(We) can do better

The Australian land tax system creates hot treeless slums. In Queensland, for instance, the Brisbane City Council charges landowners according to the assessed market value of their land. If the Council land-zoning changes to allow medium or high density housing on land previously zoned only for detached homes, then the commercial value of that land goes up as each block will then be able to hold several dwellings instead of one. Although living conditions then become cramped and the quality of life for residents of higher density declines in comparison with that of residents of detached single dwellings, the total financial value of the medium density dwellings inevitably exceeds that of a single residence on the same land.

Rich aspire now to what working class had 40 years ago

The houses and gardens in this gentrified, expensive area of Brisbane, very close to the CBD, used to belong to working class families, who grew vegetables in their back yards and whose children played in the rainforest in the valley between the houses. Those were the 'bad' old days. Nowadays, of course, ordinary people cannot hope to purchase in this area, and many will never own a home, let alone a home with a garden and a rainforest out back, 20 minutes walk from the Brisbane GPO.

Greed or necessity

But apparently even the current residents of this last green valley in inner Brisbane are going to lose the rainforest out back too, because the opportunity to make a quid by developing every square inch causes neighbours to cave in to greed, or necessity, one by one. As the land values go up, so do rates. And down come the trees...

Holding out

One man has held out now since the late sixties to the three blocks of land adjacent to a fourth with the house where he raised his children, simply because, as an architect, he can see that the forest is of more intrinsic value than the cash-value of the land. He can no longer afford to pay the rates, however, and so is faced with the option of going into debt to build on the property or going into debt to keep the property for nature.

Land-taxes and overpopulation doom nature and raise costs

Has government-engineered population growth in Brisbane made every square inch of this area too expensive to leave unpaved or is there some way out?

In June 2010, it was "reported" on ninesn.com that Brisbane home owners were to be slugged with a 5.04% increase in their council rates (based upon the the fact that the increase would drive up the rates on average by $80 (presumably per year)).

This hike shows how ordinary Brisbane home-owners and mortgagees are being made to pay the price of the mismanagement of our economy by governments at the Federal state and local, particularly due the encouragement of population growth by those governments.

Land-tax system creates slums

The Brisbane City Council charges landowners according to the assessed market value of their land. If the Council land-zoning changes to allow medium or high density housing on land previously zoned only for detached homes, then the commercial value of that land goes up as each block will then be able to hold several dwellings instead of one. Although living conditions then become cramped and the quality of life for residents of higher density declines in comparison with that of residents of detached single dwellings, the total financial value of the medium density dwellings inevitably exceeds that of a single residence on the same land.

People don't like what is happening

In spite of the profits that can be made, many residents choose to forego such profits and continue to live in single detached dwellings. They may do so in order to preserve the suburban lifestyle to which they have become accustomed and to avoid the disruption to their own lives entailed in selling their own residence and moving further away from the centre of the city, work and amenities in order to find a house similar to the one they have sold.

What can be lost

The google-earth map (at least five years old, judging by the current landscape features not shown) of the suburb near the centre of Brisbane (alluded to at the beginning of this article) shows what else can be lost by the rezoning of inner city suburbs. In this photo is a precious patch of suburban rainforest, a thing of utmost rarity in Brisbane, which is currently being gnawed away by subdivision. As mentioned in the introduction, in the past, much of the rainforest at the back of these homes was an effective commons in which local children played. The rainforest also continues to perform a number of valuable ecological services, and to provide shelter and food for wildlife. Without this patch of forest, and other fragments, Brisbane would be a far less pleasant place to live.

Removal of trees causes flooding

Rain, which falls on suburban rainforest, is retained in the soils, bushes and trees. Rain which which falls on rooftops, driveways, concrete footpaths, roadways and mowed lawns, is quickly driven by gravity into lower parts of the city. Towns in which vegetated land has been replaced with housing - particularly high-density housing - are more prone to flooding. A very striking example is the town of Toowoomba, 140 km to the west of Brisbane. over decades, vegetated land on the higher ground surrounding Toowoomba's centre has been cleared and covered with housing. Now all but the lightest of showers cause the centre of Toowoomba to become flooded.

Removal of trees causes climate warming

Those sought-after timber Brisbaner houses with their ornate wooden trimmings and lattice-work verandahs now stand where vast forests once stood. People often don't realise that the wood for those houses came from the forests they replaced. As more and more of Brisbane has been changed from living green into a concrete jungle, it's local climate has become hotter and less pleasant. The vegetation in the photo almost certainly keeps the locals cooler and Brisbane as a whole more healthy. Forested suburban settings are immensely desirable and raise the value of the housing nearby as well as benefiting the wider environment.

Environmentally responsible penalised

Yet landowners who try to preserve vegetation, including rainforest, on their land have been penalised, rather than being rewarded for the service their decision provide to Brisbane. The City Council forces them to pay rates on assessed land values that those environmentally sensitive landholders could only possibly gain from if they were to choose to destroy the vegetation on their land with subdivision and to profit

from medium density housing construction.

The google-earth map photo is about five years old. A considerable amount of urban rainforest has been lost in that time as a result of medium density housing construction. Vegetation known to have been lost has been indicated by red lines on the map. In addition, the rainforest has been encroached upon by extensions of housing, often to construct sub-units down the valley.

If some residents are willing to profit from the destruction of their natural environment, at least those who won't should not be penalised for doing so. Rather than hitting environmentally generous landowners with rate increases, the City Council should discount their rates (and do so retrospectively) for the environmental services they have protected on their land which have benefited the other residents of Brisbane and the native possums, flying foxes, and many beautiful birds, which depend on such fragments of rainforest.

Hobson's choice?

I know personally that the landowner with the three forested unbuilt blocks now sees little choice but to sell his land because the rates are so high. If he reluctantly goes ahead and the remnant rainforest is destroyed it will be more than a loss of natural beauty for Brisbane residents. Almost certainly the loss of the ecological services will make Brisbane a hotter and uglier. It will certainly not improve it. Those who can afford to will most likely draw on more electrical power to make their homes cool at least on the inside.

NIMBYs needed now

The poorer classes who once lived unpretentiously but well in this very suburb with far more space than people now do, will swelter in miserable high-density subdivisions and in the treeless outer suburbs. Many will certainly not be able to afford the option of air-conditioning because, as human population has increased and the trees have been destroyed, the heat has increased and so has the cost of housing and of power.

This kind of thing is happening all over Australia.

Brisbane and Australia need more NIMBYs.

#frogs" id="frogs">

Appendix: the decline of amphibians in urban Australia

(This brief appendix has been extracted from nimby's comment Frogs on the decline too of 6 Jan 11.)

Dr Andrew Hamer, based at the University of Melbourne, stressing that reptile and frog habitats need be conserved in residential areas by keeping them as natural as possible, even if they are only small areas. "Our research suggests that many reptile and frog species have been negatively affected by urbanization,” says Dr Hamer. With

higher density living

, more concrete drains rather than rivers and creeks, and less back yards and green wedges, our amphibians and reptile have little chance of being protected.

Simon Kuznets who, devised the GDP in the
early 1930's for US President Roosevelt for a
purpose almost entirely different to what it has
since been used for.

Bandicoot's otherwise excellent article What is Australia's population "carrying capacity"? suffers from one minor flaw. Of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which economists have insisted upon using to tell us how our prosperity has increased, Bandicoot writes:

Also, GDP per capita is a better measure of the economic well-being of a country than total GDP, as it takes into account population size – very populous countries may have very large overall GDP, but when divided by population size the resultant GDP per capita figure will give a much clearer indication of the country’s comparable wealth.

Of course it is plainly ridiculous to use Gross Domestic Product and not per capita GDP as a measure of prosperity, particularly, prosperity economists dishonestly claim to be the result of population growth.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) graph at:

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/Lookup/1383.0.55.001Main+Features132009

... makes even per capita GDP figures, and not just Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures, look good. According to this, per capita GDP "went up from $41,000 to $51,000 in real (chain volume) terms, an annual average increase of 2.2%."

So, either Bandicoot is wrong about population growth reducing per capita GDP (whilst allowing gross GDP to grow) or there is something badly flawed about the GDP, even when used on a per capita basis.

In fact, the GDP has been used and is being used by the ABS and most orthodox Australian economists in a way different from what its originator Simon Kuznets intended. In his very first report to the US Congress in 1934, he wrote:

...the welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income..._#main-fn1">1

One of the things wrong with the way that the GDP is used by the ABS and orthodox economists is that it doesn't accurately measure many increases in the cost of living. Many it ignores completely.

30 or 40 years ago one car per family would have been adequate. Today, the same family needs two or three cars in order to be able to travel around to all the places they could once get to in plenty of time in one car, on foot, on bicycle or on public transport.

So, a family which earns enough to buy two cars today looks substantially wealthier in per capita GDP terms than a family of 30 or 40 years ago who could afford only one car, but in real quality of life terms, I would argue that they are not and any family which could afford to buy one car, but which could not afford a second car, would, in real quality of life terms, be poorer.

Much car parking which used to be free is no longer so. Our local shopping mall charges a minimum of $1 for less than one hour's parking up to a maximum of $10 per day. Parking charges in CBDs of major cities such as Brisbane are vastly more extortionate, being of the order $50 in order to park your car just long enough to see a movie.

There are a large number of additional things on which people need to spend money, which they didn't have to 30 or 40 years ago.

The most obvious is shelter. Real housing costs, the massive increases of which have impoverished broad layers of previously prosperous Australians, cannot possibly have been accurately taken into account in the above GDP figures.

Those no longer able to afford secure shelter must also bear a range of costs caused by substandard accommodation or frequent changes of abode, which I doubt that economist/propagandists take into account: time and money spent searching for new accommodation, time and money spent changing residence, rent or bond money that one is often forced to forego as a result of residence change, loss of possessions that can't be fitted into or transported to a new residence, having to secure your possessions against incompatible people you may have to share a roof with.

How much more income is consumed in buying alarms, stronger padlocks, deadlocks, etc? How much more needs to be spent on insurance of household items against theft?

How about mobile phones and the Internet? Whilst I think these are good things on the whole, it is not good that so many must have these things and pay for them in order to go about life and work.

I think that if all the increases in costs of living, including costs that we didn't have to meet in the past, and all the losses in quality of life were taken into account by the GDP, I think it would show a massive decline in average income instead of the claimed $10,000 annual increase, and that is not even taking into account our non-renewable natural capital, which is being destroyed at an increased rate.

So, it appears that even the per-capita GDP figures are being fraudulently used to cover up a massive decline in our standard of living caused by our politicians in the service of Australia's wealthy elite. This fraud must be brought to the attention of ordinary Australians. Any economist or any other public figure who uses this fraud to justify they way they are running the country must be judged accordingly.

See also: Living standards and our material prosperity of 6 Sep 07 and comments, What is Australia's population "carrying capacity"? of 31 Dec 10.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">back I first learnt of this, from memory, on page 6 of Australian author Geoff Davies' Economia, published in 2003.

The population of Australia is now over 22.5 million and increasing rapidly, currently at a rate of 1.7% increase per year. Despite the deceptively small number, it still means a doubling of population every 41 years, and the subsequent increases of food, water, infrastructure, environmental degradation and housing. Opinions differ, but economic and politics demand ongoing and maximum population growth for their own agendas.

What the experts say – Tim Flannery

Professor Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year 2007, calculated a long-term carrying capacity of between 8 million and 12 million. We had that population in 1950 and 1968 respectively, not so long ago. The population is now over 22.5 million and increasing rapidly, currently at a rate of 1.7% increase per year.

Despite the deceptively small number, it still means a doubling of population every 41 years, and the subsequent increases of food, water, infrastructure, environmental degradation and housing.

Human, social and economic systems must remain within the carrying capacity of Planet Earth. Carrying capacity is defined here as the maximum number of human population that can be supported by a particular ecosystem or eco-region or physical landscape on a continued basis without irreversibly degrading the health and ecological processes.

His report, Tim Flannery - Biological considerations in determining an optimum human population for Australia
Our diversity of species in Australia is extremely high, with slow growing and reproducing plants and a very small number of warm-blooded carnivores, with a correspondingly minutely adjusted ecosystem incorporating highly specialised characteristics and co-operative behaviours. We do not have the mountainous and fertile soils with predictable seasonal patterns of Europe.

On the contrary, Southeast Asia has very productive soils, plentiful rainfall and plenty of sunshine, with a large ability to provide food for cheap. Australia has the oldest soils on the planet - very depleted, dependent on fertilisers, plentiful sun shine, but rainfall is the limiting factor.

The world ability to supply food for a growing population depends on the population carrying capacity. The population carrying capacity depends on the soil quality and the level of technology applied.

Australia's unique landscape and environment
With Australia's population projected (boosted) to reach 35 million by 2049, critics continue to express concern about the pressure this growth will place on resources.

Humans are large warm-blooded omnivores. They have high energy demands. This makes them potentially vulnerable in Australian environments. Human populations in Australia have always been small and dispersed, being an order of magnitude or more smaller than the average density found on other continents (Birdsell 1953).

Virtually all hunter-gatherer societies seem to possess a 'golden rule' of population. This is, that in "normal" times, the human population of a given area rarely exceeds 20-30% of the carrying capacity of the land. (Sahlins 1968).

Surely, Flannery states, It would appear to make good sense to observe the 'golden rule' of population in determining Australia's 'carrying capacity'.

1994 Australian Parliament House of Representatives Standing Committee

In late 1994 The Australian Parliament House of Representatives Standing Committee on Long Term Strategies delivered a report entitled Australia's Population 'Carrying Capacity'. One Nation—Two Ecologies. This report argued that Australia should adopt a population policy.

Obviously, it's worrying that the population trajectory has most likely already exceed the long-term carrying capacity.

Australian Academy of Sciences Symposium:

In 1994, Australian Academy of Sciences held the Symposium, "Population 2040: Australia's choice". The joint statement said:
the quality of all aspects of our children's lives will be maximised if the population of Australia by the mid-21st Century is kept to the low, stable end of the achievable range, i.e. to approximately 23 million.

Australia's land mass, though large, is less rich than other continents in many biologically important elements. As a consequence, its ecosystems are relatively fragile, and human impact on the environment is particularly severe. This impact has been documented even for the relatively sparse, low-consumption Aboriginal societies. The impact of modern Australian society is much more severe.

Stable Population Party of Australia

The Stable Population Party of Australia is advocating a stable population at 23 million in line with the Australian Academy of Science findings. To obtain this option we would need to have zero net migration and phase out the baby bonus.

MP Kelvin Thomson

Kelvin Thomson's 14 Point Plan for Population Reform aims to set out the reasons why I believe the world’s projected population levels are too high and unsustainable – global warming, food crisis, water shortages, housing affordability, overcrowded cities, transport congestion, fisheries collapse, species extinctions, increasing prices, waste, war and terrorism.

We are already in “ecological overshoot”. Land size does not equate to carrying capacity. Our lifestyles, for the most, are spiraling downhill due to the stress of population growth and the associated costs and loss of social capital. Once ecosystems melt down, they are gone. It doesn't depend on what we want, but how many people our land can realistically and desirably support. Big is not necessarily better.

Treasury 2010 Intergenerational Report

According to the Treasury 2010 Intergenerational Report, the best way to respond to the economic and fiscal pressures of an ageing population is to support strong, sustainable economic growth. Economic growth will be supported by sound policies that support productivity, participation and population — the '3Ps'.

They assume that if Australia's productivity growth could be increased above the long-run average, the economy would be bigger, living standards would be higher and fiscal pressure from the ageing of the population would be reduced. If, for example, annual productivity growth was to average 2 per cent over the next 40 years, then:

• annual real GDP growth would average over 3 per cent over the next 40 years and the economy would be $570 billion bigger in 2049?50; and
• real GDP per capita in 2049?50 would be 15 per cent (or around $16,000) higher.

It assumes that the main purpose of the economy is to GROW, even to our own detriment. Costs of economic growth include increased pressure on social relationships and environmental degradation, whilst non-welfare issues include distribution, poverty and intergenerational equity. Also, GDP per capita is a better measure of the economic well-being of a country than total GDP, as it takes into account population size – very populous countries may have very large overall GDP, but when divided by population size the resultant GDP per capita figure will give a much clearer indication of the country’s comparable wealth.

The same baseless argument of "keep the economy growing" is being proved as a sham. As for a worry of populations going down, why is this a bad thing? While GDP overall may decrease, GDP per person (or GDP per capita) will certainly increase. Higher populations don't create wealth, it just redistributes. Production is the engine room of economic growth!

So as populations go down, the average citizen is better off. Only people reliant on growing markets ie, CEO's, politicians, producers of consumer goods etc would be worse off.

Japan is presented as a "loser" in the population stakes, where India is "the big winner". Makes you wonder about the value of winning that particular economic growth race!

Tony Burke Minister for Population

The nation's first Population Minister, Tony Burke, ruled out setting population targets in the strategy that he will draw up over the next 12 months. He ruled out a model that could take into account lour “chronic” labour shortages, with any precision. With a growing population happening "no matter what", the federal government would not focus on an arbitrary population target. His recent “report” is a sham. Our population growth is not arbitrary or inevitable, but manipulated by political decision. What about shortages in water, energy, food, land and funds for education and training?

Tony Burke needs to take a holistic viewpoint, and not just base his assumptions on limitless growth. 

Global threats
We are not the only country in the world that has raised the population question. Global population is an increasing threat, and once natural resources and amenities outstrip supply, we could be facing famine, lack of potable water, pollution of oceans and waterways, and environmental degradation - leading to further decline of species, and extinctions. Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan are other Asian countries that are facing food security problem due to limited arable land to support the ever increasing population.

Evolutionary Trait to expand
An evolutionary trait of species is to consume and increase numbers and overtake the territories and resources of other species is very well developed in humans. Once populations tip over a level that supports an economy of scale, the downside could be disastrous.  As species capable of a moral and spiritual dimensions, can we justify the mass extinctions of other species on the planet, for our own expansion? Each species lost means a decline in the health and robustness of our ecologies.

As Dr. Paul Ehrlich said, All causes are lost causes without limiting human population.

Birdsell, J.B. (1953). Some environmental and cultural factors influencing the structure of Australian Aboriginal populations. American Naturalist 87:171-207.

Sahlins, M. (1968). Notes on the original affluent society. Pp 85-89 In Man the Hunter. R.B. Lee & I DeVore (eds). Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago.

Whale Poop Pumps Up Ocean Health

New research in the Southern Ocean has revealed that the excretion of nutrient-rich poo from whales boosts the growth of plankton in the ocean, which helps to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  The increased population of plankton bolsters the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

University of Vermont whale biologist, Joe Roman and his colleague James McCarthy from Harvard University have discovered that most whales actually deposit waste that floats at the surface of the ocean as a "very liquidy, a flocculent plume."

Image: Humpback whale poop
Source: courtesy of Jennifer Kennedy at About.com Marine Life
 
 
 
 

Whale poop doesn't sink to the bottom of the ocean. The Harvard studies have shown that whales play an important role in transporting nutrients from where they feed, in deep waters, up to the surface, where they  fertilize tiny, floating plants called phytoplankton.

Research in the Southern Ocean has revealed that the excretion of nutrient-rich poop from whales boosts the growth of plankton in the ocean, and this bolsters the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Australian biologists estimated that 12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean each defecate about 50 tonnes of iron into the sea every year after digesting the fish and squid they hunt.

The iron is a terrific food for phytoplankton - marine plants that live near the ocean surface and which suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.

The ability of the Southern Ocean to act as a carbon sink may have been diminished by large-scale removal of sperm whales during industrial whaling.

Clearly, it is erroneous to claim, as the three whaling countries tout, that whales compete with their commercial fisheries.  Rather, they enhance them.

Whale Fall

Living whales can provide as much, if not more, valuable scientific information to aid their conservation than dead ones.  Even dead on the ocean floor ("whale fall"), their bodies support a myriad of marine species for decades.

Image: whale fall Wikimedia commons.
 
 
 
 

Oceanographer Craig Smith of the University of Hawaii has been studying the remarkable afterlife of whale corpses ("whale fall") and has shown that their remains last for decades and must dot the ocean bottom everywhere as they are natural stepping stones between hot vents and cold seeps, supporting a myriad of species.

A San Diego biotechnology company is working with Smith to develop a cold-water detergent containing an enzyme found in bacteria growing on whale bones. Such a detergent may have the potential to yield substantial energy savings on a national scale. Understanding what happens to organic-rich matter in the deep sea--like a 35 ton whale--is another area of broad ecological interest.

Some scientists say the self-awareness, suffering and a social culture, along with high mental abilities, are a hallmark of cetaceans.  There are so many values associated with whales and dolphins that it is criminal to reduce their value to that of livestock, or simply "meat"!

If Japan is justifying their illegal whale slaughter under the smoke-screen of "scientific research", then their junk science must be exposed to enforce their removal.

A day in the life of a wildlife carer ... how many wildlife carers and vets would euthanase this joey? Professor Steve Garlick and Dr Rosemary Garlick (with the help of wildlife expert Howard Ralph D.M.V.) have managed to save hundreds of kangaroos that would have otherwise not had a chance.

On 14th September, a joey was brought to Professor Steve and Dr Rosemary Garlick. He had a smashed and compound fractured toe, loss of skin to leg and torn finger nail. Nobody knew how it happened.

His weight - a mere 2 kgs.

Special Kangaroo's injuries

See his progress in 24 hours of treatment....

Progress in 24 hours

In early November the pin came out of his toe and on 21/11/10 they took his bandages off. Here is a photo taken late November .... such a handsome boy and thanks to these amazing wildlife carers and Howard Ralph, wildlife vet, he has another chance at life.

Progress 2 months later

The world owes President John F Kennedy, who was slain by the US military-industrial complex on 22 November 1963, an unrepayable debt of gratitude for stopping not once, but three times, the unthinkable horror of global nuclear war. He also prevented an invasion of Cuba, and did what he could to prevent the Vietnam War. Those unfamilar with JFK's achievements and plans, which were thwarted by his murder, must see Oliver Stone's JFK.

The real story of JFK runs counter to the peer-maintained wisdom of many a proud bearer of the label 'left wing'. According to the culture in such circles, no-one of principle and decency could reach the positions of power and influence attained by John F Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby (Robert). They must therefore have been corrupt, the thinking goes. Anyone who reaches such political heights could only have done so through unprincipled deals. Anyone capable of making the necessary deals could not possibly be a force for good once they had won high office, the theory suggests.

Whilst this is certainly true of most who rise in pubic office, it seems there really are exceptions to this, and that John F Kennedy was clearly one of those exceptions.

The rise to high office of a person like JFK gives ordinary people reason to hope that they might still regain control of their destiny. If Kennedy or his younger brother had lived, the power of the greedy elite in control of America would almost certainly have been broken. America would now be a much fairer society and much of the world would have been at peace since then as most of the wars, particularly those caused by the US elites in the past five decades, would have been avoided.

To deny this and to deny the Kennedys' essential good intentions, as so many fashionable "bleeding hearts", have done since JFK's death only serves the wealthy and greedy elites such people claim to oppose. Those of the 'left', who, in effect, conceal the truth of the US military-industrial complex's role in Kennedy's murder (against which even Kennedy's predecessor, Eisenhower, warned) only help maintain its consolidation of power and its ability to do harm.

As Charles Drago wrote:

Anyone with reasonable access to the JFK evidence who does not conclude that conspirators killed the president is cognitively impaired and/or complicit in the crime.(see The Anti-James Douglass Appears[1] of 14 Feb 2009)

FOOTNOTES

1. Linked article was previously at https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sendmessage.php, where a 'google' search of "anti-James Douglass" will still find it as well as this article. James Douglass is the author of the towering JFK and the unspeakable -Why he died and why it matters of 2008- JS, 19 Jan 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bushfires Royal Commission plan of increasing "controlled burning" in the Mallee is an example of a one-size-fits-all mentality. 

Birdlife including the Mallee emu-wren and black-eared miner, both of which are endangered, and threatened marsupials such as the western pygmy possum, face a dramatic loss of habitat if the commission's advice to triple the rate of prescribed burning to 5 per cent of public land each year is followed.

Bushfire proposal threatens Mallee wildlife: scientists (The Age, 20 Dec)

It would threaten the long-term survival of the region's native wildlife, a scientific study has found.

A four-year study, led by Professor Clarke of Latrobe University and Professor Andrew Bennett of Deakin University, found that large parts of the Mallee have not burned for between 20 and 140 years.

The Mallee has been recognised as the most threatened environment for birds in Australia.

Image source: Wikimedia commons

The Striated Grasswren is a little bird with rich and varied songs, and require large clumps of spinifex to hide in. The size is only suitable 25-40 years post-fire. Tree hollows, needed by many kinds of animals for nesting or roosting, take at least 40 years to develop in mallee.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Image source: SA Government

Mallee Emu-wren (Stipiturus mallee) is one of Australia’s smallest birds, weighs up to 6.5 grams. It uses its size to great advantage to move quickly through dense shrubs, darting about amongst the very prickly spinifex. Very large or frequent fires can eliminate these birds from large areas, leaving them isolated in small, scattered locations, unable to escape further fires. It is globally endangered.
 

Large fires burn thousands of hectares and dramatically change vegetation and wildlife habitats.

Professor Clarke said the Baillieu government needed to respect the unique characteristics of the Mallee in managing fire risk.

The Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act (FFG) and Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act should be used to override the Bushfires Royal Commission and stop any actions that further threaten species and their habitats.

Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) chief fire officer Ewan Waller said the program would be the biggest in recent years, weather permitting. Burning is by far the best way to manage fuel loads within our forests and give protection to Victorian communities, Mr Waller said. What about species who make homes in this "fuel load"? "Victorian communities" are more than humans!

Ecological sensitivities and endangered wildlife are just left to be collateral damage!

This year is the International Year of Biodiversity, and it is not too late for some real action to protect some diminishing native species.

Copies of the Mallee Fire and Biodiversity Project are available here.

Contact:

Ewan Waller
Phone: 03/9412 4777
Fax: 03/9650 8575
4th Floor 8 Nicholson Street
EAST MELBOURNE, 3002
VIC
[email protected]

http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/fireURL

Ted Baillieu
Phone(03) 9882 4088
[email protected]
325 Camberwell Road, Camberwell 3124

Department of Sustainability and Environment
[email protected]
Call 136 186 from anywhere in Australia for the cost of a local call

On this year's ABC Radio National Boyer Lectures, the main barrow that featured speaker Professor Glynn Davis pushed is that Australian Universities should be greatly expanded to take in a vastly increased number of overseas students prepared to pay money for their education. He claimed that this is necessary, because Australians are unwilling to pay the taxes necessary to fully fund their Universities. This presumes that allowing hundreds of thousands of overseas students to buy education, and through that, Australian citizenship, comes at no cost to ordinary Australians. In fact, there is a cost which is far greater.

[Perhaps I should add that Australians continue to pay the same amount of taxes - in general 33% or so - but university fees have been added to this.]

Below is a comment I made yesterday to Radio National's Boyer Lectures page. It has yet to appear. A lot of other past comments were critical of Glynn Davis's talks as compere Peter Mares noted:

Professor Glyn Davis joins me in the studio ... to respond to some of the comments and criticisms from listeners

One critical comment includes a past comment made by myself about the fifth lecture. (See also How 'free market' education 'reforms' have undermined Australian democracy) Peter Mares, the compere of the series, referred indirectly to #WorkingConditions">another listener's comment, when he said:

One #WorkingConditions">listener in particular points to the massive casualisation of the workforce. Something like 40% of teachers in higher education are now casual staff on short-term contracts.

I posted the comment below, yesterday. It has still not been published on the page, but the publication of my earlier comment gives me hope that it will be.

The expansion of Universities to educate large numbers of foreign students is harmful to Australia

I found the only memorable and useful part of the program to be this “Post-lecture Discussion”.

The questioning by Peter Mares showed that the essential content of Davis's "vision" for our universities is no more than selling Australian 'education' to ever more vast numbers of citizens of other countries to allow native Australian taxpayers to avoid having to pay themselves for our tertiary education system. Davis repeatedly claimed, with no substantiation, that by doing so, our Governments were conforming to popular will.

In reality, native Australians have never been asked as to whether or not they would have preferred to maintain a decent education sector with their taxes. If they had, and, if it had been made clear to them the even greater cost they are now being made to bear as a result of the cutbacks to education and the alternative 'funding' method which Davis so enthusiastically embraces, I believe most would have chosen to maintain prior levels of government funding.

The cost that ordinary Australians are now being made to pay for the change to our tertiary education and related fields includes:

• The unaffordability of tertiary education to ordinary Australians through higher tuition fees, escalating costs of living, especially housing, and the reduction of wages and conditions in part-time work that many students were once able to turn to.

• The replacement with on-the-job training that most workers enjoyed with training in the workers' own time and expense at universities. Much of what students are now taught was once taught by government and private sector employers during working hours

University training is not only more iniquitous than the older way of training of many of our workers on the job, including through apprenticeships, but the evidence suggests to me that it is also inferior. One of many examples is that the quality of nurses graduated from university seems significantly lower than that of nurses trained in the old way, on the job and with subsidised housing. Nurses trained in the old way believe that they could have run rings around today's graduates after they finished their training. Even if the pay was modest then, nurses were still considerably better off than nurses attending tertiary education, incurring a debt with little or no income whilst attending University.

Davis's argument presumes that Australia is so much better endowed with knowledge and wisdom that we can teach so many people from other lands far better than they can teach themselves and so much better than they can teach us. (And if they can teach us as well as we can teach them, why aren't hundreds of thousands of native Australians flocking to overseas universities?) The sorry experience of transferring nursing education onto universities seems to suggest to me that Australia is not particularly gifted as a provider of tertiary education. It seems more likely to me that there is a far less lofty reason for the apparent appeal of Australian education to overseas customers, that reason being as a means by which relatively privileged from overseas can buy Australian citizenship.

#WorkingConditions" id="WorkingConditions">Appendix: Decline of working conditions

The following comment was referred to by Peter Mares above:

Free speech? Social justice? Collegiality? For who? Universities have shameful labour hiring practices that allow tenured academics to build their careers by exploiting a servant class of contract academics - hopefuls that don't dare speak out; who work long hours, often for less payment than guest workers digging for carrots. THIS is the dirty little secret to how universities 'make do'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reasons Sweden support the most open immigration program in Europe

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

The media and various government websites clearly and openly qualifying native kangaroos and possums as 'pest animals' needing to be 'culled'. But what if they aren't pests at all? The law protects those who kill protected native species under certain conditions but could there be non-lethal ways of dealing with the problem? Could this be part of a national strategy to drive the nails deeper into our native animals' collective coffins? It is no wonder we have the world's worst record for mammal extinctions with government attitudes like this.

On 26 October, 2010 in the Banyule and Nillumbik Weekly (1) there was an article about how kangaroos in Plenty Gorge in Greensborough, the North-Eastern suburbs in Melbourne are becoming a problem.

In this article the Invasive Animals Co-operative Research Centre says:-

“Kangaroos can cause serious damage to farm fences and crops, scare domestic livestock, such as cows and sheep, and cause motor vehicle accidents. Controlling numbers is essential for safety and productivity.

‘‘Kangaroos can also cause environmental damage, especially if they are confined on reserved land and their numbers are allowed to increase unchecked. Contraceptives may be useful for controlling kangaroo populations in confined areas or in the peri-urban area. However, much more work is required, including an assessment of their biological and ecological impacts, before they could be considered,’’ the centre’s latest report states."

In my mind many questions arise. Let’s examine all these claims to see if they are true:-

1. Invasive Animals?
What on earth is the Invasive Animals Co-operative Research Centre doing commenting on a non-invasive animal? Kangaroos are native animals and by definition are NOT invasive, exotic or feral. Why did this newspaper choose to quote from this organization and not the Department of Environment?

Invasive Species (IUCN definition):

Invasive species are organisms (usually transported by humans) which successfully establish themselves in, and then overcome, otherwise intact, pre-existing native ecosystems.

According to Dept Env website, kangaroos are not invasive species either.

2. Destruction to the Environment?
It is well known that cows and sheep, being hoofed, cause massive soil erosion and destruction of soil ecosystems, pollute the air, soil, waterways, contribute to deforestation and biodiversity loss and the drought. In short they are turning this country into a desert. So why are kangaroos being scapegoated for causing environmental damage when it is not the truth?

3. Damage to Fences?
If kangaroos cause damage to fences, isn’t it time farmers erected ‘kangaroo-proof fencing’ so that kangaroos do not enter farms and do not get entangled in barbed wire fences. What about the damage fences cause kangaroos, does it ever occur to them that fences are a worse hazard to kangaroos than kangaroos to fences? And what about the fact that livestock routinely damage fences? Should we cull livestock because they damage their own fences?

4. Damage to Crops/Competition with Livestock

According to CSIRO kangaroos hardly ever visit wheat farms. According to the Dept of Environment grazing pressure of kangaroos is very small 1-8% compared to livestock (92-99%). (2)

It is a proven fact that kangaroos do not eat crops (8). Graziers will normally budget 10 litres of water per day for sheep which doubles in hot dry summers. An average size kangaroo of say 25kg only needs only 1 litre of water per day to survive. (Hume 1999).

According to the CSIRO, kangaroos do not compete with sheep (3).

5. Scaring Livestock?
As for scaring livestock, it’s more likely that kangaroos would be scared by livestock. Kangaroos do not attack cows and sheep - they are herbivores after all.

6. Causing Motor Vehicle Accidents?
It would be fair to say that humans cause motor accidents as equally as kangaroos. We are in their territory after all. In many ways we could prevent these motor accidents.

a) Why aren’t there overpasses or underpasses for wildlife on main roads?
b) Why aren’t there wildlife corridors for kangaroos to traverse to their habitat which we continually carve up as if the land is ours, not theirs? Surely we are the ones to blame for not accommodating them and their needs?
c) Why don’t more motorists slow down when they see kangaroos by the roadside, especially at dusk and dawn?
d) Why don’t more cars have shoo-roo devices attached to them emitting a high-pitched noise to alert the kangaroo of the approach of their vehicle?

Aren’t we equally responsible for all the motor vehicle accidents involving kangaroos? How many kangaroos and other animals die every day and suffer in agony compared to the number of humans losing their life as a result of these accidents? Aren’t we being a trifle selfish (anthropocentric) here?

7. Controlling Populations?
The Invasive Animals Co-operative Research Centre says it’s important to control kangaroo numbers. Well isn’t it time we controlled our own populations? Human overpopulation at 7 billion is certainly overdue for a bit of controlling! What a joke that we should be controlling a native species (and white man is feral to Australia remember) when we can’t even control our own. Perhaps compulsory contraception of humans would be a good start? Yet the Department of Sustainability and the Environment (DSE) issues permits for landowners to ‘cull’ kangaroos on their property. Obviously we live in a society where it is permissible to kill ‘protected’ native animals when people are unwilling to find other win-win solutions to a perceived threat.

8. Threat to Communities or Public Health?
The DSE spokesman Nick Talbot says

“The permit system is necessary because animals can …. pose a direct threat to communities or public health,’’

I have never heard of kangaroos attacking people unless they were walking a dog off the leash. That is understandable as those kangaroos were most likely only trying to protect their mob. If people would have their dogs on a leash at all times, including on their properties, such a situation would never arise. Herbivores are not aggressive unless there is a life-threatening situation.

As for public health, eating kangaroo meat (such as what is for sale in supermarkets around Australia) would be far more of a public health risk than having them hop around outside. It’s a joke that DSE can talk about public health in this way when kangaroo meat, being game meat, is full of parasites and zoonotic diseases (4).

9. Is it Humane to Kill a Healthy Animal?
According to DSE a condition of a permit is that humane methods of destruction are used. However, we know that this is not always the case. Not all landowners are skilled in the use of firearms and many kangaroos will not be humanely shot in the head. Anyone can get a gun and a permit without the ability to hit a target. Wildlife carers have to attend to animals with faces blown off, limbs missing, orphaned joeys. Yet DSE does not regard relocation as an option, which seems infinitely more humane to me. Given a choice between death and a new place to live, what would you choose? Is killing a perfectly healthy animal because it’s in our way humane? Or is there a better solution?

In view of the above points, how can anyone refer to kangaroos as a pest?

Definition of ‘Pest’

The website http://www.feral.org.au states the definition of ‘pest’ as:

A pest is an animal that causes significant damage to a valued resource. The pest status of an animal can change with time, between areas or according to the perception of the assessor. What might be one persons pest might be another’s valued resource. Native animals such as kangaroos and possums can be a pest in some situations.

By that definition, humans are pests because we cause significant damage to the most valued resource of all – our environment. We have destroyed 75% of our forests. Billions of native animals have died in the process. We have polluted waterways and sucked them dry, blasting all the fish out of the water.

We have ignored the unique biological and ecological role our native animals have to play in their NATURAL environment, which we are taking from them. To native animals we, with our bulldozers, concrete, trucks and cars, would be the biggest pest of all, worse than hoardes of dingoes, pythons, feral dogs and cats, poisonous toads, predatorial eagles put together. In fact WE are the nightmare to them! They flee from us on sight and no wonder.

Kangaroos are regarded as vermin

According to http://www.feralfocus.org.au

The word 'pest' is generally used to describe an animal that causes serious damage to a valued resource. Such a pest may be destructive, a nuisance, noisy or simply not wanted. A pest may be an animal that was originally introduced by humans to new lands - this is particularly the case in Australia. Or, it may be a native animal such as a kangaroo, possum or parrot.

It is important to note that people decide whether an animal is a pest. What is one person's pest may be a valuable resource to another. For example, recreational hunters and meat processors may regard the feral pig as a valued resource rather than a pest. Others believe that feral pigs are a threat to the environment and agriculture. Such diversity of opinion is one of the main reasons that pest control has had varying success.

Strictly a feral animal is a non-native animal that has escaped from captivity and established a self-sustaining population independent of humans. Hence wild horses, pigs and cats are feral, while foxes and rabbits are not as these latter two animals were deliberately released to establish wild populations. However, the word is now generally applied to ‘any non-native animal that causes serious damage to human interests’

How convenient… for humans that is!

Definition of ‘Feral’

According to http://www.feral.org.au:

What is a feral animal? Strictly a feral animal is a non-native animal that has escaped from captivity and established a self-sustaining population independent of humans. Hence wild horses, pigs and cats are feral, while foxes and rabbits are not as these latter two animals were deliberately released to establish wild populations. However, the word is now generally applied to any non-native animal that causes serious damage to human interests, and is how the word is used in this web site.

Man has encroached native, endemic species' natural habitat, it would make more sense to refer to us as the 'ferals' in this scenario! Does that mean we should be culled, since we are a non native species infiltrating an area outside our natural range?

What is an exotic animal?

An exotic animal is an animal that is outside its natural range. It may be an animal that has been introduced to Australia or New Zealand from another country, or it may be an animal that has been translocated to another part of Australia or New Zealand. For example kookaburras have been introduced to south-west Western Australia.

Our National Emblem

Since kangaroos are on our national emblem and proudly displayed by Australian companies, airlines, rugby teams etc. and since we regard kangaroos as pests, how does that auger for our overseas images? Guess it affirms that we are a PEST WORSHIPPING nation?

AT ONE POINT THIS WEBSITE CLASSIFIED KANGAROOS AS 'FERAL' UNTIL THEY WERE INUNDATED WITH LETTERS! AFTERWARDS, ALL REFERENCES TO KANGAROOS BEING FERAL WERE REMOVED BUT THEY WERE STILL LISTED AS PESTS ON THE WWW.FERAL.ORG.AU WEBSITE. WHY ARE THEY THERE AT ALL WE ASK?

Australia's Dysfunctional attitude to their national icon

Since we classify kangaroos as ‘pests’, all those logos we use to flog things to other countries and to promote our country with our Coat of Arms, must by interpretation declare that our goods and our image is, indeed, a pest.

It is one thing to use something for largesse, another to appreciate its true worth.
Time for some reassessment methinks.

It is outrageous that government websites such as www.feral.org.au should list kangaroos and possums native to Australia at all let alone as pests.

Kangaroo Shooting Unsustainable

Referring to native animals as ‘pests’ is what drives local and complete extinctions, as any scientist well knows. Certainly it is more and more recognised by landowners and by ecologists and wildlife experts that the larger macropods such as Eastern Grey and Red kangaroos are disappearing from the landscape except in few pockets where their habitat and landowners allow them to exist.

Even the commercial 'culling' program in NSW lists densities of the 'common' Eastern Grey that are in fact scientifically quasi-extinct (5). The shooting of 15% of this species is unsustainable when consideration is given to actual kangaroo population biology.

Shooters do not limit themselves to shooting 15% of a local population. Local populations and mobs are in fact shot in entirety with the 15% quota only being applied as a whole to the state itself. This is why shooters are not meeting their quotas – as the populations do not exist. This is also why, in rural and regional areas, whole landscapes are being emptied of kangaroos - as ecologists doing field work in central and western NSW are noticing.

Certainly the National Parks and Wildlife Service in NSW does not check landowners’ claims of hundreds of kangaroos needing to be shot under occupier licenses. Rangers have in fact explicitly admitted that they don’t ask questions as the issuing of licenses are a ‘public relations exercise’. There is in fact no central collation of the numbers of kangaroos that are shot under s.121 licences in NSW. This means no baseline data or any idea of the numbers of kangaroos shot outside the newer commercial culling program has thus ever existed.

Further, the Kangaroo Management Program itself does not assert that commercial shooting is to protect the landscape from damage. It is a program driven by the kangaroo industry.

If you check and analyse the official surveyed population numbers and actual reports on government websites (6), you will see their numbers have plummeted between 40-80% across regions since 2001. As a whole, populations have crashed by an average of 50% across the state since 2001 – despite correction factors multiplying actual counts by higher numbers and despite population figures including whole new counted areas in the 2009 census.

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics - Bureau of Rural Sciences (ABARE-BRS, formally BRS) administers the Australian Pest Animal Research Program (APARP) which engages in pest animal management issues. It is through this program that ABARE-BRS supported the development of the website feral.org.au.

ABARE says that native animals such as kangaroos and possums can be a pest in some situations as they cause significant damage to valued resources such as the environment or agriculture (e.g. possums in New Zealand). But that does not mean that native animals should be referred to on a feral animal website!

Conclusion

I utterly condemn the inclusion of native animals on a website about ‘pest’ animals, paid for by taxpayers’ dollars, using information that has not been tested or critiqued by independent sources.

Since Australia has the worst reputation in the world for mammal extinctions especially in the last 230 years, surely it means humans are the biggest pest to biodiversity as well as the environment in every aspect?

It's well and truly time we Australians stopped treating our native animals like vermin and learned to respect our national icon, at least as much as overseas visitors do. Premier Keneally (7) has acknowledged that our iconic kangaroos and koalas hold the key to a revival of tourism in Australia. So why don't the laws change to give them the protection they and their habitat so desperately needs? I only hope she is serious and not saying it because Oprah Winfrey (who hails from her country of birth) happens to be touring here right now?

What can I do?

Write to the following people and voice your complaints about the government's attitude to and treatment of our national icon, the kangaroo and possums, who are also supposed to be 'protected.'

[email protected]
[email protected]

References
1. http://www.banyuleandnillumbikweekly.com.au/news/local/news/news-features/watch-out-roos-on-the-run/1978238.aspx?storypage=0
2. http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/drs/indicator/162/index.html
3. http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/WR9740027.htm
4. http://www.nokangaroomeat.org
5. http://www.stopkangarookilling.org
6. http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/trade-use/wild-harvest/kangaroo/population/index.html
7. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/its-time-to-get-real-on-tourism-says-nsw-premier-kristina-keneally/story-e6frf7l6-1225969554791
8. Arnold, G. “Can Kangaroos survive in the Wheat Belt?”, West Australia Journal of Agriculture, Vol 31, 1990

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

Pandering to the people vs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wars are fought with euphemisms

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

The Puppet Intelligentsia

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

Multiculturalism is a smokescreen

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

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

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

Tim Murray

By Julianne Bell, Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc. and Jill Quirk, Sustainable Population Australia Inc. (Victorian Branch)
Planning issues dogged the Victorian ALP Government, although the ex-Planning Minister seemed remarkably unconcerned about community angst over high rise, high density development. Probably millions of dollars of the community's money and thousands of hours have been spent opposing unwanted, inappropriate developments especially in the established suburbs of Melbourne.

State ALP lost right to govern over population growth

From a quick analysis of the results of the Victorian State election it seems that the ALP lost its right to govern as a result of the direct and indirect effects of extremely rapid population growth in recent years in our State. Former Premier Brumby and his Cabinet failed to recognise the elephant in the living room - population growth. This was confirmed by Daniel Andrews, newly elected Opposition Leader, who attributed Labor's defeat to their having "not kept pace with growth" nor having "stayed ahead of the unprecedented (population) growth in the last few years." (3AW and ABC Stateline 3 December 2010.)

Unrealistic state policy

We submit that, as recent projections indicate Melbourne's population will almost double and reach at least 7 million by 2050, there is no way that the Brumby Government could have kept pace with provision of adequate services and affordable housing for Victorians. The same will be the case for the Baillieu Government if the present population intakes to Victoria continue. Any Government would simply be playing "catch up" and so it is inevitable that the community's living standards will fall further and further behind.

A rough overview of the demise of the Brumby Government follows.

Pipeline another cost of population overgrowth

The ALP was able to hold onto most of its non-metropolitan seats with the exception of South Barwon and Seymour. Constituents of the seat of Seymour were extremely disaffected by construction of the North South Pipeline (also known as the Sugarloaf Pipeline.) This piece of infrastructure was hurriedly installed to provide water for Melbourne's growing population. As it has turned out, it has not been needed as the drought has broken, but the intention was to siphon water away from the northern rivers of Victoria as required to supply Melbourne and hence the community in the seat of Seymour were the losers from population growth. The seat has gone to the Coalition with the help of preferences from independent candidate and Plug the Pipe member, Jan Beer.

Overpopulation-related erosion of living standards

Moving in towards the vortex of Melbourne, the outer suburbs suffered from an erosion of their living standards and financial stress from increases in council rates due to the rising cost of land and cost of infrastructure required by a rapidly growing population and so the ALP seats of Gembrook, Mt Waverley, Mitcham and Forest Hill were lost.

Public transport fiasco another cost of overpopulation

Turning our attention to the sand belt electorates; the seat of Carrum was unexpectedly lost to Labor, then Frankston, Mordialloc and finally Bentleigh became the last ALP domino to fall in the State Election. Constituents reported that they have suffered, amongst other things, from unreliable, unsafe and crowded train services which, in our view, were primarily due to increased pressure of population and failure of the Government to fund public transport. It was particularly aggravating that the Government splashed out on the Peninsula Link freeway which, reputedly, will soak up $2.8 billion of taxpayers' funds by the time it is completed.

Traffic congestion another cost of overpopulation

Focusing right in, the clearway issue due to traffic congestion from increased population and inability for our local streets to cope with traffic volumes even outside normal "Peak Hour" was a very sore point in inner southern suburbs of Melbourne, especially Malvern, Richmond and Prahran. The anger over this was expressed at a rally "Make Brumby History" on Parliament House steps, just before the election. The rally expressed a multitude of citizens' concerns but the impetus came from those opposing clearways.

Planning problems & protests caused by overpopulation

Planning issues also dogged the ALP Government, although the ex-Planning Minister seemed remarkably unconcerned about community angst over high rise, high density development. Regular rallies were held at Parliament and in the inner city, for instance, over the extension of the urban growth boundary; the destruction of the Windsor Hotel with the addition of a 92 metre tower block; loss of other iconic heritage properties in Melbourne; and his ALP fundraising ("cash-for-chat") lunch with developers. Probably millions of dollars of the community's money and thousands of hours have been spent opposing unwanted, inappropriate developments especially in the established suburbs of Melbourne.

No winners in this endless catch-up game

Unless the Baillieu government recognises that it is impossible to make life better for Victorians if population growth continues, as in the last decade, it too will fail to deliver as Victorians suffer anew. With continual rapid population growth, any state government will spend most of its energy just trying to cope with ever increasing demand for all services and housing and fighting escalating costs.

Dire environmental costs of overpopulation

The most serious long term problem that has been brought about by population pressures is the effect on the environment. The areas of concern - waterways and wetlands, water supplies, biodiversity, coasts, estuaries and the sea - detailed in the 2008 State of the Environment Report show our precious and fragile environment to be in a parlous state and this report should be a warning to any government taking the reins in Victoria.

Baillieu government faces same destiny if does not change course

Unless the Baillieu government faces the limitations firstly of our environment and secondly of the capacity of our society to provide requisite infrastructure, it will have little hope of outperforming the last government. The rate of population growth is, to a large extent, a choice made by the Federal Government which holds the actual keys to the immigration gates. We consider, however, that the Baillieu Government should create state history by establishing a joint Parliamentary committee of enquiry to examine just what is a sustainable population for Victoria, in order that our standards of living can be maintained and our environment rehabilitated and protected for future generations.

Jill Quirk is the President of Sustainable Population Australia Inc. (Victorian Branch)
P.O. Box 1173 Frankston 3199.

Julianne Bell is the Secretary Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc.
PO Box 197 Parkville 3052

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

Green Left Smear Network Always Quick Off The Mark

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

Our Unearned Reputation Precedes Us

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

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

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

Marxist Refugees Found Sanctuary In The Environmental Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Murray
November 17, 2010

Overpopulation conjures up many images. Most typically, one thinks of traffic gridlock or bulldozers ripping up forests or farmland to make way for more housing developments. But these images fail to impress the green wing of the Growth-Management Industry, the so-called "environmentalists" of the "progressive" coalition of feminists, eco-socialists, soft-greens and human rights advocates. For them there are always "solutions" that obviate the need to face the elephant in the room. Public transport, smart growth, green technology and good green living habits will do the trick. The trouble is, they won't. It is all a delusion. Numbers matter--the social justice agenda cannot defeat the laws of physics. And the best metaphor to make that point remains Garrett Hardin's sinking lifeboat.

Bulldozers or Traffic Jams---What Better Symbolizes Runaway Population Growth?

After the website for Immigration Watch Canada was recently re-designed, I was asked if I could think of a more appropriate image to adorn its mast ---a more plaintiff illustration of the negative ecological consequences of mass immigration to Canada. Initially, I was persuaded that a picture of ten lanes of gridlocked traffic leading out of Toronto would make our point quite eloquently. But then I faltered. On second thought, I said, a picture of a new housing development being constructed on farmland would prove more poignant. I added that given the impact of hyper-immigration, the bulldozer should replace the beaver and the maple leaf as our national symbols. But then, once again, I had second thoughts. Why?

The Soft Green Party Line

For as predictable as frost in winter, Fem-Green-Left environmentalists can be counted upon to reflexively retort with their standard objection. It goes something like this:"Gridlock is not a function of overpopulation but wrong-headed transportation policy. With disincentives for driving cars and extensive public transit in place, we could move people efficiently and economically without environmental impacts. And urban sprawl is not a function of overpopulation either. With strict land-use policy, we could house people within compact urban growth boundaries and preserve greenfield acreage. In both cases, our per capita energy consumption could be dramatically reduced. There is unexploited brownfield acreage in our cities that could be the site of energy-efficient low-rise infill housing that would reduce commuting by placing people close to their workplaces."

Betsy Hartmann A Leading Exponent of Population-Denialism

None better regurgitate this party-line more quintessentially than the Queen of Smear, Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, author of the infamous "Greening of Hate", which attempted to discredit the ecological case against mass immigration by accusing those who make it of fronting for a sinister racist, nativist and xenophobic agenda. She showcased this fallacious reasoning in her attack on Chris Hedges for arguing that we are "breeding ourselves to extinction." ("Rebuttal to Chris Hedges-- Stop the Tired Overpopulation Hysteria", Alternet March 14/2009)

"The population controllers also have blinders on their eyes when they attribute the cutting down of forests, the polluting of water supplies, and the extinction of species to too many poor people, rather than the unchecked power of large corporations to monopolize resources and ravage the land. Missing from the picture is the question of technological choice: for example, reducing the population of automobiles and investing in public transport worldwide would do much more to curtail climate change than imposing limits on family size."

Again resorting to standard green-left script, Hartmann cited the United States as the worst offender of industrialized countries who, with only 20% of the world's population, have contributed 80% of the carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the atmosphere. Instead of recognizing that as a good argument for curbing immigration and reproduction in America, she proposed that Malthusian environmentalists drop their apocalyptic act and "get down to the gritty green work of making effective and equitable environment and climate policy." By “histrionic fear-mongering” that “pointed the finger at population growth”, Malthusians would have us "alienate the Global South" and "shirk" our responsibility to find practical solutions like carbon capping, energy-saving retrofitting of existing buildings, investing in alternative energy, public transport and lifestyle changes.

Climate-Change Obsession Serves The Globalist Vision

It must be understood that for this generation and genre of “environmentalism”, atmospheric pollution is the only metric of environmental degradation that deserves much attention. The virtue of climate-change obsession is that in its call for “global” solutions that must demand “global cooperation”, the open-borders mentality finds its most convenient friend. The impertinent demand of “nativists” to protect their nation’s environment from unfettered trans-national migration can then be framed as the wrong-headed belief that the environment can be “nationalized”. Gone is the foundational injunction of environmentalism to “act locally”. Passion for what is closest to hearth and home is alien to the rootless cosmopolitan greens, who see such attachment as a parochial bond that succours a “fortress” mentality. We have no right to a “national” culture or a national environment. Thus the corporate agenda finds cover in the Trojan Horse of Green Globalism--- the world without borders they both seek.

Reducing Per Capita Consumption And Waste To What End?

This "tired" soft-green cant provokes the obvious questions. Questions like "What good would come from 'alternative energy and public transport' and 'energy-saving retrofitting of existing buildings' if there are more people consuming resources and more buildings being built than ever before due to population growth? What if you succeeded in getting everyone out their cars and into public transit while population growth continues, would not the amount of resource consumption and pollution still increase? Even if you could cut per capita consumption in half---which would be a death sentence for a great majority of people in the world and bring severe destitution to most citizens even in the developed world---what net benefit would accrue if the population doubled? Should we forfeit a sustainable future for the sake of not alienating the corrupt leaders of the "Global South"? If our very survival as a species is contingent on aggressive family planning measures in developing countries and the cessation of mass migration of the global poor to the industrialized north, should we defer to etiquette and the diplomacy of silence? If was a firefighter who saw smoke coming out of your attic, should I avoid pounding on your door or bursting in to loudly demand your evacuation for fear of alienating you? And how do you think I would feel about an environmentalist who smelled the smoke but preferred to "get down to the gritty green work" of polishing the wood furniture, admonishing me for "histrionic fear-mongering" and “shirking” my responsibility to look for effective solutions?

Elementary Physics Obviously Not A Course Requirement At Social Justice University

Showing pictures of gridlock and urban sprawl to the snake-oil salesmen of green delusions will not register because they are congenitally incapable of understanding the physics of bailing water out of a leaky boat. It is quite simple. If you don't bail out a volume of water equivalent to the volume of water that is pouring into your vessel, you are going to go for a swim, and then you are going to regret that you welcomed so many passengers on board, and that you accused those who had warned against your reckless hospitality of racism, nativism and xenophobia.

Overloading a lifeboat to satisfy the dictates of an ideologically fashioned concept of social or "environmental justice" is not only perverse and suicidal, it supremely arrogant. For there is no greater testament to human hubris and conceit than the assertion that a moral law of our making trumps a law of biophysics and the species-imperative to survive. Hartmann and the “progressive” coalition of feminists, “eco-Marxists” and soft-green growth-managers consistently fail to understand that there can be no equality, justice, reproductive or human 'rights' in world without humans.

Perhaps then, the best image to illustrate this stark truth is not a traffic jam or a shiny new subdivision atop farm acreage, but an overturned lifeboat surrounded by passengers floating face-down. The lifeboat can be Canada or the United States or any one of a hundred nations. Or it can be Planet Earth, capsized when too many passengers shifted to the more affluent starboard side to find the “justice” which Betsy Hartmann and the ideologues of delusional egalitarianism claimed was their due. It is called “slosh dynamics” and it involves a concept referred to as “the centre of gravity”, but that is another one of those laws of physics that they obviously don’t teach in Political Correctness 101, Womens’ Studies or at Hampshire College.

Tim Murray
November 19, 2010

Frodo still has pellets in the stomach. Condemnation from the Queensland government is rather shallow when biodiversity in southeast Queensland is under pressure from habitat loss primarily due to increased urbanisation, driven by population growth, a fact stated in the State Government’s State of the Region (SEQ) report.
State planning is currently based upon the fool’s dream of endless growth. Human population growth brings disfunction, social dis-ease, lack of connection to our land and indigenous species, and increased crime. Her veterinarian carers confirm they cannot remove all the pellets from her tiny body.

Shallow sympathy belies institutional callousness in Queensland

Frodo still has pellets in the stomach. Condemnation from the Queensland government is rather shallow when biodiversity in southeast Queensland is under pressure from habitat loss primarily due to increased urbanisation, driven by population growth, a fact stated in the State Government’s State of the Region (SEQ) report.

State planning is currently based upon the fool’s dream of endless growth. Human population growth brings disfunction, social dis-ease, lack of connection to our land and indigenous species, and increased crime. Her veterinarian carers confirm they cannot remove all the pellets from her tiny body.

Language As A Double-Edged Sword

As William Catton has observed, language is a double-edged sword. It can be employed to convey clear and accurate information or be an agent of obfuscation and manipulation. Since the tactics of deceit and camouflage are a common to a cross section of species, Catton maintains that they must not be necessarily seen as a character flaw but instead be viewed objectively as a sometimes necessary adaptation to confuse predators and prey. As Churchill said, sometimes the truth must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. It is doubtful that the Normandy invasion would have succeeded without the fiendishly deceptive ploy of creating Patton’s phantom army. Perhaps the imperatives of group living in an hierarchical arrangement primed the primate brain for deceitful tactics, but in language we have developed a means to deceive even ourselves. Language has become a weapon of mass distraction and destruction. What was a competitive advantage of decisive importance in our ascendance may prove, ironically, to be the agent of our ultimate demise. When we are not using language to practice deceit, we amusing ourselves to extinction by "conjuring fictions with words", as Catton put it, stupefied and inebriated by the opiate of escapist storytelling.

Whose Lens Are We Wearing?

The concept of language as a kind of lens or filter, or even straight-jacket, cannot be over-stated. Wittgenstein said that the limits of language are the limits of one’s world. By that token, bilingual or multi-lingual people typically have a broader vision. It is not what we look at, but how we look at it. Objective reality is not a linguistic construct, but how we perceive it is paramount. In filtering reality, language draws a caricature of it, bringing a part of it into sharp focus while blurring the rest. The question then becomes, whose lens are we wearing? What filter are we looking through? And most crucially, how do we remove it?

The Purpose of Newspeak

Orwell made us understand that the purpose of “Newspeak”---the language of the fictional totalitarian society depicted in his “1984”, was to rid standard English (“Oldspeak”) of all adjectives and unnecessary words so that people would not be able to feel or think in proscribed ways. If one could not describe sadness, one could not feel it, and if there was no word for democracy or justice, one couldn’t complain about arbitrary government action. By eliminating words, Newspeak would narrow the range of thoughts. Thus the objectives of contemporary “political correctness” are classically Orwellian. The notion is that if we can’t label people or things by potentially harmful terms, then people will desist from thinking of them in those terms. And if politically acceptable euphemisms are substituted and repeated ad nauseam, the brain-transplant will be complete.

Euphemisms Are Employed By All Factions

It must not be thought that euphemisms are the exclusive weapon of left or right, government or business. In fact, it is my contention that it is most perniciously employed by what may be termed “the growth-management industry”, a coalition of environmental NGOs and their corporate benefactors united in a mission to make growth palatable by coating it of sugary-sweet syrup of oxymorons like ‘smart’ or ‘managed’ growth and ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ development. Its purpose, as Catton might phrase it, is to induce in the message-receiver a definition of reality that benefits the message purveyor. And its working.

Euphemisms Are Most Dangerous In the Service Of Growth

It is in the ideology of growthism where euphemistic language presently makes it most incursive and dangerous intervention in the determination of what we perceive to be real. The ideology that economic and population growth is beneficial, necessary and inevitable prevails, to a large extent, because the language which mediates that message, the language of classical economics, has colonized academic forums, radio and television studios and the print media. Consequently the very real prospect of environmental Armageddon is seen by the audience through the same rose-coloured glasses that are worn by the presenters, their writers and researchers, and those whom they interview, tinted by the growthist vocabulary they use to interpret that reality. A stable population is therefore described as “stagnant” and an economic “bust” is never represented as an environmental “boom”, while a drop in housing construction is represented as a calamity urgently in need of a fiscal stimulus.
How can we remove their lens? The answer is to substitute our lens for theirs. We have to constantly challenge media terminology and offer our own. We must refuse to allow the enemy to define our predicament and frame the questions. In the meantime, however, the snake-oil salesmen of the growth-management coalition has us buffaloed. Unfortunately for them, however, Mother Nature ain’t buyin’ it.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Living, breathing human beings must convert energy and consume it to survive. We can call that economic activity any oxymoron we like----sustainable development or smart growth---but deceptive labels can’t negate its negative ecological impact. As Derek Jensen observed, “Building houses is destructive. Manufacturing toilet paper is destructive. Printing books is destructive. But there is no reason to stop there. The industrial economy itself is inherently destructive.” George Plumb elaborates. “Land development is really land destruction. First it destroys the land where the development occurs and there is no bio-capacity left. Second, it destroys surrounding land because it requires infrastructure. Third, it destroys far away land because it requires all kinds of resources to construct that development.” Just who are we conning but ourselves?

Mother Nature's Dictionary

In Mother Nature’s dictionary the only “smart” growth is the kind that never happened, and the only “smart car” or “green building” is the one never constructed. There is no entry for “eco-cities” because no city can ever be self-sufficient or not rely on external inputs, often imported from far away. All cities draw down resources and generate waste, and the even the construction of “energy-efficient” housing involves structural elements like nails, pipes, bricks cement, plastic and wiring--and they aren't made from angel dust. If you want to see a city with a small footprint go to the ghost towns of the Wild West.

Mother Nature knows that agriculture of any kind has adverse impacts, most conspicuously in soil depletion and deforestation. She knows that the manufacture of pollution abatement technology, catalytic converters, electric cars, solar panels, wind farms and nuclear power plants with zero CO2 emissions involve intrinsically damaging processes that space does not allow me to enumerate. Mother Nature is a “systems thinker”. She looks at the entire life cycle of a product, from resource extraction, through manufacture, transportation and disposal. She is from Missouri. When we tout the marvels of “eco-friendly” technology she replies, “Show me”. Then she reminds us of the Jevons Paradox and the Khazoom-Brookes Postulate. In the context of a market economy, more efficient resource use by more efficient technologies, by making inputs cheaper, only provoke more total consumption. Even more efficient land-use strategies, conservation and recycling enable more growth rather than constrain it--unless introduced within the framework of a steady-state economy.. And making “responsible” consumer choices does not challenge the source of waste and pollution---the economic system which fosters and relies upon consumerism and growth. We can and should mitigate our impact, but we can't eliminate it.

Mother Nature does not want more “green” consumers. She wants fewer consumers. She does not care about our virtuous self-abnegation or personal frugality. She doesn’t care about our per capita consumption—it is our aggregate consumption that registers on her scoreboard--the sum total of ‘per capitas’. Her advice? Stop growing stupid.

Face it. Mother Nature is not fooled by euphemisms.

Tim Murray
October 31/2010

[Swiss Confederation Institute]

Australians voting at each level of government, invariably become disillusioned by the two major parties, Liberal and Labor, promising and not delivering. We supposedly have representative democracy in Australia, in which Members of Parliament are supposed to represent their electorate in the three levels of government. But Parliament is dominated and controlled by Party politics and over 90% of parliamentary members are patsies of political parties, which are beholden to vested interest groups.

Party politics and rules and mandates and vested interests (big business, wealthy individuals, labour unions, property developers and the like) donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to these political parties to shape political outcomes to what they want.

Democracy in Australia is a vested interest democracy, and this has unsavoury similarities to the overtly corrupt political culture of many Asian countries to Australia's north.

What Australians deserve, have fought in wars for and rightly expect is true democracy, not the vested interest democracy that we put up with today.

Since Australian federation, the Libs or Labs (or variants thereof) have taken alternating turns of governing, invariably following voter rejection of each incumbent in the governing cycle. The Lib-Lab pendulum of power for over a hundred years has reinforced voter disillusionment with Australia's political process.

Australia's proportional representation has been corrupted by the Party system. MPs are beholden to Party policy, Party rules and Party discipline. Voter representation has been undemocratically supplanted by Party Representation and this extends to the Greens and to the Nationals.

No more blatantly obvious was entrenched Party control and intimidation of its member patsies was on 20th October 2010, in which during Independent MP Andrew Wilkie gave his famous speech to the Afghanistan debate, and only one or two members of the Liberals or labor even turned up. The Lib, Lab and Nats factions of Laborals all blindly are all the way with Obama and Clinton in the US strategic crusade. They were told not to attend the debate, so the Laboral patsies obeyed.

Australian politics has long been a de facto two-party system. The Australian Labor Party supposedly representing the urban working class, although that class has become middle class and comfortable. The Liberal Party is centre-right leaning broadly represents business, the suburban middle classes and is in coalition with the Nationals, supposedly representing the 'Bush' (outside the capital cities). But demographic changes and urban-centric funding have seen a steady move to bigger and bigger cities. Both Liberal and Labor are both Centre-Right leaning and spend most of their campaigning trying to differentiate themselves from one another. They have effectively become one Party of two dominant factions, the 'Laborals' and increasingly less representative of the interests of ordinary Australians.

The remaining Labor Lefties have defected to the Greens - now a diluted soup of disaffected urbane bohemians; a shadow of the Greens once noble environmentalism platform.

All the while, traditional Australia has been cast aside - rural communities, the unemployed, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, the poor. Australia, once a proud classless nation, has now a growing underclass of poor.

'In Australia we do not lack the ability to solve poverty; we lack the will.

'We have been unable to make the necessary changes to social structures to reduce poverty because of the majority's preoccupation with protecting their own incomes, a preoccupation nurtured every time a political party declares that its priority is more growth.' [Hamilton, Denniss 2005, 'Affluenza']

Once one of the major parties is elected, the ability of the individual to exercise democratic choice ends. The new Government's agenda dictates what happens for the next four years. The Party goes off and serves the vested interests of the powerful elite who have donated large sums to the party. McConnachie (2000) has termed this an 'elected dictatorship'.

Between elections, the government can be unaccountable and typically is. The electorate is powerless. Electoral promises are commonly broken, trust is broken, and power is exploited on a loose legitimacy of having 'electoral mandate.'. The political party, whose turn it is at power, claims that it is authorised by majority vote to do anything - even take the nation to war as history has repeatedly shown.

What to do about it? What is the alternative?

Real democracy is 'Direct Democracy

What is direct democracy?

Check the following links:

Wikipedia

Direct Democracy in Switzerland

Initiative and Referendum Institute Europe

Direct democracy comes to Australia

Direct Democracy UK

DIRECT DEMOCRACY: Government of the People, by the People, for the People

Direct Democracy on ABC Radio National's Rear Vision program of 17 Nov 2010. (Link added belatedly on 1 May 2011.)

Unless there's economic growth, we're not making progress
Unless the trucks rumble along the roads, we're not making progress
Unless the engines of industry are turning, we're not making progress
Unless the factories and mills belch out smoke, we're not making progress
Unless our armies are on the move, we're not making progress

Until we respect the planet, we won't progress.

The overpopulation poses at least two problems:

(1) The excessive growth of humanity destroying natural systems across the globe. Five selfish and delinquent countries contribute to nearly 50% of the world's population (notably China, India, USA, Indonesia and Brazil).

(2) The mass migration of humans due to whatever cause (civil war, famine, climate change, natural disasters, sea rise, poverty, recession, the lure of a better life, whatever).

The solutions lie in addressing each of these quite separate driving problems, rather than in addressing for instance 'sea rise' per se. The priorities lie in tackling the biggest and worst problems first - the 'Fat 5' - China, India, USA, Indonesia and Brazil. The Fat 5 are more important than the G20.

The Overpopulation Problem

The high birth rate problem is cultural and is being encouraged and not discouraged by each of the Fat5 governments. It can be resolved by these Fat5 governments each imposing social engineering using financial carrots and sticks. China's one child policy was cruel, but large families living in poverty is also cruel. What about large financial incentives for vasectomies?

The Mass Migration Problem

The second, the drivers of migration are nationally and geographically specific. Two recent examples are the Tamil and Iraqi exodus cause by civil war. These civils wars were human caused and yet the international community (aka the UN) has miserably failed both. The mass exodus was foreseeable and avoidable - neither of course were easy to resolve, but they will happen again until we learn how to avert civil wars, the cause of most mass migration.

Australia's Immigration Problem

Australia's specific immigration concerns are mainly from two causes - refugees which represent less than 2% of the average annual total (but 98% of media interest), and the 98% arriving by plane for economic immigration - people escaping poverty, recession and seeking the lure of a better life in Australia, indeed invited by the Australian Government (but which attract 2% of media interest) .

Solutions become more obvious when the problems are clearly defined.

Who is a refugee?

The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (and its 1967 protocol), to which Australia is a signatory, defines a refugee as:
Any person who owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his/her nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country.

However, the terms "refugees" and "migrants" are frequently used interchangeably. The two words refer to very different groups of people.

Boat people threats?

There's never been any credible evidence of a particular threat to national security. 
Five thousand arrivals a year by boat seeking asylum is a drop in the Pacific Ocean of a migration program of hundreds of thousands.

The number of refugees Australia accepts is set each year and has remained between 13,000 and 14,200 since 2003. This year the number will be 13,750, regardless of the number of boats that arrive.

Over 3 million people have arrived by plane in the last 20 and about 50,000 over-stayed visas etc thus making them illegal immigrants. Boat people in numbers terms are a lot less than numbers by plane for illegal immigrant status. The media and political parties play to the fear of “boat people” and illegal immigrants.

The illusion of control

An Australian born citizens who marries a foreigner will find it difficult to bring his/her spouse to Australia. This injustice enforces the illusion that Australia is seriously in control of who and how many people arrive at our shores.

Our politicians are deliberately making political use of the "security threat" from boat people and creating a smoke screen to hide the main source of our our population growth - skilled economic immigration!

The hype of the “boat people” and “border security” is a smoke screen to draw attention away from the real source of the drain on our resources, and an impediment to our obligation to the resettlement of genuine refugees – economic migration!

Challenges of settlement

Statistically, women from refugee backgrounds have the highest unemployment rates in the Australian labour market. Along with our own unemployed, and those who lack opportunities to gain skills, they need to be protected from being replaced by the skilled imported here from overseas.

Becoming economically integrated and maintaining financial security is difficult for newly-arrived immigrants to Australia, who in some cases are excluded from the social welfare system for a significant period after arrival.

Refugees tend to be in higher risk low skill jobs and tend to be employed in industries more affected by economic downturns. Some may have been tortured or experienced other trauma either before or during their journey.

There are also a significant number of entrants whose qualifications are not recognised in Australia and they need time to make adjustments. There is also the issue of learning English.

It is important that we recognise their specific needs and address these.

The challenge for Australia is to assist newly arrived refugees to process the experiences of their past and rebuild their lives in Australia.

In terms of global rankings, Australia comes in at 68th in terms of refugees per 1000 inhabitants and 77th in terms of refugees per gross domestic product per capita. In real terms, this is 1.1 refugee per 1000 inhabitants and 0.6 refugees per GDP per capita. This makes us mean-spirited and misers in regards to taking refugees.

According to the Green Left, nations like Australia need to throw open their doors and pay for the mass relocation of people who now have no choice but to abandon their homes to survive.

Climate change refugees

It is predicted that there will be millions of climate change asylum seekers in the future. Oxford University's Norman Myers believes that the number of climate refugees could be as high as 200 million by 2050. It will be the poorest countries that will be the worst affected. How many of these will also be from the impacts and direct consequences of overpopulation is also unknown.

More refugees will knock on Australia's door unless rich countries help poorer nations cope with climate change, a key UN scientist has warned.

Professor Martin Parry - a prominent UK scientist who chaired the last United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment of the impact of climate change - said wealthy countries such as Australia had “good, selfish reasons” to
spend money helping the developing world adapt to global warming. Not selfish, just realistic.

Professor Parry said there are likely to be significant population shifts away from areas severely affected by global warming, but the process will be "manageable" if it takes place over a number of decades. Really?

In July 2008 the World Bank warned Australia that future climate change refugees present the government with a major policy challenge. in August 2009, Pacific members of the Alliance of Small Island States (SIS) underscored 'serious and growing threat posed by climate change to the economic, social, cultural and environmental well-being and security of the SIS countries'.

In July 2009, an Oxfam report warned that:
By the year 2050, about 75 million people could be forced to leave their homes in the Asia-Pacific region due to climate change. Pacific island governments are already tackling climate change-related relocation and resettlement.

Policies based on Compassion?

Australia's system of immigration detention is failing on many fronts, and the Greens believe a more commonsense and compassionate approach is needed,
Greens Senator Hanson-Young said. However, environmental limitations don't respond to “compassion” but to “commonsense” and being responsible for keeping ecological balance.

Artificially replacing nature's bounties is energy consuming, costly or even undiscovered. There are limits to technology.

Our own carrying capacity could easily be compromised if we take the route of compassionate response and try to accommodate them all. Our environment, our ecological "services", have no obligation to increase their outputs, their bounties, to accommodate more people, no matter how urgent and pitiful their plights are.

Tight guidelines

Thus, we need some very tight and water-proof guidelines to how we treat asylum seekers to avoid the floodgates being opened, under the assumption that we have limitless land and resources here in Australia.

Politicians do not have the capacity to paint broad strokes even on such a large canvas!
The UN should be trying to advocate a global responsible human population challenge to limit family sizes, but the "sacred cow" of population growth still roams at large!

Clearly, our limits to growth are already being stretched, and we have a high reliance on oil and a globalised economy! Prime Minister Julia Gillard must make some tough, long term, policies and put the interests of Australians FIRST while maintaining a limited humanitarian intake!

Whose responsibility?

The problem is not just overpopulation, and it is not just of “non-whites”. It is a global responsibility.

The majority of Australia's growth, 66 per cent, was due to overseas migration, with the remainder, 34 per cent, due to there being more births than deaths. Australia's population growth is double the world's average!

People settling in Australia adapt our lifestyles, our consumption levels, and add to the local/global population pressures.

Carrying capacity

According to Paul Kelly, Editor-at-large of The Australian , the idea that Australia could not "carry" 36 million people is absurd, and the idea of a “carrying capacity” is loopy!

He believes that environmentalists will “construct principles that make this seem untenable”. Thus, environmental science is not tangible, substantive or concrete?

NSW premier Bob Carr has told a forum that Australia's population should be capped at 28 million. Back in January this year, Tony Abbott's “instinct” was “to extend to as many people as possible the freedom and benefits of life in Australia.” Should such serious policies be left to “instinct”?

Professor Tim Flannery believes the long-term human carrying capacity of the Australian continent and Tasmania could be as low as 8 million people. It looks big on the map but its mostly desert and non arable land.

The idea of a “carrying capacity” has been buried by the growth lobby and other deniers of reality.

Whereas most farmers have an accurate understanding of the carrying capacity of their land, we really have very little idea of what level of population this land can support.

Solution?

The solution to the world's displaced is left for politicians driven by economics, philosophical and idealistic arguments. What we can deduce from our current knowledge is that our present population in Australia is already more than enough, indicated by our lack of fresh water, the demise of our food bowl, and lack of arable land.

What is the answer to the escalation of our looming humanitarian crisis of countless refugees?

We have no new colonies to plunder, and the capacity of developed countries to accommodate millions is doubtful. It's like changing the deck chairs of the Titanic. Once a vessel is full, it is reckless to keep adding more passengers.

Do we start to turn away the haunted, the rejected, the persecuted, the homeless? It's a serious ethical challenge, a dilemma!

Australian Citizenship Pledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have anything you would like to raise, which is likely to be of interest to our site's visitors, which is not addressed by other articles, please add your comments here.

Comments made on previous "Miscellaneous comments" page

Comments on this page have were closed on 25 Mar 11. If you wish to make a comment, please do so on the current Miscellaneous Comments Page.

Because of a bug in the installed version of Drupal, the links from the right column erroneously pointed to page 1 and not to where the comments actually were, that is, on page 2. To rectify the problem, these comments have been manually copied here and forwarding links have been manually inserted in appropriate places.

#comment-5824" id="comment-5824">Anna Bligh's concrete legacy

Re: Steve Irwin Day Hypocrisy

#comment-5825" id="comment-5825">Death penalty for Asia Bibi

#comment-5828" id="comment-5828" class="active">Brumby boost to native waterbird annihilation and cruelty

Whatever you think about 9 11, this story is so revealing of the contempt our public media and our Primeminister have for public opinion and free expression and for that reason needs to be promoted. (Ed.) The interview by Jon Faine of Kevin Bracken about 9/11 on 20 October 2010 was "possibly the most biased ever heard in Australia on radio broadcast by the tax payer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This attack by Faine of Bracken's questioning the 9/11 events included a torrent of ad hominem slurs and an absolute refusal to discuss any evidence that the events were anything but what we have been told by our governments. Interesting to note that John Faine is now complaining that the ABC has been swamped by 9/11 activists and it may take the ABC many weeks to deal with the massive amount of complaints and comments they have received. Many of these I know to be formal as I have received many courtesy copies of the complaints to the ABC accusing them of breeching their charter and broadcast policy."

Whatever you think about 9 11, this story is so revealing of the contempt our public media and our Primeminister have for public opinion and free expression and for that reason needs to be promoted. (Ed.).The interview by Jon Faine of Kevin Bracken about 9/11 on 20 October 2010 was "possibly the most biased ever heard in Australia on radio broadcast by the tax payer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This attack by Faine of Bracken's questioning the 9/11 events included a torrent of ad hominem slurs and an absolute refusal to discuss any evidence that the events were anything but what we have been told by our governments. Interesting to note that John Faine is now complaining that the ABC has been swamped by 9/11 activists and it may take the ABC many weeks to deal with the massive amount of complaints and comments they have received. Many of these I know to be formal as I have received many courtesy copies of the complaints to the ABC accusing them of breeching their charter and broadcast policy."

The particularly good report that follows on the Faine/Bracken interview is by John Bursill, of 9/11 Truth Australia, and was originally published as Visibility 9-11 Welcomes Australian Union President, Kevin Bracken – A True Working Class Hero!

Listen here: http://visibility911.com/blog/?p=1785

To many the name Kevin Bracken is a new one in regards 9/11 Truth. The reality is that Kevin has been a champion of the 9/11 Truth cause since 2006 by disseminating information throughout the Victorian Union Movement and the Maritime Workers Union of Australia. He has distributed DVD's, shown films and shared information regularly with his associates and the people of Melbourne and he achieved motions calling for a new investigation from both the Victorian Trades Hall Council where he is the President and the Victorian branch of the Maritime Union of Australia of which he heads as Secretary. Kevin has also attended numerous conferences on 9/11 and has been the facilitator of such in Melbourne, Australia. Over the years Kevin and I have developed a close working relationship, both striving for the truth 9/11 to come out to bring end to the wars and to get our rights back that have been eroded since 9/11!

This is the motion passed on the 28th of March of 2008 at the VTHC;

"That this meeting of VTHC Executive Council calls for a thorough, independent enquiry into the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11.

The events of that day have been used to start pre-emptive wars "that will not end in our lifetime". They have been used to attack civil liberties and legal principles that have been the cornerstone of civilized communities.

There is an urgent need to reassess the way we view the world after September 11 and we call for proper investigation into the events around that day."

On the 20th of October 2010 Kevin was asked to ring into ABC 774 Mornings with John Faine although Faine disputes this. This was following an email that was sent to Faine by Kevin questioning 9/11 in the context of Australia's ongoing support of the Afghanistan occupation. After the recent Australian Election it was demanded by the Australian Greens in a "balance of power" deal that the Australian involvement in the Afghan War be debated in parliament in it's first sitting. This debate had been going on this week and it was the first time any such debate had happened since 9/11, which is simply outrageous.

This interview by Faine was possibly the most biased ever heard in Australia on radio broadcast by the tax payer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This attack by Faine of Bracken's questioning the 9/11 events included a torrent of ad hominem slurs and an absolute refusal to discuss any evidence that the events were anything but what we have been told by our governments. A reasonable explanation of what happened and also with attached audio can be found here. This story titled "Trades Hall president Kevin Bracken Stands by his 9/11 Conspiracy" has been reported all around the world and included a poll which started off running at around 50/50 asking if Kevin's questions about 9/11 were "reasonable" but has continued to move in his favour ending up at the time of writing these notes at 75% in favour of Bracken.

Kevin has received literally thousands of thank you's from around the world for his brave stance for 9/11 Truth! Standing his ground even after being directly verbally bashed by the Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard saying he was "stupid and wrong" and having his own leadership comrades buckle at the knees if the face of unfounded ridicule. Rather than running for cover Kevin with his chin in the air has reiterated his position defying any to debate him on the issue! As usual all media presstitutes have refused, as there is obviously "no debate to have". It seems that the vast majority of the public disagree and would like to see such a debate but none of the so called "journalists" dare to tread such a path.

Interesting to note that John Faine is now complaining that the ABC has been swamped by 9/11 activists and it may take the ABC many weeks to deal with the massive amount of complaints and comments they have received. Many of these I know to be formal as I have received many courtesy copies of the complaints to the ABC accusing them of breeching their charter and broadcast policy.

The battle for 9/11 Truth is far from over and as long as the fools in power maintain their policy of occupation of Afghanistan they will remain exposed and at risk of criminal prosecution due to the lies of 9/11. Lets hope it comes soon or they realize and stop the bloodshed.

#appendix1" id="appendix1">Appendix: YouTube presentation of 'your' ABC's Jon Faine's persecution of of Kevin Bracken for speaking the truth

YouTube broadcast, originally created by A Lawson (alawson911) can be found here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE3pMPObcGU). For your convenience, we have reprinted A Lawson's accompanying comments below.

Listen to an overbearing gatekeeper, Jon Faine, attempt to rubbish the genuine concerns of an Australian trades unionist, Kevin Bracken, in an attempt to stifle any debate about the many anomalies in the official 9/11 story.

Seldom have I heard anyone, who obviously wants the issue to go away, do more to attract attention to it. He did this during a phone-in on the publicly-owned Australian Broadcasting Commission's 774 ABC Melbourne radio station.

A small amount of sound editing was necessary, but the integrity of the conversation was retained. The unedited sound file of the conversation can be found on this Internet page.

http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2...

The following web page has more background.

Trades Hall president Kevin Bracken stands by his 9/11 conspiracy
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/vict...

Mayor Robert Doyle has recommended that powerful owls be encouraged back to Melbourne's parks in order to reduce the possum population. He may be desperate for publicity, but he is giving a poor example. It sounds mean to possums, which he misrepresents as 'vermin' and might encourage still more cruelty to them by ignorant people. An anonymous contributor writes, "Mayor Robert Doyle is focusing on the wrong pest. ..." (This article first appeared as a comment by Nimby, "Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle's war on possums," to candobetter.org.)

Article by "Nimby."

Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle's war on possums

Melbourne's Lord Mayor Robert Doyle is threatening to unleash a brigade of predators - powerful owls - to fix our problem possums. Cr Doyle yesterday declared war on the "exploding" population of "vermin".

He says, "I know they are protected, but I come out of my house in South Melbourne and I'm virtually waist deep in possum poo."

Next year, nesting boxes designed to attract powerful owls will be placed in Royal Park in Parkville, and the Fitzroy and Flagstaff gardens in the city.

Powerful owl

The Powerful Owl is symbolic as being one of the supreme nocturnal predators in the forests of south-eastern Australia, They are forest dwellers which rely on areas of old growth forests that contain mature, live hollow bearing eucalypt trees that can be hundreds of years old. The main component of the Powerful Owl diet across its range is Ringtail Possum, this may be supplemented by other arboreal possums and gliders depending on the geographic location and prey present, eg Greater Glider, Brushtail Possum, Sugar Glider, Yellow-bellied Glider.

Ironically, the powerful owl is Vulnerable in Victoria. They are adversely affected by the clearfelling of forests and the consequent conversion of those forests into open landscapes, but the species may persist in forests that have been lightly or selectively logged. Thanks to VicForests! Here we have contradictory policies from State and Local government.

More trees needed for native animals

Rheya Linden from Animal Active branded the Mayor "ignorant". The human population explosion has meant that native trees are being chopped, and the number of exotics have increased. What we need is an ecological balance, with MORE native trees!

Too many humans too ignorant to recognise our natural wealth

Mayor Robert Doyle is focusing on the wrong pest. Why not clean up all the alcohol venues and the drugs and violence in Melbourne's streets, and make it safe like it used to be? The violence and crime is not coming from possums, but feral humans! We can't fight against Nature and pretend we are a European city. Australia is a country called "mega-diverse", which means we are rich in flora and fauna. This is part of our natural wealth, and it needs to be embraced, not trashed.

To many, xmas has become an annual social pressure. The thought of each looming xmas heralds anxiety and stress and an imposed orthodox dogma. To a great number it brings on depression.

CEO of beyondblue: the national depression initiative Leonie Young says:

"Christmas can be a very stressful time with the pressures of selecting gifts, preparing food and entertaining family members. Many people look forward to this time of year only to face an anticlimax if their hopes aren't fulfilled" [Beyond Blue].

Xmas means complying with religious ritual and cultural expectations. It is a Christian superstition that has an irrational hold on millions. It imposes unnecessary costs and many are compelled each year to rack up credit card debt simply to comply with and somehow fund the over-evangelised 'time for giving'.

The Church evangelises its conformist message across the land - 'thou must partake in the xmas ritual, or else feel guilty about ignoring Jesus's message. Such guilt-laden conformity to a traditional orthodoxy denies head space, so who needs it?

Retailers evangelise its 'shoppist' message across the land - 'thou must partake in the xmas ritual, or else feel guilty at the 'annual unwrapping'.

Retailers and their advertisers cash in on the guilt trip and profit from it. But the whole 'chrissy' splurge is unnecessary, decadent, wasteful. It is harmful financially and its consumerism is harmful to the planet.

Xmas excess is so 20^th C!

A liberating alternative

Xmas comes at a time of year when really the fundamental need of most people is to simply relax, kick back, share quality time with valued people of choice, and perhaps review, reflect, forget, chill and get one's head space into a happy state and perhaps helping others. No dramas!

Instead, 'Rest and Recreation' (R&R) although derived from American military culture, is so much more aligned to the real human need this time of year. The end of year period should be set aside for rest and recreation - what ever that means for each person, family, friends and culture.

Bugger the dogma, the guilt-laden complying to religious dogma, the gifting, the unaffordable excesses, the overeating, the shopping congestion, that invasive 25^th deadline. Bugger the retail super profits! More and more are waiting for the January sales anyway. How liberating!

Surely society has matured enough to question why we do it. R&R deserves to replace xmas. Replace gifting with catch up and with 'me' time. The rest of the year is inflexible and typically demanding. This year end break need not be. It should a time of flexibility and personal choice and mental health.

R&R (or perhaps the 'chill season') is a more mature thinking. It is free thinking.

The universal test is that year end ought to be a time to look forward to. If xmas has become a time not to look forward to, then question it, stay away from the shops and take well needed R& R instead. One only lives once and life is too short!

Happy Holidays!

Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia

" Every woman, should be able to have the number of children they wish for. In most places this is way less than the actual number they have. For me this is a moral right. " S. Gardiner

This is to inform feminists that I consider it my sovereign human right not only to drive a car, but to drive it is as fast as I want to, and into areas which they arrogantly claim should be car-free zones. I should also have the right to take on as many passengers as I want to, even if my car is designed to carry just a few. I also consider it my right to fish wherever and whenever I want to, and to catch as many fish as I see fit. As hunter gatherers we fished without restriction for hundreds of millennia, and therefore this too must be considered a fundamental human right. Conservative Mormon commentator Glen Beck recently said the rights stipulated in America's foundational documents were inalienable because they were God-given. Since our Creator gave us those rights, no human being or elected body of human beings can take them away. I was born free, and I will not be chained by sustainability laws that would make me behave responsibly.

Perhaps many feminists believe, that in the interests of some totalitarian utopia, that these freedoms should be sacrificed for the collective good. But coercion must be rejected on practical, as well as ethical grounds. The answer is that if men like me are given the opportunity to be educated, career-oriented and prosperous, we will throw off the shackles of self-centeredness and freely decide in our own good time (50-100 years perhaps), to voluntarily drive slowly and respectfully, take on just one or two passengers and be content with catching one or two fish in the designated season. We know that strategy worked with cigarette smoking. After decades of health warnings, smokers out of their own free will suddenly decided that it was inconsiderate to blow smoke into other people's faces in pubs, restaurants, planes and theatres. Coercion was not necessary. Moreover, studies showed that those smokers who were highly educated, independent and prosperous were the very first ones to quit killing the rest of us with secondary smoke. Sure it took three decades to work itself out, but what was the death of millions from lung cancer compared to the alternative of having coercive laws imposed on all of us?

It may indeed take 50 years for women across the world to become independent, educated, urban, rich, secure and free of patriarchal religious programming. Eventually, though, they will choose to give birth to only one child for each seven families --- or whatever it takes to drive us down to 100 million global consumers or less---a number that would still exceed carrying capacity by a factor of ten. But so what? The biosphere can wait. We are only losing 100 species a day from human overpopulation---we still have 10 million species in the bank. So what's the rush? Peak oil? Peak water? Peak everything? Don't worry, human ingenuity will solve it. Meanwhile, of course, I must be free, as a man, not to use a prophylactic. For me this too is a moral right. Not so? There you go again, trying to interfere with my rights.

OK, say I am wrong. Say that by insisting on my human rights that our own species will become extinct. So what? Life would not be worth living without the freedom to do as we please. Give me liberty, or give me extinction. Better dead than red, as they used to say in the 50s. It's a slogan I still live by.

If you don't like my attitude, take it up with God. He's the guy who gave me my rights, remember.

Tim

Seriously: A question. If the Chinese OCPF law is coercive, what was Mao's policy of encouraging women to have 5 or 6 children? Is it only laws which are coercive? Or can an envrionment of human overpopulation be even more coercive than coercive laws? An environment created by the sum total of individual haphazard decisions? Is it not possible that any regulatory environment fashioned by "coercive" laws is less coercive than the laissez-faire environment that forced the creation of those regulations? Are not laws of any kind "coercive"? Do do not laws imply regulation of people by law-enforcers who have the power to punish transgressors? Why are some behaviours deemed as inalienable rights while others are deemed provisional privileges? Does not changing context dictate changing standards?

I am a consequentialist. I believe that if an action or behaviour is intrinsically "right" or "wrong", "good" or "bad", then surely its consequences must be assigned those same attributes. And if that is the case, then the consequences of an action or a behaviour which is thought be a 'right' should be weighed against the loss of rights that it may involve. It is really just a math problem. Only the calculus of what is good for the greatest number must factor in all those lives yet to come which may be foreclosed by a given behaviour (eg. the "right" of women or their husbands to have as many children as they choose). We need to design a population policy that takes into account not the wishes of individual people for a given family size, but the number of kids which will not cause our extinction. The laundry list of countries or states which have lowered their birth rates to "replacement" levels from Costa Rica to Iran to Kerala through voluntary measures does not impress me, because replacing our currently unsustainable population is not an option. Even shrinking it to 2 billion is not enough. We need to go much, much lower, much more quickly than that. So far, Jack Alpert's calculations of a sustainable target http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTWduFB_RX0 ( a global population of less than 100 million) are the most realistic. But that damns Jack with faint praise. A good case can be made for 2-3 million. No, I am not out of my mind: 2-3 million. But that is another discussion.

[Image Source: Material Excesses of Christmas are a Moral Problem: Objecting to the Extreme Spending, Borrowing, Materialism
Image © Austin Cline, Original Poster: Library of Congress, USA]

If full environmental costs were embedded into consumer products pricing, then the price of high environmental cost consumer products would rise, making them less affordable and so their consumption would fall. Rampant consumerism is unaffordable to the planet anyway. But what we pay for consumer items is artificially subsidised by leaving out the environmental impact costs. Throughout the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, developed countries have partied with free lunches, and now we are learning that there is not such thing long term. The planet and its nature is now paying for that free lunch. We need only read the next article below by Bandicoot 12^th November, 'Are we witnessing the death of our planet?'

Conspicuous consumption and decadence deserves taxing, because its costs are destructive on the planet and need to be curbed.

I propose a 'planet cost' measure on all products and services globally. This being the full lifecycle cost of a product/service in terms of its environmental cost on the planet - from manufacturing/procurement, inventory, marketing, distribution, to its consumption and waste ('dust to dust' so to speak).

Planet cost needs to be mitigated by imposing behavioural changes on human consumption. Carrots only encouraged those who want to change, so a behavioural stick (aka a 'planet tax') is needed for those conspicuous consumers who don't and who don't give a rats.

In order to determine the tax rate, simply apply a planet impact global test base on severity and scale relative to the other products/services.

So a plastic bottle of phosphate-based laundry detergent used in standard sewerage (so 20^th C) would be priced at $30, whereas a reusable glass bottle of phosphate-free detergent used in a grey water reuse system would cost only $15. With such disparate pricing, behavioural change wouldn't take long!

"Some of the money spent on Christmas wrapping paper, decorations, and unwanted gifts might do some good feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and tending the sick." [Austin Cline, Austin Cline's Agnosticism / Atheism Guide].

Do the planet a favour, buy fewer xmas gifts. Catch up with family and friends instead!

Happy holidays!
:-)

Further Reading:

War on Xmas

Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia

Huge floating patches of unrecycled pelagic plastic in the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are yet more damning evidence of the damage that is being done to our planet by the rapid expansion of industrialisation across the globe. This is being done to suit the greed of humankind's elites. The harm that is being done to our ecological life-support systems, including the inexplicable disappearance of bee colonies that once thrived across the northern parts of the American and European continents could hardly be explained away as a coincidence.

Article originated as a comment. Thanks, Bandicoot, although, I can hardly say I feel overjoyed to have learnt this news. See also comment Sea Turtles are in the dumps - editor

It seems that we are witnessing the death of our planet right before our very eyes. The extreme weather, Gulf oil disaster and use of deadly dispersants, to decades of agrichemical and synthetic medicines leeching into water ways, and general human pollution resulting in having to now map the North Atlantic Garbage Patch (not to be confused with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ) -- has resulted in major breaches to our interdependent life system.

Scientists have gathered data from 22 years of surface net tows to map the North Atlantic garbage patch , which lies to the east of Bermuda, and its change over time, creating the most accurate picture yet of any pelagic plastic patch on earth.

The data were gathered by thousands of undergraduates aboard the Sea Education Association (SEA) sailing semester, who hand-picked, counted and measured more than 64,000 pieces of plastic from 6,000 net tows between 1986 to 2008.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean the size of France. Recent data collected from Pacific albatross populations suggest there may be two distinct zones of concentrated debris in the Pacific. he Patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.

the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.

It was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early-retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii.

Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.

Over the past few years, honeybees have suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from colonies that once thrived across the northern parts of the American and European continents. The pest, a type of mite called Varroa destructor, is a natural parasite of the Eastern honeybee (Apis cerana). Today it is almost impossible to find a honeybee colony free from the mite.

"The landscape has changed considerably over the last 30-40 years; we've seen well-documented changes in our birds, our flora and also in some of our insects," said Andrew Watkinson of the Insect Pollinators Initiative (IPI), "but now there's a growing concern that our insect pollinators are also in decline, whether that's in terms of the number of honeybees, number of bumblebee species, butterflies and hoverflies."

Editorial comment: Can the criminality of the 'free market' 'growthists' be under dispute any more? Australia has undoubtedly contributed to the piles of garbage now floating in our oceans by its massive past exports of coal, gas, metals and other raw materials to China, India, Japan and other economies which are so wastefully churning out those plastics. Yet our political, economic and industrial 'leaders' want this country to further compound the problem by massively expanding our exports and in doing so turning much our country, including agricultural land and nature reserves, into a desolate, poisoned quarry. To make this possible, we are told that we must massively import more workers to dig up our raw materal. Of course, by their privatisation of the Port of Brisbane and Queensland's railways, the Queensland Government will ensure that little of the proceeds of this global environmental vandalism will go into the pockets of ordinary Australians. Instead it will help to further line the pockets of the already obscenely rich.