immigration

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

A "SUCCESS" Story That Is A Prelude To Catastrophe

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

Immigrant investors drive the property market here

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

Web of interest paralyses democracy

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

Precious Democracy sacrificed for transient commercial advantage

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

Vancouver post petroleum - a town of expensive tombs?

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

Tim Murray
February 9, 2011

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

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

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

For only The Shadow knows!

And what does The Shadow know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The weed of corporate crime bears bitter fruit!

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

Unstoppable waves of migrants, overcrowding, displaced workers

uncontrollable crime, an alienated youth culture without hope and "one of the most divided and unequal ... countries in Europe", ---is this portrait of contemporary Britain a picture of our own future?

Let the British Poor Eat Cake

Wendy Kellett has a vision of what is to come. And it is a nightmare.

Speaking of her native land, the United Kingdom, she writes that:

“This is now one of the most divided and unequal-and overcrowded-countries in Europe. Unemployment amongst the young is rising; poverty amongst childless adults of working age is rising; immigration continues unabated-driving down wages at the bottom. The real value of incomes has fallen steadily in the past couple of decades, primarily affecting those with the least. Property values have soared, driven by speculation, a deregulated financial sector and increasing pressure on land from development and population growth.

The ‘toffs’ have no idea, or no concern, for what the less fortunate are experiencing. (They will find out, sooner or later.) Their attitude was typified by the chief executive of the Barclay group, Bob (deep-pockets-my-bonus-is-bigger-than-yours) Diamond when he defended the remuneration culture of the UK financial sector before the Commons Treasury Select Committee on bank bonuses. Diamond declared that ‘There was a period of remorse and apology; that period needs to be over.’ I must have missed the remorse and the apology. Diamond rejected the demands of MPs that he forgo his 2010 bonus, which could amount to $8 million.

So it’s business as usual for the greedsters, able to continue unabashed-- courtesy of the publicly funded rescue package---all gain, no pain. The pain is borne by the young, the unemployed, the sick, the disabled, the impoverished, the homeless and the millions of workers who are seeing the value of their wages plummet.”

An Archipelago Of Rich Enclaves In A Sea Of Crime And Poverty

The UK has become what John Kenneth Galbraith said of America, a nation where “private affluence co-exists with public squalor”. By 2015, she predicts, we will see a UK where

“Rising inequality, matched by population growth, will exacerbate the divide between rich and poor and a demoralised and resentful public will be increasingly numbed by diversions like sporting events, celebrity television and political messages which skilfully demonise the poor and needy. Entrepreneurial types will no doubt turn in ever greater numbers to drug dealing, people smuggling and black market supply of now-unaffordable goods beyond the reach of many. Mass migration from Africa and the Middle East will continue , driven by climate change, poverty and population growth. The rich will continue to move into gated enclaves and religious groups will fill the gaps left by vapourised public services : I suspect that ,increasingly, we shall see whole areas dominated by different faith groups.”

Canadian Youth Alienated And Embittered

I replied that this unfolding tragedy sounds very much like what is occurring in North America.

“Sounds a lot like Canada. The United States is even worse. The gap between rich and poor has grown dramatically since the 80s. Now Canadian cities are being to resemble American cities as they were 20 years ago. We have a social safety net that they don't, but the level of services are dropping like a stone. What Galbraith said of America is now true of Canada. The working class has been pauperized, caught in a squeeze play between the outsourcing of good-paying manufacturing jobs and the "in-sourcing" of cheap imported labour which has driven down the wages of displaced blue collar workers and their children, who must compete for the McJobs of a growing low-wage service sector.

Many of these kids have degrees and are trying to work off student debts in the five figures flipping burgers or selling cars for chump change while politicians bemoan the plight of immigrants with degrees who can’t find employment relevant to their field of study. No wonder that so many young people are still living with their parents. The more removed the wealthy become from the masses, the less empathy they have. But incivility, hostility, rudeness, and hostility are bubbling up among the young. In the 60s our fault was our naive idealism. Theirs is their unapologetic cynicism. On the CBC today, I heard the testimony of a bus driver who saw five black female teens on his bus threaten an elderly white lady because she was "looking at them". This kind of incident was unknown in Canada in my time. But it is common now. People are alienated and angry and they are lashing out at the wrong targets.”

The Lost Generation

Wendy also observes the same youth alienation in the United Kingdom.

“I see blank ,sullen incivility on the faces of many of the young : disturbing but explainable. They are fed a diet of, to quote REM : 'shiny, happy people' on the telly, who are famous for being famous, and whose fatuous remarks beggar belief. I suspect that the young know, perhaps subliminally, that they have no stake in the present and no expectations of the future : nihilism; anomie and disengagement are the result.”

It is clear that what we are witnessing--- in the so-called affluent societies---- is the emergence of a Lost Generation----alienated, hostile and withdrawn---immersed in a digital technology that has become both their defining trademark and their sanctuary from a world beyond their control. We are witnessing a systems collapse and the unravelling of Euro-American civilization. As Yeats said in his epic poem, “The Second Coming”, the centre cannot hold.

Tim Murray
January 26, 2011

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B.Yeats 1919

Cornucopians can select from an ideological buffet of arguments to deny that our growing human population is a serious problem. I have identified seven of them, but they are not exclusive---some overlap and could be treated as corollaries of others. Those in population-denial typically employ a coalition of them to make their case.

The Capitalist Lie:

We can grow the pie so that even the poorest among us can have a satisfactory slice. "A rising tide floats all boats". The larger the population base, the larger the market, and the longer the production runs, making per unit costs lower for everyone. Resource shortages are signalled by rising prices, which only encourage entrepreneurs to increase supply by the promise of higher profits, and tap into limitless human ingenuity by funding research to find alternatives to those resources which are exhausted or affordably accessible. In other words, we can "grow" the limits. The differences between Keynesians and free marketeers of the Austrian School are superficial---a petty dispute between those who believe that governments can create wealth by 'prime-pumping' fictional wealth into an unsustainable economy and those who believe that an unsustainable economy can best grow with less government intervention. Both schools of fiscal management assume that the human economy is not subject to bio-physical limits.

The Socialist Lie:

There is enough to go around, if only the pie was divided up "fairly and equitably". The problem is not with growth, but how the benefits of growth are shared. People are our greatest resource, the more the merrier. (Ask the Sandinistas). We need only ensure that they are properly fed and educated to exploit their potential. The root of our predicament is not over-population, but poverty, that is, capitalism. Furthermore, there is no "humane" way to control population growth, so it must be ignored. Growth can be 'sustainable'. The concept that there are limits, and that violating them might involve our extinction, and that nothing is more 'inhumane' than extinction, is beyond the pale of socialist consideration. The appalling environmental track record of command economies like those of the former Soviet bloc is ignored or forgotten, or if need be, disowned for not being examples of ‘true’ socialism, but rather, of “state capitalism”. Capitalists, however, are not to be granted similar dispensation to disown corporate debt capitalism. The “eco-socialism” that the green-left talks about is still on the drawing board. History is skeptical.

The Green Lie:

We can arrest economic growth---as we must---without reversing population growth. By reducing our personal footprint, by re-using, recycling and conserving, by making responsible consumer choices, by adopting 'green living' habits, by aspiring 'to live like Ghandi and not like Gates', by living simply, we can allow all of humanity to simply live. And by proper land use management, burgeoning human populations can be steered out of harm’s way from greenfield acreage, farmland, and sensitive wildlife habitat and concentrated in densely packed cities to minimize their energy footprint. You can't nationalize the environment. Environmental issues like climate change---which is the only important metric of environmental degradation----are global problems that demand global solutions and global cooperation. We must be 'inclusive'. We therefore cannot alienate other nations by strengthening our borders, rather, we must work to lower them and be welcoming to all who aspire to live here. We must remake our nation into a microcosm of the human family. Our mandate is not to constrain our population growth---which can be decoupled from GHG emissions, habitat and farmland loss----but to increase our 'diversity'. There is no national culture worthy of preservation, unless it is found in the developing countries. If migrants greatly increase their footprint upon settlement here, then our obligation is not to deter them, but to reduce our own footprint to responsible, third world levels. In short, let's move over, squeeze tighter, and consume and waste less to accommodate more and more newcomers. It was our profligate lifestyle that drove them from their homes, so it is our moral and legal obligation to assist them by opening our doors to them, even if it rescues only a fraction of their numbers. The Green slogan is that of Socrates. “I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.” And the Canadian version is "Canada---home to the world."

The Feminist Lie:

Population control is intrusive, it is another male attempt to control women's bodies. Population growth is not a problem but a symptom of gender inequality. If women are "empowered" by education and career opportunities, they will of their volition choose to have a number of children that is sustainable for the society at large. Procreative rights are incontestable. Sustainability is a by-product of human, women’s, workers and farmers rights, which therefore must be our primary focus.

The Technology Lie:

We can maintain or increase our extraction of renewable and non-renewable resources by developing more efficient technologies. Thus there is a confluence of socialist, green and feminist agendas into what may be termed the "environmental justice movement". The Jevons Paradox, that is, the fact that in the context of an economy premised on growth, more efficiencies, by making things cheaper, only provokes more total consumption, is not confronted.

The Religious Lie:

God or Allah will provide. Procreation is more than a right, it is a duty. And who better to enforce that duty than priests, mullahs and husbands? We are the creator's anointed species, with a mandate to grow and exercise dominion over other species. We can have our cake and eat it. We can expand without limit and push rival and subordinate species off the plate and be "good stewards" at the same time.

The Simonian Lie:

Julian Simon's assertion. The more people there are, the greater the chances that geniuses like Einstein will be born to generate the ideas that will save us. 15 billion brains are better than 10 or 7 or 2 billion brains. This belief, even if not overtly stated, runs like an undercurrent through all cornucopian lies. The notion that human brains, to function optimally, need proper nutrition, education and healthy bodies to carry them is a minor detail, as is the fact that the planet cannot indefinitely deliver those pre-requisites to the number of people who live now, never mind those billions that Simonians of all stripes want to add.

While the eco-Malthusian position offers an alternative perspective, it is often alloyed with some of the preceding impurities which confuse and compromise its central thrust: Without population stabilization and reduction, per capita reductions in consumption occasioned by frugal behaviour or efficiencies in technology or land use are ultimately futile, and that without cultural change and the force of law, unsustainable behaviours will persist even if the common people of both genders are "empowered" to make fertility choices. From speed limits to no-smoking bylaws to fish catch quotas, all laws are inherently "coercive", and all individual rights are ultimately conditional on the probability that their free exercise does not substantially restrict or infringe upon the rights of other people and other species to survive and flourish. Population reduction is not a gender issue, for over-population itself is more coercive in its influence upon women than anything the Chinese government has instituted. While the prospect of applying one-child per family laws universally is slim, the fantasy that voluntary measures alone will achieve the global population decline we need is even more remote. This is the "Malthusian Lie" that must be exposed when the cornucopian lies are finally laid to rest. The question that ‘voluntary’ family planning advocates must ask is, “Why, in the pursuit of population stabilization, with even the levers of total media control and a one-party dictatorship at its disposal, did the Chinese government find it necessary to complement moral suasion with legal sanctions?”

Tim Murray
January 20/2010

It has almost become commonplace now for prominent environmentalists like David Suzuki to declare that economic growth cannot continue in a finite world. Even Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May has been heard to quote Paul Ehrlich's old line that "growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". The problem is, however, that they do not follow this insight through to its logical conclusion. What does economic growth consist of? If population growth is a critical ingredient of economic growth, then what drives population growth? And if migration to affluent countries promotes population growth in both the nations of emigration and the recipient countries, must not any credible strategy to fight economic growth involve tightening borders and restricting this flow?

"We have come to believe that growth is the very definition of progress. You talk to any businessperson or politician and say, 'How well did you do last year?' And, within a picosecond, they will talk about growth in the GDP and the economy in profit, jobs or market share. And, anything in a finite world cannot grow forever. We live within the biosphere, that cannot grow- it's fixed." David Suzuki

At long last there is a growing consensus among environmentalists that growth must not simply be managed, but stopped, before nature does it in a more ruthless and arbitrary fashion. Nevertheless, while it takes little insight or courage to identify and attack the problem in broad terms, it requires bold persistence to follow that commitment to its logical conclusions and ruffling politically correct feathers in the process. Unfortunately, not many anti-growth advocates are so audacious. So far there seems to be seven subsets of anti-growth consciousness that must be treated as stages toward total comprehension of the issue.

1.Those who recognize that economic growth cannot continue in a finite world.

2.Those who realise that economic growth must not only be stopped, but reversed. There must be “de-growth".

3. Those who understand that global population growth is a critical component of economic growth.

4. Those who understand that population growth in affluent nations or nations of growing affluence is more dangerous than population growth in undeveloped countries.

5. Those who understand that immigration has become a key driver of population growth in many affluent nations like the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK.

6. Those who understand that mass migration to affluent nations is a spur to global population growth. Open borders are a fertility stimulant to countries of emigration and relieve the pressure upon their governments to pursue sustainable population levels, while affluent nations with immigration-driven runaway population growth lack the credibility to lobby for lower birth rates in developing nations.

7.Those who understand, then, that reducing mass migration to North America and similarly affluent regions is crucial to any effective effort toward pro-actively reversing global economic growth, if for only the reason that migrants from poorer nations greatly magnify their ecological footprints upon arrival. At the same time, we understand it is the practical and moral obligation of affluent countries to address the “push” factors which drive migrants of poorer nations out of their countries.

Lamentably, the great majority of environmental leaders who have “gone out on a limb” to denounce economic growth, or even to declare that it must be reversed rather than simply stabilized, will not go out any further. Perhaps they reason that their constituents are not yet ready come with them----or that corporate donors will de-fund their organizations if they did. It is clear that from the investigations of Washington Post, Johann Hari, Christine MacDonald, Michel Chossudovsky and Cory Morningstar---to name but a few---that corporate foundation money has played a decisive role in taming environmental NGOs and channelling them down paths that our less consequential to the corporate bottom line. But whether it be for mercenary reasons or simply deference to political correctness, Canadians remain puzzled why David Suzuki, for example, can tell Australians on their public radio that their country is over-populated, but is apparently unable to say the same thing in Canada about his own country on the CBC. If Dr. Suzuki—and other prominent green voices---are sincere in their determination to see economic contraction, then they must climb up all of the steps outlined above. They must take special note of Herman Daly’s ninth policy proposal for moving toward a steady state:

"Stabilize Population. We should be working toward a balance in which births plus in-migrants equals deaths plus out-migrants. This is controversial and difficult, but, as a start, contraception should be made available for voluntary use everywhere. And while each nation can debate whether it should accept many or few immigrants, and who should get priority, such a debate is rendered moot if immigration laws are not enforced. We should support voluntary family planning and enforcement of reasonable immigration laws, democratically enacted. A lot of the pro-natalist and open-borders rhetoric claims to be motivated by generosity, but it is “generosity” at the expense of the U.S. working class—a cheap labor policy. Progressives have been slow to understand this. The environmental movement began with a focus on population but has frequently given in to political correctness." http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/556

Tim Murray
January 5, 2010

Activism at Universities has declined as a direct result of 'reforms' to Australia's tertiary sector since the ousting of the Whitlam Government in 1975. Ordinary Australians have suffered considerably as Governments have been able to impose unpopular policies harmful to Australians' interests, far more easily.

The following has been adapted from my comment in response to a recent lecture by Professor Glynn Davis, broadcast on ABC Radio National. (This whole article has also been modified since it was first published on 21 December.

) Professor Glynn Davis maintained that Indian student demonstrations in Australia showed that activism was alive and well here. But he failed to comment on an immense vacuum in political comment and grass-roots activity as the civil rights of Australians have been continually eroded. It is surely very convenient for those who profit from this erosion that student preoccupation with issues of minority discrimination prevents agitation in the face of a more general decline in civil rights and quality of life.

How can supposedly 'left wing' academics of Professor Glyn Davis's generation remain so quiet about the fact that vast layers of Australians, once able to enjoy comfortable and financially secure lives, have become impoverished under the social 'reforms' that Australia has endured since the late 1970s.

The agent of this silence is the anti-scientific dogma of so-called 'economic rationalism' with which almost all government decisions- and, it seems, academic theories - have to comply these days.

As a consequence, the cost of University courses has climbed (almost without protest) beyond the means of many ordinary Australians. Higher education costs plus other massive rises in the cost of living, particularly of housing, have made it impossible for people not from privileged backgrounds to spend time engaging in political activism as students once did. So many are forced to spend much of their free time working to pay rent and other living expenses. I also did this when I attended University full time until 2001, but the situation has become even worse since then. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, I know for a fact that it was possible for students to live in share accommodation, comfortably, if modestly, on government Austudy payments alone, without them needing to work. This was true even in inner Sydney suburbs.

Today's lack of free time in the lives of students prevents them from engaging effectively in social activism. The same can be said for unemployed people, who are required to spend much of their time fulfilling pointless obligations to seek work even where it doesn't exist. This political situation has made it far easier for governments to undemocratically impose many other policies that have also greatly harmed ordinary Australians.

There are many examples of such polices: privatisations (including the privatisation of retirement income (aka 'superannuation'), which even Bush could not impose upon the US), although the Chilean dictator Pinochet achieved this in the 1970s; the emasculation of the Whitlam government's Medibank and the public health system, the GST, reduction in employment opportunities; destruction of worker protection whilst importing foreign workers; and the overall decline in government services.

Among bad policies, we should also include the two invasions (1991 and 2003) of Iraq and the Afghan War, which began in 2001. The protests against war in Iraq were the biggest protests in Australian history since those against the Vietnam war, yet our governments went ahead with the Iraq invasion. There was little protest against the Afghanistan war, of course, because of what happened on September 11 of 2001. The situations Australian soldiers currently risk life and limb for in Iraq and Afghanistan are based upon pretexts since proven to be lies. The discovery of the lies which led to the invasion of Iraq is particularly well documented (and dramatised), by the way, in the recent movie "Fair Game", starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, about the 2003 Iraq war.

What happened to protests against war in Australia? I know the answer. It is too complicated to go into in this article. Suffice to say here, that we no longer hear much against wars. The last person to raise a profile on this issue was dissed by Jon Faine and the Prime Minister herself before disappearing from mainstream media view. I refer, of course, to Kevin Bracken.

Sweden has joined the United States, Britain, Spain and other nations as a target of politically motivated violence. It is no longer possible for countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden to think about their populations as homogenous groups with shared values and world views.
The costs are high. Foreigners are 6.2 times as likely to be incarcerated than Swedes, or 520% higher incarceration rate.

As one of a many open immigration policies in Europe, Sweden has struggled to confederate more immigrants from Iraq than any other Western nation since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Sweden has always welcomed asylum seekers from all over the world, particularly the Arab and Islamic worlds.

However, foreigners are 6.2 times as likely to be incarcerated than Swedes, or 520% higher incarceration rate.

The number of violent and deadly crimes has increased by about 200 percent from 1976 to 2006, the report showed. Only in 2009, five deadly shootings occurred in Malmo, compared to four in Stockholm and eight in Gothenburg.

The anti-immigration party’s personality Jimmie Akesson has described a flourishing series of Muslims – about 5 per cent of a country’s race – as a biggest outmost hazard to Sweden given a Second World War.

Explosions that killed a suspected bomber and injured two passersby on a busy shopping street in Stockholm are being investigated as a “terrorist crime,” sending shock waves through Sweden, which prides itself on its open, peaceful society and had so far been untouched by the post-9/11 attacks.

The man, identified as 28-year-old Iraqi-born Swede Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, directed his ire toward Sweden’s military presence in Afghanistan and Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who drew an image of the prophet Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body in 2007.

Omar Mustafa, president of the Islamic League in Sweden, said he feared the attack could undo the years of progress made by Muslims living in Sweden.

The right is pointing to the bomber as a clear example of why Sweden should stop accepting more immigrants and promoting a multicultural society.

Reasons Sweden support the most open immigration program in Europe

1. Too much prosperity between 1940-1970 when they were building the welfare state. Most Swedish people think that the two are causally linked. They think the are prosperous because they expanded the welfare state 1940-1970.

They escaped the war. Sweden as a nation is still naive and innocent. The first notable wave of immigration into Sweden came in the post-World War II period with workers from Germany and Holland, later spreading to southern Europe including Italy, Greece and Turkey.

2. Egalitarianism is very strong for historical reasons. This makes them lean left.
More than a thousand years of continuous existence as a sovereign state allowed for the gradual development of strong national institutions. During the medieval period, the practice of serfdom was never established, and the preponderance of independent farmers helped minimize social class differences and nurture an ethic of equality.

Read more

3. Humans are basically "good". If they act bad, it is probably because they are having an emotional difficulty, a hard time, and talking to them will solve the problem. Beyond those who seek to rubbish welfare state-ism with references to alcoholism, depression, and suicide, Sweden is high on the quotient of niceness and goodness.

Swedes think that is true for all life. They are surrounded by nice, good normal people, and become very native. This combined with the mirror effect ("everyone is like me") with catastrophic consequences. They simply don't have theories about predators and opportunistic people, such as people who exploit the welfare state, thugs, Islamic terrorist etc.

4. White guilt. When Finland and Italy were poor in 1960, Swedes had been rich and prosperous for 30 years. Their "white" guilt needs to be balanced by non-Westerns.

They believe very strongly in their social model. They, understandably but wrongly believe is why they don't starve or have wars like Africans, corruption and a soft state like Italians or crime, inequality and social problems like America.

5. Secularism. When you don't have religion, your mind looks to substitutes. This can be ideology or things like new-age, both popular in Sweden. A spiritual vacuum can be deceptively liberating, but encourage open-ness to ideas that may be contrary to their interests.

Like Australia, the large ethnic diversity that does exist makes it problematic to define what is typically Swedish today.

The most effective way to conquer and colonize a people is to strip them of their identity as a people, as a distinctive culture and as a sovereign nation, and to delegate the wet work to a Puppet Intelligentsia. Like the Jews (Kapos) of the Warsaw ghetto whom the Nazis appointed to manage an orderly genocide, this contemptible class of rootless cosmopolitans, with media collusion, then set to work in convincing a new generation that they are part of a greater whole, a noble international enterprise, an empire, and that allegiance to the land of their forefathers is parochial, anachronistic, selfish and ‘nativist’. No sooner did we throw off the shackles of our infantile self-image as British ‘subjects’ when now, we are intoned to become “citizens of the world”. But we are not citizens in a global participatory democracy, but the passive consumers of global capitalism. In the name of diversity were are seeing what is left of our identity tossed into a global blender, with the left is calling it international workers solidarity. Face it. What we are witnessing is an invasion, and multiculturalism is just a useful smokescreen.

Pandering to the people vs.

Pandering to the Growth Lobby How typical of the New York Times. One would think this was written by the CBC.

Instead of discussing the dangers that Islamic fundamentalism poses to western democracies who have opened their doors to mass immigration from Islamic countries, this journalist focuses on the restraint of Sweden's Prime Minister in responding to the recent bombing attempt by an Iraqi-born terrorist. ("Sweden's Near Miss" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/opinion/14tue4.html ). Note how he characterizes those who oppose this policy:

"......the misleadingly named Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party of the extreme right."

"Center-right politicians elsewhere in Europe — France and the Netherlands, for example — have been quick to pander to similar xenophobic parties and their supporters."

This is the standard analysis of PC journalism. "Anti-immigration" is conflated with "anti-immigrant" and those who would defend national sovereignty and the cultural heritage of their own country are "xenophobic" and of the "extreme right".

By what measure of inverse reasoning do the politically correct regard politicians who defer to theopinions of the electorate as somehow "undemocratic"? How is bowing to public pressure seen as "pandering", but bowing to the pressures of cheap labour employers for open immigration as "statesmanship"?

Most governments are puppets of the growth lobby. Rather than confess their collusion with the Ponzi population agenda, these puppets dress it up as a noble act of responsible statecraft. They call it "tolerance", a respect for "diversity", "the rule of law". Whose law? The law of the people, or the law of their so-called "representatives"?

Wars are fought with euphemisms

Political wars, like those fought by armies, are waged and rationalized by the use of euphemisms. It is critically important to frame the battle in terms that will win public support. The Japanese did not define their aggression in 1941 as a naked grab for oil in the Dutch East Indies, but as a project to establish a South East Asian "Co-Prospertiy Sphere". The Bush administration, similarly, did not describe the war against Iraq as a war to secure oil supplies but as a war against terrorism. The annals of colonial conquest are replete with this kind of spin. What is even more advantageous for the invader though, is to convince those who have been invaded that their subjugation is in their own interests. If the conquered can believe that they are actually being "liberated", then the task of exploitation is rendered so much easier. A proven technique is to reward the ruling class of the conquered territory with junior-partner status for their valuable role in helping to manage and channel popular dissent along ineffectual paths. The Vichy regime was a classic case in point. The Romans also were masters of this technique. Nothing works better than to install a puppet regime that allows the locals the illusion of independence.

The Puppet Intelligentsia

That is precisely what "The New Class" is. A puppet intelligentsia. They are that coalition of "progressive" globe-trotting politicians, academics and journalists who, as a badge of membership in the "Those who know better Club", sneer at anti-immigration sentiments, which they characterize as nativist, bigoted and parochial. Their role is to "educate" the masses to accept and embrace the invaders as the vanguard of a new world order. The national culture, as such, must be discredited as an anachronism, and instead the people must be encouraged to shift their allegiance to a distant entity. Citizens must be made to feel proud to be mere cogs in an Empire, and be content with the reputed rewards that colonial status brings. In Canada now, that process of mental assimilation is half-way complete. Left-wing hypocrites who once celebrated Canada's growing independence from Britain, and once fretted over growing American influence in the 60s and 70s, now see Canada's "great multicultural project", as Green Party leader Elizabeth May calls it, as our distinctive mission in the world. It is a belief that has been preached daily for decades in classrooms and newsrooms without challenge, and the dividends of this relentless and rootless cosmopolitanism are now evident. Most readers polled by the National Post in 2008, in fact, voted to make "Canada---Home to the World" our national slogan. We are not to be credited with having our own home-grown culture. Instead, we are merely a mosaic of imported cultures, a United Nations in microcosm. It is a globalist vision, espoused by people who purport to be opposed to globalism. In fact, they share the corporate dream of a world without borders. Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Lennon all "come together right now", if you will pardon the use of Beatles' lyrics.

Multiculturalism is a smokescreen

The truth is, mass immigration is a profoundly and extremely "right-wing" project, and, to use Dan Murray's description, the cult of multiculturalism can be likened to the "artillery" which softens up our lines before the shock troops mount their attack. A good metaphor, but another comes to mind. The Canadians who landed on Juneau Beach in Normandy gained their beach-head by laying down smoke to conceal incoming tanks. The cant about tolerance and diversity can be regarded in the same way. It is just a smokescreen for the invasion, a fog which conceals the prime corporate objective to drive down labour costs and expand the number of consumers. But the Green-Left cannot see through it. Perhaps it is because green NGOs are blinded by corporate donations. The irony is, one day they will wake up and realize that when the smoke has cleared, the net result will be a displaced and pauperized indigenous workforce, and a Tower of Babel where people cannot mount a challenge to their exploitation because of their ethno-cultural divisions. They will cease to be citizens and exist only as consumers. The only common culture will be the culture of money. Some diversity. A rainbow of faces but a conformity of thought and behaviour.

Canada--home to the world. Or will it be "Attention Walmart Shoppers"?

Welcome to the original multicultural paradise, the one that serves The New Class across the world as a model and template for national suicide and global integration.

Tim Murray

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

Green Left Smear Network Always Quick Off The Mark

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

Our Unearned Reputation Precedes Us

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

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

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

Marxist Refugees Found Sanctuary In The Environmental Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Murray
November 17, 2010

Australian Citizenship Pledge

'From this time forward
I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people,
whose democratic beliefs I share,
whose rights and liberties I respect, and
whose laws I will uphold and obey.'

When new Australians pledge their loyalty to Australia, it is not some token spiel, it is a solemn oath!
Personally I have never had to take this pledge, because I was born here. But I would be happy to take it without hesitation. My loyaty to Australia, its people, its values, its laws are unequivocal.

Australian citizenship is a privilege, highly valued and sought after globally. It is not a right.
Citizenship comes with prerequisite conditions and performance conditions. With those privileges come responsibilities.

Foreigners are welcome* as Australian citizens according to Australian conditions:

# be law abiding
# respect Australian liberties and rights
# respect and share Australia's democratic beliefs
# speak, read and write English
# proactively assimilate and integrate
# accept Australian traditional culture
# rescind any cultural mores that irreconcilably conflict with Australian values.

[*Subject to Australia's carrying capacity and commensurate with adequate Federal Government infrastructure investment.]

Breach those conditions and your citizenship should be made null and void. Commit a serious crime and you shoudl be automatically deported, and barred from ever returning to Australia. This clause needs to be enshrined into Australian law and I call on it to be the basis for a Conditional Citizenship Bill to be put before the Australian Federal Parliament.

Australia must control who comes to this country, else all Indians, Asians, East Asians, Africans, Europeans, Brits, Russians, Kiwis and Americans could argue a self-serving entitlement to swamp Australia. Bugger that! That would be unjust on Australia and Australians - a fairness justification any country would stand by. As if Australian Aborgines haven't suffered from successive waves of colonising immigrants from the British torrent and then succumbed to British authorised foreign herds every since?

If one looks at the facts, Australia has and is being overwhelmed by immigrants. The problem is pathogenic and it skyrocketed exponentially after Whitlam's multiculturalism manifesto of 1973.

Some of these immigrants are committing serious crimes once in Australia. Immigrants who have a record of criminality and foreigners visiting Australia who then commit serious crimes while they are here are rightly automatically deported.

So why should similar serious crimes be immune from deporting the perpetrator simply by Australia's honourable process of residency or citizenship? Answer: It shouldn't!

Such defence of citizenship has no basis for someone who has breached the conditions of citizenship, flouted Australian laws and cause serious crime in Australia. Once convicted they deserve to be deported to their country of birth.
Simple rule, Fair rule. Try doing same overseas. Name one country that would be more lenient than Australia for such crimes by 'new' citizens!

Apply this rule universally and I challenge that any genuine injustice could emerge.

Australian citizenship is a world-leading privilege and don't millions of humans around the planet well know it?
But if all of India's and China's now millions of educated were deemed eligible to migrate to Australia what would protect the incumbent local Australians from beingh overrun?

Only birth rights present the fairest universal test. Else Australia risks being overrun by the world's populations that have a life less ideal than Australians.

Economic immigration is a form of human gravity. Humans flow to the attractive countries of least resistance. And at present our ethnic-biased Laboral governments keep the immigration door open despite no local electoral mandate permitting the bastards on Capitol Hill to do so.

To reiterate, the simply test ought to be that if one is not born in Australia, one's citizenship privilege is conditional on performance. If you commit a serious crime in your new host country - then simply that is a fundamental breach of your citizenship conditions and you have voided your privilege and entitlements.
Of course your offspring cannot if they were born here.

So-called 'naturalised citizens' agree to comply with the "same duties and obligations as those who were born in Australia.
If they breach those duties and are permitted to stay in Australia, then what message does that send to wannabe 'crims' overseas?

And think about it. This rule is not just for Australia. It should be universal. The only losers are the criminals.
With all the ethics in Australian gaols, it is about time they were deported and Australian draft and vote for a Conditional Citzenship Bill - foreigners are welcome as Australian citizens according to Australian conditions - be law abiding, speak English, procatively assimilate, accept Australian traditional culture, and rescind any cultural mores that irreconcilably conflict with Australian values.

Simple, fair and just...and I encourage other countries to do the same.

The so-called 'skills shortage' in Australia is mere industry propaganda to avoid training costs. This is despite Australia have an advanced industralised base and a deep capacity as an education training nation and indeed exporter of education! Industry argues that it doesn't spend on training because their trained staff leave - what an excuse!

Yes, government and industry bleat unsubstantiated a 'skills shortage' so they can bring more and more immigrants for selfish short term economic ends while avoid financial cost of education and training locally and moral obligations to do so.

Mining companies are the worst. Their international ring-in approach sourcing foreign contractors suits mining companies to a tee - no give and all take!

Remember BHP Billiton's immoral abandonment of Ravensthorpe in WA in January 2009?
[Read More]

BHP had promised the Ravensthorpe community that it was to be there for the long haul so workers came and small businesses invested, only to see BHP Billiton suddenly close its nickel mine near Ravensthorpe, move out and leave about 1450 locals out of work and up to 5000 dependent people devasted.

Mineral commodity prices are fickle, but mining companies don't care about human resource planning and training. They know to just run to Australian politcians and cry we can create jobs so give us trained workers. So another round of flood gate immigration rolls to stay long after the work has gone.

Now two years on and mining companies are again crying 'skills shortages'.
[Read More].

But did they invest in skills training of the pervious workforce. Don't be silly, training cost seat into profits and dividends and Marios Klopers' bonuses.

Contracting is rife in many industries where employers treat workers like disposable razors. Desperate workers from developing countries will do almost anything. It is a dumbing down of Australian standards. It has encouraged 'flood gate migration' and the Laborals have no population vision.

Read More about what BHP did by abandonning Ravensthorpe and Hopetoun...

I think mining companies are more contemptible than the banks. Why should anyone listen to their pleas to avoid a super mining tax?

Related comment: 'The List' determines their 'course'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

KELVIN THOMSON MP

Member for Wills.

In Growth We Prosper

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

It has been quite the year.

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

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

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

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

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

Resistance is Futile. We are the CBC

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

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

At What Point Will The Media Question Growth?

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

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

Studin's Mad Dream Prevails

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

Tim Murray
November 6/2010

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

Climate Change Obsession A Justification for An Open Borders Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Murray,
October 12/2010

© Tandberg

Australia's alternating Liberal/Labor (Laboral) governments accept all comers because they have become conditioned to be fearful of the racist slur automatically cast by immigrant lobby groups like the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia.

Australia's mass media is constantly bombarded by propaganda condemning any criticism of immigrants or any calls to reduce immigration. And guess who's driving the propaganda - the immigrants who want more of their country folk arriving, and who protest 'stuff assimilation' - we'll retain our nationality in Australia!

Take the emotive propaganda in a recent article by the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia which it had published in Fairfax's Sydney Morning Herald on 21st October 2010:

So Migliorino claims that assimilation is 'walking backwards', that 'equality of all cultures...is the soul of a truly multicultural vision.'

Look at the divisiveness of multiculturalism, where ethnic enclaves thrive in our capital cities - with no intention to integrate with the Australian mainstream population! A more 'cohesive nation' is one with common values, ways of life, culture and social mores.

Government polices across Australia have mandated into law acceptance of 'cultural diversity' while not accepting into law recognitionj of Australian cultural values. Why?
Such immigration favouritism has indeed 'disempowered and marginalised' traditional and ancestral Australians and our traditional cultural values.

Anyone dare critical of 'cultural diversity' is conveniently branded 'racist'.

Australia has continually had a 'national multicultural policy' since Whitlam went on his politically correct high horse introducing multiculturalism in 1972 and Fraser and subsequent Laboral governments have perpetuated it ever since!

Such is the guilt-inciting crafted language being reinforced in the mass media to ensure any anti-immigrant sentiment by free thinkers remains taboo.

Colonist invasion of Australia and the persecution of Aboriginals is not a justification for more immigration!

Following Migliorino's article and heading up Fairfax's typical 'COMMENTS ARE NOW CLOSED' list, is a gem response by reader, John Williams who comments...

"I have never heard such bull...t in my life.

People come to Australia because of our values and lifestyle which has been created based on our 200 year history of English beliefs and principles.

These values that have been instilled in the Australian way of life since settlement and enshrine the notion of fairness, equality and giving people a go no matter their background, religious beliefs, financial status, etc.

Some of the migrants that come to Australia appear disinterested in every aspect of Australian life. They appear intent on setting up their own small country, bringing with them their own countries beliefs, prejudices, principles and rules and setting up in Australia which leads to enclaves being established and exclusion of all things Australian.

I have no problem with people being proud of their heritage and cultural background, but when you hear Australian born children and grandchildren of Immigrants referring to themselves as Turkish, Lebanese, etc, then it makes you wonder why we even bother.

These people need to embrace an Australian culture first and foremost, otherwise get the hell out of Australia because we dont need you or want you.
We want people to be embrace Australia first, becomes Australians and be proud of their adopted Country - Australia. Not some distant war torn, undemocratic, 3rd world ghetto from where they came, otherwise just dont bother coming here in the first place.
Forget all the political speak and correctness. It is about time for politicians to ask

Australians the kind of Australia they want and the kind of migrants that they would like to see and the answers may shock you Mr Migliorino."

by John Williams | Kensington - October 22, 2010, 8:05AM

Then there's another piece of immigrant propaganda from Migliorino:

'ETHNIC COMMUNITIES WARN THAT ANTI-BOAT PEOPLE RHETORIC WILL FEED RACISM', 9 August, 2010

'Laboral'* invitation of hoards of foreign populations from 'contra-cultural' societies is directly displacing the lesser numbers of traditional Australians (those born here and with traditional ancestral origins in Australia). It is a repeat of British colonisation of Australia that directly displaced Australia's Aboriginal people. It is what the Dutch immigrants did to the native South Africans under Apartheid. It is what the Chinese immigrants have done to the indigenous Fijians.

It is immigration history repeated!

The Laboral policy of immigrant favouritism is 'reverse racism'. It is discriminatory against local people and their traditional way of life, their values and their rights. It is a form of 'cultural treason' against the incumbent population.

Then when an immigrant gets into a position of influence (management, politics) favouritism to the immigrant's countrymen and women is ignored by Australia's anti-discrimination laws. Australia has one rule for immigrants, another rule for traditional Australians who feel unjustly targeted by the various laws that favour immigrants. These laws treat traditional Australians as if we are inherently racist. But by such favouritising and by immunising immigrants from racism rules, Australia's anti-discrimination laws have become a passive form of reverse racism.

The tragedy to all parties (locals and immigrants alike) is that the unjust discrimination felt by traditional Australians is causing local disaffection, understandably. But what conveniently goes unmentioned by supporters of cultural immigrants to Australia, is the aggressive intolerance of foreigner cultures by the countries of origin of many Australian immigrants cultures - Indian intolerance of Christians and China's intolerance of Falun Gong are classic examples.

Traditional Australian are feeling marginalised in their own native country. That disaffection and sense of injustice is steadily converting tolerant easy-going Australians, like myself, into angry resentful protectionists. The vocal outrage is perceived as racist, but it is an early cry for justice by disaffected locals. Reverse racism risks inciting reactionary racism. It throws civilised tolerance out the window and descend humanity into its primitive mode of protecting its own clan. It is a slippery slope.

Once reactionary discrimination takes a cultural hold amongst a local population united against a perceived threat of invading immigrant culture, local attitudes become entrenched. Human history has many stories of such and many quite recent and close to home.

One shouldn't have to sign a declaration of accepting cultural diversity of foreigners if that cultural diversity is open ended without parameters and that policy does provide for Australian cultural values and standards to prevail. Yet it has become standard policy for Local and State governments to mandate all public servants comply with accepting cultural diversity - willy nilly!

I shouldn't have to speak Mandarin to get a job in North Ryde. Immigrants should though have to accept Australian values and social standards by living in Australia - equality of women, free speech, reward based on merit (no chronyism), fair pay for a fair day's work (no slavery), highs standards of hygiene, etc.

Australian social values and standards were once common sense and taken for granted, but with so many arriving with different values and standards, Australia has got to the point of needing its social values and standards protected in legislation - an Australian Values Act.

Cronulla in 2005 was a warning to governments. Heed it and curb the immigration and listen to us locals! Yet in the government of our modern society, especially across Australia, members of parliament are naive, and untravelled idealists who invariable tow their Party's line and whom hold no experience or qualifications in sociology. We are ruled by incompetents of dangerous naivety.

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Murray
October 22/ 2010

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

Nationalism is a domestic reaction to foreign invasion (be it militarily or by mass immigration) and the consequential displacement of the local population - real or perceived.

Foreigners visiting are guests and are welcome. But foreigners arriving as permanent settlers threaten to compete with the territory and rights of the local ancestral population - again, real or perceived. So any immigration program warrants prior approval by the local population, and sensitive and respectful settling, adjustment, communication and time and space for assimilation to integrate.

Humans are territorial by nature. Foreigners visiting are guests and are welcome. But foreigners arriving as permanent settlers can threaten to be competition with the local population - again, real or perceived. So the immigration process demands local acceptance and careful and respectful settling, adjustment, communication and time and space for foreigner assimilation with the local ancestral population.

History has shown that over time, foreigners can become accepted by the local population if assimilation is carefully managed in small doses over time. The rate needs to be evolutionary not revolutionary.

Britain's foreign invasion of Australia never respected or tried to assimilate with the local Aboriginal peoples. It is a lesson of history still not learnt in Australia.

When many foreigners arrive as permanent settlers, ancestral locals feel their territory and rights naturally threatened, like all territorial animals.

When social pressures ensue (higher costs of living, higher rents, higher house prices, jobs filled by immigrants, increased unemployment, congestion of public infrastructure - roads, public transport, schools, hospitals, child care, migrant favouritism in the workplace) such domestic fears are confirmed. Resentment then builds.

Mass immigration is by definition non-military invasion. Nationalism is a domestic reaction to foreign invasion. Stop the mass immigration and nationalism pressures subside. Read history and learn from it. Nationalism is always just below the surface in any established identifiable community.

Australia's open-door policy on immigration is driven by the short-term published yet narrow economic benefits and lobbied by those who stand to personally gain financially. But Australia's open-door policy on immigration is ignorant of the social consequence and longer term capital burden of requisite infrastructure.

Australia's LibLab politics of mass immigration is set to fuel fervent nationalism for years to come. Sydney's Cronulla Riot of 2005 was one of unchecked localised domestic resentment to foreigners.

The riot was a spontaneous groundswell by local juveniles defending their traditional beach turf from a perceived invasion of gangs of arrogant Middle Eastern immigrants muscling in. It was classic tribal territorial reaction and a regrettable chapter in Australian history. Since that ugly time, the relationship between the two groups has cooled due to concerted efforts by all parties to work together. But the underlying cause of the riot was the Immigration Department's abandonment of assimilation.

The Cronulla Riot was a warning to all national governments who choose to narrow-mindedly ignore the domestic social implications of uncontrolled mass immigration and who abandon immigration assimilation principles. If perpetuated, mass immigration and the displacement it causes to traditional populations may in future be more co-ordinated and organised.

Our politicians do not study social history and they are the cause of the problem, not the immigrants themselves. Australia should learn from the Fijian experience of mass immigration by Indians, which ended up outnumbering the indigenous Indo-Fijians. indigenous Fijian Commodore Frank Bainimarama stated that:

" his main reasons for overthrowing the Qarase government were that it was corrupt, and that it was conducting racially discriminatory policies against the country's Indo-Fijian minority. In a speech publicly announcing the coup, he stated that Qarase's policies had "divided the nation now and will have very serious consequences to our future generations".
[Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bainimarama#Explaining_the_coup]

It is critical for social cohesion in any country, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand or anywhere that immigration is carefully planned, implemented and monitored and that assimilation is effective through to full integration. For governments to abandon its core protective responsibility of the ancestral rights of its citizenry is unpalatable in its social consequences.

by James Bisset

The effect of immigration on the employment of Canadians became a bit clearer this week. On the Tuesday, Sept 14 edition of CBC Radio's The Current, Economics Professor Eric Howe stated that 1 in 7 Aboriginal Canadians in Saskatchewan lost their jobs in 2009. Mr. Howe is a specialist in Aboriginal issues and teaches at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. He described the job loss as "an utter disaster" for Aboriginals. He said a number of factors had caused this to happen. One was that the Saskatchewan job market slowed in 2009. Another was that the Saskatchewan provincial government was at that time "pushing the hiring of immigrants at the cost of hiring people already here".

The fact that 1 in 7 aboriginal residents of Saskatchewan lost their jobs is very significant. According to the Government of Saskatchewan's web site, Saskatchewan's population is now just over 1 million. In 2001, people of aboriginal descent comprised 13.6% of the province's population. Aboriginals are a rapidly growing group in Saskatchewan and are projected to comprise 32.5% of that province's population in 2045._#main-fn1">1

It is probably safe to say that they comprise close to 18% of Saskatchewan's population today. Mr. Howe did not provide raw numbers for the job losses, but they were probably not low.

In response, Rob Norris, Saskatchewan's Minister of Immigration (as well as of Advanced Education and Employment) has stated that "immigration to Saskatchewan is driven by employer demand for workers already trained for a particular skill". He also said that the province does not "push" employers to hire immigrants, but that it helps employers to find workers. Furthermore, he has declared that the success of Saskatchewan's future is linked to Aboriginals. The government, he says, is doing what it can to help Aboriginals and its Metis population to find opportunities in education and in employment.

The key issue that Mr. Norris should be dealing with is whether the employers' demands are legitimate and whether the provincial government has unintentionally helped some employers to act against the employment interests of its own citizens.

Regarding the conflict between the statements of Mr. Howe and Mr. Norris : Professor Howe has spent a large part of his long teaching career specializing in aboriginal issues. His experience lends a considerable amount of weight to his statements. Saskatchewan Immigration Minister Rob Norris does not have the same amount of experience with the issue. "Hire An Immigrant" initiatives have been well promoted by Canada's immigration industry during the recent recession. Few, if any, Canadian politicians at any level have expressed disapproval about the corrupt motives and obvious dangers of these immigration industry initiatives.

According to Statistics Canada, Canada allowed over 282,000 Temporary Foreign Workers to work here in 2009. That number has doubled since 2005. In 9 of 10 provinces, the number of Temporary Foreign Workers has increased since 2005. In 2009, Ontario took 94,762, B.C. took 69, 038, Alberta took 65,038 , Quebec took 30,552 and Saskatchewan took 5971. Several provinces have experienced dramatic increases. Alberta took 4 times as many TFW's in 2009 as it did in 2005. B.C.'s numbers have more than doubled since 2005.

Here are the questions Mr. Norris, the government of Saskatchewan, and all provincial governments (particularly the provinces with such high numbers) have to answer:

1. Undoubtedly, "utter disasters" have occurred in other parts of Canada, particularly in provinces like Ontario, B.C., and Alberta which have absorbed the majority of Canada's 5 million immigrants since 1990. Why have academics like Professor Howe (as well as governments) not investigated and corrected the "utter disasters" ? Regarding academics, do we have examples here similar to those in Australia where most of the research funds available are for research that portrays immigration in a favourable light?
2. Since most of the 282,000 Temporary Foreign Workers who enter Canada are requested by employers, how closely have Saskatchewan and other provinces monitored employer applications for Temporary Foreign Workers? For example, the jobs that employers are filling are supposed to be advertised in Canada. Only if employers cannot find Canadians for those jobs are they allowed to bring in foreign workers. Mr. Norris says that employers were looking for workers with particular skills. So, what were the "skills" that Saskatchewan's 5971 TFW's had? Were they food service skills such as those used by workers at Tim Horton's, McDonald's, Wendy's, and the like? If so, were Saskatchewan Aboriginals and mainstream Saskatchewan residents just as "qualified" for those jobs, particularly if they had just lost their own jobs? The governments of all other provinces have to answer the same questions.
3. The 282,000 Temporary Foreign Workers that worked in Canada in 2009 is an enormous number. It is very hard to believe that Canada needed that large a number. This is especially true for the last 2 years when Canada was in the most severe of the three economic downturns it has experienced since 1990. The question is probably not "Have employers abused the programme?", but "How many have abused the programme and to what extent?" For example, some people have pretended that they are employers, advertised "jobs" that do not exist and, in effect, used the TFW programme as an alternate immigration programme. To what extent has this occurred with TFW's?
4. Some Canadians like to say that Canada needs Temporary Foreign Workers because Canada does not have enough people to do agricultural work. However, Canada already has a programme (Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme) to take care of agricultural worker shortages. Regarding actual numbers of foreign agricultural workers : in a June commentary on the SAWP programme, the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union stated that Canada allows about 15,000 foreign agricultural workers to be employed here each year. The key fact is that the number of foreigners who come here as agricultural workers is tiny, about 5% of all those who come here as TFW's. Compared to the number of all agricultural workers in Canada, the number of foreigners who work in Canadian agriculture is still quite small. According to one source, Canada has over 100,000 agriculture workers, but about 80% of them are Canadians. They enter under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme (SAWP) and leave at the end of their work term (usually several months).

A big question is this : If Canada is to bring in any Temporary Foreign Workers at all, why has it not used the cautionary devices in the SAWP programme as a model in order to avoid the "utter disasters" that have occurred in the past 2 years?

And of course, the biggest question of all is this : In a recession in particular, but even in good times, why is Canada bringing in so many permanent immigrants?

James Bissett, the former executive director of Canada's entire immigration service, helped set up the Seasonal Agricultural Workers' Programme (SAWP). It originated in 1965 for Caribbean Commonwealth countries and was later expanded to include Mexico. It was called a "Premium" programme because farmers paid the transportation costs of workers from and back to their country of origin. They also paid the prevailing wage for Canadian workers. A consular official accompanied the workers to handle worker complaints. The lodging that farmers provided was inspected by officials from the Canadian government and the home countries of the workers. Farmers could recommend good workers be permitted to return the next year. As a testimony to the good will that existed between workers and employers, on days off, the farmers took workers to events in their communities. In the winter, the workers invited the farmers to attend festivals in the Caribbean. While the workers were in Canada, farmers provided the workers with spending money. However, a key part of the programme was that a large percentage of the workers' wages was held back. This was done to ensure that the workers left Canada. When the workers returned to their countries, their wages were deposited into their bank accounts in their home countries.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">[back] Editorial comment: Whilst we appreciate that the expected growth in Saskatchewan's Aboriginal population may be the only way that they currently have to prevent themselves from becoming an even smaller minority, we at candobetter, nevertheless, hold that all population growth is unsustainable, whether caused by immigration or increases in the existing population.

With 2236 people arriving every week in Victoria - 1800 of those moving to Melbourne
Why buy east when you can Mumbai west? 11/9 The Age there is scant recognition of the amount of infrastructure needed to support these numbers.

Point Cook is called "Mumbai Cook". According to the article: one of Melbourne's newest suburbs tells an old migration story that echoes the history of places like Carlton's Little Italy - Lygon Street - or Richmond's mini Saigon - Victoria Street.

Comparing Melbourne's multicultural imprints of Victoria Street and Lygon street and Richmond simplify and hide the real issues here. It is the reluctance of our political leaders to acknowledge the world's global threats, and the impact of on-going and limitless population growth on an already stretched Australia's resources. Our wide and open spaces are being turned into housing estates!

What was stimulating in the past, and helped us create an economy of scale, is now toppling our population over the point no return, and human numbers will keep increasing.

Delhi and Mumbai rank among the world's top most populated cities. Mumbai, with a population of 20.4 million, occupies fourth place behind Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Undoubtedly, like in Australia, urban sprawl will keep continuing and real estate prices keep increasing. Property in Mumbai is already some of the most expensive in the world, and no doubt there are some great positives about the city, and some have become wealthy!

Everybody is searching for good jobs in Mumbai for earning money that can helps them to survive their life. But many of the people are unable to get the job even if they are talented and meritorious. Currently Mumbai stands communally far more polarised in terms of population distribution than ever before, and this is one of the primary reasons for the presence of crime in the society. The burgeoning crime rates to the fact that more and more unemployment has been created after the shutting down of the textile mills in and around the city. In India, religious and caste divisions generally coincide with economic divides, and these give rise to an amplified form of social division.

The city's crime graph, like its burgeoning population, is also rapidly rising: over the last decade the city has witnessed a 52% rise in crime.

Sankar Chatterjee, curator of paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University says that a meteorite more than 25 miles wide hurtling toward Earth at 36,000 miles per hour and caused massive destruction. In fact, the exact scenario played out 65 million years ago near present-day Mumbai, India, and could be the smoking gun that ended the dinosaurs’ reign on Earth.

The sixth extinction can't be blamed on meteorites but to human overpopulation!

Bringing Mumbai to Victoria's west is about importing this global threat to Australia. Despite the converging threats of climate change, peak oil, peak soil, extinctions, rising costs of water, power and infrastructure needed to maintain our lifestyles, growth continues!

Urban sprawl means additional infrastructure are needed for power, water, increased transport and health costs, not to mention the increase in greenhouse gas emissions!

The Australian Conservation Foundation has called for clear goals to stabilise our population, saying that a rising population will make it much harder to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, restore our rivers, biodiversity and soils to health and ensure a good quality of life for everyone.

Infrastructure spending will always be inadequate in keeping up with such high growth.

However, the tremendous financial and political power of the growth-lobby is far greater than the threat of anthropogenic climate change, or any global or local environmental or sustainability concerns.

For too long the immigration program has been out of public control and run purely for the interests of an elite number of business groups and portions of a pro-ethnic lobby who are both quick to throw the term "racist" or "nimby" when their their interests aren't pandered to.

Housing prices are at levels that can only be called unaffordable, cruel and family hostile. We used to be a country famously known for our rate of home-ownership! Now we have rising homelessness, mortgage stress and "shortage" of land and housing.

Companies no longer bother to run traineeships and apprenticeship programs because they prefer to import skills. Universities aren't training sufficient Australian doctors, so we have "skills shortages". They are poached from overseas to save on education costs, and create another justification for immigration.

Universities aren't funded sufficiently, so they must rely on foreign students.

Roads are congested, water and electricity costs are accelerating as fresh food prices inflate due to market becoming high density housing and as water is rationed to farms. Freeways costing billions must be built, in denial of peak oil, to keep up with traffic demands.

The growth lobby never admit that their population growth doesn't improve GDP per capita but only the overall size of the economy, or that the infrastructure shortfall makes everything more expensive.

You don't have to know that 35 per cent of Sydney's population was born overseas. Some areas are even higher. The ethnic diversity is overwhelming!

The elite business interests, the ethnic lobby, and the pampered property developers have their own selfish interests at heart not that of the general population.

http://www.fecca.org.au/

There appears to be another group of people that just enjoy screaming "racist" as a way of feeling superior! Secular humanitarian ideologies have become a major force, and keep promoting "equality" and a "one world" approach to everyone instead of patriotism.

Racism is more prevalent in poorer areas, and where third- and fourth-generation Australians live in ethnic enclaves, feeling like minorities. All this "diversity" and "multiculturalism" that we are supposed to embrace is the result of mass immigration, something we have no say about.

Immigration lobbies' selfish arguments have created their own myths for too long to justify our ongoing population growth. However, ideologies, economies and ideals are infinite, but not our land, our ecosystems, our limited fertile "green belt", our natural resources, our water, energy and our hip-pockets.

Sex is a voluntary act, therefore children are discretionary. The motivation to have many children to support a family is a backward primitive tradition that is an unsustainable, selfish burden and impost upon an already grossly overcrowded planet.

Yes, as one CanDoBetter.org contributor has highlighted: "the explosive population growth we've seen in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other predominately agrarian societies is due to most women having large families of 4+ children."

Big family culture is unsustainable and selfish

I refer to my previous article on this website of 11th August 2010 'Boycott charities until donations linked to conditional birth control and wealthy high-birth nations forced to fund their excess' and to my comment 'Time for third world charity to be conditional on birth control'.

A key solution to the global big family culture is for affected national governments to impose a consistent, long-term, mandatory financial combination of carrot and stick initiatives upon their populations, as well as from the United Nations/World Bank upon those national governments delinquent in population control.

The human global message is: Families must receive no public benefit beyond 2 children.

This is morally superior to China's one child policy. If the global community were to research the Catholic and Mormon culture of more wealthy western nations, they would realise that the burden and impost of big families upon the planet are far worse because the offspring consumerism demands are infinitely more extravagant. The United States is where the big family luxury problem lies.

Meanwhile...the Haiti Earthquake

While human family size is nothing to do with urgent humanitarian relief such as in neglected Haiti (Third World and overpopulated) following the Jan 2010 Earthquate, Haiti's extremely wealthy neighbour, the United States, has a neighbourly moral obligation to lead and finance the humanitarian relief and rebuild the social and economic infrastructure of Haiti.

Meanwhile...the Pakistan Floods

While human family size is nothing to do with urgent humanitarian relief such as in Pakistan (Third World and overpopulated), following the July 2010 Massive Floods, Pakistan's extremely wealthy neighbours, India, China, Russia and India's nearby oil rich Arab nations NO DIFFERENTLY have a neighbourly moral obligation to lead and finance the humanitarian relief and rebuild the social and economic infrastructure of Pakistan.

Indeed, worse than Haiti, given the pre-existing civil unrest associated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda terror threats, the real risk is that Pakistan could else fall into civil collapse and another war zone like Afghanistan. Cheaper to care for Pakistan now than wait until it becomes a terrorist haven. This is not rocket science!

Meanwhile...India's Extravagant Games

India's egotistically extravagant multi-billion Commonwealth Games should be cancelled! It is costing in excess of 15 times the original estimate!

The Indira Gandhi International Airport modernisation alone is costing nearly US$ 1.95 billion! [Read More] This is a comparable value to the crop losses from the Pakistan floods over India's border. [Read More]. And yet Indians and Pakistanis are the same ethnic people with mixed Hindu and Muslim religions, divided in 1947 by a tyrannical colonial Britain.

New Delhi Commonwealth Games Stadium.

Editorial Comment:

Australia is heading down the same way as the countries which John Marlowe uses as an example here. We are being treated like just another colony. There is nothing about our prevailing 'race' or 'ethnicity' that protects us from a colonial-style government that wants to maximise population for commercial reasons that have nothing to do with democracy.

Male Gang-Gang Cockatoo under threat in Hornsby and Ku-ring-gai from encroaching Sydney urban sprawl. © Ian Montgomery, Birdways

Australia's greatest social, environmental and economic problems are 'root (cause) driven' by immigrated (human) overpopulation.

Human overpopulation (from immigration and record migrant births) is putting unsustainable pressures on Australia's economy (demand driving higher prices, interest rates, raising the cost of living, reducing housing affordability, unemployment, record consumerism driving import demands and a spiralling trade deficit.

Human overpopulation (from immigration and record migrant births) are putting unsustainable pressures on Australian urban society (creating ethnic enclaves, fueling racism, causing road congestion, overloading public infrastructure - water supply, energy, hospitals, roads, schools, childcare etc).

Human overpopulation (from immigration and record migrant births) is putting unsustainable pressures on Australia's environment (river flows, sprawl destroying bushland and killing off wildlife, sprawl invading arable land).

Perhaps Sydney's Gang Gang Cockatoo deserves to be made symbolic of the environmental harm driven by the pressures of excessive immigrated population sprawl. An endangered Gang Gang Cockatoo population is found in forested gullies in Sydney's northern suburbs. It is threatened with extinction by encroaching urban development resulting in clearing of forest and woodland habitat for more human housing. [DEC]. The Gang Gang surely has a supreme moral right to be protected from extinction than the rights of invading humans.

Yet both Gillard's Federal Labor & Abbott's Federal Liberal talk of 'sustainable population' is mere hollow headline spin. Both are committed to economic growth, because they know no better.
Both are committed to encouraging skilled immigration because if is a cheaper bandaid measure for industries not prepared to invest in local vocational training. Both have deceitfully chosen a joint campaign of media distraction on a miniscule refugee issue.

Both are only using the phrase 'sustainable population' as a slogan for vote catching.
The LibLabs have become irrelevant.

The Greens immigration policy is mainly about encoyraging more asylum seekers and vaguely "support(s) skilled migration programs that do not drain critical skills from other countries and do not substitute for training or undermine wages and conditions in Australia."

The Nationals are just adopting a combined Coalition policy - committed to blind economic growth, a vague interpretation of what 'sustainable population means and a nominal reduction in annual immigration from 2% to 1.4% (170,000 p.a.) while "liberalising" arrangements for temporary business visas (457s).

So where are there immigration policies for Australia that seriously address the problem and subsequent immigration harm being caused? My own policy would be to effect an absolute moratorium for 24 months, during which time an independent commission assesses the triple bottom line (TBL) impacts and establishes true TBL targets and maxims for (1) population, (2) immigration, (3) supply minimums on a per capita basis for TBL outcomes - e.g. infrastructure minimums like '1 hospital bed per 5000 people' within a 30 minute car journey, etc. Such maxims set quantifiable limits on Australian social, environmental and economic values.

Of all the currently registered political parties in Australia, only the following have a serious policy committed to reducing Australian immigration:

Australia First Party (NSW) Incorporated

Australia First immigration policy reads:

"Australia First Party agrees with the notion that our primary reason for immigration should be based on Australia's need, i.e., the only justification for immigration is net value to Australia. We will make sure that immigration takes into account social cohesion, employment opportunities, urbanisation and environmental issues.

Our policy on immigration is "zero net" which means the number of immigrants we will allow in each year will equal the number of people permanently leaving Australia per year."

One Nation

One Nation's immigration policy reads:

"To restrict immigration except that related to investment and for this to continue at least until Australia’s unemployment crisis is resolved."

Secular Party of Australia

Although not advocating reduced immigration, the Secular Party of Australia does advocate reducing the Australian birth rate and has some comparable initiatives:

The Secular Party of Australia's immigration policy reads:

"Global population is a significant issue in dealing with many environmental problems. Australia is a dry but relatively rich country, and has a low population compared with our neighbours. Australia's resource wealth will enable us to maintain a privileged position in the global community. The Secular Party is opposed to policies that encourage a higher birth rate. It is the policy of the Secular Party to abolish the baby bonus.

The Secular Party deplores xenophobic attempts to demonise refugees and asylum seekers. We support continuation of an immigration program that is both economically beneficial and environmentally sustainable, and which provides sufficient allowance for our humanitarian obligations. We note that migrants to Australia must agree to respect certain values, including the equality of men and women, as part of the Australian Values Statement in the immigration application form. It is the policy of the Secular Party to consider means by which migrants may be required to respect these values that they have already agreed to."

is not registered with the Australian Electoral Commission for the coming Federal Election.

Its policies are:

"1. Adopt a formal national 'population policy' to stabilise Australia's population at around 23-26 million through to 2050. (Since we are at 22 million, this would mean a moratorium).

2. * Adopt a balanced and sustainable migration program, with annual immigration at around *50-80,000, being equivalent to total annual emigration.

3. Reject any selection of immigrants based on race.

4. Maintain Australia's current annual refugee intake of 13,750, within the broader immigration quota.

5. Phase out the Baby Bonus and re-direct funds to an appropriate parental leave scheme that promotes greater female participation in the workforce.

6. Tie foreign aid wherever possible to the improvement of governance and economic and environmental sustainability, with a particular focus on women's rights and education and on opportunities for couples to access family planning services."

"The Stable Population Party was due to be officially registered on July 24, but Julia Gillard called an early election on July 17 and prevented us from standing candidates under our party name." [SPPA website]

Serious immigration reduction policy for Australia is overdue. The longer we allow more and more arrivals, the closer Australia is approaching social, environmental and economic crises.

If Gillard is not a rehash of the hollow Rudd, who hoodwinked us into the false hope of the 2007 pork barrelling and spun that hollow 2020 Summit; Gillard's absence of maxims and deadlines for Australia's population/immigration targets only confirms voters ought to realistically presume more of the same.

Tony only wants to stop the boats. He is quite happy for the other 99% arriving by plane to keep coming.

Ordinary voters need to detox from this election bender. Only the political parties, their advertisers and their media allies stand to benefit. Like the pubs and clubs that own the pokies, they control the outcome and the punters lose.

Voters need to stop hoping things will improve under either LibLab party. After 21st August, we won't enter a new era. It will be more of the same. The media phasing will run to formula. First they'll flog reality TV labelled as 'Decision 2010', then there'll be celebration and paralysis by analysis, followed by a month of new government honeymoon hope, before inevitable criticism returns and the eggs start flying again. [I wish that bloke waiting in the Canberra café had been a better shot!]

If only voters for once would accept that after the election things do not improve either way. If voters vote non-LibLab for genuine change, there is a slither of hope that voters may get what they wish for - 'change'.

But who else is out there? With such a political vacuum, why are there so few choices, so few alternatives, so few leaders? The LibLab's have their oliogarchic system sown up with their donated millions providing campaign supremacy, their safe seats, their gerrymanders, the electoral system's prejudice against newcomers and small players, and the mainstream media bias allowing only the LibLabs their time in the sun.

So we cop the same old LibLab pendulous crap. In living memory is has been Holt > Gorton >McMahon> Whitlam > Fraser > Hawke > Keating > Howard > Rudd > Gillard... All LibLab. All like tired re-runs of M*A*S*H* once the ratings finish.

ABC TV's Tony Jones' current affairs debate this evening 'Dick Smith's Population Puzzle' provided first prominent Australian, Dick Smith, with a heart-felt concern about the uncontrolled, unplanned immigration surge impacting Australia, then second a rigorous but too brief a debate from nevertheless a fair cross-section of what appeared to be informed observers.

It was a good start and that's all it was. Where to next?

It was disappointing to hear the two ethnic voices, one Asian woman on the panel and a young Bangladeshi man, both critical and disrespectful of deep seated Australian notions of what constitutes Australian cultural values. New Australians do not help their cause when they outwardly condescend local cultural sensitivities. It is read as immigrant prejudice and would not matter which country they were in. Criticism of local values risks unnecessarily inflaming dormant nationalism. And nationalism in Australia is mild compared with that across the subcontinent.

Useful issues were presented from many quarters - Bob Brown from The Greens highlighting the global issue and the finite resource issue, Labor Minister for Sustainable Population Tony Burke MP seemed to have a balanced grasp of the key drivers and problems, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Scott Morrison offered constructive input, a developer in the audience pushed the 'growthist line for migrants at all costs, as did trolling boomer John Elliott. The mayor of Mt Gambier presented a constructive tangible example of regional inequality and opportunity. His example is one that should be extended to other regional centres. Other issues raised escape me from short term memory.

Encouragingly, all speakers on the panel and those Tony selected to speak from the audience, offered constructive ideas and input in one way or another. So let's not close off this valuable discussion while the topic is merely at an early chapter in public/political awareness and maturity.

One key observation is that Dick Smith, who dared to initiate the debate and invest much in the documentary, insightfully concluded that at least Australia is mature enough to start publicly debating the subject, but what needs to be thought through next is a national plan for a sustainable population for Australia into the medium term future.

Well done Dick Smith!

May the debate continue into the public arena hereon! CanDoBetter has been leading this debate on population for years, so it is good to see the mainstream media catch up!

Although human population is a global threat, Australians need to embrace the problem of population in Australia first and recognise it as a core driver of social problems in Australia - lowering quality of life, higher costs of living, urban congestion, overburdened public infrastructure, etc. Australians need to become more mature in tackling the debate and not let it slip into unrelated racism and refugee issues. In the process we need to be wary of self-motivated lobbyists and more attuned to the interests of all Australians at heart - indigenous Australians, ancestral Australians, birth Australians, new Australians, Australian society and the Australian disappearing natural environment last, but not least.

Frankly I am so glad now that Big Kev and his 'Big Australia' madness has been condemned to history.

The reasons The Greens remain a marginal alternative party are:

1. They exclude those not ideologically 'green', so alienation keeps them alienated from the mainstream

2. They do not translate their idealistic ideology into pragmatic shovel-ready policy initiatives with dollar values and immediate costed implementation plans; so they remain perceived as a futurist think tank, not regarded as a real-time alternative executive government.
Take the dominant election issue of overpopulation. The Australian Greens have an Immigration and Refugee policy listed under their category 'Care for People'. But they also have a Population policy under their category 'Environment'. This categorisation may seem odd, but the logic is that population is an underlying driver of environmental damage.

I have read The Greens population policy. It logically is grouped into 'principles', 'goals' and 'measures' (or policy initiatives).

The Greens 'population principles' are about factoring the impacts on the environment and society and living standards. They recognise the issue is complex and include issues like women’s rights, unsustainable resource use, inequitable distribution of wealth and power, multiculturalism, international human rights, the shortsightedness of being driven by economic goals, the ageing population and geographical distribution.

The principles and goals are what the Greens are good at.

But getting straight to the 'measures' or policy initiatives for the 2010 election, this is the motherhood waffle, and I quote their 5 vague 'measures':

1. Support, through extensive community consultation, a population policy directed towards ecological sustainability in the context of global social justice.

2. Work to achieve a sustainable relationship between humans and the environment by taking action:
- in Australia, including planning, consultation and a whole of government approach, to improve equity in consumption levels and resource and technology use; and
- globally, to improve social and economic equity and promote programs that empower women.

3. Implement the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action as endorsed by the Australian Government (this is humanitarian immigration and relevant to refugees not population)

4. Ensure that Australian family planning programs, both domestically and overseas, are adequately funded to deliver services in the context of reproductive health programs which increase the power of girls and women to determine their own reproductive lives, and increase the understanding of men of their reproductive responsibilities.

5. Prepare contingency plans for possible large scale humanitarian migration as a result of climate change.

Translated in simple terms, the above 5 measures mean:

1. A population policy so vague as to be anything they want it to mean
2. Make population environmentally sustainable somehow, ensure opportunities are made fair for all, and empower women.
3. Implement an 1994 international obligation on refugee acceptance
4. Improve family planning education to prevent unwanted pregnancies
5. Get ready for massive future refuge intakes.

Don't get me wrong, The Greens have some good ideas and frankly they are more 'forward thinking' than the LibLabs media reactions. But I don't support The Greens per se.

The are too pie in the sky! They come across as intolerant of compromising their environmental mandate with mainstream values of liberalism and work opportunity.

If the Greens come own from their ivory tower, resolve their cultural impasses and get relevant and pragmatic - then they may stand a chance of attracting the mainstream vote.

Until then, green pigs fly!

But the Greens need to learn from past rejection. They need to recognise that evolutionary pace dependent upon protest votes is unsustainable. Laissez Faire Greenness is delaying Green credibility by the mainstream and with recent trends it may be 2050 before Greens get a leg in.

The Greens need to get real, else bring on an alternative Liblab alternative with more than a single policy platform!

The political vacuum across Australia exposed by the LibLab boomer industrial thinking, and abandoned by the Democrats and lost in the rural wilderness by the Nationals, won't wait for no party.

Australian disenfranchisement with politics will not last long. Australia's political landscape is set to change.

"A Christian nurse who refused to remove a crucifix at work has lost her claim for discrimination after an employment tribunal panel ruled that she should have reached a compromise with her hospital employers."
[The (UK) Sunday Times, 7th April 2010, 'Crucifix ban nurse Shirley Chaplin loses NHS discrimination case'].

The case was first reported back in September 2009 by the (UK) Telegraph newspaper article, Nurse faces the sack for refusing to take off her cross'

UK Equality Act Open to Subjective Interpretation

It is inconsistent that a small neck cross worn by British nurse Shirley Chaplin could be health risk to patients, while bangles worn by Sikh nurses and while headscarves and long sleeves worn by Muslim nurses are not deemed to be a health risk to patients.

One rule for some?
Anti-Christian rules in a traditionally Christian country?
Workplace bias towards non-Christians?

The tribunal's judgment is inconsistent and discriminatory and so misinterprets the principle of equity in the workplace. It makes a mockery of the law. Worse, it contradicts and outlaws traditional British Christian values.

The UK Equality Bill became an Act of Parliament on 8 April 2010. [Easy Read Version].

The UK Equality Act 2010 was introduced to replace outdated, complex and inconsistent anti-discrimination legislation. It is intended to provide a more simplied legislative framework to protect the rights of individuals and advance equality of opportunity for all people in the UK.

The spirit and goals of the UK Equality Act 2010 seem fair and equitable for the most part by encouraging mutual respect, equal treatment and opportunity to people irrespective of gender, race, age, sexual preference, religion, ethnicity, disability, etc.

But is it achieving this?

The Shirley Chaplin case highlights a fundamental oversight in the legislation by permitting subjective interpretation of the Equality Act. The Equality Act's aim of addressing disadvantage and under-representation in British society, especially in the workforce, has to be consistent to be universally accepted across British society.

Shirley's tiny tight neckless cross a patient health risk? What a spurious diversion! What a dangerous social precedent for Britain! What gross injustice! The tribunal's biased decision exposes the failing of the Equality Act and a betrayal of British local tradition.

Are they going to ban church bells across Britain in case it may upsets immigrant Muslims?

The Equality Act rings dangerously like the Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement of 1938 which sought appeasement to avoid conflict. But equality is not about appeasement. It is about applying fairness consistently.

Inequality still prevails under the Equality Act. Now the pendulum has swung against the traditional Christian Brits themselves. What next, Sharia Law in the Royal Courts of Justice?

"Positive Action to Increase Diversity" - means just what?

The Equality Act also has a troubling component as well. It prescribes "Using positive action to increase diversity" to the extent that social minority groups should be represented at executive level of government, across the judiciary, in commerce and indeed across all social institutions.

It states:

Positive action?

Comments:

Given Britain's long Parliamentary history, given that mass immigration has only been happening since post WWII, fifteen MPs of differing races is frankly a significant representation. But an MP does not have to be of the same racial background to be capable of representing special interests of migrants of a certain racial subgroup in Britain.

Britons are represented based on the electorate they live in, not according to race.
Would it not be approximating Apartheid to seek parliamentary representation on a racial basis. When immigrants settle in a country they assimilate into the population. Migrants to Britain become British.

In any case, how does Britain compare to the countries where many of these different races originate? I would argue that it fairs incredibly fairly. How many non-indigenous MPs are there for instance in Indian, Pakistan or Bangladesh for instance? The following table lists where most UK immigrants came from in 2001.

And yes, ideally the top university positions should be held 50/50 men/women. But are senior administrative roles the types of jobs most women want? Yes the opportunities should be equal to women as they are to men and this university issue perhaps requires case by case analysis, but what is the end game by putting token females in these roles just to make the statistics comply with some utopian ideal? It would only undermine the rights of women to be treated equally as men on merit.

The problem with this utopian social prescription is that it prioritizes perfect and complete demographic representation irrespective of merit. The Act also fails to clarify the underlying vaues of British society and to provide for clear guidance when minority diversity clashes irreconcilably with the social values of the majority.

Britain is naturally dominated by Britons of Christian Anglo-Saxon origin (those born there with local ancestry). It is therefore logical that most social institutions are dominated by those of Christian Anglo-Saxon origin. Leadership is a factor of many complex attributes of a person particularly the understanding of the culture of an organisation. Cultural fit is a mission critical attribute of a leader.

Migration is changing the demographic makeup and steadily new arrivals are being represented, but social change takes time and must take time. The alternative of rapid social change is to risk social unrest. Britain is one of the few ancient societies that can lay claim to having averted revolution.

Leaders of UK society, indeed any society should be chosen on merit. If all minorities are to be represented on all social institutions, that representation risks being tokenistic.

It is a noble and ethical aim to be nondiscriminatory. It is totalitarian to impose minority interests on the majority.

Perhaps migrants with vastly different values sets to the dominant British values should consider the reciprocal application of such a law in their country of origin. How long will it take for such social equality to apply in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh?

The new UK equality legislation is being subjective interpreted to enable some social minorities to be more equal than others.

The legislation needs to go back to the UK's legislation drafting board.

Sitting Bull (c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man who led his locally indigenous people as a war chief during years of resistance to migrant colonisers in what is now South Dakota, USA.]
Read about the Native Americans

Cultural assimilation is about respecting and adopting the prevailing local ways of a place - language, laws, social values, behavioural standards, customs, intermarriage, and spatial distribution across the community, etc. Assimilation is a gradual change process.

Australia's most excessive immigration Prime Minister on record, Kevin Rudd, just gone, by allowing 300,000 immigrants into Australia in 2008 denied any chance of assimilation.

The idiom 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do', is an instructive guide applicable to any land - Australia, Kosovo, Mongolia, Tibet, Saudi Arabia, not just for visitors, but especially for immigrants. A country has no obligation to change and adapt to suit those from foreign soils. Indeed, immigrants have an obligation to be humbly grateful to their new host country and their new hosts. That gratitude deserves the respect of accepting the local ways, not seeking to change them.

Respecting locals, local rights and local values is akin to respecting one's elders - an underpinning principle of all human societies. Those that arrived first have highest moral claim. Nobody has greater right to a place than where they are born. No-one has control where one is born - as such birth rights morally prevail over non-birth (immigrant) rights; indigenous rights morally prevail over immigrant rights.

Where this lore has been savaged through human history is by the use of armed conflict.
That human history has been dogged with rape, pillage and plunder does not make it morally right that it should be repeated. Local rights morally prevail. This is a universal right deserving not just of the human world but also the natural world.

Immigrants rejecting cultural assimilation with the local population are unwelcome invaders by definition. Newcomers by rejecting adoption of the local culture, are disrespectfully asserting an unjustified claim to establish and impose a foreign culture. It is an invasion, albeit short of armed conflict, or what colonists euphemistically term 'annexing', but arguably that is one of the few differences.

Immigrants seeking 'a new life' in Australia or New Zealand have a moral obligation to respect and adopt the ways of life of the local inhabitants, not to impose their foreign ways of life upon their new hosts.

Both Australia and New Zealand immigration policies have historically performed a disservice to both the local population and immigrants alike, by abandoning immigrants in the assimilation process. By ignoring the full cost of assimilation under the cloak of multiculturalism, successive governments may have kept their quarterly cash books in the black, but let the social costs soar. Government immigration responsibility stops not at the airport arrivals gate but after assimilation.

The British were unwelcome invaders when Cook landed at Poverty Bay New Zealand in 1769 and then at Botany Bay, Australia in 1770. Subsequent exploitation, colonisation and mass murder in these islands by the invaders was wrong and immoral and indigenous generations have remained aggrieved and downtrodden ever since. Both histories are of violent invasions of native peoples lands. History cannot be undone, but must not be repeated. The current indigenous peoples remain complex open wounds awaiting healing.

With history unchangeable, it would take many more generations to come to achieve acceptable conciliation by the respective indigenous peoples. This unresolved conflict has a higher priority than adding to the problem with new immigration waves - and that is even if a genuine conciliation process was to start now.

But the national identity problem faced by both New Zealand and Australia stews at the psyche mainly because this process has not even started. It is symptomatic of the national immaturity of both nations.

Instead history has been successively repeated - immigrant wave after immigrant wave. The problems have been compounded because of the lack of assimiliation.
Enclaves of ethnic migrants have cemented themselves and more recently been exacerbated by short-sighted concepts of multi-culturalism, addressing skills shortages, fueling economic growth and allowing massive influx.

It is the disgrace of both these nations that generation after generation they shun conciliation with their indigenous, while generation after generation both nations perpetuate the fragmentation of their societies by encouraging migrants bringing 'old country' baggage with them. Seeking a 'new life' in a new country means just that!
Perhaps New Zealand as always leads Australia in some respect as it questions the 1840 multiple versions of the Treaty of Waitangi and M?ori-P?keh? relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Australian Aborigines have not yet been offered a treaty. [Read More]

As the immigration wave cycle is allowed to continue without assimilation, the largest populations of the world will ultimately swamp both nations, overwhelming locals, local rights and local values, ultimately with their own. As both New Zealand and Australia are democracies, once the migrant number reach majority, migrants will be in politics and power. Locals will become downtrodden and ultimately extinct like the Thylacene and Moa.

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