immigration

The Growth Lobby seemed to have gone to some trouble to justify immigration to Australia on Wikipedia. Immigration_to_Australia It seems dated during Rudd's tenure.

The arguments are shallow but useful in gaining an insight into the case for more immigration. The same old pro claims are presented:

Historical Success Claim - Immigration is good for Australia because historically Australia has had continual immigration and this has resulted in a growing economy.

Of course, this economic justification ignores the problems and injustices associated with invasion, convict settlement, colonisation, Aboriginal genocide and widespread deforestation.

It also presumes Australia’s historical circumstances have not changed and that carrying capacity is infinite. It also fails to acknowledge that immigration has concentrated in the Capital Cities of mainly Sydney and Melbourne, to the detriment of rural communities, which has encouraged the development of two Australia’s – an urban one and a rural one, with the bulk of government resources allocated to the urban one.

Skilled Migrants Claim Australian immigration policy is highly focused on encouraging selective skilled immigrants to fill skills shortages.

This argument is contradicted, when it identifies “in March 2009, the Australian Government announced a 14 per cent cut in the 2008-09 permanent skilled migration program intake from 133 500 to 115 000 in response to worsening economic conditions.” This indicates that migration does not encouraged improved economic conditions but exacerbates economic woes.
This argument ignores the 635,000 currently unemployed across Australia. How many of these are immigrants?

Immigration encourages multi-culturalism claim

The settlement patterns of Australian immigration have not been followed up with any programme of assimilation or any concern for demographic planning to avoid ethnic ghettos. As a consequence, instead of a gradual filtering of different ethnic groups across Australian society, each ethnic group has retained ethnicity, ways of life, cultures and values and many ghetto communities have been allowed to form. For example:

* Samoan enclave in Logan City (Brisbane)
* IndoChinese enclaves in Springvale, Richmond, Collingwood and Footscray (Melbourne)
* Korean enclave in Box Hill (Melbourne)
* Turkish enclave in Brunswick (Melbourne)
* Indian enclave in Hawthorn (Melbourne)
* Lebanese enclave in the Bankstown – Lakemba (Sydney)
* Vietnamese enclave in Cabramatta (Sydney)
* Indian enclave around Parramatta (including Harris Park, West Mead) (Sydney)
* Sri Lankan enclave at Strathfield (Sydney)
* Chinese enclave at Epping (Sydney)
* Sudanese enclave in Blacktown (Sydney)
* Malaysian enclave in Willeton (Perth)
* Indian enclave in Canning Vale (Perth)
* Papuan enclave in Cairns (Far North Queensland)

The trends show that these enclaves are being reinforced, rather than there being active assimilation with the broader community by federal immigration. Immigration is state-sanctioned invasion. Responsibly immigration respects local values first and ensures assimilation. Responsible immigration does not stop at the airport arrivals gate.

Immigration does not harm the environment claim
The argument runs that “on a global level immigration does not affect population” – it just redistributes it. Well since Australia is a more attractive destination for living, that redistribution is biased to Australia. Australia has become a melting pot magnet. Once Australia becomes over-crowed that attraction will dissipate but by then it will be too late to change. Forced emigration is not a democratic option, like encouraged immigration is.

The argument relies on the Productivity Commission, which has a mandate to encourage growth, so hardly a reliable source. “The Productivity Commission Inquiry Report No. 28 ‘First Home Ownership’ (2004) also stated, in relation to housing, that “Growth in immigration since the mid-1990s has been an important contributor to underlying demand, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne.”

Counter arguments about aligning population to environmental carrying capacity and the link between population growth and greenhouse gas emissions have been ignored.

Immigration doesn’t reduce housing affordability, rather it drives demand for better quality housing claim No basis is provided for this claim. It suggests migrants have more disposable income than locals which results in better quality housing. If this is true than wealthy migrants are displacing poorer locals.

Immigration raises employment levels for Australians who are relatively unskilled claim
No basis is provided for this claim. If migrants are only filling employment vacancies that cannot be filled by Australians, where are the verifiable statistics? How many recent migrants are in fact unemployed? Why are 635,000 Australian’s unemployed? Why would employers seek foreign workers in favor of local workers if the labour costs are equivalent, given foreign workers have added problems of language conversion, resettlement, cultural assimilation, permanency uncertainty. Why are Australia’s not allowed education opportunities to enable them to meet the local skills needs?

Negative population growth has adverse long-term effects on the economy as the population ages and the labour market becomes less competitive.

Perhaps more Australians would have larger families if the costs of living that existed in the 1950s boom were re-established. Immigration has raised demand, increased scarcity and driven up the cost of living, making large families unaffordable to all but e wealthy.

Immigration decreases unemployment claim This is a complete falsehood. Such a unsubstantiated claim needs more than theoretical regression analysis to even be listened to. While more immigrants will increase demand consumption for goods and services, that will encourage increased employment, if supply exceeded demand then why are process rising and not falling?

Immigration does not necessarily cause an overburden on public infrastructure claim
No basis is provided for this claim. The only justification offered is the biased “Productivity Commission's final research report found that it was not possible to reliably assess the impact of environmental limitations upon productivity and economic growth, nor to reliably attribute the contribution of immigration to any such impact.”

See also: "How the Growth Lobby threatens Australia's future" of 24 Jan 09.

Click for French tv coverage

Airport closed by Islanders

In August this year (2009) Easter Islanders, who are mostly of Polynesian origin, 'closed' their island for 24 hours, blocking the one airport. Their purpose was to demand limits on immigration from Chili and on the length of time tourists might come and stay.

The were demonstrating because of the impact of tourism and population growth on the island. The French Press described it as a fear that their 'island paradise' might be lost, but we should remember that the Rapanuans, as the inhabitants of Easter Island probably prefer to be known, clawed back from the brink of extinction after overpopulation, nearly reduced their island to a desert in the 18th century, forcing some of their ancestors to survive by cannibalism. If this island has returned to paradise status, it has been dearly-won.

It is ironic that the island that the world knows as the most famous case of overpopulation should even have to ask for control over their population numbers, but inspiring that the Chilean government has recognised this right in a country not known for its attention to human rights.

According to the Blog for the Association of Adoptive Families of Children born in Chili, Rapanui Mayor, Luz Zasso Paoa, commented, "We depend for our heritage on sustainable development; we have to take care of resources such as water, energy and the managment of waste, reminding people that Rapanuians have been sounding this warning bell for ten years.

Illustration: Interactive Wikipedia map of Easter Island and its sights

Dangerously High European Immigration

The population has increased at a dangerously rapid pace, mainly due to the influx of people of European descent via the Chilean mainland. At the 2002 census there were 3,791 inhabitants, up from 1,936 inhabitants in 1982. By 2009 there were about 5000 inhabitants. Rapanui is 163.6 km2, with little fresh water.

The island is also losing its native Polynesian identity to European Chilean sea-changers. The native Polynesians (known as Rapanuians) have dwindled from around 70% in 1982, to 60% in the 2002 census. Chileans of European descent formed 39% of the population, with 1% Native American from mainland Chile.) (Source: Easter Island Article ID: 53418

Each year 50,000 tourists come to visit the beaches and volcanic landscapes which are world famous for their giant Moai statues of stone. Rapanui is 3,500km from the Chilean coast, once the most isolated island in the Pacific, and the last to be settled by Polynesians. Some theories have it that the islanders' ancestors chopped down the last trees in order to keep on making those statues. The statues stare out to sea like an island SETI program, as if signalling that the island was inhabited, hoping that this once most isolated island in the Pacific might to be found by other friendly Polynesians in the once endlessly large universe of the Pacific Ocean.

In fact the island was found by unfriendly Europeans and many of the islanders who had survived cannibalism and starvation, were taken away as slaves in the 18th century.

Today the stone statues are again attracting the wrong sort of crowd.

Easter Islanders get power to limit immigration to their island

In October this year, after public consultation, the people of Easter Island (Rapanui) approved a reform of the Chilean constitution which will give authorities on Easter Island more control over migration movements. This was an initiative of the Chilean Government, designed in response to Islander concerns about the impact on their ecosystem and culture of growth in tourism and immigration.

96% vote to restrict immigration and tourism

Some 1,300 - or more than 96% of voters welcomed the reform, according to Chilean media sources,

The Vice Minister of the Interior, Patricio Rosende, explained that the vote will "help to regulate the growth of the population of the island. It is a very fragile place which won't support an indeterminate number of permanent inhabitants."

In September the government had launched a system of immigration cards to control the reason, length of stay and place of stay for visitors, as a first step to control immigration traffic. The Supreme Court in early October had ruled that this idea was 'illegal and arbitrary in the name of freedome to come and go in the country.'

The vote in October would launch a process to revise the article in the Constitution which already recognises that Easter Island has a special status.

Source of above:"L'île de Pâques vote pour contrôler ses visiteurs," Agence France-Presse, Santiago, Publié le 27 octobre 2009 à 07h52 | Mis à jour le 27 octobre 2009 à 07h55 and France2 archived television video at http://info.francetelevisions.fr/video-info/index-fr.php?id-video=MAM_1500000000004645_200908181520_F2 Accessed on 27 December 2009. Easter Island Article ID: 53418

The Future Eating Syndrome

Nowhere is the ability of a system to limit growth more important than on isolated islands. The Pacific Islands were the last in the world to be severely disorganised by colonisation and the ideology of "Progress" so dear to the growth lobby. The destruction of their original societies was documented by many sources, including religious, commercial and anthropological. But the fact is, Easter Island's grisly history turns out to be the exception to the Pacific Islander rule - at least for those many island societies that survived well. Generally, Pacific Island societies have been the greatest survivors ever known, with some lasting more than 40,000 years. Even Hawaii had lasted for about 3000 years before the arrival of Europeans. Japan is another example of a Pacific island that succeeded for a very long time without overshooting its resources. No modern European society can claim anything like this success.

The Easter Island story is of the late colonisation by a single party of Polynesians of one of the most isolated islands in the Pacific.

It was so isolated that it is thought likely that no further traditional Polynesian colonisers ever arrived. Despite these inauspicious circumstances, this one party of Polynesians seeded a complex civilisation in 390 or 400AD which reached numbers between 7000 and 10,000, profiting from the abundant sea-life and productive vegetation. But the downfall of the Easter Islanders apparently lay in their very success, for they reputedly ate themselves out of house and home, finally dwindling to a handful of incestuous cannibals, surrounded by those mute giant statues which had been produced by their dead civilisation. By 1700 AD population had dropped from an estimated 10,000 to around one or two thousand. It is thought that no visitors landed until the first European voyagers in 1722 who described the straggling survivors of the former nation.

This form of death to a society by over consumption has been held up as the likely or even as the inescapable fate of modern man and consumer society by eco-gurus such as Jarad Diamond (Collapse) and Tim Flannery. Tim Flannery called it "Future Eating" in his famous 1994 book, The Future Eaters (Reed Books). In a series of international petroleum depletion discussion e-lists led initially by Jay Hansen of www.dieoff.org, Easter Island has been held up to illustrate the proposition that humans will always overshoot their environmental carrying capacity.

That people of 'progressive' cultures have so easily identified Pacific Island societies as hopelessly unsustainable lies in the severe dysfunction of most Pacific Islander cultures since the majority were exposed to 'Progress' through mostly British colonisation from the 1850s. The spectacular fate of the Easter Island, which was thought to have occurred before any colonisation, simply confirms in most "Progressive" peoples' minds that the poor Pacific islanders must always have existed in hopelessly dysfunctional societies, doomed to bloom and die like so many tropical blossoms, due to some innate lack of the progress gene.

But all Pacific islands did not end up like Easter Island. Most did not. So the whole proposition that Pacific Islanders are chronicly in need of direction from outsiders is flawed. And there must be an antidote to the Easter Island future-eating syndrome.

Australia is to be counted among the once-isolated islands of the Pacific and Australian Aborigines once used the same sustainable land-tenure and inheritance system as all other successful islanders. The Australian and New Guinean Lapita people were present in societies at least 40,000 years ago.

'Modern' Australia is a product of British colonial history and a victim of the British capitalist land-tenure and inheritance system. For all that it is bigger and more resourced than its smaller neighbours and for all that the white population far outnumbers the original black population, Australia is dogged by the same exploitation, overpopulation, and ruin as the other British-colonised islands. Because Australia is bigger than the other Pacific islands, its ruin is taking a little longer than some islands' and most of us cannot see that what is happening in our suburb is happening all over Australia's thin strip of fertile coast. Rest assured, however, that if we keep going as we are, we won't last nearly as long as Easter Island did before it crashed. And, what is happening to Australia is also happening to North America, Canada and Britain.

Wouldn't it be great if the people of Rapanui, having learned from the pain of being unfairly held up as an example to the world, were able to stop overpopulation destroying them a second time.

Let's wish them the best of luck and follow their example!

JUST PUBLISHED UPDATE:

UPDATE DEC 2012: If you would like to know more, Sheila Newman has applied a completely new test of the collapse model of Easter Island, which will stun those who thought they knew all about it. Read about this in chapter four of Demography, Territory & Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations (see link). Forensic biologist, Hans Brunner writes of it: "This book takes us to a completely new paradigm in multiple species population science. It shows how little we understand, and how much we need to know, of the sexual reactions when closed colonies with an orderly reproduction system are destroyed, be it people or animals." Two chapters are on multi-species demography, the rest apply the theory to non-industrial societies, including Rapanui

My website: www.somethingfunnygoingon.com ~ My Book: Agent Provocateur: the backlash against the anti-smoking campaign ~ is concerned with Civil Rights, Over Population & Pollution

Origins and explanation of illustration [1]
Just so we understand one and other, I have some (not all!) - definitions of the words Patriot; Traitorous, and Bigot; they are derived from a thesaurus, and as such, become somewhat diluted as one progresses through the synonyms, however, I believe that essentially, the following words are best described as follows:

The thesaurus definition & synonyms of a patriot are: devoted; dedicated, dutiful, faithful, fervid, jingoistic, loyal, nationalistic, statesmanlike, zealous.

The antonyms of patriot are: antisocial, misanthropic, traitorous.

The Thesaurus definition of traitorous are: unpatriotic; double-crossing, double-dealing, ,betraying,

Outside legal spheres, the word "traitor" may also be used to describe a person who betrays (or is accused of betraying) their own political party, nation, family, friends, ethnic group, team, religion, social class, or other group to which they may belong.

The main definition of a racist is bigot: and a bigot is describes as being an intolerant, prejudiced person.

... And so, I would like to reiterate what many of us quite well understand, and that is, that further populating of Australia by means of Immigrants is unsustainable.

I hope not to be 'read' as a bigot, but rather as a patriot, wanting to preserve for current and future (made in Australia) - generations, a sustainable Australia.

From http://www.biosensitivefutures.org.au/overviews/overviews-1/major-ecological-issues-in-australia-today

- I have understood this:

All sustainability of our community requires adequate, clean water and housing. Neither of these requirements is commensurate with burgeoning populations who require more than an adequate supply of water.

Equally devastating to sustainability is the increasing requirement to find land suitable for housing (using arable land) and infrastructure, within the newly built ‘communities’, to enable them to function as a robust, productive society.

None of us wants to see our quality of life reduced – we all want to be able to use water when we want to, and a comfortable, affordable home – and jobs to fund our standard of living.

None of what I am saying is news ~ but I put forward the notion that it is patriotic to feel this way, and not a bigoted, antisocial motivation that drives me to write here, in this blog.

Further more, it should be noted that there is unlikely to be a reciprocity in the countries from whence our immigrants arrive; i.e. I would almost be certain that amongst other nations there would be a legal instrument to prevent advantage being taken of the nationals of those countries by international arrivals, intending to 'set up house'.

I believe that, as expected of us, we would fight, as patriots, for our Country - if we were at war ~ why are we not expected to feel the same way to keep our standard of living - to keep the peace? .. to maintain and keep our way of life, our valuable resources?

I believe that all Australians have a right to keep Australia safe, viable, and sustainable.

... Singapore has to buy water from its neighbor - Malaysia... do Australians want to... be in the same boat?

By the way, hands up those of you who feel betrayed by successive governments who have 'sold us out' to an unsustainable 'ideology' of populate or perish? I, at least feel, that successive governments in Australia have been treasonous - have been traitorous - to the Great Australian Dream.

Notes

Candobetter Editor:

Nation and Citizenship

Agent Provocateur has hit the nail on the head in defense of patriotism. There have been attempts recently to massage 'Nationalism' into a politically incorrect term. Whilst nationalism can get out of hand, as in National Socialism, and whilst Marx made good points about international workers' rights, the location of human rights and rights of citizens has always resided in the concept of the nation - first in Roman law, and later in French law. (To contrast: in Ancient Rome about 2% of people were citizens with full rights (women could be citizens but did not have full rights. ). By the end of the Roman Empire about 9% of people were citizens. A theory is that the rulers began to sell citizenship in order to increase their tax-base. [Sources: It has been estimated by William Scheidel, "Population & Demography" (Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics, 2006, that, towards the end of the empire, about 9% of the Roman Empire of about 70 million were citizens. This was after the rules of citizenship had been considerably relaxed. Bruce Bartlett, “How Excessive government killed the Roman economy, The Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-7.html. David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 2006, pp 166]

Nationhood and citizenship within it was the basis of the French revolution, which substituted a code of rights to property, shelter and self-government (i.e. the rights of 'free'-men for feudal subjection where only a very limited number of people in a polity had the right to own property and their own persons. If we abandon the concept of citizenship and the rights of citizens we abandon our rights to self-government. Then we risk becoming plastic entities in small power-bases where rights must constantly be negotiated. This was the situation during the medieval era in Europe. Because of the very poorly defined rights of citizens in most anglophone government systems, this constant renegotiation is a feature of our struggle to control national assets and resources.

[1] Origins and Explanation of Illustration. The illustration is of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, dated 1789, and the chief document of the first democratic French Parliament, 1789. Called a 'revolutionary' parliament, it was actually a legal parliament, formed with the King's consent, and based on legal rights of subjects which were carried principally by representatives of the low clergy and the ordinary people of Britanny, who were soon joined by people from all over France. The first violent act of the Revolution was when the king, in an attempt to rescind his authorisation of this document, surrounded Paris with royal troops under his command, with the intention of intimidating the people there. This prompted the famous 'storming of the Bastille', which has often been severely misinterpreted by anglophone sources as a strange attempt to liberate a few disreputable nobles from a debtors' prison by ignorant and misguided 'commoners'. The Bastille was, in fact, broken into by the frightened people of Paris in order to obtain gunpowder and weapons to defend themselves against the King's army.

The king backed down on this occasion, but monarchists in Europe constantly attempted to give him support to bring down the revolution. The French revolution did not end until 1846, and there were three restorations of monarchy. Napoleon's role was very interesting and important and represented France's war against a coalition of European monarchies, plus fascinating trade wars with England using this coalition. I

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens 26 August 1789was passed by the Assembly on 26 August 1789.

Passed by the National Constituent Assembly.

"All men are created and remain free and have equal rights.
That the natural rights of man are liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression.
That the principle of sovereignty resides in the nation.
That the law is an expression of the general will and that all are equal before it.
That every man has the right to be presumed innocent.
That everyone has the right to liberty of expression and that no-one may be harassed because of their opinions, including religious ones.
That the Constitution rests on the separation of powers.
That Property is an inviolable and inalienable right."

Under the Roman Law structure of French (and most European government) which Napoleon reinforced, it is difficult for private individuals to control more property and power than the state. The key to democracy here is citizens' rights as members of the state. In British law it is more easy for private individuals to gain control of property and power, which we seen in the rise of massive international corporations, which began in the era of coal-and iron based colonialism from Britain. The interpretation of the inviolability of property within the british structure of US government has had a problematic and undemocratic outcome in the US system. The Australian system also lends itself to this distortion, whereby it is possible to aggregate enormous amounts of land and resources under private ownership. Then the owners can form a private power-base, such as we see in The Property Council of Australia. Such a base has the power to influence government well beyond democratic control and there is always the danger that Government will merge with such power bases, which has happened in Australia.

Right to Vote

In France and Britain, women did not acquire full citizenship with voting rights until the 20th century. (British women 1928, with some property restrictions, and French women in 1944, with no property restrictions) However, France was way ahead of Britain and the rest of the world, in granting qualified (i.e. with exceptions) ‘universal’ male suffrage in 1792. Although this suffrage excluded women, the clergy, soldiers and Algerian French, it did not exclude the poor and landless (as long as they were men, of course). Universal male suffrage in Britain did not occur until 1918. Prior to the granting of universal male suffrage in France and Britain, voting rights depended on the possession of landed estate.

On 18 December 2009, Queenslander's were greeted with yet more bad news by Brisbane's Courier-Mail newspaper in the story "Monster power price hike" (in 19 December printed edition):

The Queensland Competition Authority (QCA) has just announced a draft decision that would see prices rise by 13.83 per cent between 2009-10 and 2010-11.

The decision would add an additional $276 to the average annual household bill of $2000.

It is the fourth successive jump in electricity costs since the State Government claimed deregulation of the industry would put downward pressure on prices.

The heavy price, already paid Queenslanders for former Premier Peter Beattie's decision, made without their consent or any electoral mandate, to privatise the retail arm of the state owned electricity utility, continues to climb.

The Courier-Mail's editorial of 18 Dec 09 attempted to rationalise this. It's title "Using less power is key to beat price rise" gave a clue as to what its tack would be.

It began by appearing to empathise with, but at the same time diminishing the grounds for outrage against this decision.

PRICE rises, particularly when the hand of government is involved in some way, are always going to be politically contentious.

As such, yesterday's draft decision by the Queensland Competition Authority ... sparked the predictable howls of protest from consumers and the Opposition, and grumblings from the Government.

Then it immediately proceeded to provide its own wholely predictable justification for the increases.

With the massive investment required to maintain and expand Queensland's electricity network to cater for a growing and increasingly power-hungry population, rises such as this were always inevitable -- ...

If price rises were 'inevitable' as a result of population growth actively pursued by both the Queensland and Federal Governments, then why weren't the people who are now being made to pay the costs, first asked?

As we have shown in other earlier articles, the Courier-Mail newspaper like the state Government has been playing a double game with the Queensland public on this issue.

For years both have been shifting between the outright encouragement of population growth and then, when the detrimental consequences have become too obvious to deny, a pretence that it is beyond our own contol. This has been described elsewhere in the articles "Exposing Queensland Government population growth duplicity" of 1 Apr 09 and "How Government and the Murdoch press deceive Australian public on immigration" of 27 Oct 09.

Whilst, in more recent years, Courier-Mail avoids explicitly stating its support for population growth, the same is not true of the national daily newspaper the Australian also owned by Rupert Murdoch. Examples of promotion of population growth and high immigration are listed in the abovementioned article. Another is the editorial with the lofty and pretentious title "Population is destiny" of 19 Sep 09 which enthusiastically endorsed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's stated goal of increasing Australia's population to 35 million by 2050.

The editorial makes sweeping claims about how such population increases will be of enormous indisputable benefit to all, but, of course, no-where does it mention the environmental, social and economic costs that Queenslanders are now being made to pay for population growth. No-where does it warn that charges for services such as electricity, gas and water will rise as a consequence.

For their part, the Courier-Mail's reporters and editors write of the effects of population growth as if unaware of the role played by the Australian in bringing it about.

If it chose the Courier-Mail could use, very effectively, its voice towards stopping population growth and the consequent harm, only one example of which that this editorial addresses. I have demonstrated that it has shown that it is able to on other political questions in the article "Courier Mail spins news of 79% opposition to fire sale to reveal its privatisation colours" of 11 Dec 09, but in regard to population growth, it chooses not to.

It lets off the hook the politicians whose undemocratic unpopular decisions have so harmed the public interest and continue to do so. In regard to former Queensland Premier Beattie, the editorial Courier-Mail's editorial contines:

... and former premier Peter Beattie was foolhardy at the time of the Energex retail sell-off to talk up the prospect of cheaper power.

The possibility that Beattie's long since discredited promise of cheaper power, rather than having been 'foolhardy' may have been judged necessary to achieve his goal of bludgeoning public opinion into accepting the deregulation and privatisation of the retail arm of the state's electricity utilities sector, is not considered.

Beattie's claim is only one of many examples of similarly baseless claims of the benefits of privatisation made by politicians. The possibility that claims made by Premier Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser today in support of their current bid to flog off $15 billion worth of public assets may be similarly groundless is, of course, never raised by the Courier-Mail with its readership.

The editorial argues against aginst any direct Government intervention to reject or curtail the price risese approved by the QCA:

Not only would this undermine the authority of the QCA itself, it would also be a recipe for disaster for commercial entities in Queensland's power sector, many of whom are operating on very thin and competitive margins as it is.

In fact, such a move would likely drive away participants from the sector, resulting in less competition and ultimately even higher prices.

So, the fabulous competitive energy market is apparently economically unviable, that is unless it is allowed to charge massively more than what the previous Government owned electricity retail arm charged for the same service!

Instead, the editorial argues that the Government act to modify consumer behaviour:

As was demonstrated during the water crisis, a concerted public information campaign can result in an enduring behavioural shift when it comes to consumption patterns.

Our love affair with airconditioners and other power-hungry appliances has resulted in average household consumption rising from about 6400 kilowatt hours to 11,000kWh in the past decade. And in the past five years the network has been expanded to cater for an extra 4200 megawatts of electricity at times of peak demand -- enough to power South Australia and Tasmania combined.
This additional capacity does not come cheap, and the costs must ultimately be passed on to the end user – and these are consumers who, on average, have increased their electricity consumption by 70 per cent in only 10 years.

Of course, the Courier-Mail now conveniently forgets its own past role in encouraging ever greater per capita consumption of energy and other resources.

One of the principle reasons for "our love affair with airconditioners" as the editorial puts it, is the shoddy designs of housing crammed together on sprawling suburban developments with little tree cover in between the concrete, the often black-coloured tiled rooves, guaranteed to absorb the maximum possible amount of heat and bitumen roads. Whilst the Courier-Mail clamoured to expand the housing development industry and the importation of customers for it, the Courier-Mail showed little leadership of which I am aware, towards at least ensuring that what was built would not be so energy inefficient.

Now people who paid so dearly to buy these dwellings may have be forced to swelter without air-conditioning in the summer heat or pay probibitively for it.

Before the Global Financial crisis, the Courier-Mail fed to Queenslanders expectations that the economic boom would last forever and, not that long ago it was considerably less circumspect in its support for population growth. It openly clamoured for ever greater numbers of people to move to Queensland to fill what it insisted were critical labor shortages as I described in the article "The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth" of  Jan 07.

Now we have discovered, to our cost, that this state never had the unlimited capacity to cater for new arrivals and ever higher per-capita levels of consumption that the Courier-Mail insisted that we did have, the Courier-Mail's own past consumerist propaganda, at least in some respects, is turned around 180 degrees.

The editorial concludes:

Without altering our behaviour, the only way to keep a lid on electricity prices is via government subsidies. And then we all end up paying more -- no matter what our individual usage -- through higher taxes.

Of course, we know better than to expect of the Courier-Mail to argue to end reckless Government policies of population growth and privatisation that created the shambles that the electricity secore has been turned into.

Instead, we are expected to fix the mess by reducing our consumption whether through smart means or by brutal means which will reduce our livng standards.

But even if we achieve this, it can only provided a temporary reprieve until we achieve population stability.

What you can do: Queensland citizens can sign the e-petition calling for the resignation of the Queensland Government and new elections. See "Anti-privatisation e-petition calls on Queensland government to resign" for further information.

Australia is copping an annual record 383,000 net migration as of last year. Why? Historically, this is tantamount to foreign invasion by stealth. In any preceding deacde in Australia's history, this number would be publicly considered an 'immigration invasion'. That it is not funded with proportionate government infrastructure to secure and maintain Australian living standards (aka home affordability, the idealised 1/4 acre block achieved by our parents, 2-3 kids able to attend affordable childcare, schools followed by affordable tertiary education, time with the children.

Wake up! Middle Australia and its ideal of a comfortable disposable income, low costs, spare time, paid overtime has gone. It has all gone since business was given cheaper options of overseas contract labour who knew nothing about unions and our legacy of fighting for workers rights, and since Australia's immigration tsumani forced an escalation in domestic demand.

Problem is Governments keep listening to their economic performance druids so as to pacify a media brainwashed in economic-or-bust theory. Perhaps as ancient Pagans listened to their druids, we are captive of the same aura.

Kevin Rudd and his Labor Party and the Liberal Party are conditioned to following modern day economic druids to guide them on national economic policy, but also to guide them on national social policy and national environmental policy. This is even though their druids have no knowledge, training or omnipresent guidance in social or environmental issues.

Makes one wonder!

Australians are being pacified and re-educated into believing misleading justifications like economic growth, addressing skills shortages, multi-culturalism, being a world citizen, etc.

Pacification is the final stage of any invasion and we're copping that when all criticism gets morally put down as 'racist'. But race has nothing into do with it. The problem is the sheer numbers, not whether they're from Suffolk or Timbuktu.

Emigration poster 1948: ‘Australia, land of tomorrow’, Joe Greenberg. Courtesy Museum Victoria


Australia's post-WWII notion of 'populate or perish' was a falsehood promoted by PM John Curtin's man Arthur Caldwell, fearing Australia's vulnerability to invasion from the north in the wake of how close the Japanese got in 1942. Our government no longer uses the justification 'populate or perish'; it's been long tried, debated and dismissed as nonsense.

But Rudd's Mass Immigration is nonsensical. He is fuelling domestic demand on the one hand and yet supposedly leading the international charge to cut greenhouse emissions on the other side of the world. Is this two-faced, dumb or is there an ulterior motive? Look at all the stress increasing population is putting on urban infrastructure and resources in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - where all most of the migrants chose to stay! There is an absence of demographic planning to spread the populatiion demand burden. Rudd is accelerating urban sprawl in these cities, repeating California's Dust Bowl Migration of the 1930s which caused the massive urban sprawl in Los Angeles. We have also adopted the US 20th Century car-centric urban design model. Rudd has a 20th Century US mindset and prima facie condemning Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to a Hong Kong vision.

A consequence of this invasion is the emergence of ghetto cultures. Assimiliating Immigration (sporadic, small scale) works when a few from many different nationalities integrate, then after a few generations they assimilate into the mainstream culture. New Australians learn the language, acclimatise, get accustomed to Australian mores and values. We witnessed this gradually, progressively over decades with the Greek and Italians, then the Vietnamese, and we are midway through with the Lebanese. Each of these people in many cases were fleeeing poverty, like the initial British colonists a hundred years before them. They were seeking a new life and oppogC?M?>??d?V???e?_?|?6hey keenly acculturate, adapt, blend in, intermix and become accepted as Australians. This is how immigration should work to maximise the benefits to both settler and host country and to minimise the problems...again to both settler and host country.

Muslim immigrants demanding minarets in Switzerland. Courtesy The Economist, 3rd Dec 2009, 'Return of the nativists'

But the 'Rudd Gates' policy of Mass Unsustainable Immigration is churning such a mass influx of new arrivals in such a short time. The social outcomes have been ignored is a desperate attempt to maximise the perceived faster economic benefits. New arrivals are abandoned at the airport arrivals gates to fend for themselves. With so many arriving so quickly, there is no time for them to properly assimilate into Australian society, culture and way of life.

Through no fault of their own, new immigrants without a sense or compulsion of assimilation retreat to their own group and end up forming ghettos of different cultures, quite emotionally detached from the Australian mainstream. How is this good for the host country, Australia, and indeed for the new arrivals themselves? This government abandonment helps no-one - the locals, nor the new arrivals. Immigration without active integration is flagrant social neglect and abuse on a national scale to all involved.

Mass unsustainable immigration over a short time has been shown to cause a deculturation of the prevaling society's values, cultures and ways of life. On only has to look at the social outcome and costs of the mass influx of Turkish immigrants in Germany, or the recent mass influx of Middle Eastern muslims into Switzerland or closer to home at the 2005 Cronulla Riots.

Mass immigration without integration unnecessarily hightens the risk of fuelling social friction and antagonism on both sides. It breeds nationalism and in the worst cases, racism and racist violence. And it is all because governments naively manage complex societies with an economic hat on, wanting to boost its economic performance figures.

But immigration without integration and assimilation is effectively a decultural invasion, that threatens the identity of the imcumbent culture. Look at what a Koel does: >em>"The Common Koel is a brood parasite, that is, it lays its eggs in the nests of other bird species. Common hosts are the Red Wattlebird, Anthochaera carnunculata, friarbirds, the Magpie-lark, Grallina cyanoleuca, and figbirds. A single egg is laid in the host's nest and once hatched the chick forces the other eggs and hatchlings out of the nest." [SOURCE: http://birdsinbackyards.net/bird/54]

Common Koel, male. Photo: N Fifer ©

So what are 'Australian Values'?

Australians need to start debating what it means to be Australian, what values we treasure, and which aspects of our way of life we are prepared to compromise and which ones we are not. Then we need to look at what is happening to those values and way of life and start addressing their erosion.

If we don't and just sit back, 'she won't be right'. Those values will have eroded and have become relegated to history, under our watch. When 383,000 from overseas are rocking up every year, their sheer numbers unchecked will inevitably reshape Australia.

What is Immigration Policy accountable for?

Government immigration policy needs to be held accountable to immigrants and to the consequential impacts that immigration brings to Australia and to Australians. It has become clear that it is unacceptable to all parties that immigration policy stops at the International Arrivals Gate, that it ignores the special needs of immigrants, ignores integration and assimilation, ignores the costs to accommodate this direct increase in demand, ignores the consequential costs on Australia. Assimilation takes time and generations.

Public and private infrastructure and resources are proportionally consumed for every additional person added to Australia (be it by birth or immigration) - housing, roads, schools, public transport, hospitals, childcare, fuel, groceries, and every human consumption need and want. Marginal planning for immigration that stops at the International Arrivals Gates and hand balls the triple bottom line problems to under-resourced State government budgets is irresponsible. It is no different to allowing cheap import dumping into Australian markets and sending local industry broke.

This is not an argument for protectionism. It is an argument about the lack of accountability of Australia's current immigration policy for the economic, social and environmental consequences it is causing. Immigrants deserve protecting and nurturing more than most and it takes decades to assimilate. Look how long it took the Greeks and Italians post-WWII to assimilate. My estimate it took two generations and it wasn't until the 1970s until the Australia-Italian mixed culture was embraced by the mainstream, even then there must have been a lot of trauma in the intergenerational acculturation process.

Are we really 'sorry' for marginalising some of Australia's society?

What is appalling is the continued marginalisation of Australia's traditional people from the mix. If Australia's way of life and values embraced aspects of that of Aboriginal peoples, like in some way the Maori in New Zealand have shaped Kiwi culture - (look at the All Blacks Haka), then as a society Australia may not have as much need now to reverse its environmental damage.

Rudd-gazing

Mass immigration is indeed the elephant in the room. For Rudd to ignore this, the dominant driver of consumption, and to spend time on trading green house gas emissions is to negligently navel gaze as if pre-occupied in Sudoku on one of the Titanic deck chairs. 'Rudd-gazing' has become the greatest eroder of Australian way of life.

Interactions between microbes and human hosts can range from a benign, even symbiotic collaboration to a competition that may turn fatal — resulting in death of the host, the microbe or both.  What could seem benign could be a threat to existing host cultures.

Rome Scenario:

British Military strategist Rear Admiral Chris Parry pointed to the mass migration which disaster in the Third World could unleash. "The diaspora issue is one of my biggest current concerns," he said. "Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned due to the Internet and communications..."  Europe, including Britain, could be undermined by large immigrant groups with little allegiance to their host countries — a "reverse colonisation" as Parry described it.

Parry stressed that these mass population movements could lead to the “Rome scenario” – a reference to the collapse of the western Roman empire in the 4th and 5th centuries under repeated blows from groups such as Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Suevi, Huns and Vandals surging over its borders.
"In my view," concluded historian Peter Heather, "it is impossible to escape the fact that the western Empire broke up because too many outside groups established themselves on its territories." In the end, the Roman Empire, built by controlled immigration, perished under an onslaught of uncontrollable barbarian migration.

Rear Admiral Parry went on to say he was not labelling any particular group as threatening stability , but observed that there were already more than 70 diaspora groups in Britain.

More white families are moving from London to the regions while many immigrants arrive in the capital from overseas, the think-tank
Migrationwatch says.

The change in 10 years has been "extraordinarily rapid'', with 606,000 more people moving out of London than arrived from elsewhere in the country. In the same period, a net 726,000 immigrants arrived in the capital.

The recent referendum in Switzerland that saw 57.5 per cent of the population voting to ban the construction of minarets.  This is extreme tolerance considering Christians in many Muslim-background countries are being evacuated, persecuted and even martyred for refusing to conform.

Denmark now has a law preventing citizens under the age of 24 from securing residence rights for their foreign spouses. In September this year, the Flemish city of Antwerp joined France in banning the headscarf in schools.  This is hardly "ethnic cleansing" or persecution but a protection of the host's skyline, religions and cultural identity.

Weapon of “racism”:

The weapon of choice for the political elite, against any members of the indigenous population who show dissent against loss of their homeland, is the charge of 'racism'.  The pursuance of 'racism' as the ultimate taboo is the means to a political end. This is about changing the face of a nation.

The best estimate of the First Fleet, that we celebrate on Australia Day, is 1373 people.  Today the numbers of permanent and long-term migrants arriving in Australia to more than 500,000 a year. 

A 50 year 'visionary' migration plan for Australia is being developed to take into consideration such things as climate change, water availability, security and labour demands.  There is nothing about preserving our identity, or assimilation, wildlife, or the greater challenges of climate change and the higher costs of living with more people here. 

It is all so easy to come to Australia and apply to stay here.  Students can do "post graduate" studies without having completed their first degree.  Students numbers who successfully apply to live here are a hidden number.

Ad hoc population growth is colonisation:

Immigration Minister Chris Evans may have branded Mr Andrews as hypocritical in saying that our intake of migrants to Australia is too high when the Howard government welcomed more than 1 million migrants during its tenure.  (#10;http://www.theage.com.au/national/andrews-call-for-debate-on-slashing-immigration-20091210-km93.html"> Andrews call for debate on slashing immigration, )
However, Kevin Rudd has increased the number of permanent and long-term migrants arriving in Australia to more than 500,000 a year!  John Howard was Prime Minster from 1996 to 2007, and this means his government's increase happened over more than eleven years!

Australia is already under stress from population. We are losing Ramsar wetlands, record numbers of native species, even flagship species, our coastlines are under threat from oceans rising, the Great Barrier Reef, the Murray Darling food bowl and our rivers are being choked by dams and drying. The projections for Australia’s climate make it clear that farmers and other Australians should be prepared for a hotter, drier future. Higher temperatures, less rainfall, and extreme events will affect water availability, water and soil quality, fire risk, loss of wildlife and the proliferation of pests and weeds. Despite the warnings, food producing fertile land, is under threat from urban sprawl.

Ad hoc population growth, without a population policy or scientific assessment of our carrying capacity, is reckless and potentially disastrous!

In fact 'immigration',  at Australia's rate of half a million new people a year,  is an incorrect description for a process that is, to all intents and purpose, that of colonization.

The media froth and bubble over recent asylum seekers arriving by boat near Ashmore Reef mid ocean between Timor and the west Kimberley coast pales in comparison with the daily arrivals at Kingsford Smith Airport in the middle of Sydney.

The Australian newspaper on 2nd November 2009, tallied the total number of Christmas Island detainees at 1165.
Given the genocidal situation caused to the Tamils in Sri Lanka, that number is miniscule to what it could be.

Australia stood back while the Tamils were being slaughtered, when it could have as a joint member of the Commonwealth, like Sri Lanka , got involved in the humanitarian crisis there years ago. What is the point of having a Commonwealth of Nations when at time sof crisis with one of its members, the others turn a bilind eye. Regional Indian Ocean members Australia, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Mauritius, Pakistan, Seychelles and Singapore - what did they do to help Sri Lanka resolve the Tamil conflict by diplomacy? Nothing? Sat back and turned a blind eye to Rajapaksa's Sinhalese government inflicting genocide on ethnic Tamils?

Now, Australia claims it has an asylum seeker problem, mainly from Sri Lanka, but also from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Pull the other one! According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] in March 2009, estimates of the number of asylum seekers in industrialised countries increased by 12 per cent in 2008 to 383,000. In 2007 the figure was 341,000. Of those, just 4,750 people sought asylum in Australia in 2008, compared to 3,980 people in 2007. Now we have just 1165 on Christmas Island, or 0.3% of the global asylum problem.

I agree with the Australian Human Rights Commission that Australia has obligations to protect the human rights of all asylum seekers and refugees who arrive in Australia, regardless of how or where they arrive, and whether they arrive with or without a visa." Refugees in this small number don't even show on the radar of Australia's immigration problem. If the number was up about 5000 a year the issue would deserve closer scrutiny and policy review.

It is about time the Australian media frenzy over asylum seekers was exposed for what it is - racist incitement!

Whereas in fact, the Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] has confirmed net migration into Australia for 2008-09 was 283,300. That is 776 new immigrants per day and most arrive into Sydney by plane. This is where the media should have their cameras - at Kingsford Smith Airport's International Arrivals gate on the ground floor. Again the issue has nothing to do with race, ethnicity or difference, but simply the sheer numbers arriving by the plane load daily.

This time last year, in December 2008, "the estimated population for Australia was 21.64 million - this represented an annual increase of 406 100 people (comprising the excess of births over deaths plus net overseas migration) and a population growth rate of 1.91 percent. This population growth rate was the highest since 1988."

Australia's Migration Programme

Why so high? Well, successive Liberal and Labor governments have persisted with a 'Migration Programme'. The planning level under the Migration Programme for 2009–10 is 168 700. It was originally going to be 190,300, but was adjusted down due to the Global Financial Crisis. 64% of that programme focuses on what the government calls 'The Skill Stream'

This Australian Government Skills Stream is killing off Australian jobs. It needs to be scrapped immediately. A skills audit needs to be conducted across Australian industry and the results channelled into the education and training sector to deliver appropriately skilled Australians into these skill shortfall areas. If there is a time lag, let's learn from why education has failed to deliver and fix the disconnnect.

Compare the 'Skill Stream' of 2007-08 to what it was in 1997-98:
'PERMANENT VISA OUTCOMES: 1997-98 to 2007-08'

So instead of the government investing in education and training to skill up Australians to meet skills needs, it invites immigrants to fill the skills shortages. It's a form of scab labour. What happened to Rudd & Gillard's 'Education Revolution'?

The Flood of Overseas Students

The Skilled– Overseas Student visa (permanent residence) is effectively an invitation to overseas students to come to Australia replacing local students in education and then displace local Australians in the workplace.
Since, the 1990s, Australian governments have deliberately reduced university funding. This has forced universities to seek alternative funding sources, most notably from overseas students required to pay full-tuition. Consequently, there has been a flood of overseas students driven both by education demand and massive international promotion by all Australian universities to the target countries. Not surprisingly, Australia has seen a considerable growth in the number of overseas students.

Way back in 1996, Ian Dobson from Monash University in his paper 'Overseas Students in Australian Higher Education: Trends to 1996' reported a 153% increase in overseas students in Australian higher education from 21,010 in 1989 to 53,188 in 1996. The Australian newspaper on 26th February 2009 reported the number in 2008 was a staggering 543,898. So on the 1989 base year, this represents a 2589% increase!

In the article 'Overseas student enrolments in Australia at record high' Federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard was happy with what's seen as 'international education' contributing $14.2 billion to Australia's economy in 2007-08, making it Australia's third-largest export behind coal and iron ore and "the rise in student enrolments from Asia - up 21.5 per cent - was recognition of Australia's ongoing relationship with its Asian neighbours and the strong awareness of Australia as a quality education destination."

Australia's Unemployment

Then we read today, the ABS announced Australia's Unemployment rate (seasonally adjusted) for November 2009 was 5.7%. This translates to 659,400 Australians that are unemployed.

People Dumping

Immigration is importing people and when it is on such a massive scale it is 'people dumping' just like import dumping of imported products on local markets. Australia needs to recognise, that it has local values to protect. Anti-dumping duties on low cost imports are imposed to fair up the pricing to protect local industries. In respect to Australian people and local jobs, displacing locals for overseas skilled labour is 'people dumping'.

I am convinced that Kevin Rudd is anti-Australian.

Some highlights (or lowlights) from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data. (All passages are quotes from the ABS website). The only thing good is that there is now more public discussion - despite the government and mainstream press wanting to suppress anything except the propaganda that growth is good. The incoming diaspora is not some irresistable force of nature; it has been coordinated by Federal and State Government policy in cahoots with the commercial growth lobby.


http://www.census.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/DetailsPage/3101.0Jun%202009?OpenDocument

Natural Increase to net immigration rate:

For 2008-09 natural increase was 157,000, and net overseas migration 283,300. No matter how you measure it, net migration has never been so high. (p. 10 has the overview of the main data.)

Natural increase for the 12 months ended 30 June 2009 was 157,800 persons, an increase of 8.4% (or 12,200 persons) on the natural increase for the year ended 30 June 2008 (145,600 persons).

Births

The preliminary estimate for births during the year ended 30 June 2009 (300,900) was 4.6% higher than the figure for the year ended 30 June 2008 (287,700).

The total fertility rate (TFR) for the year ended 30 June 2009 was 1.978 babies per woman.

For the 12 months ended 30 June 2009, Australia's population growth rate (2.1%) was almost double that of the world (1.1%).

After a recent increase in growth, Australia is now growing at a faster rate than many countries including the Philippines (2.0%), Papua New Guinea (1.7%), Malaysia (1.6%), India and Hong Kong (both 1.4%), Indonesia (1.2%), Viet Nam and Sweden (both 1.1%), United States of America (1.0%), Canada (0.9%), China (0.6%), France (0.5%), the United Kingdom (0.3%) and Republic of Korea (0.2%). The populations of Greece, Italy and New Zealand all failed to register a
significant growth rate (both 0.0%). Further, Japan experienced a decrease in its population (-0.2%). One country that experienced faster growth than Australia was Singapore (2.2%).

Impact

Australians are losing control over access to housing, resources and ammenities, with incoming immigrant stream often much wealthier than the average Australian. There is something very wrong with a political system that allows this to happen, indeed encourages it.

In my view our non-representative 'representative' government comes from our land-use planning system, which favorises aggregation of private land, which means that private individuals and corporations can acquire more power than governments. Our governments, at Federal and State level, are hard to distinguish from private enterprise, with the ALP having massive property and financial investments, and, in government, running government owned investment and property development companies - with private intermediaries like Advance and other lobby groups, Progressive Business organisation and Labor Holdings and Labor Resources. Sources: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2152596.htm, http://www.theage.com.au/national/labor-mates-linked-to-lucrative-winning-tenders-20090808-edlz.html, http://www.theage.com.au/national/in-the-murky-world-of-lobbying-mateship-is-king-20090808-edm6.html, etc.

What you can do

Be aware of what is happening, and try to educate other people.

Tell people overseas - notably in Britain, the source of many immigrants - that the government and private immigration agents are misrepresenting Australia as a big empty country.

Say that we are 75% rangelands (grasslands) and desert. The interior is flat and salty, with few permanent water-sources. Our rivers are slow-flowing and lose much of their water to evaporation. Our soils are thin and infertile - because the land has been worn down by erosion, without recent input from glaciers (as in Europe), river deltas (as in India) or volcanoes (as in Indonesia), which contribute to fertile soils.

Most people live on the South Eastern and the South Western coast. There is only one well-watered populous settled interior area, around the Murray Darling Basin, which is our major river system. Unfortunately this area is on the brink of ecological collapse. That means that we may lose our capacity to feed our own population in the manner to which it has become accustomed.

The only reason we appear rich is that we have shared a relatively small GDP among a relatively sparse population, like Argentina - which increased its population and lost that advantage. In fact, Australia is roughly comparable to Central and South American countries with low density indigenous populations and aggressive agricultural and mining colonisation.

Australia's GDP relied on the agricultural rape of the soil, which is ongoing, and on serendipitous gold-rushes and other mineral booms and speculation on real-estate. It now relies increasingly on selling off our assets, including finite supplies of minerals and hydrocarbons, along with flogging real-estate and the illusion of permanent jobs associated with ephemeral service industries.

There are severe water problems in most cities, massive public and private debts, housing shortages. Australians work extremely long hours, their industrial relations rights have virtually disappeared, the work-culture is cruel and competitive in the worst way, and obesity is rising.

Say emphatically that Australians were not consulted about this massive program of immigration. Say that we may appear like a democracy, but that we are being treated still like a colony, with cheap workers and an extractive economy. The suicide rate is up and so is obesity.

Neighbours is a developer's wet dream and more and more people live like Kath and Kim, like aging, half-educated children, herded into 'estates', reliant on cars, with shopping center, commercial parlor games and more debt their only desolate outlet.

This was never the Australian dream.

Skippy is being starved out and chased onto the road for new developments to accommodate off-shore purchasers.

Say that the government is working with big business to take over our agricultural land and making it almost impossible for people to supplement their incomes by growing their own food.

Say that our native animals are being hounded to extinction, losing their habitats to urban expansion, and our cities are being turned into inhospitable and unnatural glass and concrete human menageries.

Write for candobetter - in comments and articles - on your feelings about this, since we represent one of the few 'free presses' in Australia. Write for other good internet publications. Join and assist protests by groups like Planning Backlash, Protectors of Public Lands, and Sustainable Population Australia, Australian Wildlife Protection Council. Eschew professional 'conservation' organisations and councils that receive grants from government or from big business.

If you are a member of any political party, raise the issues at stake and encourage your membership to get behind Kelvin Thomson's point population reform plan. Point out that your leaders are not representing the electorate or the party membership and look around for new leaders. Form breakaway groups if you can.

Your party leaders will not thank you - yes, not even the Greens. Unfortunately, the 'authorities' are simply not to be trusted; they have parasited an undemocratic situation. You will encounter severe opposition from a self-important few. That is how things got this way; anyone who raised the issue of population stability or reduction would be attacked by stooges. But people will note your courage and gradually you will find support.

There is the beginnings of a ground-swell, however, and if you and I stand up to be counted, others will.

Every day the problem gets worse; everything we can do to reverse the process or slow it down, gains time for more action.

In solidarity.

Meeting 29 November - details end of story

Overpopulation will worsen if government has its way

Australia's population is now rising at about 2% per annum. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced that our population could rise to 35 million by the middle of the century. Other experts estimate that 35 million is a conservative figure and it could be more like 40 million. It is certain that If the current growth rate continues, the population will double in 35 years. That means our population would be 44 million by 2045.

Natural and Vital resources becoming rare and unaffordable

Australia's environment is under stress already with 22 million people. Not enough water reaches the mouth of the Murray River to keep the lakes of the Coorong alive. In Victoria water restrictions prevail and a desalination plant is being built. This means there is not enough fresh water in the state for people's current needs.

Who do our leaders represent?

Why are our political leaders so pleased about the level of population growth when it causes so many logistical and environmental problems?

Democracy now

A handful of politicians voice an opposing view to the prevailing glee about growth.

The Hon.Kelvin Thomson MHR for Wills is notable amongst these.

Come and hear Kelvin Thomson speak on:

- "Population reform- Political challenges"

When?
3.00p.m. Sunday November 29th 2009

Where?

Meeting Room 1 North Melbourne Library (upstairs) 66 Errol Street, North Melbourne

(next to the Town Hall and Post Office near the corner of Errol and Queensberry St. (Parking usually available in surrounding streets.) Tram No 57 from Elizabeth St. travels along Errol St.

All welcome ! This is a public meeting held by
Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian branch)

Please join us for afternoon tea and meet Kelvin Thomson afterwards.

contact

Jill Quirk President: Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian branch)
[email protected] (If that doesn't work messages will be forwarded from astridnova[AT]gmail.com)

0409742927

This is a dramatic turn of events

First it was Kelvin Thomson MP and now Bob Carr former Premier of NSW speaking out strongly about the increase of population being forced on us by Federal and State. Will this strike a chord and open Pandora's box for the government?. Will the silent majority finally speak out?

Population numbers is the factor behind our planning and development woes and also helping to wreck our environment.

"In March the Australian Bureau of Statistics projected that one scenario, with ramped-up immigration, could mean a population as high as 42.5 million by 2056. Its mid-range scenario comes in at 35.5 million.

I need only summarise the indictments of such high-end population growth. It assumes rainfall reliability not reflected in any known data. It ignores evidence that high immigration has only a marginal impact on age distribution over the long term. It glides over the proof marshalled by Ross Gittins that high immigration worsens, not relieves, skill shortages. It also spikes the cost of land and cruels housing affordability."

Bob Carr has spoken out strongly this morning in a truly major article in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, but it did not get printed in the Age, though it is on their website, only printed in the Sydney Morning Herald.

In his article, Carr makes clear just how irresponsible the behavior of bureaucrats and governments has been. For instance he says,

"Yet none of the Canberra bureaucrats who ticked off high immigration were required to link rising population numbers to water. Not to the fragility of the Murray and Adelaide's reliance on it for 90 per cent of its drinking water; to the unpredictability of south-east Queensland's rainfall; or to the unknowns about Perth's Yarragadee aquifer. ... Letting annual arrivals blow out to 500,000 a year required not even a one-page summary of environmental implications.",/blockquote>

As he puts it, there is now a deepening "rift valley between 90 per cent of Australians and their political and business leadership over population policy, or rather the absence of any policy except "more".

If you want to comment on Carr's article, the email addresses for letters to the editor are
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected]

Below is the link to the article.

Perish the thought that we can handle a bigger population

by Bob Carr,
November 19, 2009
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/perish-the-thought-that-we-can-handle-a-bigger-population-20091118-imfv.html

This is an interesting supplement to the drive for high immigration and a huge population in Australia. It also gives an account of the role played by The Movement (B.A. Santamaria) in the Australian Labor Party's long exile from government before Whitlam. Some interesting background on Labor Party figures currently in government or recently in opposition.

This research was concluded in 2000, when the ALP had been in opposition since Keating's fall, and the author welcomes feedback and new information on this period and its sequel. See also an analysis of what drives a similar pronatalist movements in Russia in Putin’s Pro-Natalism Miscarries

New South Wales Royal Commission into the Decline in the Birth Rate

In 1904, in response to the decline in the population growth rate in New South Wales and Victoria, the New South Wales Royal Commission into the Decline in the Birth Rate (RCDBR)[1], composed mainly of businessmen with a financial interest in liquidating stagnating property assets, launched pro-natalist and immigrationist recommendations that were to set the tone for a long time to come. In the future much Australian industry, but especially the housing construction and infrastructure industries, was to become dependent on population growth.[2] This is a dependency it shares with other new world colonial states, such as the United States and Canada.[3 ]

National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)

In 1944 the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) took up where the RCDBR had left off forty years ago. Deploring the “forty year decline in the birth rate” and disparaging a rise in the birth rate between 1940 and 1943 as due to a temporary rise in marriages due to war time, the NHMRC called for pronatalist policies [4], encompassing the provision of housing, home help, child care for everyone, and kindergartens and better medical services. They also drew attention to the importance of the role played by economic security. The only alternative to an increase in natural increase would be an increase in immigration, but in 1944 that seemed to them an unlikely prospect.

Chiffley and Menzies and Immigration

However the Chiffley (Labor) and Menzies (conservative, Liberal) governments, although strongly populationist, seem to have largely ignored the 1944 pronatalist policies recommended by the National Health and Medical Research Council and to have relied on immigration. This may have been because the baby boom made pronatalist measures seem redundant as long as it lasted. The initial hope was to rely on natural increase to make up one per cent of population growth and immigration to contribute another one per cent. In Australia the immigration program had marked nation building aims but also had the major function of providing a ready supply of labor for industrial expansion.

Papal conspiracy, Communism, Democratic Labor Party and ALP

But what had happened to the strong pronatalist traditions which had persisted through the Second World War to the 1944 Report of the National Health and Medical Research Council? How could they just have disappeared?
In fact pronatalism continued to exist, particularly in the Australian Labor Party, and especially among its Catholic members. However it is hard to find any record of related pronatalism and policies in the literature which has been written about family policy of this time. This may be because an entire block of pronatalists separated off from mainstream Labor parties in a traumatic split in 1954. The Democratic Labor Party which resulted from this failed to flourish.
Remarkably, these events do seem to have been the culmination of a down-under papist conspiracy, far-fetched as that may seem. At the time Protestants outnumbered Catholics in Australia and Catholics had encountered discrimination in the workforce, especially during the Great Depression. There developed a secret society of Catholics, organised and under the direction of bishops [5], to carry out a Vatican encyclical inspired plan to Catholise Australia.

Catholic Action and the Catholic Social Studies Movement and Dr Santamaria

The secret society, of which the full name was “The Catholic Social Studies Movement” grew out of “Catholic Action”, a concept developed in Europe in the 19th Century [6]. Catholic action had been active in Australia from the 1930s and was particularly concerned about the spread of communism. However “The Movement”, as it came to be called, had a wider range of free standing policies and combatting communism may in the end have been more of an excuse for its empire building activities. It was led by Dr Bob Santamaria, an Italian born Australian lawyer of unshakeable religious convictions, intelligence, charisma and a taste for power. The first edition of its weekly newspaper, Freedom, was launched in September 1943. The centre of the Movement was in the State of Victoria, although it was Australia wide.
The Movement was highly pronatalist and immigrationist [7]. The pronatalism and immigrationism, as well as important for increasing the number of Catholics in Australia, were also crucial to its major plan, which was to block further urban concentration and settle the hinterlands of Australia with a vast population of contented peasants congregated in rural communities. Redistribution of wealth – not communism, but in the context of setting up a population of small property and business holders - was the economic philosophy [8].
Among the stated policies of the Movement were:

“8. Payment of a marriage bonus and payment of adequate family allowances, 11. Possession of Family Homes for all.” [9]

In effect the campaign sought the reunion of Church and State, as we can see from the item about education:

“9. A National System of education, 20. Recognition of religion as the basis of education.”[10]

The leader of this movement, Bob Santamaria, gave pronatalist and defensive reasons for the emphasis on rural development in Rural Life, May 1951. He wrote,

“...The second reason was national. Professor Macdonald Holmes proved to us that the birth rate, the very strength, the very numbers of our community, depended upon the strength of rural life. We were given time and again the relative birth rates in metropolitan, provincial, and country areas, and it has been proved, not only through Australian experience, but through world wide experience, that any increase in population must come from the rural areas. Therefore if we hope for survival of the country everything has to be done to build up those areas which have been given us Australia.”[11]

Was Chiffley influenced by “The Movement” – Murray Darling Basin and Snowy Mountain scheme?

It is interesting to note that a number of policy items from the movement were eventually carried out. Arthur Calwell, (Labor) the first Minister for Immigration under the Chiffley Labor Government and main driver of the post 1945 massive immigration program was himself a practising Catholic [12], and, although he did not follow other Catholics into the Democratic Labor Party, it seems plausible his policies were influenced by ideas emanating from the Movement[13]. Among those polices taken up were two calling for the institution of a bigger migrant intake and intensive irrigation in the Murray Darling Basin, with hydro electricity generated in the Snowy Mountains to be used exclusively inland, to encourage industry [14].

ALP, Unions and Reds under the Beds and Santamaria

There is evidence that in later years the Labor Party showed a high degree of confusion on whether to take seriously the threat of imminent invasion, which, with the maoist revolution, suddenly replaced that of a communist takeover of Australian unions [15].

This is perhaps not surprising, given that Santamaria and Catholic activists who had preceded him in the Labor Party had initially been preoccupied with the 'enemy within', to wit, the issue of the communist take over of Australian unions. There was for years a battle for dominance within the party between its communist members and its Catholic members. When the Movement began to organise a secret resistance network to communism within the union movement and the Labor Party, the issue of communism as a threat was covertly sown but absolutely pervasive and deeply rooted. Suddenly, after the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, Santamaria virtually stopped pushing the communist union issue in order to take up foreign policy and the threat of invasion by Asian communists. His theme was “Ten minutes to midnight”[16].

ALP Split from within – confusion reigns

The seismic split that divided the Labor party in 1954 identified the Catholic activists from the Movement as the threat from within, and so this must have made those Labor party members outside the movement wonder if the communists really were the enemy. And, since the Movement activists had led the Ten to Midnight campaign about the threat of Asian invasion, it is not surprising that those Labor party survivors of the split had become disenchanted and distrustful of all that old rhetoric.

Liberal foreign policy

The rhetoric of course had taken on a life of its own, of reds under the beds and the yellow peril. It was now the basis of official foreign policy under the Liberals, with a major immigration program the chief strategy for defense. Birthrates were of course coming along quite nicely all by themselves.

Purge within ALP

In December 1954 the Movement-sympathetic Victorian Executive of the Australian Labor Party was outlawed. By means of elections run by the Federal Executive despite the defiance of the incumbent executive, it was replaced by a new anti-Movement Victorian Executive. On 30 March 1954 the John Cain Victorian State Labor Government resigned and reformed, excluding four Catholic supporters of the outlawed Movement-dominated Victorian Executive. Seven Victorian Federal parliamentarians – S.M. Keon, J.M. Mullens, R. Joshua, WM Bourke, TW Andrews, JL Cremean and WG Bryson – all Catholics except for R Joshua, were expelled from the Australian Labor Party because they refused to declare their loyalty for the new Executive.

Both ALP and the New Australian Labor Party (the early DLP) lose election

These seven expelled ALP members met in April 1954 and formed a new Australian Labor Party, known as the “Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist)”, which eventually became the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) [17].

Both Labor Parties contested the next Victorian election and, unsurprisingly, both parties lost to the Liberal Party.

It must all have been profoundly traumatic. Not only would documents and records have been lost, but there was a sudden rupture in the chain of human command and in the chain of human message bearers within the party.

Although the baby boom would have obviated any but extremist preoccupations about the birthrate, pronatalism must have been considerably “on the nose” anyway in the Labor Party, at both Victorian and Federal levels. It could not help but be associated with the policies of the treacherous Movement that had infiltrated the Party to such a degree. Even if there had been widespread concern about communism within and without the Party, the tactics of the Movement overshadowed this.

Whitlam Era: Pronatalism on the nose

At any rate, in these intrigues may lie the explanation for the apparent disappearance of pronatalism after 1945. It had been there but in one fell swoop a great many pronatalists had absented themselves to form a major political vehicle and had formed a new party. That party struggled on and probably assisted the maintenance of the Labor Party in opposition for many years. The Democratic Labor Party never really achieved much success for itself and whatever pronatalist agenda it retained failed to make much impact on Australian policy. In 1974, encouraged by Gough Whitlam, the last of the DLP members of parliament, Vincent Gair, resigned to take up an appointment as a diplomat to Ireland.

As well as distancing itself from a foreign policy based on threats of invasion, Whitlam’s government, from 1972, launched a number of widespread policies to promote family planning, women’s rights and equal opportunity. For a long time the Labor Party stayed well away from pronatalism.

“Movement” disbanded by Vatican 1957

The Movement was officially disbanded by the Vatican in 1957. The DLP became a Federal party, but never rose to any great success. Santamaria never became a member of parliament but was a major influence on the policies of the DLP. In December 1957 Santamaria formed the National Civic Council to continue anti-communist work.

The National Civic Council still exists. It has various offshoots, including the Australian Family Association, which is domiciled in the Thomas Moore Centre in North Melbourne. It is run by one of Santamaria’s daughters and produces a newspaper, the News Weekly, which has a circulation of 10,000. It is still a pronatalist organisation, but lately has become less supportive of high immigration [18].

For years Santamaria had a column in the Australian, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch who is a Catholic convert and was recently made a Knight of the Vatican. The newspaper is very much in favor of high population growth. Santamaria died in 1998. He had eleven children.

Pronatalism creeps back: Peter McDonald and others

Towards the end of the 1990s it seemed to me that pronatalism was returning to polite demographic discussion.

On the 14 October1999 there was a big demographic conference at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, “The Transformation of Australia’s Population 1970-2030.”

Chaired by ANU Demographer, Peter McDonald [19], the conference had a strong streak of pronatalism. It was the first conference of academic importance that I had attended where there was a serious and almost unquestioned assumption that Australia and much of the developed world were threatened by the ‘grave’ possibility of 'exponential decline' in population. Impressive Power Point displays showed the populations of the United States ballooning like a cheerful fat man, that of Australia dwindling and feeble and Japan, with a total fertility rate of 1.45 and zero net immigration fading to a pitiful anorexic spindle.

The presenter of this session on “Comparative Fertility Trends,” was Professor Phillip Morgan of Duke University. The assumption at the beginning was that Australia would not be able to get the kinds of skilled immigrants it was felt would be needed in sufficient quantities and that there would be economic chaos if the population were allowed to decline. This left the only option to somehow boost the birth rate. (Note that Bruce Chapman, ANU professor of Economics who presented the session on the future of the labor force did not share this opinion at all. Rather he surmised that, employment wise, it would probably be an easier world in the next 35 years than it had been!)

I have heard that the Federal Labor Party had eschewed mention of the declining Australian fertility rate for a long time through a strategic desire to avoid feminist backlash [20].

Kim Beasely as ALP leader, his MP father, and pronatalism

On 15 May 2000, however, the leader of the Australian Labor Party (in opposition), Kim Christian Beasely, made a press release regarding a discussion paper on ALP Family Policy. This was reported on West Australia local ABC news item on the 15th May.

Interestingly the current ALP leader’s father, Kim Edward Beazley, was still the patron of the Australian Family Association in 2000. The Australian Family Association in Victoria is housed in the same premises as as the NCC, at the Thomas Moore Centre and is something of a “sister group” to the NCC. Kim Edward Beazley was a West Australian member of Parliament and member of the Labor Party. In 1950 he was an Anglican [21] but showed sympathy to the Movement’s policy ideals, notably that of allying the party closer to US foreign defense policy than British [22]. He has long been a committed member of Moral Rearmament [23] and a dedicated anti-communist. In March 1955 the Federal Conference credentials of Kim Edward Beazley senior were suspended for three years by the Western Australian ALP along with those of three others who were identified as sympathetic to the divisive aims of the Movement [24].

The Family Policy that ALP leader (1996-) Kim Christian Beasely announced in 2000 included greater access to Child care and higher endowment, concluding with a statement to the effect that this policy package would also be likely to raise Australia's falling birth rate. This was most important as "the present birth rate was leading to an unsustainable population for Australia. There is a pressing need to encourage higher rates of childbirth."[25 ]

The paper itself, entitled “Family Futures” emanated from the office of South Australian member of Parliament, Mr Swan, the shadow minister for family affairs. It explicitly denied “putting pressure on people to have children, or any such antiquated rubbish, but rather, making life easier for families; both in financial terms and in terms of the time balance between work and family life. However, arresting our declining birth rate is only a threshold issue. If we can provide more people with the opportunity to start a family, we should be prepared to back this with policies that deliver ongoing support from the time children are born.” The bulk of the policies were for better provision of child care ; there was little, if any, financial inducement. Nevertheless it is inescapable that the document has for its major raison d’être increasing the birth rate.

Angela Shanahan

Apart from the more specialised Financial Review, the Australian (which also appears as the Weekend Australian) is the only wide circulation national newspaper in Australia [26]. In 1999 Angela Shanahan first appeared as an occasional feature writer in a column called Focus . Shanahan seems to have been selected by the Australian as a pronatalist writer. Her major qualification for this post, apart from her reasonable ability to write, is her claim to be the mother of nine children. Since mothers of nine are a distinct minority and therefore could not represent a large and influential market for the Australian, one assumes that the newspaper is towing a pronatalist line.

“Procreative minority” was the title of her piece in the Weekend Australian on 20-21/5/2000 [27]. In it she describes a “kind of pursed-lipped, neo-Darwinian attitude of “the poor breed like rabbits”” She pushes the line that Australia has a “shrinking and aging population”, concluding therefore that “opposition to income support for big families is puzzling.” She attributes this to “extreme environmentalism or an ideological antipathy to the nuclear, patriarchal family which, in feminist newspeak, is always oppressive.” She promotes the idea of greater financial support for big families because they produce the “taxpayers of the future.” Disparagingly, she describes single people as “lonely old singles who never did manage to confront their fading youth”, and she complains that her children will have to support these singles as well as herself and their father.

Essentially she is suggesting that government should pay a wage to women who produce children and that this should be scaled to the number of children and that the tax system should be reformed to tax families rather than individuals. She does not go into detail but refers to the policies of the National Civic Council linked Australian Family Association.

This paper was written in about 2000, placed here in pdf form on 28 June 2006, and slightly reedited for the internet on 9 Nov 2009. Copyright to Author, Sheila Newman
Astridnova[AT]gmail.com Please cite: Sheila Newman, “Pronatalist Policy in Australia from 1945 to the turn of the century,” (2000) candobetter.org/node/623

Notes

[1 ] See most documents dealing with the history of population enquiries in Australia, e.g. Neville Hicks, This Sin and Scandal, ANUP, Canberra, 1978, p.93, Stefania Siedlecky & Diana Wyndham, Populate and Perish, Australian Women Fight for Birth Control, Allen and Unwin, Australia, 1990 and Borrie, W.D., (Chairman), Population and Australia, A Demographic Analysis and Projection, First Report of the National Population Enquiry, Parliament of Australia, 1975, Parliamentary Paper No. 6, Printed by Courier Mail Service, Campbell Street, Bowen Hills, Brisbane, Queensland 4006., Vol.1

[2] Sheila Newman, Malthusianism, Neo-malthusianism and Women’s Rights in Australia, from 1770 to the 1990s, published on French internet site, Populatique, CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), http://www.ehess.fr/populatique/, Ed. LeBras et Ronsin of EHESS. Curiously, the Commission had ignored the impact of gold rushes to New South Wales and West Australia in removing males of reproductive age from the South Eastern States, and they also ignored the dampening effect the desperate economic times must have on the remaining population.

[3 ] Conversely, from 1974, Western European economies began to gear to population stabilisation and decline and the housing industry adapted to factory built housing on demand, instead of engaging in land speculation. See http://dieoff.com/page194.htm

[4] Borrie, W.D., (Chairman), Population and Australia, A Demographic Analysis and Projection, First Report of the National Population Enquiry, Parliament of Australia, 1975, Parliamentary Paper No. 6, Printed by Courier Mail Service, Campbell Street, Bowen Hills, Brisbane, Queensland 4006., Vol.1, pp193-194.

[5] Paul Ormond, The Movement, Nelson, 1968, p 122. Ormond cites part of a letter from the Editor of the Melbourne Catholic newspaper, The Tribune, Mr Ted Adams, to T.M. Butler, (5 May 1961): “As at April 1955, the Movement was an authentic Catholic activity with a madate from the Hierachy. It was directed by and its executive officers were responsible to an episcopal committee. In such circumstances it was surely the function of a paper under Catholic control to reflect its policies without question, and to reject any submission which brought them into the sphere of open debate.”

[6] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp44-46.

[7] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp44-47.

[8] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp47-48. Murray cites the first issue of the Movement’s weekly newspaper, Freedom, where the movement’s policy was described under twenty points: 1. Public control of monopolies, 2. Public conrol of credit, 3. The Institution of Industrial Councils, 4. Assistance to small owners, 5. Part ownership of industry for the workers, 6. Co-operation in all aspects – producers, consumers, marketing, insurance and credit, 7. The principle of an Adequate Income for all, including a minimum wage that will meet all the needs of the family, allow it to provide for the future, attain to the ownership of property and imporve its cultural condition, 8. Payment of a marriage bonus and payment of adequate family allowances, 9. Wages a first charge in industry, before dividends or profits, 10. Equal pay for equal work, 11. Possession of Family Homes for all, 12. A strong program of regionalism, including spreading of all the conveniences of the city to the country home, 13. A national campaign for Family Land Settlement, 14. A radical crisis to solve the problem of rural debt, 15. Independent Farming as the normal productive policy, 16. Co-operation in agriculture, 17. A Fair Return for the farm production, 18. Self-government of agriculture, 19. A National System of education, 20. Recognition of religion as the basis of education.

[9] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp47-48. Murray cites the first issue of the Movement’s weekly newspaper, Freedom, where the movement’s policy was described under twenty points.

[10 ] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp47-48. Murray cites the first issue of the Movement’s weekly newspaper, Freedom, where the movement’s policy was described under twenty points
[11] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p111
[12 ]Paul Ormond, The Movement, Nelson, 1968, p.116. Ormond comments that Calwell, who was a practising Catholic, felt that he had been ‘frozen out’ of his Parish Church when he did not go with the Democratic Labor Party at the height of the Labor Party Split in the 1950s. Instead he changed churches.

[13 ]Although note is taken that Calwell was criticised by Movement supporters for his failure to support the movement and was slurred as a communist. See for instance, Ormond, The Movement, Nelson, 1968, pp115-116.

[14] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp 55-56, “Mostly under the influence of [Colin Grant] Clark, [economic advisor to the Queensland Government and a convert to Catholicism], the main lines of Movement social policy by the early 1950s ... [included] 6. Social services designed to encourage big families, 7. A bigger migrant intake, to build up the population, with many of the migrants being settled on the land and a high proportion of them Catholics, 8. Intensive irrigation in the Murray Darling Basin, with hydroelectricity generated in the Snowy Mountains scheme to be used exclusively inland, to encourage industry....”

[15] K Betts, Ideology and Immigration, MUP, 1988, pp86-87. She cites Dennis Altman, Rehearsals for change: Politics and Culture in Australia, Fontana, Melbourne, 1980., p.101. Betts identifies the schema of threat of invasion as a motivation for populating the land. She comments that this was a topic of open debate towards the end of the 1960s, for a short time. “In the years after World War II the development of Asian communism seemed to make the issue simpler and starker, at least for conservatives.” She adds that the picture was rather more confused for the Labor Party, and describes Calwell’s attitude as combining strong committment to the threat schema, whilst refusing to assign that threat directly to either communism or to Vietnam. She cites Denis Altman as arguing that such confusion characterised Labor thinking in the pre-Whitlam era.

[16 ] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p56.

[17 ] Paul Ormond, The Movement, Nelson, 1968, p.93

[18] Personal communication from Robert Birrell, reader in Sociology and Anthropology at Monash University and author of many books on population growth in Australia.

[19] McDonald’s articles about population projections have been cited by the Minister for Immigration (who is the defacto minister for population) and some McDonald material was displayed on the website of the Minister.
http://minister.immi.gov.au/media_releases/media99/r99115.htm:

“Minister Releases New Findings on Australia's Ageing Population, MPS 115/99 .
...A new report entitled The Impact of Immigration on the Ageing of Australia's Population has been prepared by ANU demographers Professor Peter McDonald and Rebecca Kippen, and projects that the proportion of Australians over 65 will double over the next 40 years. Those over 65 are expected to represent 24 per cent of the Australian population - the result of Australians having fewer children and living longer. While the report found that the ageing of Australia's population is inevitable, it states that factors including current migration levels will have an impact on the composition of the population into the second half of the 21st Century. "This research indicates that calls for a significantly larger Migration Program on the grounds that it would help keep Australia younger are misdirected and ill informed. Higher net migration would add to the size of the population but would have little impact on the age of the population," Mr Ruddock said. "Equally, heeding calls for zero net migration would accelerate ageing of the population." Wednesday, 11 August 1999, Media inquiries: Susan Sare (02) 6277 7860 or 0407 415 797.

[20] In 2000 I listed my source as confidential, but I don’t think this factor is any great secret.

[21] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p.146.

[22] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p.42 & 146.

[23] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p.264

[24] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p.241

[25] Report on ABC News Item sent to me by email on 16 May 2000 by Vice President of West Australian Branch of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population, Paddy Weaver.

[26] The print media is almost exclusively dominated by only two chains; the Murdoch and the Fairfax Press.
[27] “Procreative minority” is the title of her piece in the Weekend Australian on 20-21/5/2000 p.30.

Population

"Population - Mr Rudd – When do we stop?"

The quotes in the teaser were from a press release by Bob Brown on 18 September 2009.

Ed. The Speech below was made yesterday. Unfortunately, the Greens are having problems with a small, noisy, nasty minority - in Victoria at least (and rumour has it that pressure comes from South Australia) - which is preventing the majority from placing restrictions on numbers of immigrants. This minority has infiltrated all political movements and knows how to frighten people into shutting up. However, they should not be frightened, because they will have the support of the majority of good people.

From Matters of Public Importance speech Senator Brown made yesterday (28 Oct 09):

In the last few days we have had the Prime Minister talking up the prospect of an Australia in which 35 million people live. We are at 23 million now. We were some seven million when I arrived on the planet. You would not remember that, Madam Acting Deputy President Carol Brown! But we have to ask the logical question of Prime Minister Rudd: ‘Name the final point. What is the ultimate carrying capacity of Australia if you say that growth is dependent on population increase ad infinitum?’ The logic of that is that there is no end point, that we not only continue to cram people into this giant country with very limited carrying capacity but we continue to cram our fellow human beings, all of whom aspire to life and happiness as much as we do, onto a planet which cannot bear it.

I will read from the National Geographic’s EarthPulse: State of the Earth 2010 document, which says it is a collectors’ edition—and I wonder if that says something about the future as well. It says:

Scientists and policymakers have warned that environmental degradation and global climate change could cause massive displacement of populations some day. For millions of our fellow humans, driven from their homes by melting permafrost, increased coastal flooding, or desertification of once arable land, that day has arrived.

Hard numbers are elusive, but an estimated 25 million people are environmental “refugees” (officially, that word is reserved for those fleeing armed conflict). By 2050, that number could jump to 200 million. Climate change is projected to increase aridity in already dry areas, and to spur more extreme rainfall and flooding events such as one that displaced more than two million people in the Indian state of Bihar in 2008. Perhaps most alarming, even modest sea-level rise will wash away the homes and fertile fields of millions more.

On the next page, it goes to ‘Forced Migration, Hotspots of Global Change, Bangladesh’. There is a picture of three women up to the top of their shoulders in water. The woman at the front has a floating metal vessel in front of her. Obviously they are appealing to the photographer and whoever is behind the photographer for some form of sustenance in a neighbourhood where, if you are going to stay there, you will be up to your shoulders in water because of the flood. It says this about Bangladesh:

Low-lying Bangladesh foretells the future of climate refugees. Because roughly half of the country lies less than ten meters (33 ft) above sea level, it has been flooded more frequently as glacial melt in the Himalaya has risen. Tropical cyclone activity is also likely to rise in the near future, swelling the Padma (Ganges), Jamuna (Brahmaputra), and Meghna Rivers, which all lie within the country’s borders. Climate refugees already account for more than a third of recent migrants to Dhaka, the capital. Nearly 80 per cent of the nation’s legal disputes are over land erosion triggered by storms.

I watched on television just the other night as people hastily pulled down their corrugated iron shelters in Bangladesh as the banks collapsed on a river and eroded 100 metres across the fields upon which the people depended, to swallow their houses. The people hastily collapsed their houses to at least take away the building materials.

We are in a world that is in very great human-induced trouble. «Population» is part of that. When I came onto the planet, in 1944, there were 2.5 billion people. There are now 6.8 billion people, a tripling almost. By mid-century, when youngsters now will be in their middle age, it is projected there will be nine billion to 11 billion people—more likely 11 billion if you read this National Geographic special, which is currently on the bookshelves. Add this to that. At the front of the book it says:

Together we consume 1.4 Earths’ worth of resources per year.

In other words, we are burrowing away at the bounty which we need to survive. We will need 3.1 more planets if we are all to survive by mid-century on the average British level of consumption, which is below ours. That cannot happen, and we have to have the wit and wisdom to find a way to share better, to work with each other, to reduce consumption and to reduce «population growth. I hope the Prime Minister has got a lot of thinking occurring on that, because Australia is charged with being a leader, not at the back, when it comes to dealing with the issue of how we human beings are going to live peaceably with the planet instead of off it.

Pro-population-growth dogma costs Australians dearly

Continuously increasing mass immigration leading to population of 35 million and beyond is now official Australian state dogma. In other words, 14 million people - more than the 12 million that was the population of this country when I was a child in the 1960's - are to be deliberately added. The evidence of harm already caused by past population growth to the existing population, exactly as our normal intuition and common sense would have predicted, is overwhelming:

Our roads are congested, our buses and trains are packed tight, often leaving many waiting at bus stops and stations. The costs of all basic services -- electricity, gas, water, council rates, vehicle registration, parking, etc. -- are climbing through the roof.

Our governments openly justify these cost imposts on the basis that they are necessary to pay for the replacement and/or expansion of existing infrastructure to meet the needs of additional people, but they don't admit that they are responsible for inviting those people.

Where our taxes once paid the full costs of roads and bridges, people are now forced to pay the order of well over a hundred dollars each week to commute to and from work through toll roads, toll bridges and tolled tunnels.

Bligh arguments chase their own tail

Premier Anna Bligh even defends her Government's deeply unpopular $15 billion government asset fire sale on the grounds that it is necessary to pay for population growth. In a letter to me dated 9 Jun 09, the Premier stated:

... a State with a rapidly growing population can't afford to ease off building the infrastructure that supports our economy and community._#main-fn1">1

Yet, the Queensland Government continues to advertise for people to move from interstate and from overseas to Brisbane and, last weekend Premier Anna Bligh actually welcomed the 'challenge' that further population growth would provide.

Absurdistan quality of life in Brisbane

The purchase or rental of secure, free-standing housing in areas close to work and amenities is completely beyond the means of most Australians, even in double-middle-class income households, where wealth has not been inherited.

Many renters have little choice but to share the same roof with possibly incompatible strangers._#main-fn2">2

In one case, during the 2008 Queensland state elections, I even met two Brisbane women who, had not known each other only months earlier but now shared the same bed in a boarding house. The reasons were completely unromantic: Neither could by herself afford to pay the full rental of the one-room furnished accommodation. It was an arrangement of urgent necessity.

Despite the constant mediatised government propaganda that tries to normalise overpopulation, many Queenslanders must have been shocked to read in the papers of as many as 37 foreign students sharing a single house in an outer southern suburb of Brisbane_#main-fn3">3. That story was a chilling reminder of what the government expects ordinary people to put up with in the government-driven competition for space on the rental market.

The cramming of ever more human beings closer together in high rise units in Australia, is even causing residents to complain of being exposed to passive smoking by neighbours smoking cigarettes on nearby balconies.

High immigration pushes wages down and costs up

Instead of business and government sharing the responsibility of training and retraining new workers, the Australian government is making it easier for Australian businesses to import newly skilled immigrants. The cost of self-education is rising like other costs that were previously provided through our taxes. Now mature Australian-born workers, many with degrees, who once enjoyed well-paid occupations, earn marginal incomes in low-skilled jobs, replaced in their old positions by waves of recently skilled young immigrants. Some go into hock to try to keep up, or cash-in their superannuation to retrain, with no guarantee of any job-security.

In an increasingly casualised workforce, the breaking down of Australian conciliation and arbitration law and the state award system, the mass-import of ever more workers from overseas, many studying bogus courses, inevitably pushes wages downwards.

All this population growth makes the cost of living (land for housing, housing prices, rent, water, electricity, petrol) outpace any wage rises.

In Queensland, I know of how one cleaning contract company that paid its workers decent wages to clean a hotel a few months ago, lost the contract to another company which employed foreign students at bare minimum wage rates. I have been told that the security at the August Brisbane Royal National Show (aka the 'Ekka') was handled by a contract company that employed students, again at bare minimum wages.

Not surprisingly, as pay is reduced to the basic wage and sometimes even lower in casualised private industry, competition is high for the diminishing number of jobs where the requirement to provide relatively decent pay and conditions remains. In my own experience, even entry-level clerical positions in the Queensland public service now attract large numbers of applicants. Perhaps only those prepared to spend days or weeks arguing on paper their suitability for the job in the arcane jargon of the advertised selection criteria, exhaustively targeting their letter of application, stand a chance. Many who don't have the temperament to repeatedly devote hours of their days to this demeaning and, to my mind, socially pointless activity simply don't bother and miss their small chance in this employment variation of lottery.

Wildlife, green spaces and farmland destroyed for infrastructure and expansion in less-than-zero-sum game

Natural habitat is being cleared to such an extent that the koala, among Australia's most iconic species, is expected to be extinct in SouthEast Queensland in as little as two to seven years. Many other species are also threatened. Farm land is daily sacrificed to more housing. But not only farmland - entire rural communities such as in Queensland's Mary Valley - are threatened with complete destruction through inundation to provide water for our involuntarily growing population. And even then, for all the obliteration of good land, loved wild places, social histories and memorials, the water in the resulting dam - if it even accumulates - still won't do for Queensland's growing population if the government is not stopped from continuing to aggressively invite more people to come and live here.

Where have the people given Governments their consent for massive population increases?

In a democracy the people affected should expect to have the final say in whether or not to continue with such clearly harmful policies. So corrupted have our political institutions become, however, that our official political rulers show no more sign of understanding their obligation to the electorate than their friends in the corporate elites and the newsmedia. The government's obligation is to get the clear consent of the affected taxpayers at every stage of planning massive new developments and if it intends to engineer changes in population growth. Government should not go ahead without clearly informed consent. It is not enough to 'consult' if this only means telling the affected population what you have already contracted to go ahead with.

Instead of accepting the will of the people, however, Australian governments, state and federal, blithely pretend, despite our overwhelming experience to the contrary, that population growth is self-evidently and unquestioningly of great benefit to us all. Not content with dragooning the taxpayer into paying for ever more vast infrastructure and population expansion debt, they also expect us to pay for the coercive spin. An example is the taxpayer funded full page advertisement of 8 December 2005, signed by then Queensland Premier Queensland Peter Beattie, also reproduced here.

This advertisement, "Four million Queenslanders tomorrow," marketed the dangerous ballooning of Queensland's population to 4 million the next day as an unquestionable and incontestably positive achievement, as if it would be welcomed by all. Four million represented the doubling of Queensland's population since 1974.

The advertisement concluded with the words:

To all Queenslanders, I encourage you to warmly welcome our new arrivals.

Who, you ask, other than a life-hating, stick-in-the-mud, could possibly not have been moved by these cheerful words from Queensland's obviously life-loving, well-intentioned leader?

The role of the news-media in packaging and delivering Australian population policy

The implicit unstated lie contained in that advertisement was that the Queensland Government has carefully thought through how they would prepare Queensland to cope with the influx they encouraged. In subsequent years, Queenslanders were to learn to their enormous cost that it had not.

Now, in 2009, many of those same Queenslanders who, heeding their Premier's advice, may have extended welcoming arms to new arrivals from interstate and overseas, find themselves homeless, living in precarity, or on a grind of wage-slavery and debt, even if they are professionals, to pay rising rents and purchase costs. Ruthless landlords have taken advantage of the outrageously increased demand for shelter to regularly jack up the rent and the rhetoric of finance and real-estate media jocks - replacing real opinion - shamelessly inflates the already ballooning cost of housing.

Yes, Australia's newsmedia overwhelms us with propaganda dressed up as news in support of high immigration and population growth. The leading population growth pusher is Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group.

Every Murdoch newspaper doesn't peddle population growth in exactly the same way though.

Whilst the national daily newspaper, the Australian openly proclaims that population growth is inherently good for Australia, its Brisbane counterpart the Courier Mail treats the issue more ambiguously.

Perhaps this is partly because Courier Mail readers tend more to be working class than the Australian's readers, and therefore less likely to celebrate notional investments in the unaffordability of the national private estate. The Courier Mail is also a state paper, concerned with state legislative responsibilities, and these include land-use planning. It therefore is more obligated to report news of the consequences of population growth, which most obviously affect land-use and costs. A few years ago the Courier Mail did stridently beat the drum for population growth. Pretending there was a labour-shortage crisis, it called for more people to move here to work in the mines, orchards and hospitality industry, so that the state could grow faster and faster._#main-fn4">4

The Courier-Mail's implied pretence that Queenslanders cannot question population growth, let alone stop it

The Courier Mail has since changed tack to simply reporting population growth as if it is inevitable.

So, these days, rather than overtly proclaiming massive population growth is inherently good, along with much of the Australian media, the Courier Mail implies that massive and inconvenient population growth is inevitable.

Again and again the Courier Mail's reports include statements that population will grow, exactly as if it were stating that we will all pay taxes and will all grow old and die. In doing so, it dishonestly implies to its readers that population growth is not a result of a decision consciously made by the Australian Federal Government through its high immigration program, with the full encouragement of the Queensland and other state governments, along with Rupert Murdoch himself, to whose tune Governments in Australia seem to have been dancing for years. The Courier Mail avoids pointing out the simple fact that in a democracy, people have every right to expect the Government to change course, should they decide that population growth is not in their best interests.

In "Workers welcome", (15 May 2008), the Australian enthusiastically endorsed Immigration Minister Chris Evan's announced increase in immigration.

"The Government's decision to increase the skilled migration program by 31,000 places a year from 2008-09 is a move to help ease the critical labour shortage in many parts of Australia. Together with a big influx of temporary workers under the 457 visa program, the increased migrant intake should also help to lessen the threat of a wages breakout and inflationary spiral."_#main-fn5">5

A brief pretence at concern for the adverse consequences for housing affordability was made:

More migrants will inevitably cause pressures in other areas of the economy, including the tight housing sector where a shortage of stock is leading to rapidly rising rents.

But that minor concern was immediately swept aside in the next sentence.

But the economic case for more skilled migrants is clear. ...

So the trusting reader is led to believe that the editorial writer has weighed up the pros and cons and worked out that on balance we will be better off. However, as we have seen above, the "pressures in the ... tight housing sector" have since almost literally enslaved significant sections of Australian society. On top of that, the economic analysis that purported to show the benefits of immigration clearly failed to predict subsequent hikes in all kinds of Government charges to pay for the cost of immigration, in addition to the decline in our queality of life all as mentioned above.

Minister Evans's also announced plans to import workers from Pacific islands.

"Next month cabinet is expected to endorse a pilot program based on the New Zealand model for guest workers from Pacific nations. The Prime Minister wants this for foreign policy and economic reasons.

Evans says: 'The debate about temporary migration, quite frankly, is over.' His threshold point is that the immigration debate is no longer just about skills, though skills are vital, but has become a debate about labour. There is an unspoken agenda: aware that the abolition of Work Choices risks higher wage pressures, Rudd and Swan are using higher migration as a device to boost labour supply and limit wage inflation." _#main-fn6">6

The Australian reported a furor of protest against the Pacific Worker plans, but little against the sheer numbers and the uncontrollability of the impacts, on wages and housing costs.

(One can see another angle here. If a paper only reports protests against immigration if they relate to ethnicity or 'race' then this will serve the spin that Australians are racist in their attitudes to immigration but not concerned about any other impacts. This impression should serve to put people off protesting against high immigration from anywhere, for fear of being labelled racist.)

At the time I also posted an e-mail #UnpublishedLetter" id="UnpublishedLetter">included as an Appendix to the Queensland Courier Mail in response to its reporting of that issue. The letter was not published and it breathed no word of any of this furor about immigration policy, presumably subscribing to the illusion that State governments have no responsibility or power in ramping up or stabilising population numbers, which, if you have read this article, or others, such as this one about the Victorian Government, "Melbourne 2008: Life in a destruction zone", you will now realise is not true.

In October 2009 as the Australian stridently once again beats the drum for boosting our population all the way up to at least 35 million, the Courier Mail, this time, has given the issue some coverage, instead of imposing the almost complete blackout that it did in May last year. However the coverage is still relatively low key. One article by Dr. Paul Williams_#main-fn7">7 on Monday 19 Oct 09 was critical of population growth, but by Saturday it had all been forgotten. Oblivious to that and oblivious to reports of chaos, rocketing costs and declining living standards, reported in its pages virtually every day of the week Saturday's Courier Mail editorialised:

While Commonwealth Treasury secretary Ken Henry's pessimism at the thought of a 60 per cent increase in population in less than 40 years (and more than 100 per cent for southeast Queensland) is understandable, we should not shy away from the challenges and opportunities this brings.

If authorities at all levels of government can work together, planning for the required increases in services, infrastructure and facilities, there's no reason the community should not be able to cope with the inevitable demands. ..._#main-fn8">8

'No reason', except for the woeful failure of the Queensland Government to cope with the 'inevitable demands' brought about by the recent population growth it has already imposed on Queenslanders. As Greater Sunshine Coast Council Mayor Bob Abbott commented last week, "You can't go on doing the same thing and expect a different result."_#main-fn9">9

We can only conclude that somehow the 'same result' is fine by the Murdoch Press, Bligh, Rudd and the ALP investments in property and finance, such as Labor Resources P/L and Labor Holdings P/L), not to mention the government's and the Labor Party's corporate friends.

The editorial continued:

... Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is right to say this is good news for the country. Let's work together and make it happen.

Perhaps, instead, it is time we all "work[ed] together" and and let Rudd, Bligh and the Murdoch Press know that they are not acting on our behalf and that they continue to act with such high-handed disregard for our welfare at their own peril.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ See Appendix 3 of "Privatisation - let the owners decide : an open letter to Anna Bligh" of 3 Jun 09.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ See "Shared accommodation a necessity and no longer a choice for many in Brisbane" of 30 Apr 08 for a somewhat out-of-date picture of the problem.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-fn3-txt">↑ Newspaper stories include: "37 students found living in one house at Sunnybank Hills" in the Courier-Mail of "Raid finds 37 people living in single Brisbane house" in the Age of 16 Sep 09. A story about a pretence by the population-growth-pushing Brisbane City Council of attempting to fix the problem is "Brisbane City Council crackdown on over-crowded housing" in the Courier-Mail of 16 Sep 09.

#main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4. #main-fn4-txt">↑ "The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth" of 30 Apr 08

#main-fn5" id="main-fn5">5. #main-fn5-txt">↑ "Workers Welcome" in the Australian of 16 May 08.

#main-fn6" id="main-fn6">6. #main-fn6-txt">↑ Source: "Open Door" in the Australian of 16 May 08.

#main-fn7" id="main-fn7">7. #main-fn7-txt">↑ "When is too many enough?" by Dr. Paul Williams in the Courier Mail of 19 Oct 09.

#main-fn8" id="main-fn8">8. #main-fn101010-txt">↑ "Challenges of growth" in the Courier Mail of 23 Oct 09.

#main-fn9" id="main-fn9">9. #main-fn9-txt">↑ I couldn't find the story on line, but I read these words from Bob Abbott in a story in the Courier Mail of aroun Thursday or Frday last week. I will endeavour to add taht detail to this story.

#UnpublishedLetter" id="UnpublishedLetter">Appendix: Unpublished letter sent to Courier Mail regarding Pacific guest workers

Emailed: 16 May 08.

If the Pacific Island guest worker scheme works, as Steve Lewis ("Guest workers a foreign policy challenge", 16 May) claims it will, it will, in effect, be an apartheid labour scheme. If it breaks down as many fear, it will result in a further permanent increase to our population and make worse all the resultant problems which fill the pages of the Courier Mail almost every day of the week - traffic congestion, housing unaffordability, the water, health and eduction crisis and the ever growing financial costs of fixing them.

If we accept claims about there being a labour shortage, then why don't, we instead of further degrading our quality of life, change our priorities as a society. For example, must we dig up all of our mineral wealth now, when it is clearly making global warming worse? Indeed reducing our mineral exports and generous foreign aid programs, including aid for birth control, would be far better ways to help Pacific islanders.

"No apology"!

Is this "Newspeak" for a decision the Australian PM feels uncomfortable about?

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he makes "no apology" for believing in a "big Australia". he also said " I make absolutely no apology whatsoever for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia."

But Mr Rudd should apologise !

Rudd is socially-engineering Australia's population growth

He presides over a massive rate of population growth which his government has engineered. He should apologise to the present population and also to the future population that will be so much worse off than we are now as the Australian environment inevitably declines . Australia's environment right now suffers from population overload. It's the number of us and the way we live, the way waterways are interfered with for human activities, the way natural habitat is taken over for human habitation, the impact on our environment of human wastes both domestic and industrial, mining extraction and agricultural..... the sheer scale of our activities !

Optimism without foundation may doom Australians

Rudd's optimism reported by the ABC at the growing population seems to be founded on no real data. It appears as rhetoric, no more than a declared belief. The serious concerns of continuing population growth expressed by Treasury Secretary Dr. Ken Henry - water availability , biodiversity welfare of wildlife are waved away by Rudd as mere "challenges" (in "Newspeak" challenge =problem)

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth with thin fragile soils and relatively little arable land.
Australia's environmental indicators- climate,waterways,land and biodiversity indicate stress right now from increasing human impacts.

.......but Rudd has set his reckless course and will not be diverted.

He makes no apology.

MEDIA RELEASE
22 October 2009

MORE REFUGEES - FEWER SKILLED MIGRANTS

Were Australia a compassionate nation, it would be taking in more asylum seekers and fewer skilled migrants, according to Australia’s only environment group dedicated to lower population, Sustainable Population Australia (SPA).

SPA National President, Ms Sandra Kanck, says Australia could double the number of refugees it accepts, providing that at least as many, if not more (which is SPA’s preference), were cut from the skilled migration program.

Australia's humanitarian program is currently 13,500 annually, while skilled immigration for 2008-9 is 115,000. Total net overseas migration, however, for the year ended 31 March 2009, was 278,200 persons. As well as skilled migration, this includes family reunion, New Zealanders and those on temporary visas.

“We have no moral obligation to the people coming here under the skilled migration program – they are not fleeing from war-torn states," says Ms Kanck. "They are taking places we could make available to real refugees.

“With 22 million refugees in the world at the moment, Australia cannot take them all, but we can accept more than we currently do – provided we reduce the skilled migration intake," she says.

Ms Kanck says that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s rebuffing of asylum seekers and attacks on so-called people smugglers are a diversionary tactic.

"Mr Rudd is responsible for one of the highest immigration rates in decades so his line on the current influx of asylum seekers is simply a smoke screen to avoid public discussion on the bigger issue of the immigration blow-out.

“Refugees have to wait in long queues for places to become available, while at the same time Mr Rudd has an open door policy to people who want to come here for purely economic reasons.

"Surely Australia can supply its own skills and not poach from other countries," says Ms Kanck. “If we got rid of the baby bonus we could put that money into training/retraining our current population and thus decrease our reliance on the skilled migration program."

Ms Kanck added that a multi-pronged approach was what was required in dealing with refugees. Diplomatic efforts could often diminish conflict that cause people to flee.

"For instance, what is Australia doing to ensure that the Sri Lankan Government is treating the Tamils fairly and humanely?" she asks.

Racism is:

1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race, and that one’s own race is superior, and has the right to rule others.

2 : racial prejudice or discrimination, hatred or intolerance of another race or races

3: a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.

(photo: from Wikimedia commons: Australian Government poster — "The Southern Cross, the call of the stars to British Men & Women" issued by the Overseas Settlement Office to attract immigrants).

Racism is a global phenomenon which is influenced by a range of historical, social, political and economic factors.

It takes different forms in different contexts and as a result has been defined in many different ways. In Australia, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1998) defines it as:
Racism is an ideology that gives expression to myths about other racial and ethnic groups that devalues and renders inferior those groups that reflects and is perpetuated by deeply rooted historical, social, cultural and power inequalities in society.

Institutional racism (or systemic racism) describes forms of racism which are structured into political and social institutions. It occurs when organisations, institutions or governments discriminate, either deliberately or indirectly, against certain groups of people to limit their rights.

Historical perspective

In May 1901, the Australian parliament met for the first time. Its first major act was to pass the Immigration Restriction Act. Under this policy, people from Asia and other "non-white" people were systematically kept out of Australia. The "White Australia" policy was the product of decades of racist agitation against Chinese immigration.

Henry Parkes, now venerated as the "father of Federation", was often at the head of anti-Chinese laws restricting where they could live. In 1857 his newspaper Empire railed: "Total exclusion of the Chinese from the goldfields should be the law”.

The first identified threat by white settlers was from thieving, dispossessed Aborigines, who were placed in the same category as Australian fauna. Racism included the removal of Indigenous children from their families and the denial of full citizenship rights to Indigenous people.

People with similar backgrounds naturally like to be together. The ideals of multiculturalism were welcome here in Australia when most people were Anglo background, and Prime Minister Bob Hawke promoted it well. Most people embraced it, and we have benefited from immigration both economically and culturally. However, in recent years, the numbers of immigrants has risen so high, a twist of racism has seeped in.

Immigration today

The Australian government, acting on behalf of their mates in the real estate industry, is effectively inviting foreign populations to move in and colonise parts of the country.
Australians are forced to carry the costs. They have to compete with rich foreigners for housing in a country already facing a chronic housing shortage. They have to pay their taxes just so that wealthy foreigners can simply move in and make use of Australia's public services and infrastructure.
(Eye on Immigration: selling Australia)

The Howard government left behind a robust immigration program of more than 120,000 net immigrants a year. The Rudd Government set a target of 190,000 migration places in 2008-09, a 20 per cent increase over the previous year's target. It increased the working visa program to double its size four years earlier. Not a word was said about this during the 2007 election campaign.

Racism phobia

Are we so terrified of the R-word, racism, so brainwashed by the thought police, that no dares mention skin colour any more? Not even the cops when seeking a
crime suspect?
Surely skin colour is just as objective as hair colour?

Hey Hey It’s Saturday ratings success has been marred by accusations of racism after a skit on the Red Faces talent segment featured a group of doctors in black face paint re-enacting a Jackson 5 song. Would a similar skit about ABBA have been racist if they painted their faces white?

Racism today

In the UK, Pakistanis are twice as likely as Indians to be unemployed. Two years ago, their government’s research showed almost half of British Asians and blacks arguing that there are too many immigrants.

Particularly following the September 11 attacks, both Muslim and Arab Australians have experienced a significant rise in Islamophobia and racism.

More recently we have witnessed race-based confrontations in Cronulla and now fears have grown over the perceived violence and gang culture of Sudanese immigrants.

There was a backlash against Sudanese immigrants and a move by our Government to attempt to justify a freeze on our African refugee intake.

Kevin Rudd scrapped the "Pacific Solution", abolished temporary protection visas, and let illegal arrivals get more lawyers. The Federal Police warned that this may increase the number of attempted arrivals to Australia. The dismantling of the Howard government's border protection policies has led to a surge in boats. 255 Sri Lankans asylum seekers, now bobbing off Java, are refusing to leave their boat. They now face detention in Sumatra rather than Nauru. Is it not surprising that Australia is their choice of refuge, knowing that we have the highest migrant intake in the developed world?

Our heavy intake of well-educated and well-off immigrants is a stark contrast to those that are turned away or places in detention.

The recent attacks on Indian students have thrust the issue of racism in Australia into the mainstream news bulletins.

Over populating Australia

Australia's population is forecast to surge from 22 million to well over 35 million in 40 years. . Our population this year grew by 439,000, or 2.1 per cent, the highest in the developed world.

In the past anyone questioning immigration to Australia risked being labeled racist. But now there's a new accusation leveled against anyone speaking against the massive surge in immigration to Australia. Now debate is being shut down by economic and political ‘correctness'.

Modeling by the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University shows each additional one million people adds 25 million tonnes of pollution to Australia’s greenhouse accounts.

“An increase in population to 35 million by 2050 would mean 325 million tonnes of additional pollution, costing us at least $10 billion a year in extra carbon pollution costs alone,” Mr Berger of Australian Conservation Foundation said.

GDP ignores the cost of the environmental damage done by immigration. Head hunting skilled workers from developing countries roughly doubles their greenhouse gas emissions, in the process making it all the harder for us to achieve the necessary reduction in our emissions. Our greenhouse gas emissions are rising, contrary to Kevin Rudd’s climate change commitments.

Immigration-fed growth in the economy is good only if it raises the real average incomes of the existing population. If it doesn't, we're running a high immigration policy mainly for the benefit of the immigrants who are able to earn more in our country than they were in their own country. Sharing finite resources means an erosion of the quality of life.

The
ABC's Four Corners program recently ran a piece on the 'new homeless'; families that couldn't find an affordable house to rent.
What do you do when you've lost your job, lost your home and you have three kids to feed? You end up in a motel cooking, eating and sleeping in one room at the taxpayer's expense. These are Australia's new homeless.

The narrator failed to mention one of the causes of the homelessness - the increased demand for housing fueled by high immigration levels.

Time for debate on immigration

It's time to drop the political correctness that for years has meant anybody who questioned immigration levels was labeled racist, or a supporter of Pauline Hanson!

One Nation was anti-immigration, anti-economic liberalization party. According to their web site, “One Nation is not, nor has ever been, a racist party. We are however a fiercely nationalistic party that puts the well being of Australia and it's people before anything else. It is obvious by the tens of thousands that came out to support us that there is a ground swell of ordinary people in this country who are sick of the self serving, on both sides of politics, that has been passed off as leadership for so many decades.”

There was no hint of racism, just a questioning of our high immigration and how it serves the interests of Australians. Racism was muddied by an immigration debate!
The issue now is not about race.
This is about numbers, and the future. (Herald Sun)

Capitalist leaders have always known immigration was a great way to permanently weaken unions and culture in favour of economics. Are our leaders deliberately diluting Australian-ism, patriotism, so we are accommodated into a global market? Already our real estate, many industries, tertiary education, job markets, consumer items and our population are being quietly globalised.

THE Rudd government must urgently rein in migration or tens of thousands more young Australians will miss out on their first jobs , a new report warns. (The Australian)

Already, 15- to 24-year-old Australians are bearing the brunt of burgeoning migration levels, their unemployment rate rising from 8.8 per cent to 11.7 per cent in the year to September, the study by Monash University academic Ernest Healy reveals.
Cut migrants to aid jobless:

India as a nation is faced with massive problem of unemployment. Unemployment rates for women are higher than those for men. The incidence of unemployment among the educated is much higher than the overall unemployment. If our definition of unemployment is defined to include any job which does not move an individual to living wages within one year, then India’s unemployment is not the official 7-9% but about 26%!

If our unemployed, or underemployed, or students went to India to access their tertiary education system and raided their limited casual or professional job opportunities, surely there would be a "racist" backlash!

Let's get back to some basic good old-fashioned Australian patriotism instead of all the globalisation that is being inflicted on us. Tertiary educational institutions should be funded to educate primarily Australian citizens, not internationals, and jobs should be for Australians, not outsourced overseas or for opportunist students hoping to stay here.

Australia’s population growth has been historically driven by immigration. Now we need to be stabilized and established as a distinct but multicultural entity.

The abuse of the word “racist” is manipulating us into silence and being used to enforce policies that were appropriate and beneficial in past decades, but are not appropriate for Australia in the 21st century.

Real estate speculation occurs on previously unknown levels via the global Internet, with rapid convergence and mushrooming of of speculative industries and professions across government and private sector. At Federal level, the National Foreign Investment Review Board (NFIRB) promotes foreign investment in local real estate and encourages housing purchases by temporary immigrants for high turnover. Local realtors tout Australian property internationally, using private migration agents and local solicitors. At State level (where land use planning laws are made), organizations like the Property Council of Australia (PCA) are closely involved with determining government policy. The Australian citizen has less and less say in any of this.
Illustration a collation of old icons from sites encouraging foreign investment and immigration.

Consequences for the economy of big rises or drops in housing prices

Various convoluted explanations exist for why high land prices (= land/housing prices) would not affect general inflation. These arguments do not hold, however, when a major factor in inflation comes from outside the local economy. In this article I draw attention to the likely impact of the addition to the Australian property market of more and more home buyers and property investors purchasing from overseas using foreign currency that has greater value than our local currency. Some may be from poor countries but they may also be among the world’s richest citizens.

Australia as a Pacific Island economy with little protection for citizens

The impact ressembles the effect of first world tourists on a third world economy.

Prices go up to meet the pockets of the tourists and locals are priced out of the market and reduced to living from a sort of fringe economy, as the more lucrative tourist economy takes over. Those locals that have held onto property are able to interact with the foreign-based currency holders on a more equal footing, since their assets have benefited from the
inflation. They become the elite. Rentals, like hotel prices, go up way past the affordability of the bulk of the locals, who are more and more marginalised. The rents still seem quite cheap to the tourists and foreign residents as long as these foreign residents hold substantial foreign currency and as long as their currency remains better than the local currency, or they remain wealthy by world standards.

A better system of land-tenure does exist, but we don't have it

The continental European (Napoleonic) system developed in France after the Revolution does protect citizens from this kind of impoverishment.

First world tourists will often complain about the outrageous prices of everything in tourist-affected economies like Noumea, French Guyana, the Seychelles etc. It is not so easy in these places to find little indigenous hotels where you may stay for a
song, and dine at little cost. At least one of the reasons for this is that in the overseas French territories the French system safeguards adequate public housing at affordable prices, as well as prioritising the employment of locals, the education of locals, the health system for locals, and unemployment benefits etc. This means that much of the earnings from foreign currency are passed on throughout the economy and to most of the population. So, whilst prices remain so high that only the rich really tend to stay in French resorts, the locals have sufficient incomes for them to be able to live within that economy without becoming marginalised into a secondary economy. This is a source of frustration to those who expect all resort economies located in third world areas, like the South Pacific and the Caribbean, to provide for cut-rate tourism. It is, however, a great thing for those who actually live on the islands.

Unfortunately Australia has a bad land-use planning system which leaves its citizens vulnerable.

Globalisation of Australian real estate

Real estate speculation has been made possible on a level never previously conceived of due to the global Internet, through property dot coms like the media-owned www.realestate.com.au and www.domain.com.au. This has permitted rapid convergence and mushrooming of speculative industries and professions across government and private sector. We have at the Federal level, the National Foreign Investment Review Board (NFIRB) ramping up foreign investment in local built and off-the-plan real estate and facilitating built housing purchases by temporary immigrants for high turnover. On the local level we have realtors touting local property internationally with the assistance of private migration agents and local solicitors. At State level (where land use planning laws are made), organizations like the Property Council of Australia (APC) are closely involved with determining government policy.

Australians as islanders without effective rights of citizenship

Australian citizens are in the same predicament as the indigenous populations of small pacific island colonies when international developers decide to turn them into resorts and start building hotels and up-market housing. Resources and ammenities become limited commodities which only the rich can afford, and pretty soon the locals are barely subsisting in shanty-towns.

In the late 1980s people started to see that what was happening to Australia was the same thing that happened in Hawaii, where real-estate prices are notoriously high and related to the presence of a high volume of foreign investment capital.[10] During the pre-internet hike in Australia's land/house prices, beginning around 1988 and following the highest total net immigration in Australia prior to the current record-breaking period (2006-), there was an out-cry. The Australian government responded by barring foreigners from purchasing established dwellings in September 1987.

Urban researcher, Peter Rimmer[11] observed, however, that this did not prevent "Australians living abroad, immigrants with permission to settle permanently in Australia, and foreign companies seeking accommodation for executives from purchasing residences."[12]

Continuous erosion of our foreign investment laws

Subsequent amendments to the Acquisitions and foreign takeovers Act (1975) have considerably watered down even these weak protections.[13] The FIRB now seems almost to be leading the charge in touting Australian real estate to foreigners with superior currency.[14] Foreigners on short-term visas, such as students staying for one year, are positively
encouraged to purchase established dwellings, providing they sell them when they leave at the end of one year. Short-term immigrants also provide a good market for rentals. The effect of this rate of turnover on land/housing prices must be hugely inflationary. A strong indication that it is considered a source of big money by the speculative real-estate suppliers to the market is the aggressive promotion of this opportunity for purchasing Australian real estate by migration agents with real estate and legal firm connections on the Internet.[15]

The 1973 Oil Shock

These trends to opening up Australian real estate and other equities began after the 1973 oil shock, in 1975, with Prime Minister Fraser. From less than 10% in 1972-75 under Whitlam, foreign investment in Australia increased to 49% of GDP in 1990-91. By 1986 more than half was destined for real-estate investment.[16] Prime Minister Fraser initiated a long series of amendments of the Australian Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act (1975) with the effect of increasingly facilitating foreign investment in property development and real estate.[17]

In post-oil shock Japan opportunities for newly formed construction companies and developers shrank. Rimmer wrote that those major Japanese construction companies, which had been hurt by policies of zero public sector growth, preference for regional contractors, and sluggish private sector activity in Japan, particularly through fiscal policy in the early 80s, adapted to the situation by seeking work in other countries. They brought with them the funds invested by Japanese investors and banks, offering "the most favourable fixed price" and "to take an equity in the project if necessary, arrange loans at low interest rates from financial institutions in Japan or Australia" and guaranteeing "any money required if the project [went] over cost".

Australia, which was keen to attract major projects during the recession of the late 1980s, largely in the hope of job creation, responded to these inducements. Australian States vied with each other to attract these Japanese construction projects, many of which were in real estate. [18]

Rimmer wrote that "keen for the economic benefits and political spin-offs, the states, as we have seen, are prepared to override the usual planning role performed by local government of directing development into preferred locations to meet economic, social and spatial preconditions."[21]

This obviously remains the case.

The other consequence of concentrating investment on the property development/housing sector is that a growing population provides an easy, constantly increasing market for raw materials produced here, but for cheap imports produced overseas. This perpetuates the many problems associated with a commodity bound economy, dooming us to ever increasing foreign debt, with a widening rather than deepening economy, restricting our skills and systems bases.[22]

NOTES

The notes begin at [10] since this article adapts extracts from another document.

[10] In a land-planning system with many of those hall-marks of the US system.

[11] Peter J Rimmer, "Japanese construction contractors and the Australian states: another round of interstate
rivalry", in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, E. Arnold, London, Vol.12., no.3.,
pp.404-24.

[12] Peter J. Rimmer "Japanese construction contractors and the Australian States: another round of interstate
rivalry", op.cit., p.421.

[13] Information about these changes to The Foreign Takeovers Act )1975), now known as the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act (1975) over time is available from the Foreign Investment Review Board in appendixes to its Annual General Reports, which are available on internet from http://www.firb.gov.au/policy_pubs/publications/AnnualReports/1999-2000/appd.htm Note that the Act is not confined to property investment but this seems to be a large part of its business.

[14] www.escapeartist.com/australia, which is an immigration and property investment internet site, announces, “Expatriates Build Wealth in Australia - The Aussie dollar is at an all time low against the American dollar and the strong Pound Sterling. Consequently there is strong purchasing power for Expats and UK residents in Australia. Australia welcomes foreign investment in real estate. Overseas investors can therefore obtain the benefit of freehold title. …”

“To take advantage of this, major developers such as Central Equity apply to the Federal Government Foreign Investment Review Board to gain permission to sell their residential apartments to foreign investors prior to releasing their development to the public.”

[15] Here are some examples of these kinds of internet sites. Migrate Australia www.migrate-australia.org/ are owned and operated by My Great Australia Pty Ltd. Like many members of the Migration Institute of Australia, they deal in real estate, finance and conveyancing, as well as arranging all sorts of visas and providing legal advice.

Some others are: www.James Tan Immigration lawyer.htm, www.escapeartist.com/, which has pages for many other countries in the world and www.australiaforyou.com.au. Australia For You has remarkable graphics. In fact many of these sites are graphically innovative, information packed, multi-lingual, specialise in a particular language, may offer a specialty, such as romantic introductions, and seem impressively connected and serviced. They generally lead with the information that they have registered immigration agents on board.

[16] R.H. Fagan, "Foreign Investment", in Australian Encyclopaedia, Terry Hills, NSW, Australian Geographic, Pty. Ltd, 1995, p.1394. For more about the FIRB, see S. Newman, The Growth Lobby and its Absence, Op cit., Chapter 3 heading, “The Residential Construction Industry”

[17] Information about these changes to The Foreign Takeovers Act )1975), now known as the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act (1975) over time is available from the Foreign Investment Review Board in appendixes to its Annual General Reports, which are available on internet from http://www.firb.gov.au/policy_pubs/publications/AnnualReports/1999-2000/appd.htm or see more current information here. Note that the Act is not confined to property investment but this is a major part of its business.

[18] Rimmer, Op cit p. 405 and 418.

[19-20] These notes are not used here.

[21] Rimmer Op Cit., p.417.

[22] “Going for Growth – Business Programs for Investment, Innovation and Export”, also known as “The Mortimer Report”, to the Federal Minister for Industry, Science and Tourism, Australia, 30 June, 1997. The Mortimer Report drew a distinction between absolute growth and per capita growth. It pointed out that economic growth resulting solely from increased population serves no economic purpose. The true measure of economic progress, the report stated, is economic growth per head of population. That being the case, the Mortimer Report declared its brief to recommend measures that would enhance per capita economic growth.

Taking its data from OECD reports, the Mortimer Report found a negative correlation between per capita GDP and population growth over the period 1970-1995.

A paper correlating population growth rate and per capita economic growth rate was prepared by Dr John Coulter for the 2003 ISOS conference on sustainability. For the purpose of his analysis, Coulter divided the countries of the world into two groups, rich and poor. For each group, he correlated per capita GDP growth with population growth, using rigorous statistical techniques. He found that for rich countries absolutely no correlation between per capita GDP growth and population growth. For poor countries, the correlation is strongly negative: the higher the population growth, the poorer is the country.

For countries like Australia that rely on their resource base for their income, the argument is particularly significant. In 1860 about 70% of the country's exports were mineral and agricultural products. Almost the same ratio applies today. For Australia’s situation, the more specific question than what do countries have to win or lose from population growth is - what does a country with a commodity-based economy have to gain economically from population growth?

The answer to this question lies in the external trading account. For population growth in commodity-based economies:
• almost no relation at all exists between exports and population.
• an almost linear relationship exists between population and imports.

Extreme cases often make telling points. A country which is entirely reliant on commodity exports and has an extreme level population growth may reveal an outcome that a less extreme country might achieve at a more leisurely pace.

Saudi Arabia is an extreme example of a commodity-based economy experiencing excessive birth rate. Saudi Arabia earns over 90% of its export earnings from products based on one basic commodity – oil. Saudi Arabia’s rate of population increase is about 4% per annum. Saudi Arabia’s population is doubling in less than every twenty years. Half the population is under 15 years of age.

For more on this see S.Newman for SPA VIC First Home Affordability Enquiry Submission.

Illustration: "Cage metropolis". The building block for the nightmare city depicted in the illustration comes from stills taken from a France2 (National government) television news report on 9 September 2009. The report showed people living in cages, several to a room, and paying USD$120 weekly in rent.[1]


This suffering is the result of population pressure in a system which does not protect human rights from its impact, in Hong Kong, an ex-British protectorate. We cannot blame it on the recent Chinese government, which has retained the British system. When the British took Hong Kong over, there was no population problem like this. It was a colonial creation which the mainland Chinese have chosen to perpetuate.

Australia's system - like Canada's and most in the USA - shares many of Hong Kong's problems, in part because its land-use planning laws have similar origins, and because population growth is encouraged despite the problems that it causes.

In Australia more people every day are homeless. If you doubt just how precarious many peoples’ situations have already become, have a look at the Four Corners video-report on homelessness, "The Last Chance Motel"

Underpinning the out-of-control cost of living in Australia is the massive rise in land-costs as the principle factor in housing prices and the cost of productive activities. These costs radically reduce the margins for profit in production and the margins for economy among wage-earners, raising costs for Australian small business and consumers.

The Australian Consumer Price Index will not tell you this because it has never counted land in the costs it surveys. The reason is because land is not supposed to be a ‘consumable’, even though the property developers package and market it just like one.

Is this the way we want to live?

Have we even been asked?
Why are we being pushed into this nightmare and who is responsible?
Read on:

Salt with a grain of salt ...

"Where to put the extra millions at the end of the 21st century?" Bernard Salt asks readers of Mr Murdoch’s Australian, September 10, 2009.

What? Doesn't Mr Salt know? I thought he was going to put them up in his lounge room.

Seriously though, Mr Salt, a partner in KPMG, has been doing little else but market rapid and continuous population growth for Australia over the past ten or fifteen years. So, if he doesn't know where to put them, why does he do it?

Recently I heard a radio presenter say, "Demographer Bernard Salt has looked into his crystal ball and has predicted that Australia’s population will grow …"

Mr Salt bills himself as a 'demographer', but I think it is fair to describe him as a property development marketer who describes himself as a demographer and who has used that title to give authority to his claim that high immigration and constant population movement within Australia is natural, inevitable or desirable and that he is a clever spotter of it.
And Mr Salt doesn’t ‘predict’ on the basis of pure statistical trends. Along with other high-profile members of the Growth Lobby, he influences trends. He does this in part by making media announcements as if trends to rapid growth are predictive and then inviting people to invest in the likelihood that infrastructure and housing demand will increase as the population growth does. He also doesn’t just suggest that trends will continue. He is a member of a group which benefits financially from population growth and therefore actually tries to push trends to go upwards faster.

Why is Bernard Salt so important?

Bernard Salt is a spokesperson for the Population Growth Lobby, which I identify as a set of industries which make money out of population growth and organize to promote it.

Whilst there are other media-promoted spokespeople for the Growth Lobby, such as Peter McDonald of the ANU, Salt is one of the most ubiquitous, appearing frequently in most or all forms of the mainstream media. Not only has he recently been featured in long articles in Murdoch’s Australian, he also now has a column in the Herald Sun. He is also quoted by state and federal governments. The amplitude given to his statements by the mainstream media and government means that what he says has massive political ramifications.

Population numbers touch every aspect of society

As the then Senator Barry Jones said years ago, in relation to the 1994 Inquiry into Australia’s population carrying capacity, "Population numbers touch every aspect of society."

Uncontrolled population growth is a juggernaut.

You and I haven’t actually been asked by our governments whether we want to be dragged along in the slipstream of the growthist juggernaut, but we have the right to be asked.

As citizens we should be asked before it continues to go ahead.

It is wrong that government and mainstream media have tried to normalize growthism through repetitive promotion of it, via voices like Bernard Salt’s, before any public debate has taken place. Any so-called debate has been conducted with growth lobby promoters given talking rights as if they were ordinary citizens without vested interests, but also featured as authorities with more weight than citizens, quoted and amplified ad nauseum by the mainstream media, public and commercial. The essence of democracy is that the citizen’s voice has primacy over that of any private institution with vested interests in issues of national and state government, resources and assets. That value is being lost in the public-private production of out-of-democratic-control population growth in Australia.

KPMG and the "Big Shift"

As I mentioned earlier, Mr Salt is a partner in KPMG Australia. KPMG is part of an international accounting company with business relationships with many corporations, whose reputation is not unblemished.[5]

Ten or fifteen years ago I was curious to notice that KPMG Australia was in the business of publishing annual 'population growth trends' in the form of books or folders for businesses that wanted to make money by speculating on where there would be rising demand for land, power and goods. As I recollect, some 15 years ago, these printed volumes cost around $300 each.

When I first noticed KPMG’s role in marketing population growth to business, the internet was not even available for ordinary people. Now Australian property and citizenship are marketed at ever-increasing volume and with almost no restraints over the internet to the world. The profits for those commercial interests which have acquired control over land, water, power and other resources, plus the associated services and infrastructure, run literally to billions of dollars, narrowly channeled to a relative few individuals and corporate streams. That situation has created a political, demographic and inflationary tsunami which threatens to crush any democracy and quality of life in Australia.

Before the internet, Mr Salt himself did not seem to me to stand out from the crowd. He was spotted as a major marketing talent by the Growth Lobby at some stage, however - perhaps because he was waving so hard - and came into focus with his - ahem - wittily titled book, The Big Shift, which came out in around 2002.

Manipulating housing prices and population growth

The claim to fame of The Big Shift was to predict that housing prices (read land-prices) would grow in Melbourne more than they would in Sydney. And you only have to look at Hong Kong where people pay a fortune to live in smaller and smaller places to see that Salt was right on the nose for the money. (See the illustration, "Cage City".) Where there is growth these days there is pain, and someone has to benefit.

Since Sydney was having huge problems expanding, despite the militant growthists in NSW parliament at the time – Bob Carr not withstanding - the Growth Lobby had honed in on Melbourne. The Lobby was marketing population growth and property development there with a vengeance, destroying democracy in the process. (One nightmare event was Mr Bracks' Melbourne Population Summit in 2002, where school children were bused in with organised enthusiasm reminiscent of a Hitler Rally - Lebensraum! Lebensraum! – and addressed by business ‘leaders’ like Richard Pratt and Steve Vizard.) [2]

What’s different about Mr Salt’s recent article?

In his September 10th article, to my knowledge, Mr Salt has taken a slightly different tack. Here he is warning politicians that the population projections they relay to the electorate as 'predictions' to justify their engineering of artificially stimulated population growth will continue exponentially beyond their theoretical statistical boundaries.

He is right. To put it a little more folklorically, these political sorcerers' apprentices have meddled dangerously with demographics and have unleashed an exponentially growing number of angry magic mops - the angry mop being a metaphor for insoluble, compounding problems and the sorcerer’s apprentice a metaphore for Mickey Mouse politics.

Safe to call out "Fire!" after the house has burned down?

Why is Mr Salt only just now mentioning that the consequence of accelerating population growth to the degree that Australian politicians have been doing is dangerous?

This overpopulation has been caused through excessive immigration to a population which, attentive to the signs all around it, was limiting its own growth by slowing down natural increase.

This overpopulation is not the public’s fault, for they have not been given any real role in the political decision, nor have they received dispassionate information about it.

The fault for this lies in the members of the growth lobby who have militated irresponsibly for population growth and in the members of governments which have allowed the lobby’s agenda to run Australia’s politics, sidestepping democracy.

Overpopulation means starvation, thirst, poverty, insecurity, homelessness, environmental degradation, no wildlife, and corrupt and terrible politics. We already have all these things but they can all get worse with more population growth.
When Bernard Salt was marketing his Big Shift book with its socially divisive generalisations about how younger people should resent 'Baby Boomers' a few years ago he didn't have too much to say then about how:

"There is the very real prospect that urban planners will have to manage the development of three Australian mega-regions (Sydney, Melbourne, southeast Queensland) each rising to between five and seven million by century's end. This means Sydney and Melbourne will have to accommodate an extra three million residents, or two million more than current planning has considered."

Pardon? Urban planners managing the very mess they created and which Salt writes that they could not even see coming? Lunatics in charge of the asylum? Mr Salt, it is up to we the people, to manage our own affairs. It is called 'self-government' and 'democracy'. Butt out!

Nor did he say then:

"If Melbourne and Sydney are to grow to seven million and beyond, surely both cities need to consider long-term water and power supplies."

Or warn that we would run out of water and power:

"It may be possible to crib a few extra years of water supply by preservation and pipelines but this will not supply water needs for the two million-plus residents expected in Sydney and Melbourne beyond 2030."

Or tell the politicians:

"I simply do not see the range of solutions being offered as sufficiently robust to accommodate the scale of growth Australia must accommodate this century."

He did not say:

"Urban consolidation is all well and good but it is simply not possible to add three million people to Melbourne's existing urban footprint. Even if it were technically possible, the citizenry wouldn't accept it."

Or add, sotto voce, tongue in cheek ha ha:

"Although I suppose there is the option of enforcing compliance to urban consolidation laws using a special squad of enforcers."

The dangerous myth that we must have population growth

Nonetheless, if the article introduced a few disclaimers this time, Bernard was still back to his old tricks: at pains to reinforce the growth lobby myth of the inexorable:

"Water savings and renewable energy make a great contribution to the efficient operation of our cities as long as the rate of urban growth is not too vigorous or long-lasting. And that's the issue. Australia will be an immigrant nation for our lifetime and for the lifetime of our grandchildren."

(Who says? Bernard Salt says. And the Murdoch press promotes the ideology.)

Then, seizing the territory of environmentalists, he calls for a 'debate':

"What this nation needs is a frank and robust debate about options for population and urban growth on a grand scale and over the long term."

Now, I would just like to point out that the Nation may need a debate, but that debate should be among the people. Corporate spruikers like Bernard Salt and their sponsors – KPMG, Mr Murdoch, Fairfax et al - or their minders and amplifiers – who include, I am afraid, Mr Rudd and Mr Brumby, as well as a raft of other sorcerers' apprentices who started off the magic mop avalanche - don't have the right to a voice in a citizens’ 'debate'.

Why ban Growth Lobby spokespersons from a citizens’ population debate?

Why don’t Growth Lobby spokespersons have a right to a voice in a debate on population growth? Because they don't 'debate'; they market propaganda. They are not acting in the capacity of citizens. They are corporate entity spokespersons. They have narrow profit motives which overwhelm the rights of citizens. Some may actually believe their ideology, but it is a dangerous ideology and should be labeled as such, along with racism. The spokespeople for the Growth Lobby have occupied and taken over the media in every shape and form for years now. They have not just influenced the so-called 'debate' or 'discussion'; they have actually influenced the size of our population and our related fate.

They are in fact responsible for us running out of water, paying unreasonable prices for land, and losing our democracy to laws privileging planning and developers’ objectives over human rights. They have advocated our perilous situation and many can clearly be shown to have done so in the pursuit of related financial benefits, or in order to remain in office in a country where the mainstream commercial media will either ignore you, discredit you or overwhelm your voice with their propaganda, if you are against population growth and have a rational argument. [3]

Indeed, overwhelming of rational argument is what seems to be taking place at the moment in the Press. Kelvin Thomson has come out with sound arguments pointing to the absolute folly of continuing avoidable population growth in Australia. Immediately there is an absolute tsunami of growthist propaganda coming out of every media organ.

And the growth lobby is not going to lose the opportunity to turn the spotlight on growth to their advantage.

There is no place for the commercial growth lobby in this debate

Here's their punchline, in the words of Bernard Salt:

"In this debate I'd put hard questions on the table such as the option of constructing metropolitan dams and nuclear power stations."

Mr Salt wants to ... surprise, surprise... argue a need to build nuclear power plants to supply power for the out-of-control population growth which HE says, "Australia must accommodate this century."

Well, actually, it's not very surprising, because it has been obvious that the business lobby was forcing population growth on Australians so as to have an excuse to 'go nuclear'.

Honestly, I wouldn't be so shocked, except that Mr Salt and his ilk really don't seem to care whether or not it works.

See "Nuclear power, totalitarianism and overpopulation in Australia"
If it doesn’t work, millions of Australians will die because you cannot run a complex society without huge amounts of power and you cannot mass produce food and transport it within such a society without cheap and abundant fuel. Going by the major oil discovery trends and depletion models, access to cheap and abundant fossil fuel is currently on the way out.[4]
Furthermore, if we are to attempt to deal with this terrible problem by using nuclear power, then the people who are expected to continue to suffer for it – Australian taxpayers – must own it and control it. Before any population growth goes ahead, the government should contract with Australia’s citizens to make laws so that those who expect to make a profit out of population growth by building cities around power plants, should be made to pay for that power with their profits in taxes on population growth impact-related profits. Indeed, these laws should apply to anyone making a profit out of any impacts related to politically stimulated or politically engineered population-growth. This would allow for immigration to replace emigration, but not to exceed it until such time as the population had stopped growing.

NOTES

[2] Read more about the cage cities and about how the promise of improved living standards from industrialisation has panned out in Hong Kong. Australia is prey to the same colonial myth associating big populations with wealth. The reality is that the myth justifies a system that exploits people horribly, then chews them up and spits them out. Governments that foster continuous population growth can never keep up with the provision of housing and never have any intention to do so. All policies are palliatives.
Read about it on the Urban Poor Asia: Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. On one page, the Society for Community Organisation (SoCO), reports on a recently finished survey of Hong Kong's street sleepers. "The numbers are on the rise - from 819 in January 2000 to 1,259 in December 2000. .... Not large numbers by Asian standards ... but a rise of 47% .... The surge is attributed to a change in welfare policy and the recession.
Wages for low paying jobs have dropped 30 to 50% over the past 2 years, so many people may not be able to afford housing. Some unemployed refuse to seek the dole (unemployment relief) for fear of being stigmatized. According to the survey there are more younger people becoming street sleepers.
SoCO has urged the welfare department to adjust the unemployment application process to take into account the realities of the poor.
The government according to Ho, have taken up many of the recommendations resulting from the SoCO survey. When the survey was published, one immediate impact was an increase in the government budget allocation for outreach workers.

The SURVEY and other information on Hong Kong's urban poor and Housing Policies is available from SoCO

[2] Pratt and Vizard, together with Tim Watts of OzPop (junior organization to APop sponsored by the New America Foundation), also published the speeches from the event in a book.

[3] How would we prove such a political motive? By showing where the media repeatedly published politicians repeatedly making ideologically-based growthist statements where counter-arguments were put but neither published by the media nor responded to sensibly by the politicians.

[4] There are a great many sources, but I can vouch for Seppo A. Korpela, “Prediction of World Peak Oil production”; Colin J Campbell, “The Assessment and importance of oil depletion;” Seppo Korpela, “Coal Resources of the World;” Michael Dittmar, “Fusion Illusions;” and the articles on Nuclear Fission and on Geothermal power and Australia and France after Fossil Fuel by myself in Sheila Newman, (Ed), The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, UK, 2008

[5] See some more re KPMG in Naomi Klein article ]

In an editorial piece in
"The Australian" newspaper, Bernard Salt explained that over the next 50 years, the Australian tax base (the segment of population who contribute to tax) will be eroded, as more people retire and our low birth rate.

Mr Salt said all metropolitan plans developed in the previous five years had to be rethought: in the state of Victoria, Melbourne 2030 has been recast as Melbourne @ 5 Million; Adelaide in South Australia has a new 30-year plan; and southeast Queensland has a new regional plan. “Indeed, I would say that recruiting workers (and students who turn into workers) from overseas must remain one of this nation's growth industries over the next 20 years.”

(Global population growth 1950 to predicted in 2050)
Has Mr Salt taken into consideration the social, ecological, cultural impacts of this continuing, socially engineered, population growth?
It’s just pure extrapolation without understanding the exponential nature of growth.

Our population is estimated to reach 35.4 million in 40 years, a dramatic revision from the 28.5 million projected only two years ago. However, with our rate of growth, the “over” 35 million is an understatement! According to calculations by the Centre for Population and Urban Research that Bob Birrell heads, net immigration of 180,000 a year and a fertility rate of 2.0 would be required for the population to reach 35 million in 2051. However, our immigration rate is well over this rate, plus we have hidden numbers students applying for PR, and New Zealanders living here.

Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveal that the population grew by 2.06% in the year to March this year, the fastest growth in the that period since figures were started in the their current form back in 1981.

All in all more than 502,000 people arrived here under varying migration schemes, such as family reunions, business and work visas of varying types. This is a doubling rate of 35 years!

By contrast, Japan's population started falling three years ago and is projected to keep doing so at an accelerating rate, contracting by one-fourth to 95 million by the middle of this century.

To offset the loss of funds involved in a larger base of people exiting the workplace, and to pay for services needed for the older population Mr Salt believes that governments will look at expanding migration.

Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows the proportion of Australian people aged 65 will almost double between 2006 and 2036, from 13 per cent to 25 per cent. For all the growth, the proportion of the aged will still be higher than it is now?

Immigration at present is running at the highest levels since the post-war immigration boom.

The most rapidly expanding elderly age group, however, is the over-85s. Their numbers will triple from 333,000 in 2006 to about 1.1 million in 2036, up from 1.6 per cent to 4.2 per cent of the total population. During the same period, the number of centenarians is projected to increase more than five-fold, from less than 5000 to more than 25,000.

The Federal Government has been increasingly concerned about ''longevity risk'' in the retirement income system - the risk that self-funded retirees may run out of money if they live longer than they expect.

Other reforms to tackle longevity risk are being considered by the Government's tax reform panel, headed by the Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry. To help prepare the economy for the changes, the Government announced in the budget that the pension age would rise from 65 to 67 between 2017 and 2023.

Australian National University demographer Peter McDonald said the recent increase in the birthrate in Australia, up from 1.79 to 1.93 in the past two years, was “encouraging”.
"The lower the birthrate, the more migrants you need," Professor McDonald said. "If we had birthrates like those in Germany or Italy we would need to look at greater numbers of migrants."

Adding more people will never keep our population young. Adding more people to “replace” or “compensate” for our dangerous ageing population is surely a way to blow-out our numbers!

We cannot just superimpose earlier conditions on today’s. Australia has changed since the 1950s and we have environmental, resource and climate change challenges now that didn’t exist before. Extrapolating the benefits of adding more people is dangerous under the stresses we are facing of today.

--------------------overseas----------------

Japan, known for its low-fat staple of fish and rice, will have the most centenarians in 2050 – 627,000, or nearly 1% of its total population, according to census estimates. Japan pays special respect to the elderly and has created a thriving industry in robotics – from dogs and nurses to feeding machines – to cater to its rapidly ageing population. Japan has one of the world's oldest populations, with many young people putting off starting a family because of the burden on their lifestyles and careers.

Italy, Greece, Monaco and Singapore, aided by their temperate climates, also will have sizable shares of centenarians, most notably among women.
Italy - But with the country’s plummeting birth rate and ageing population, many parts of the economy would find it hard to survive without foreign workers. Last year a government report on immigrant relations showed that 42% of Italians recognise that immigrants are essential to the economy

Populations in the Gulf are getting older and increasing in size, with a big bulge in the number of teen-agers who will be entering the work force within the next 10 years. These trends are making its harder and more costly for governments to provide high-quality healthcare and schooling. The Gulf has one of the world’s highest rates of obesity; 27 per cent of all men and 40 per cent of all women are clinically obese. The older people become, the fatter they get – though this seems to conflict with the ob-gen argument that we need to get fat to avoid starvation. On this view, an ageing population means a fatter population in the United States, China, Japan, and much of Europe.

In Indian context the older population has been rapidly increasing. It is said that while it took France 120 years for the population of the elderly to double, it took India just 25 years to achieve this phenomenon. India’s elderly population increased from 12 million in 1901 to 19 million in 1951 and 77 million in 2001. According to an estimate by 2021, India’s elderly population will cross 137 million. Presently India has the second largest aged population in the world. Nearly 90 per cent of the total workforce in India is employed in the informal sector. Thus, social security offered by pension schemes is available to only 10 per cent of the working population retiring from the organised sector.

----------solutions?------------

It is true that the only way our leaders are able to combat an ageing population - bar introducing state-sanctioned euthanasia for the over 85s - is to have a faster-growing population of young people. Australia has no comprehensive plan to deal with its growing population. Decisions on migration are made at one level of government - federal - in isolation from the states, which are responsible for actually housing, educating and caring for the new inhabitants. This solution that has been in the news of late; an increase in immigration.

Australia is perceived to have one of the largest countries in the world, yet we have one of the smallest populations. In this plan, the government intends to use this excess space, to open the doors to a controlled form of immigration, in which only younger people are allowed. They hope this may counter the effects of an ageing population, through stimulating the economy with greater activity and productivity.

The employment challenge of ageing populations cannot be solved by perpetual population growth, because perpetual population growth is not possible in a finite world.

Today's young people will always grow into the elderly of the future, and therefore today's workforce into the dependants of the future.

Definitions of economic dependency focus too narrowly on the proportion of older and elderly people in a population, while the contribution of dependent children and other economically inactive groups has been ignored.

Impossibly large numbers of additional births or settling migrants would be needed to maintain the dependency ratios enjoyed by growing populations.

Population Trust POPULATION POLICY: EUROPE

• Welcome the projected stabilisation of EU population in 2025 and gradual decrease over the period 2025-2050. The world has no choice but to welcome ageing populations as the better educated nations reduce their natural population. Climate change implications should mean that less people means less greenhouse gas emissions and thus easier to scale up renewable energy sources.

• Improve the health, education and training of the working-age population. Improved diets would avoid Western diseases and obesity, and thus the costs to the health care system.

• Improve the education and training of young people - the future workforce. Our massive HECS fees and having our universities and tertiary education system globalised should stop. Concentrate training on our own youth, not those from overseas.

• Create more flexible jobs to enable groups such as working mothers, the disabled and older people to join the workforce. Retirement should be more flexible, a phasing out system, not just a cut-off point. A chronological age is not the best indicator of readiness for retirement.

• Raise state and corporate pension ages in line with life expectancy and personal health and well-being levels.

• Encourage and enable people to save more for retirement.

One-quarter of Japanese men are still working after they have turned 75. "The biggest thing that Japan has that we don't have is a much stronger participation in the workforce," Professor McCallum, Victoria University's deputy vice-chancellor, said. In Japan, older men step down from senior positions and take lower-level jobs to make way for younger generations.

Special attention should also be devoted to the development of annuity markets and other instruments which help the retirees in the pay-out phase.

An important part of the myth of disaster from ageing populations is the fallacy that growth must be unending. This has been promoted by pressure groups that benefit from population growth through escalating values of real estate, mass markets, demands for building, and, in supporting immigration, importing cheap docile labour for unpleasant jobs, and already-skilled personnel that have not cost the reception country any expense in education and training.

However, there is less recognition that growth has downsides. Past civilisations have grown beyond the resources available to them, and collapsed.

There is no easy solution to the economic impacts of an ageing population. However, we need to stabilize our numbers, not replace older people through adding more people! We all must share the pain until we reduce our numbers to a sustainable level.

The alternative, an overloaded Australia and the implications of the erosion of our ecosystems, destruction of our wildlife habitats, loss of arable land, the threats of water and food shortages, and climate change, all need to be taken into consideration.

Biological systems can grow until they consume their natural resources, and then find equilibrium with other species. Nothing can grow forever on finite ecosystems, and economists should take a lesson from biological communities, not just extrapolate the benefits of a growing population and ignore the many facets and implications of infinite growth.

Phone in PM Rudd on Jon Faine - Immigration question

On the Jon Faine program, Radio ABC, Melbourne, 3 September, 2009, people were invited to phone in with questions. A caller, Ron from Box Hill, asked Rudd to house the homeless and balance the budget, not to waste money on the new broadband network, and to “immediately stop immigration”. (Perhaps the caller was responding to the grueling exposure of homelessness in Australia on the Four Corners program, "Heartbreak Hotel") where many forum participants linked homelessness to the greed of developers for immigrants.

Faine ran through the caller's points one by one to prompt Rudd's answers.

Faine: “Stop immigration?”
Rudd: “You know something, I thought we had a bit of a bipartisan consensus on this going back to let me say World War II that this country, a nation of immigrants, will continue to be a nation of immigrants into the future”.

Media manages damage control and sells nuclear at same time

I have noticed a flood of this kind of talk since Kelvin Thomson 'came out' scientifically criticising continuous population growth and I assume that it is the way the media intend to deal with immigration on behalf of the government and vice versa.

A Bernard Salt article in the Australian,"Where to put the extra millions at the end of the 21st century?" (September 10, 2009) comes out with some incredible assumptions/dictates:

Bernard Salt says:

"And that's the issue. Australia will be an immigrant nation for our lifetime and for the lifetime of our grandchildren."

"But what of the next stage of urban growth beyond five million to six then seven million? Melbourne and Sydney jointly contain 14 million residents of Australia's 35 million.Does this mean Sydney and Melbourne will account for 24 million if Australia reaches 62 million then? Is this possible? "

"There is the very real prospect that urban planners will have to manage the development of three Australian mega-regions (Sydney, Melbourne, southeast Queensland) each rising to between five and seven million by century's end."

"I simply do not see the range of solutions being offered as sufficiently robust to accommodate the scale of growth Australia must accommodate this century."

And, of course, all this tyrannically planned, assumed and imposed growth, is a means to an end: it justifies a nuclear economy. Never mind that we will not be able to afford one and the problems of uranium supply are huge and the success of thorium and breeder reactors cannot be guaranteed; the growth lobby, notably the developers and the mines will make money out of our destitution as long as they can talk Australian governments into underwriting the technology and the infrastructure for the big cities they plan around nuclear reactors.[4]

I wonder now how all those in the Australian Conservation Foundation who pitilessly militated against any effective expression of disapproval at high immigration feel now to realise that, if Penny Wong pretends to 'de-link' population growth from carbon emissions, everyone else is busy coupling high immigration to nuclear power.

Freddy the blind environmentalist could see this coming.

Ziggy Switkowski [1] and Bernard Salt [2] are making clear noises about nuclear; the "Climate Institute" (a P.R. blog) and Frank Lowey's Institute of International Affairs will find excuses for it [3] and Penny Wong's 'de-linking' will probably be predicated on it.

AATSI and the Scanlon Report" have done the blueprint for the 'way forward'. Salt's comments, seemingly tongue in cheek, echo similar statements made without humour in the Scanlon Report.

Special enforcement squads - Ha ha

Salt flags housing behemoth populations with growth economies in continuous sprawls all over our most fertile coasts and hinterlands, suggesting that our major cities will not be able to contain such human explosions.

"Although I suppose there is the option of enforcing compliance to urban consolidation laws using a special squad of enforcers."

There you have our predicament in a nutshell. We kid ourselves if we think that, in the eyes of Obama, Rudd, et al, Australia is any different from Chile or Argentina. (See Shock Doctrine articles.)

Press serves up Rudd with G20 and plenty of whipped cream

Page 2-3 of the Financial Review, 26-27 September, mercilessly flatters the bumbling Rudd, as though he were a two year old promoted from a high chair: "Australia has won a seat at the table of what will become the world's new peak economic decision-making body in the biggest shift in global financial architectures since the end of World War II." See also the Perspective insert, pp. 19-21 in the same Fin Review.

To me that's an indication that none of our policy will be made at home or democratically; we are simply to be further co-opted as a corporate colony.

If it all goes smoothly for those who, with the help of the media, have captured the helm of this country.

NOTES

[1]Ziggy Switkowski, once head of Telstra, now Chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, is again promoting nuclear at public expense in "This debate could really go nuclear", 'Perspective', Financial Review, 26-27 September 2009, pp. 25-27

[2] "Demographer", Bernard Salt has been marketing population growth and housing developments for many years now, as a partner with the international accounting firm, KPMG, and you would think that he would have warned us of the consequences before they might lend themselves to the hyperbole of 'inevitable' if he were truly concerned about public welfare or democracy.

KPMG, which Steve Bracks (ex-Premier of Victoria) went to work for in Timor, has been linked to pernicious international interference in Iraq along with a number of other big corporations:

"Michael Fleisher, the founder of the Chicago School based Shock Doctrine, [said in 2003 of Iraq that] ‘protected businesses never, never become competitive’. “He appeared to be impervious to the irony that Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all the other US corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the US government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot – all at taxpayer expense." Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine p.355.

[3] Lowy is a developer who has used the issue of climate change to launch certain opinions on many different political and development issues. As an Australian developer, not surprisingly, he wants to see our population keep on growing. The argument that we will need nuclear power to support such growth then comes naturally. See, for instance, http://www.lowyinstitute.org/Publication.asp?pid=786 and do a search for 'nuclear' on the Lowy site.

[4] For political and economic costings see the analysis of nuclear power requirements and capacities in "France and Australia after oil" in Sheila Newman (Ed.)The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto Press, UK, 2008

Illustration source was http://www.connectinghistories.org.uk/Learning%20Packages/Social%20Justice/social_justice_lp_03a.asp
September 23, 2009

Uncontrolled immigration blocks social housing for native-born

New research by Migrationwatch, based on official figures, shows the pressure that uncontrolled immigration has placed – and will place – on social housing.

Speaking at the annual conference of the National Housing Federation in London on September 23, Migrationwatch chairman, Sir Andrew Green, said that in the last ten years, the number of UK born tenants in social housing in the UK has fallen by about 1.2 million while non UK-born tenants have increased by 300,000. As a result, the proportion of foreign born has increased from 7.2% to 11.1% - an increase of 54%.

Migrants who arrived here in the last five years and are not refugees are not yet eligible to apply for social housing but could become so in future years if they are granted settlement. Grants of settlement for non-EEA nationals are running at about 160,000 a year, giving a potential pool of 800,000 although, of course, by no means all will apply.

The rise in the proportion of foreign born in social housing is greater because the supply of social housing has not merely failed to meet the demand in a period of very high immigration, but the stock of social housing has actually fallen over the last ten years.

In England, the number of social housing units has fallen from 4.4 to 3.9 million in the last ten years.

Immigration has added nearly three million to the population of the UK over the same period, mainly in England.
The waiting list for social housing in England has risen by 80% in the six years 2002-8, up to 1.8 million, with a sharp peak in 2003-4. Recent research by the National Housing Federation, published in March, suggests that the waiting list could approach two million in 2011.

Earlier this month the Government announced plans to build 2,000 homes in England – which it described as the biggest social housing building project in England for "over 20 years".

By way of comparison, this would be enough to meet the projected household formation of new immigrants for just over a week.

The pressure on social housing is set to continue:

The population of the UK is growing rapidly - twice as fast as in the 1990's and three times as fast as in the 1980's. By 2028 it is set to reach and then exceed 70 million.

70% of this increase is due to immigration. In other words, unless it is controlled, immigration will add the equivalent of 7 cities the size of Birmingham over the next 20 years or so.

Immigration is the major factor in household formation – 40% or, on average, nearly 2,000 new households a week - and it is the only one that can be influenced by government. Unless immigration is brought under control, we will need to build one home every six minutes for new immigrants for the next 25 years.

Commenting on the research, Sir Andrew said:

`In the debate about housing, immigration is a huge elephant in the room. Pressures on the green belt, the need for more affordable housing, overcrowding – all of these are made worse by large scale, uncontrolled immigration. Unless the next Government makes a clear commitment not to allow the population to hit 70 million, and to build its immigration policies around that commitment, we will need to find the money and space to build seven cities the size of Birmingham in the next 25 years just to house new immigrants. We are sitting on top of a population timebomb. It must be a major priority of the next Government to defuse it.'

Commenting on this press release, Australian population sociologist, Sheila Newman, said,

"These trends are relevant to most English speaking countries since most have inherited from the United Kingdom housing and population and citizenship policies and laws. She said that many English-speaking writers commenting on population growth in anglophone countries remain unaware that on the Continent - western Europe - the roman-based Napoleonic system means that immigration is rarely 'permanent' and housing of all kinds is seen as a social obligation and cost, rather than a private profit industry. This means that in non-anglophone Europe housing is a constraint on population growth."

She added,

"It is important for the people in the English speaking settlement countries to realise that there is a much better system elsewhere."

For more on that other system see The Growth Lobby and its Absence, particularly Chapter 7 and the submission to the Productivity Commission's First Home Buyers affordability Inquiry (which quickly covers many different housing systems) which are all available on-line here, plus further discussions such as this one.

Observations on how we are being backed into a corner

The propaganda against the 1/4 acre block started a few decades ago. - appearing as opinion pieces in newpapers. I believe this propaganda was aimed at very ordinary people in or suburbs with traditional blocks. It was to prepare them to relinquish their lifestyle and for their children not to expect it in the normal course of events. I don't think it was aimed at rich people as they are different - a special case. The very rich can actually do the opposite to "urban consolidation." The rich can buy the next door property in Toorak, bulldoze the house and annexe the land for their own pleasure in the form of a tennis court or swimming pool.

The propaganda seems to have been on behalf of those who wanted to effect radical change in values and rights for the sake of population growth, which for various reasons they derived benefit from - usually financial.

Why this is important

The 1/4 acre block affords some local self sufficiency to the ordinary person. 50 years ago it was quite common for people to keep chickens in the suburbs- some still do but I don't think it's as usual. There is probably an economic reason for this . Vegetable gardens were common then and they may be trying to make a return now.

Recently in Sydney I visited a cousin who has built her eco friendly dream home in the suburb of Ryde. The garden was for low rainfall, the house worked on passive temperature control and in the corner of this living arrangement was a chicken house with inhabitants. Area of block- 1/4 acre approx.

As oil depletion continues I believe self sufficiency will become more important. The more land per family we lose the less self sufficient we can be.

How dare we be talked into denying children the rights that we grew up with?

I believe the people of Melbourne are losing their land by stealth and propaganda. I also wonder how people can, on the one hand, be talked into having more children, and, on the other hand, talked into letting go of those children's rights.

In 2007 I made a submission to the Melbourne 2030 review. I made some of the points below. (Now Melbourne 2030 is out of date, of course. They are trying to bring in something even worse. )

Urban temperatures rising, trees and water disappearing

Urban temperatures are higher than those in the country, and made worse by air conditioners. I worry about the reduced ability of land to absorb water with increased concrete bitumen, housing and impermeable surfaces in general. I can see this affecting the water table and possibly having ramifications with regard to street trees and other trees and vegetation on public land. We should be preserving trees to keep the city cool and moist instead of infilling and concreting everything.

I would have thought with all the apartments and townhouses shooting up in the bastardized process known as suburban infill, that we would want to keep backyards full of trees etc. Never mind that I'll never own a $1.8M 3BR house in Hawthorn East, I'm just glad someone owns it so that there aren't twenty people in 6 townhouses there instead.

So God bless those rich people in their big houses!! (Unless of course they are developers and politicians telling the rest of us to go and live in high-rise infills.)

Even if I have hardly any garden at all, I want to protect other people's gardens. They are part of the environment and even if the garden is not mine- I benefit if I walk past or live near it. I breathe the oxygen that its greenery exudes. I am cooled by the transpiration of the leaves. Even if I live in a one bedroom apartment in the same street, I am better off if this house and garden remain than if this house in turn is bulldozed for another block of apartments. I can see what the obvious counter argument is to this - homelessness - but that problem is circular; the root cause of homelessness is rapid population growth.

Urban wildlife is yet another issue - one I feel so deeply about that I can hardly even write of it. Gardens provide some habitat for native animals, birds reptiles, and insects. The more the city is consolidated, the more predictable every space within it becomes and there will be little room for any species other than humans, dogs and cats. And, even then, the dogs must be on leads and the cats must be kept indoors. It would make more sense if we made friends with the neighbourhood possums, but the government has designated them as pests.

If we continue with population growth at 2% per annum- we stand to lose the few advantages we still have very quickly. If we have a population growth rate of 1% per annum we will still lose it but at half the speed.

I do not think that Australian politicians have a moral or any other right to do this to us.

The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly's misnamed book The March of Patriots, chronicling the Prime Ministerships of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard's, has been supplemented, at taxpayers' expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio stations Conversations program.

See also: "Review of Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'" of 21 Nov 07

The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly's misnamed book "The March of Patriots," which chronicles the Prime Ministership of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard's, has been supplemented, at taxpayers' expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio station's "Conversations" program.

"Conversations" is hosted by former Doug Anthony All Star Richard Fidler, who is now a Radio Presenter in Brisbane.

Tired old platitudes

The tired old platitudes that Kelly and other pro-corporate journalists have long used to sell these two discredited leaders to the Australian public -- "what you see is what you get", "a Prime Minister of conviction", etc. -- were lapped up uncritically by Richard Fidler in an astonishingly dull interview lasting almost an hour. Fidler challenged none of the 'free market' premises that Paul Kelly has used to justify the economic, social and ecological carnage wreaked on this country by Keating and Howard.

The central, supposedly controversial, thesis of Paul Kelly's book, is that today's wonderful, modern, prosperous 'free market' economy was created from a tired, outmoded, overly-regulated, protected, public-sector-dominated economy, through a common 'struggle' by these two leaders at different times.

Until now, many of us had naively assumed that both these men had been working to counter eachother's political agendas.

In reality the supposed 'struggle' amounted to these two men imposing a neo-liberal free market agenda on the Australian public with full cooperation and support from Paul Kelly and others in the Murdoch Press.

Shock doctrine techniques

The techniques used by the ex-prime ministers resemble those Naomi Klein describes in her towering work of political analysis, The Shock Doctrine of 2007. The Shock Doctrine documents cases where the neo-liberal project was imposed through trickery and deceit in apparently democratic states, rather than through outright military dictatorship. Although The Shock Doctrine does not contain any chapter on Australia, readers are still likely to gain a vastly better understanding of what happened to Australia under Keating and Howard than they will from reading The March of Patriots.

Paradoxically, the initial stages of the economic neo-liberal project began during the Whitlam years. In spite of Whitlam's many other economic nationalist policies, some manufacturing tariff barriers were reduced. The Fraser Coalition Government which followed in the late seventies and early eighties allowed greater rights to foreign concerns to buy Australian mineral wealth and companies. These policies were given a boost with Keating's sudden embrace of financial deregulation and his floating of the Australian dollar when he was Federal Treasurer, shortly after Labor won office in 1983. During the 1985 election the then opposition leader, John Howard, announced a hit list of twelve publicly-owned enterprises that would be sold off by a Coalition government if it won.

Howard lost that election, but by the time he won government in 1996, of the twelve on Howard's hit list, only Telstra remained in public hands. The other eleven, including the Commonwealth Bank, QANTAS and the national satellite company Aussat, were all disposed of in a Labor Government frenzy of privatisation.

Similar agendas - Howard and Keating

The other key plank of economic neo-liberalism implemented by Keating was the privatisation of retirement income, otherwise known as 'superannuation reform'. This was first undertaken by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Not even the corrupt, cravenly pro-corporate Bush regime dared try to put that one over the American public, but the Keating 'Labor' Government did so to Australians in the late 1980's and we are all reaping the terrible whirlwind this decade with the global financial meltdown.

Howard's policies since 1996, with the possible exceptions of his attempt to break the Maritime Union in 1998, and his imposition of his so-called "Work Choices" legislation in 2005, were merely continuations of Labor's policies.

Hardly 'news'

None of this would have been new to critical observers of these two leaders, so Kelly's 'revelation' that Howard and Keating had worked in office to achieve virtually the same economic and social goals is hardly news.

Even though a good many of both leaders' policies were deeply controversial and strongly opposed by many Australians - often a majority in the case of the privatisations of Government assets - Richard Fidler failed to put any of this to Kelly. Other awkward topics not raised in the inteview included:

• The numerous lies peddled by both Howard and Paul Kelly's Australian newspaper to win public acceptance for the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and
• The Australian Wheat Board (AWB) scandal in which AU$296million in bribes were paid to the very Saddam Hussein Government that John Howard would tell us in March 2003 posed such a mortal threat to world peace that we were left with no choice but to invade immediately.

Boat people

One incredible assertion from Paul Kelly that Fidler accepted uncritically was that Howard's motive for taking a strong stance against boat people in the Tampa and "Children Overboard" affairs of 2001 was not electoral advantage, but rather his strong desire to maintain the integrity of Australia's borders. In fact Howard later loosened entry requirements and ramped up immigration to record high levels as the Sydney Morning Herald's economics editor reported in the story "Back-scratching at a national level" of 13 Jul 07.

The program, far from being a probing interview that Australian taxpayers should rightly expect from their ABC struck me as little more than free advertising for Paul Kelly and the Murdoch media.

Sugaring dubious medicine

Another consequence of the publication of Kelly's new book and the attendant marketing, in which the ABC is now participating, could be a normalisation in retrospect of the Keating and Howard Governments' unpleasant and undemocratic policies. Such a representation of political history could then be used to deter citizens from questioning new asset-stripping, austerity and wealth transfer programs, whether under the current Rudd Labor Government or under a new Coalition one.

See also: "Review of Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'" of 21 Nov 07

Appendix: E-mail sent to Richard Fidler

The following e-mail was sent at 11.30PM, which would have been approximately 25 minutes into an interview lasting roughly 55 minutes.

Date: Monday 21 Sep 2009, 11:30:21 am
From: James Sinnamon
To: Richard Fidler

Paul Kelly's 'revelation' that both Keating and Howard both helped to bring Australia to what it is today is hardly news.

The interview has, so far, proven to be even more dull than #comment-235107">"Keating the Musical".

Have you read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Docrtine"?

Even though it doesn't have a chapter on Australia, it gives a much more accurate picture of what happened to this country than what Paul Kelly is giving.

A lot of us dispute that deregulation, privatisation, removal of trade union rights, etc, has been beneficial.

The GDP measures that economists use to prove that this has all been beneficial are flawed and capable of presenting massive declines in quality of life as increases. As an example, just ask yourself why at least two incomes are now necessary to buy even a modest dwelling when one was easily sufficient barely more than a generation ago.

Could you please consider questioning the economic neo-liberal premises of Kelly's glowing tribute to these two abysmal political misleaders?

sincerely,

James Sinnamon

This e-mail had no noticable impact on the remaining part of the interview. No reply has been received so far. If one is received it will be posted below.

According to the latest Intergenerational Report, Australia's population will balloon by a staggering 65 percent to 35 million in just 40 years' time, up from around 21.5 million people at present. This projected increase is around 7 million more than previously forecast and will be driven primarily by immigration.

Already, Australia is struggling to cope with the environmental and social effects of rapid, immigration-driven population growth. A decade of high immigration under both the Howard and Rudd governments has had a major impact on a variety of quality-of-life issues ranging from housing costs, infrastructure overload and traffic congestion to environmental quality, water shortages and social cohesion.

A lone voice of reason in the lower house, federal ALP backbencher Kelvin Thomson says the projected population explosion will have a "catastrophic" effect on the environment and has called for immigration levels to be reduced.

"We are sleepwalking into an environmental disaster," Thomson said. "There will be impact on the availability of food, water, energy and land. These things are already stretched and a 60 per cent population increase will only drive up the cost of these essentials and lower our living standards."

"And what about the impact on our major cities? Declining housing affordability, traffic congestion, over-crowded concrete jungles."

Yet, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is purported to have said that Australia's projected population explosion is "great" news.

It may be great news for the parasitic "growth lobby" which profits from both the cheap labour and additional consumer demand supplied by immigration, but it is far from good news for the rest of us who are forced to carry the costs. In fact, it's a living nightmare.

Read more:

"How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future", January 24 2009.
"Australia 'sleepwalking' into population disaster", ABC News, September 18, 2009.
"Population boom 'a recipe for tragedy'", The Australian, September 18, 2009.

The following paper, published in the Winter 1997-98 issue of The Social Contract journal, was given by Mark O'Connor to the Fourth National Conference of the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia (FECCA) on December 7, 1996 in Adelaide. FECCA is a major promoter of immigration and multiculturalism in Australia.

Where Does the PC Line on Immigration Come From?

By Mark O'Connor

As a member of a group dedicated to reducing Australia's population growth, I worry that Australia over the past 15 years has had by far the world's highest per capita immigration rate. Luckily we seem to have turned a corner, and our net immigration (if you believe the lowest of the figures being put out by government sources) may now be only 50,000 a year, which is a little over one-third of our net natural increase (i.e. the excess of total births over total deaths - currently about 142,000 persons annually). [Sadly, O'Connor's optimistic observation that Australia seemed to have turned a corner has since been proven incorrect. Immigration has crept ever upwards since the late 1990s, and is now running at record high levels.] Clearly our first priority now should be to work on attitudes as to family size.

Yet immigration remains important. It sends a most negative message to the community. How can the ordinary citizen see having a small family as a contribution to the community's well-being when he or she must also watch (and pay taxes to help) the government increasing our population through immigration? Indeed the Department of Immigration has favorably cited a recommendation from the growth economist John Neville that if the birthrate falls or stays low then immigration should be increased to compensate for this.

Clearly we environmentalists must question the rather bizarre assumptions on which the immigration debate is conducted. How can it be "selfish" to resist immigration yet be enormously to our benefit to take in immigrants? How could former Prime Minister Keating simultaneously claim immigration benefits the economy yet want to charge New Zealand for dole payments to our NZ immigrants? How can it be "racist" to want to control immigration when most immigrants, especially until the last few years, have been of the same Caucasian race as the overwhelming majority of Australians? How is it that when we have rescued people whose own countries or cultures have failed them, we are so often and so complacently told by "ethnic leaders" that we are in their debt rather than they in ours?

Similar questions are asked in the United States. In October 1993 I was an invited guest at the annual conference of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. At its final session Professor Otis Graham from the History Faculty at Santa Barbara (CA) spoke brilliantly about the internal contradictions of the USA's current official (or politically correct or PC) line on immigration. Subsequently he was asked how such self-contradictory positions had become established as dogma. He answered, "I simply don't know - I wish someone would explain it to me."

Later in the discussion I offered a rather tentative explanation in the form of a very simplified "story" of how these positions may have been reached. I wasn't very sure how complete or accurate this story (or theory) was, either as a comment on American or even on Australian history; but several of those present, including Professor Graham, pressed me to write it down and publish it. So here it is, still tentative, but a little more fleshed out.

Perhaps our "politically correct" attitudes to immigration come from particular conditions produced in the decay of 1960s and 1970s radicalism. Sociologists like Alvin Gouldner and Katharine Betts have pointed out the paradox that entire groups of the tertiary-educated, who once saw themselves as anti-establishment radicals in fierce opposition to the values of their parents, have now moved up the social system and are running bureaucracies and governments. The old "anti-establishment," these scholars imply, now runs the establishment.

This is clearer in Australia where the more left-wing of the two major parties has won the last five elections. (In the U.S., the Bush and Reagan years prevented there being quite such a conspiratorial left-wing tone to the current bureaucratic power group.) Many such people were among those who "saw the light" in the Sixties and Seventies but then in the Eighties, when they were getting a little complacent, were offered money instead - "the money or the light?" - until they eventually chose the money. They were also (again, this is more clearly true in Australia than in the U.S.) the first generation in which easy access to tertiary education became open to a meritocracy of the talented.

"[This New Class] sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions." Gouldner and Betts_#main-fn1">1 see this new ruling class as differing from a traditional aristocracy in that it does not depend on inherited wealth. Its capital is largely intellectual capital, represented by its tertiary degrees. It sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions. Let us accept this term "New Class" on probation, for the moment, and see what we can do with it. (Luckily this is not a matter of speculating about some poorly known and distantly observed group; it is essentially my own class I am talking about, and includes many of my own friends and former class mates. Reading this, they may well complain that I have "turned conservative," though, oddly enough, I believe that it is they who have done so.)

In Australia in the 1980s, many members of this class entered the bureaucracy and went on to earn degrees in economics, often training in the most cynical of economic rationalist schools (like that of the Australian National University). Thus, underneath the cement of avowed radicalism which binds the new ruling class together (serving as their meal ticket and union card) is sometimes a guilty conscience about having betrayed so many of their utopian and Aquarian ideals - for this was a generation whose hopes went far beyond the dull obviousness of social justice. The triumphalism of their politics often reflected the lyrics from the musical Hair "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" - an age of transcendent and psychedelic possibilities, of trusting the universe, and of release from constraints.

The result of this guilt can be a desperate attempt to find new grounds for difference and for moral superiority - no longer, this time, to justify revolution, but rather to maintain an establishment. Any ruling class that lasts more than a decade will feel the need to justify itself by having some ideal to which it appeals. It will invent some central legitimizing principle - usually a moral one. Thus a traditional aristocracy may place a moral value on the notion of "nobility" itself - a quality on which, by definition, it has something of a monopoly. By contrast it may see the classes it exploits as not merely "villains" but "villainous" and therefore needing to be ruled and guided. Our modern ruling class needs some similar principle to justify its free lunches and overseas travel.

They - or let me say "we" - used to be comrades in the struggle that built a better, more humane society. But what radical ideals are left when so many have been abandoned for pragmatic reasons and profit? Most utopian and Aquarian concepts of the 1970s have been quietly drowned. The psychedelic substances are only occasionally used by the successful baby boomers. Experience in running bureaucracies and governments has taught them not to be unduly idealistic about human nature. And so they have fallen back on a more basic or background ideal, one which, at least in Australia, was almost forgotten during the high point of 1970s radicalism. Yet when I went up to university in 1962 this had been the one ideal we all took for granted to treat everyone equally, regardless of race, color or creed (and some were beginning to add of gender).

Almost everyone in Australia believed in this ideal, at least in theory. So it is hardly surprising that the New Class still believe in it, at least in theory. The problem is that it is hard to claim moral superiority on grounds of such a common ideal.

The left-wing and tertiary-educated elite was now quite used to the fruits of power, yet already troubled by increasing evidence that it was just as corruptible as any previous establishment, and that it might soon lose favor with the electorate. In the resulting search for moral self-assurance and legitimacy, radical egalitarianism was the virtue it eventually focused on.

Why? It seems that the divide between left and right, liberal and conservative, is a persistent if fuzzy human tendency. It may be the characteristic mild schizophrenia of our species. And yet, most of the qualities that mark this divide between left and right "Both idealism and self-advancement combined to produce ... believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views."are as morally neutral as those that differentiate, say, French culture from Greek culture. For example, tending to believe or disbelieve in the perfectability of human nature is not of itself a moral position; nor is the tendency to visualize oneself as a rebellious youth rather than as a controlling parent. The one quality by way of which the left can plausibly claim a specifically moral superiority is its concern with equality - its tendency to side with the underdog.

Before long some politicians and media people who were members or aspirants to this successful class were prepared to side with such underdogs as illegal immigrants, and even against the clear interests and beliefs of their own constituents and nation. Both idealism and self-advancement now combined to produce the mild paradoxes of an establishment that favors anti-establishment sentiments and styles in the arts (and often elsewhere), of believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views, and of an elite whose claim to privileged status is based quite largely on anti-elitism.

Yet, even a decade ago it was getting harder and harder, at least in Australia, to find true racist rednecks against whom the no-longer-very-young, left-wing, educated classes could rebel - especially after those classes had been running the government and much of the media for years.

Their answer was a trick borrowed, I believe unconsciously, from the McCarthy-ites of the 1950s, and from their spiritual cousins, the Stalinists of the same era. It involves what Freudians call "projection." You project upon some real or invented victim-class your own secret guilts. If you were one of Stalin's henchmen, your secret guilt was an aspiration to privileged middle-class status in a very poor country. Down with the Kulaks! If you were someone like J. Edgar Hoover you could project upon others your own betrayals of public trust and public interest. Down with the communists!

You might then encourage the media to work up an intense obsessive concern about this evil, a concern which contains its own built-in, self-reinforcing loop. The pursuit of communist conspiracy (or in the USSR of a capitalist-revisionist conspiracy) became so omnipresent and all-encompassing that it readily discovered all the evidence it needed to sustain and even intensify its own belief.

By the 1980s, if "racists" (i.e. anti-egalitarians) had not existed it would have been necessary for the meritocracy to invent them. (In Australia, where most ethnic leaders were Europeans and thus of the same Caucasian race as the population that had invited them in, they used the term "racist" just as freely, even though the differences at issue were not racial but cultural - unless one believes in sub-racial classifications.) For some members of the New Class the term "racist" became a way to disparage anyone who believed in "inappropriate" meritocracies and elites - i.e., ones other than those by which they themselves were sustained.

Their other great trick, also consciously imitated from the McCarthy era, was that when you need to enhance your own moral position you discover a conspiracy against some widely-revered public virtue - a virtue to which you can easily lay claim. Thus, by imagining (or exaggerating) a communist conspiracy the McCarthy-ites turned their own minimal and commonplace virtue - that of allegiance to the democratic rule of law and to the legitimacy of the American state - into grounds for a claim of moral superiority, even of heroism.

How could Betts' New Class, the new ruling bureaucratic class of the 1980s and 1990s, turn their own minimal and commonplace virtue of believing in the brotherhood of man (the siblinghood of humanity) into a special virtue that justified their rule? The high immigration policy, toward which some special interest groups were pushing them, inadvertently supplied an answer.

High immigration alienated and indeed damaged the interests of the non-tertiary-educated majority, yet it did so in ways that were deniable. A media blitz, started or helped by special interest groups, soon turned high immigration into a symbol for acceptance of human rights. Once this assumption was swallowed it became clear that those who opposed high immigration - the majority of ordinary citizens - were wallowing in moral error, denying human equality, and in dire need of "guidance" from an elite. ("How satisfactory!" purrs the Mikado in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.)

Initially high immigration had little cost to the New Class. It wasn't usually their jobs the immigrant workers were after, and poverty-related crime took place mainly in suburbs far from their own. For those who had hitched their bureaucratic careers to ethnic programs or multicultural policies, high immigration was pure profit. They could preach against "selfishness" and take the moral credit to themselves, sending the bill to the ordinary citizen. Like the Unjust Steward in the New Testament parable they had found a failsafe way to buy moral credit with someone's else's money (Luke 16 2-4).

The New Class tend to be internationalists (for a mix of idealistic and business reasons) who are strongly opposed to the evergreen appeal of nationalism. Worldwide, it would seem that nation-states based on ethnicity are being formed at a faster rate than at any time since just after World War I.

Ironically, the internationalists soon found themselves in alliance with those who want to Balkanize, multiculturize or racialize the nation-state. (Remember how often multiculturalism was associated with globalization in the discussions about NAFTA?) By a further, now familiar, paradox the cry of "racism" became a trademark of both the globalist New Class and of its allies, the racialists. Some members of the New Class discovered that high immigration, like some of the extreme forms of multiculturalism, could be a way to bring down the nation-state and undercut its loyal supporters. It was twice blessed it could enhance one's status as an international high flyer and simultaneously as a noble fighter for the underdog.

The New Class globalists found themselves in effective alliance with leaders of certain immigrant groups who were practicing globalists only so long as the rhetoric of globalism could help them increase their "market share" and hence their power within the country. Some of these leaders are chauvinists who play the politics of ethnic pride in a way to resemble the Nineteenth century colonials "We do have the right to enter your country, and on our own terms, because we need it and you don't really own it; and in any case we are doing you a favor by adding an admixture of our wonderfully rich culture to your sterile, narrow and un-diverse Anglo culture."

The new politically correct line on immigration - much like the plethora of new "culturally sensitive" terms with which the ordinary citizen could hardly keep up - was one more way for the New Class to assert its leadership over the insensitive masses, on whose behalf they had shouted in the streets barely twenty years earlier.

And the fact that there was popular resistance to high immigration was reassuring to the New Class. It enabled them to ward off any nagging doubts that they might have lost their radical edge and suffered the common fate of aging into conservatism. If the New Class could not stay forever young they could at least stay forever radical. Some indeed seemed to desire even more public resistance to their ideas. Mark Ulmann recently accused one group in Australia of being "desperate for a witch to burn."

In high immigration and multiculturalism the New Class had found its difference from the bulk of society, and what seemed to many of them a legitimizing moral principle. They could deliver expansive population growth with the steadily rising property values that meant billions of dollars to some of their friends in business. They could extend contempt to all those excluded classes that had failed to advance like them through the mandatory tertiary education into the new enlightenment.

From patronizing a people's culture it can be a short step (as the history of imperialism shows) to denying their aspirations and interests. It soon became politically correct for the New Class to deny that there was such a thing as an Australian or American cultural identity, other than a multicultural one. This made it easier to deny that the American or Australian people had any exclusive right to their own country, or even that there was such a thing as a cohesive Australian or American people. If the nation does not really exist, then why should not its elected and appointed servants sell out its interests in favor of a global one?

That's the story/theory. How well does it fit the facts - in Canada? in the United States? in Australia? in New Zealand?

Notes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York, Seaburg Press, 1979.

Katharine Betts, Ideology and Immigration: Australia 1976 to 1987, Melbourne University Press, 1988; "The Environmental Movement, New Class, and Immigration Reform," Papers of the 1993 BIR Conference: The Politics of Immigration, available from the Department of Immigration, PO Box 25, Woden ACT. I am indebted to Dr. Betts for a number of insights woven into my "story."

See also: Forum discussion on Andrew Bartlett's blog in response to this article commencing 5 Nov 09, "Population is destiny" editorial in the Australian of 19 Sep 09, Population boom 'a recipe for tragedy' in News Ltd Online of 18 Sep 09, "35 million Australians? Start preparing now" editorial in the SMH of 18 Sep 09.

In the following article, originally published in the Winter 2008 issue of The Independent Australian magazine, Dr John O'Connor draws attention to Professor Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive and the chapter in it specifically on Australia and its overpopulation woes.

Jared Diamond on Australia's Sustainable Population

By Dr John O'Connor

Perhaps the single most astonishing, ridiculously contradictory set of public policies we face, is the left hand of government promoting reduced greenhouse emissions, conservation of diminishing freshwater, soil fertility and other declining natural resources, while the right hand promotes rapid population growth through high immigration.

Is this a classic example of the left hand not knowing (or wanting to know) what the right hand is up to? One well-disposed but concerned observer from abroad (a frequent visitor to our shores) is the United States’ Professor Jared Diamond, author of (inter alia) the very influential Guns, Germs and Steel (1997). This treatise is a convincing science-based exposition of the geographical and environmental reasons for the technological ascendancy of European nation-states during the second millennium, in addition to the usual social and other reasons advanced by historians. It traces humankind’s global history since the appearance of agricultural settlements in the Middle East “fertile crescent”, Nile and Indus valleys and China, wherever our ancestors encountered domesticable animal and plant species, and the consequent spread of agriculture-based societies throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Prof. Diamond has since published Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (Penguin, 2005: 574 pp) which includes a chapter, "Mining Australia" (38 pp) deserving the most serious consideration by any Australian government, regardless of its party political social theories. In this tour de force, he reviews the reasons for the disintegration of cultures with legacies of abandoned ruins in Norse Greenland, Anasazi Chaco Canyon, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and other Pacific Islands, in Mayan Yucatan, and elsewhere. These reasons - mainly overpopulation and irrational actions driving local environmental degradation - have also played their part in modern tragedies including the Rwandan genocide and the impoverishment of nations such as Haiti, while neighbour states (eg. Dominican Republic) prosper. The prospects for nations including China, the United States, and others subject to environmentally disastrous values, with failure to recognise or anticipate the consequences of irrational political policies and unsuccessful remedies, are comprehensively brought into focus.

He sees Australia, not as a nation facing imminent collapse, but as the first world’s miners’ canary: a developed country facing a rapid decline in living standards as its burgeoning population outstrips its rapidly degrading natural resource base. After consulting widely with government authorities, academics (including Tim Flannery) and grassroots farmers, graziers, and Landcare-type groups, Jared Diamond compares us with other nations, past and present. He details our problems of soil fertility and salinization, land degradation, diminishing freshwater resources, distance costs, over-exploitation of forests and fisheries, importation of inappropriate European agricultural values and methods and alien species, trade and immigration policies. He concludes that the mining of our natural resources - their unsustainable exploitation at rates faster than their renewal rates since European settlement began - gives us the dubious distinction of ”…illustrating in extreme form the exponentially accelerating “horse race” in which the world now finds itself……on the one hand, the development of environmental problems……on the other hand, the development of public environmental concern, and of private and governmental countermeasures. Which horse will win? Many readers……will live long enough to see the outcome.”

Specifically, he concludes:

”Contrary to their government and business leaders, 70% of Australians say that they want less rather than more immigration. In the long run it is doubtful that Australia can even support its present population: the best estimate of a population sustainable at the present standard of living is 8 million people, less than half of the present population.”

The reasons supporting this alarming prognosis (how long is “the long run”?) are very briefly summarised as follows.

• Non-sustainability: ”At present rates, Australia’s forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic……the former are renewable but the latter aren’t.” And: ”While many other countries are mining their environments……among First World countries, (our) population and economy are much smaller and less complex than……the U.S., Europe or Japan……the Australian situation is more easily grasped.”
• Exceptional ecological fragility: ”…the most fragile of any First World country except perhaps Iceland……many problems that could eventually become crippling in other First World countries and already are so in some Third World countries - such as overgrazing, salinization, soil erosion, introduced species, water shortages, and man-made droughts - have already become severe in Australia.”
• An informed population: we have ”……a well-educated populace…and relatively honest political and economic institutions by world standards. Australia’s environmental problems cannot be dismissed as……ecological mismanagement by an uneducated, desperately impoverished populace and grossly corrupt government and businesses……”
• Climate change: clearly exacerbating our ”obvious massive impacts on the Australian environment”.
• Australian soils, especially their low nutrient and increasingly high salt levels. Britain as a trade partner and model society have shaped Australian agricultural practices inappropriate to the Australian landscape (e.g. agricultural practices based on high-yield British soils). We inhabit ”…the most unproductive continent…soils with the lowest average nutrient levels…old, leached over billions of years…only a few small areas have been renewed by volcanic or glacial activity or slow uplift. Agriculture has therefore depended on fertilizers and cultivation of large low-yield areas, with increased machinery and fuel costs, competitive disadvantages vis-à-vis food imports, low agroforestry returns due to slow tree growth, and relatively unproductive coastal and inland fisheries due to low-nutrient runoff.
• Salinity, i.e. salt mobilization. Increasingly, low soil nutrient fertility is worsened by salt, from three causes: sea-salt blown inland over south-west W.A. wheat belt; repeated past marine inundations of the Murray-Darling basin and evaporation of inland lakes; mobilisation of salt by land clearance and irrigation agriculture. ”Salinization…already affects about 9% of all cleared land in Australia……projected under present trends to rise to about 25%.” And: ”The total area in Australia to which salinization has the potential for spreading is more than 6 times the current extent and includes a 4-fold increase in W.A., 7-fold increase in Queensland, 10-fold increase in Victoria and 60-fold increase in New South Wales.”
• Fresh water as a population-limiting factor: ”Australia is the continent with the least of it.” Most readily accessible water is already utilised - domestic, agriculture and industry. For instance, our largest river, the Murray/Darling, has two thirds or more of its flow drawn off each year (in some years no water is left to enter the ocean), and becomes progressively saltier downstream towards Adelaide, with increased burden of pesticides from cotton farming and irrigation practices. Further high-energy desalination plants now seem inevitable for urban requirements. Historically, “Australian land use has gone through many cycles of land clearance, investment, bankruptcy and abandonment” from early colonial times, due to low soil productivity and a disproportionately large fraction of pastoral and arid lands subject to low-average unpredictable unreliable rainfall. This is due to the ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) climatic factor, resulting in uncertain crop returns, bare soil, and consequent soil erosion and salinization. South Australia’s Goyder Line and parts of Western Australia’s Gascoigne provide two of many examples.
• The “tyranny of distances”, imposing large extra costs, both within Australia and between our trading partners. These costs also mitigate against medium-sized towns, producing the world’s most urbanised nation (about 60% of us dwell in the 5 major cities).
• Introduced species: cattle and sheep have been of great economic value, while also damaging fragile ecosystems. Whereas rabbits, foxes, cane toads, carp, feral buffalo, camels, donkeys, horses, goats, blackberry, “Paterson’s curse”, mimosa in Kakadu, and other weed species (about 3000, alone causing economic losses of about $2 billion annually), are expensive disasters.
• Land clearance (encouraged by tax incentives), overstocking and overgrazing have resulted in dryland salinization, soil erosion and land abandonment. ”Rotting and burning of the bulldozed vegetation (in 2005) contribute to Australia’s annual greenhouse emissions a gas quantity approximately equal to the country’s total motor vehicle emissions.”
• Marine overfishing: species which have been “mined” to uneconomically low levels include coral trout, eastern gemfish, Exmouth Gulf tiger prawns, school shark, southern bluefin tuna, tiger flathead, and orange roughy. Damage to freshwater fisheries, e.g Murray cod and golden perch, may also be irreversible.
• Forestry: with only 25% of 1788 forests remaining intact, and still being mined, half our export products are wood chips (as low as $7 per ton) sent mostly to Japan, where the resulting paper sells for $1000 per ton; we import nearly 3 times our forest products exports, one-half as paper and paperboard products. ”One expects to encounter that particular type of trade asymmetry ……when an economically backward non-industrialised unsophisticated Third World colony deals with a First World country……buying their raw materials cheaply, adding value……and exporting expensive manufactured goods to the colony.”
• Trade: ”In short, over the past half century Australia’s exports have shifted from predominantly agricultural products to minerals, while its trade partners have shifted from Europe to Asia.” We are exposed to unprecedented new national security and economic factors.
• Population policy: ”The fallacy behind the policy of “filling up Australia”, despite ”compelling environmental reasons” to the contrary, arises from our aspirations for national security and economic power (with only a few millions each, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Singapore already outstrip us, implying that quality is more important than quantity?) Some politicians and business leaders still call for a population of 50 million, regardless of our declining natural resource base! This may rapidly convert us to “a net food importer rather than exporter of food”, in a world already struggling to feed an expanding population of some 6.6 billion. It will also dilute our per capita earnings from mineral exports.

Professor Diamond sympathetically reviews the many remedial policies, individual and group activities which are attempting to control these and other problems. No doubt some items need some up-dating. But his main point remain valid: because it is all happening so rapidly here, he regards our nation as a warning and an example to the developed world. For this reviewer, one local need stands out above all others: the need for a rational population policy, with numbers in balance with our diminishing natural resource base, having due regard for limiting factors listed above. Indeed, this need applies not only to Australia, but to our Earth entire, recently imaged by the outbound Voyager 2 space probe as a single pale blue pixel, a dust mote suspended in a sunbeam. On this damaged dust mote, we and our descendants will continue our species’ history, our unfolding comprehension of our origin, present existence and attainable future. Or so we hope.

Dr John O'Connor had 25 years lecturing, research (specialising in air pollution, plant stress), and consultancies (government and industry) in the environmental sciences. Now retired, he is active part-time in adult education. When submissions were called for the 2020 Summit, he sent in a précis of Diamond's chapter on Australia.

In the letter included below on 2 Sep 09 to the Melbourne Age, Mark O'Connor, author of "Overloading Australia" noted. that contrary to his earlier claims that immigration had been "slashed", Immigration Minister Chris Evans has recently admitted we have "an unprecedented, unplanned migration wave". In 2008 he claimed net immigration was half what the Bureau of Statistics had said it was. Whether this is through design or incompetence, Evans is clearly serving vested interests at the expense of ordinary Australians and, accordingly, should resign. (Note: two other letters published in the Melbourne Age on the same day are also included)

It's no business for big business

SENATOR Chris Evans' claim that immigration should be the nation's labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants, especially younger, skilled workers, is absurd ("Migration rules set for revamp", The Age, 31/8).

The Australian population should be our normal source of workforce. Decisions about who comes to Australia should not be left to employers. Big employers have a long history of making bizarre ambit claims about the numbers they propose to employ. Often the real aim is to create a surplus of job seekers and thus bully governments into giving the go-ahead for short-sighted projects to create jobs.

The liveability crisis should be a higher priority than importing "skilled and willing" (read "temporarily more docile") workers from elsewhere.

Senator Evans bizarrely claims that his "attempts to have a more sophisticated debate about the topic have totally failed". What efforts?

The book Overloading Australia documents him claiming in May 2008 that net immigration was less than half what the Bureau of Statistics says it was. Recently he claimed immigration had been "slashed", when it was soaring. Now he admits we have "an unprecedented, unplanned migration wave". He should resign and be replaced by a minister who serves the Australian electorate, not vested interests.

Mark O'Connor, co-author, Overloading Australia, Lyneham, ACT

It's time to debate, people

I AGREE that it is "time for a reality check on immigration policy" (Editorial, 1/9). I would go further and say it is time for a national population policy. Tim Flannery, in his Australia Day address in 2002, indicated that a population policy was vital for Australia to have an environmentally sustainable future.

He said the way to achieve such a policy was for the nation to engage in a truthful, vigorous debate, together with a government inquiry charged with setting an optimum population target. Once the target had been decided we should determine our immigration policy in light of it. This, Flannery believed, would take most of the hysteria out of the immigration debate.

In my view, the bipartisanship way the major parties have kept immigration policy debate out of the public arena is an affront to democracy. I believe an appropriate forum for debating a population policy would also act as a prophylactic in keeping irrational ideologies out of the debate.

Questions about the boom

THE boom in immigration, resulting from the wholesale granting of permanent residency to international students on the basis of skill credentials obtained here, is at last being reviewed.

The demographic distortion from this influx may have resulted in increased unemployment and disaffection among migrant and native young people.

Any net benefit from the ''education industry's ''export'' earnings might not withstand examination, with the money cycle involving repayment of loans from Australian earnings, plus huge long-term costs to Australia. Issues include the diversion of educational resources to service this trade and the downgrading of the perceived value of Australian qualifications.

Excerpts from Age article Migration rules set for revamp

"Australia's immigration policy is set for an overhaul amid concerns that it is failing to meet the nation's long-term needs, with a record influx of more than 600,000 temporary residents adding to the strain of a growing population.

"...

"New figures to be released today show that Australia's official migration program recorded an intake of 171,318 permanent migrants in 2008-09.

"When the 13,500 refugees and the 47,780 New Zealanders who settled permanently in Australia are included, the migration program saw 232,598 people arriving in the past year, a 12.8 per cent leap from the previous year's record high of 219,098 people.

"But according to figures obtained by The Age, a further 657,124 temporary migrants with the right to work arrived in Australia during the past year. The 11 per cent surge in temporary migrants was fuelled by big increases in foreign students (up 15 per cent to 320,368) and working holiday visas (up 22 per cent to 154,148).

"...

The surge in temporary migrants with a right to work has created an unprecedented, unplanned migration wave. Senator Evans said Australia needed a rational immigration debate, beyond the hysteria about the few hundred boat people who arrive each year.

"...

"Decisions about who came to Australia would be increasingly left to employers ..."

See also: Overloading Australia - new book about Australia's overpopulation problem of 23 Jul 09 by Sheila Newman, Review by sociologist, Katharine Betts of Overloading Australia of 8 Apr 09, "Migration rules set for revamp" in the Age of 31 Aug 09, Want job, will travel in the Age of 31 Aug 09, Workforce ripe for the picking by John Sutton, national secretary of the CFMEU in the Sydney Morning Herald of 31 Aug 09.