supported by the establishment of a new National Workforce and Productivity Agency, from 1 July next year, which will work closely with industry to identify critical skill needs and build a more skilled and capable workforce. The Labor government is improving support for Australians with a disability to help them into work where possible. I support these significant reforms to address the issue of workplace participation and skills shortages."
[2] The very first line of this paragraph as delivered in the House of Representatives ran, "I do not, however, agree with raising the skilled migration target for the 2011-12 financial year to 125,850-a record level."
[3] - The rest of this speech is the text which Kelvin intended to deliver, but which was abuptly cut off in the House of Representatives because the Opposition called a quorum and time ran out.
Inside also link to Kelvin Thomson's blog response to Government's Population Strategy (Have your Say).
Kelvin Thomson is the Labor MP who continually calls his party to issues of democracy and environment. You can also comment on Mr Thomson’s Blog, "Response to the Government’s Population Strategy (have your say)"
The video linked to below records Thomson's reaction in an ABC interview to Minister Burke's shameless exercise in using public money and social capital for a pretend inquiry. Thomson's words are relatively restrained. Others think that Burke has no right to remain in parliament for selling the Australian public out so badly.
In the TV debate of April 12, 2011, the leaders of Canada's four parties with parliamentary seats demonstrated that beneath the phony left-right dichotomies, parliament is ideologically monolithic in the most important sense. All of them believe in the necessity, desirability and possibility of continuing economic growth, and that immigration-driven population growth is its necessary concomitant and driver. But how could it be otherwise? Politicians do not effect change, they respond to it. And the environmental movement---and its political arm in the NDP and the Green Party, has done nothing to create a constituency of awareness that population growth in Canada is unsustainable, an awareness that if widely shared, would compel political parties and their leaders to address it. Most culpable is David Suzuki, who could move mountains if he would publicly say what he has said of Australia: that in relation to our resources, we are in serious population overshoot.
Take a look at Nature Canada's website http://www.naturecanada.ca/election2011.asp, and their "questions to ask " politicians in this federal election, and then you will understand what is wrong with Canada's environmental and conservation movement. They have taken the "P"( for population) out of the IPAT equation, the foundational formula of the environmental movement in the 1970s, essentially, environmental impact is a function of population levels and average consumption of each individual. Nature Canada, Nature Conservancy, the David Suzuki Foundation and the Sierra Club, the Green Party of Canada and the fake greens in the NDP all would have you believe that we can add 350,000 consumers to our population every year, year after year--- one metro Toronto every decade----without negative ecological impacts! And if challenged, they will tell you that we can shoe-horn tens of millions more into this country by strict land use planning (aka "smart growth"), preserve greenfield acreage and minimize their energy use. Aside from the fallacy of this contention, it is intellectually dishonest. Land use planning is in the hands of local government, and as Professor Robert MacDirmid of York University has documented in "Funding City Politics", local governments are controlled by developers.
1. Why won't you, Canada's green NGOs?make public your corporate funding sources? Why do you hide your corporate benefactors from your own members?
2. Why do you accept money from corporations like RBC, the Toronto Dominion Bank, the Walton Group, Encana, Atco etc etc? What do they want from you? What have you not said or advocated in return for their patronage? What is the going rate for your silence?
3. Can you explain the 'coincidence' that you have not taken on immigration-driven population growth in Canada when that is a major goal of corporations like RBC who fund you?
4. Can you seriously argue that we can "decouple" population growth in Canada from environmental degradation, from farmland and habitat loss and carbon emissions?
5. Why have you not pushed for an environmental assessment process for the government's immigration and pro-natalist policies? Do you honestly believe that renewable energy can be "scaled up" to meet the demands of a Canadian population that grows at over 1.08% per annum? Do you understand what exponential growth is? If you think a population level of 34 million for Canada is sustainable, at point would you concede that it isn't? 44 million? 54 million? 84 million? At what point along the road to ruin would you be prepared to call for a Population Plan for this country, as did Dr. Michael Healy and his UBC research team in their federally commissioned report, “Prospects for Sustainability”. As the Science Council of Canada warned in 1976, Canada must limit and stabilize its population.
The population-myopia of Canada's environmental movement is an outrageous omission that smacks of political correctness and outright corruption. Species loss is not something that only happens in some distant wilderness. The real killing fields are right here on the perimeters of Canada's growing urban centres. That is why Walton International, a land banking corporation, finds that it makes good business sense to give donations to Nature Conservancy for high profile land acquisitions far away from the farmland that Walton likes to purchase at the edge of cities like Calgary. When that land is rezoned to 'urban' use and housing development, Nature Conservancy stays mute, as it has when other patrons like RBC underwrite urban sprawl or bankroll the tar sands. Then, when Nature Conservancy "saves" a wetland or valley 500 miles away, these corporate donors can share the bragging rights. The new parkland is then declared parkland "forever". Forever, that is, until oil hits $250/barrel or minerals critical to our economy are in desperate shortfall. Until then, however RBC, the TD bank and Shell Canada can show off their credentials as good green citizens and paragons of corporate social "responsibility".
Where can nature be found on the ballot? Why won't Suzuki speak out against Canadian population growth?
Nature Canada implores us to "vote for nature" in this election. But where, on any federal election ballot in any constituency, can "nature" be found? The counterfeit "Greens", along with the NDP and the Liberals, actually want to hike Canada's immigration quota from its current 285,000 to 340,000!!!! Canada already vies with Australia for the dishonour of having the highest per capita immigration intake in the world, and has the highest population growth rate in the G8 group! Privately, according to some sources, David Suzuki has called this process of converting third world immigrants to "hyper consumers" in Canada as "madness", but will not say soon a major media outlet. He has, however, bravely gone on ABC radio in Australia to tell Australians that Australia is overpopulated. But Australia already has Tim Flannery and the Australian Conservation Foundation to tell them that. Will we have to invite an iconic Australian environmentalist here to say the same thing about Canada? In what way has Canada not overshot its carrying capacity to the same degree as Australia? Why the silence, Dr. Suzuki? Why be frank 'down under' but be seized with demographic lockjaw in your own country? Does the David Suzuki Foundation customize its policies to suit its benefactor, RBC, whose Chairman Gordon Nixon has lobbied for an immigration intake of 450,000?
Nature Canada is right in one important respect. In their words, "we cannot afford to allow nature and the environment to be ignored." So why are they ignoring population growth?
Tim Murray
:
What will you do to make sure Canada does a better job of enforcing our laws to protect wildlife like caribou, whales, and migratory birds?
How will you make sure nature is really protected in all federal parks and protected areas?
What will you do to protect more lands, waters, and oceans for nature and future generations?
How will you do a better job of using federal regulations and environmental assessments to prevent environmental disasters?
My hard-earned tax dollars are going to subsidize big oil and gas companies and our Canadian lakes are being handed over to mining companies to dump their waste. What will you do to end these dirty subsidies?
What is your party’s plan to really move Canada to a green economy powered by renewable energy?
Canada urgently needs an ambitious national plan to protect nature for wildlife, for us to enjoy, and for future generations. What will you do to show national leadership and give Canada an ambitious vision and a plan to protect nature for all?
Tell Canada’s leaders where you stand – vote for nature in 2011!
David Suzuki - Interview with radio station 6PR, 22 Sept 2006:
Suzuki: You know I was shocked to find that you have got a Minister in the Federal Cabinet here (Treasurer Peter Costello) who is encouraging Australians to have more and more children. Why? Because everybody thinks that in order to keep the economy growing forever you have got to have a growing population to keep that economy growing.
And so no one ever asks what is the cost of adding more people to Australia, a country as far as I am concerned that is already overpopulated because the demand of each Australian is so great?
Journalist: So you are saying Australia is overpopulated?
Suzuki: You bet.
Last night a TV debate was held between the leaders of Canada's 4 main parties. All of them proceeded on these assumptions:
1. Continual economic growth is necessary, desirable and possible.
2. A growing population is necessary to fuel economic growth.
3. Continued high levels of immigration are necessary to replace and increase our existing population level.
The only difference between them was whether a higher or lower proportion of those immigrants should be drawn from the "family class" category. And even here, Prime Minister Harper argued that his government had remained faithful to the concept of "family reunification". Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe joined the chorus in favour of more and more immigration, but stated that multiculturalism "does not fit Quebec", which has a duty to ensure that immigrants be fully integrated into a francophone society that represents only 2% of North America's population.
Needless to say, none of the leaders questioned the justice or the sense of pro-natalist policies and child-benefits packages, or the lunacy of the Quebec government subsidizing couples' IVF treatments to the tune of $7,000 a piece.
And it should be added, that Green Party leader Elizabeth May would have been in emphatic agreement with these leaders had she participated in the debate.
We are passengers on the HMCS Ecological Titanic led by a captain and aspiring captains who believe that we should pick up more passengers, and remain ignorant about the perils ahead. Has anyone one of them read James Howard Kunstler, or Richard Heinberg, or Michael Ruppert, or even one article in the vast archive of material that is available on overshoot?
Tim Murray
April 13/ 2011
When I recently re-read my article 
Murdoch media contradicts itself on immigration of 18 Feb 09, I found that the articles in the Murdoch Press I had cited and linked to from that article were no longer available on-line. (See also, my comments at the end of that article.) If publishers are not prepared to preserve copies of documents published on the Internet, then why should others be prevented from doing so by the copyright laws?
When I recently re-read my article
"Murdoch media contradicts itself on immigration," of 18 Feb 09 I found that the articles in the Murdoch Press I had cited and linked to from that article were no longer available on-line.
As the title of the article suggests, it showed contradictory information about immigration in three different articles in the Murdoch press. The articles were:
The first two were unambiguously pro-immigration. The first was of a supposed immigration success, Frank Lowy, whose principle contribution to Australia is the building a vast empire of shopping malls which have replaced the publicly owned markets where small retailers could once sell their wares to the public and make a decent living for a fair day's work. Today, small retailers are charged phenomenal rents to able to do business in Lowy's vast concrete mausoleums. The second was a report of the Courier Mail's owner's public lobbying for more immigrants.
The last story, whilst seemingly also of the successful immigration of English immigrants to Australia might have caused many readers to wonder, if high immigration and high population growth were so beneficial, then why did it seem to cause people from a country which had opened its doors to immigration to want to flee from there?
Not wishing to be in breach any copyright laws I limited the amount of material I quoted from those articles in my own.
That was fine, when interested readers could check the articles in full for themselves. However, these excerpts are now all that is left of those articles that candobetter site visitors can easily access. So, they are unable to get more information available in those articles about how the Murdoch organisation has been seeking for some years to impose high immigration on Australia and they are unable to view the article on English immigrants in Moreton Bay in order to better verify my claim that the article bears out my argument that high immigration to the UK has been detrimental to UK residents.
It seems that one effect of copyright laws is to allow important historical documents that could well embarrass some powerful vested interests to go missing.
Perhaps it should be made a condition of granting copyright that the owners of the copyrighted work undertake to preserve the work and on-line access to it at least until such time as anyone who had expressed to the copyright owner interest in having a copy of the work had been given an opportunity to obtain his/her own copy. If the person seeking copyright is not prepared to give such an undertaking then copyright should be refused.
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