A typical member of the growth lobby, for several years now, Bernard Salt, of KPMG, he has been in the business of boosting population growth in Australia, with the idea that people with the same values as him can make a lot of money out of it. Now he is coming out of the closet and telling us that all this population growth means we have to go nuclear. Unfortunately, I don't think he knows what he is talking about.

According to my calculations, if Bernard Salt is allowed to continue to take the stage, and garners support from state governments and the Federal government, along with others of his ilk and values - that means that Australia is up S--- Creek without a paddle and we are headed straight for the rapids - with no lifeboats and carrying far too many passengers, with more coming on all the time. See below on the logistics of power supply and the costs of setting up nuclear.

See more and related articles here Ziggy Switkowski, Population Numbers and Nuclear in the Australian and Nuclear Fission and the future for Fast Breeder Reactors

Australia and Peak Oil: The North Korea route or the Cuba Route?

Short term to 2050

In theory there should be two choices available for Australia in the short term: the ‘Cuba route’ and Nuclear Power (the Growth lobby route) to deal with decline in fossil fuels and the problem of global warming.

The Cuba route: After the fall of the iron curtain, cheap soviet oil was no longer available for North Korea or for Cuba, so both had to lear to live without much fossil fuel. Korea went the industrial agriculture and nuclear power route. Cuba went the relocalisation and permaculture route. Guess which polity did the best? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't North Korea.

You will find all the references for this article in Chapter 20, "France and Australia After Oil," in Sheila Newman, (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto Press, UK, 2008. In the same book you can read more in Antony Boy's articles about North Korea and also about Japan's options for the future without cheap and abundant oil.

The Cuba option

The biggest problem for Cuba was and remains transport. Bicycles can only do so much. Servicing a population and infrastructure shaped by oil but without that oil is fraught with difficulty. Cuba had relied on importing food, agricultural fertilizers, and petroleum for road transport. Relocalisation of institutions as well as food production was the main solution. People in the cities were assisted to produce their own food and state farms were turned into small leaseholds and cooperatives. Permaculture techniques and draft animals replaced fossil-fuel based fertilizers and petroleum for farm machines and transport. Cuba is now self-sufficient and Cubans purchase 80 per cent of their food at local markets. Throughout and still, the state remained a vigilant welfare provider, attending particularly to health and education, with an unusually high ratio of doctors per capita.

The key to the Cuban solution was land redistribution, which was possible within Cuba’s system. This alternative is not going to be easily available in Australia because of the land-use planning and housing system, which makes relocalisation very difficult. That is a pity because many see this alternative as a desirable way of profiting from adversity by reducing centralization and aggregation of land, energy resources and utilities, and strengthening democracy, independent and collective economic and social participation.

The North Korean option for Australia

The Nuclear route is the opposite way. It implies total electrification, synthesising, using complex technology, the pattern of settlement and transport which arose from exploitation of the natural endowment of petroleum. It requires massive investment, and in Australia’s case, the investment sought is likely to be private. This implies ongoing loss by citizens of control over the country’s energy systems and all that flows from that – the future of work, the state of the environment, natural amenity. It implies the reshaping of Australian society by corporations with profit alone in mind, for the benefit of a small dominant asset-rich class, with the electorate a mere captive market.

In Cuba the energy supplies and materials which permitted centralized power were suddenly withdrawn and Cuba lacks the mineral resources to attract capital intensive investment. This situation surely facilitated local reorganization. In uranium-rich Australia, an opposite structuring is more likely. Because government policy favours commercial investment over public investment, nuclear facilities would tend to consolidate corporate power and its relationship with national and state government. Australia’s Anglophone mainstream media derives largely from syndicated US sources and these cultural mediators not only do not support communism or socialism, but they do not support dirigisme or relocalisation either.

In the space of a few years long-established Australian government anti-nuclear power policy reversed under Mr Howard, in spite of public disapproval. Mr Rudd is similarly surrounded by nuclear power fans in the form of the Growth Lobby. See also"Ziggy Switkowski, Population Numbers and Nuclear in the Australian", and
"Scanlon report underpins threat to Australian democracy". Bernard Salt is right there in among them.

I do not expect Mr Rudd to maintain any opposition to nuclear power in this country for long.

Nuclear is seen as an investment opportunity which will provide employment, international importance, and new industries. Rationales offered to the public are the [manufactured] imperative to provide power for projected (politically engineered) population growth and the desirability of off-setting greenhouse gas contributions from coal-fired electricity and coal exports. (Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter.) Australian planning is dominated by what the corporate sector wants. There are many indications that public sector scientists are expected to support private, corporate research and development rather than leading with public research responding to public need, which might result in moderation rather than accelerated consumption.

According to the ABARE, in the financial year 2005-6 Australia’s total primary energy consumption was 5640.7 petajoules (PJ) , growing at an average of 2.2 per cent or about 120 PJ per annum over the past 20 years. No-one is seriously suggesting replacing all this with nuclear. The suggested figure is more like 25 power plants in the next 15 years supplying one third of Australia’s (doubled) electricity demand. But many people believe that nuclear will actually take care of the problem of fossil-fuel depletion, permitting business as usual.

To do so would theoretically take 225.6 thousand MWe nuclear power plants each supplying 25PJ, plus an average of 4.8 new nuclear plants per year to supply annual growth in consumption. Each plant’s initial cost would be around $USD2 billion, in an economy currently valued by the World Bank at $US768 billion, but heavily indebted and privatised.

Of that 5640.7PJ primary energy, around 55 per cent comes from petroleum (35 per cent) and gas (19 per cent). To rely on nuclear to replace this by powering an electric car or hydrogen road transport system is a further absurdity. In addition to the 225.6 imagined nuclear power plants, more would be required to supply electricity to plug-in electric cars and to split water into hydrogen to carry more electricity to fuel the creation of new infrastructure to manufacture and service hydrogen-carrying electric vehicles, requiring more electricity (obviously).

Each 1000 MWe nuclear power plant would itself require around 1.3PJ per annum or 52PJ over a 40 yr life-time according to the Australian Uranium Association.

The government is counting on coal and gas to fill the initial gaps in petroleum supply, but coal is being exported so fast and the world is using it up so quickly with the gas peak already looming, that nuclear will presumably be called upon to supplement coal, gas and oil as well. Perhaps the government is desperately trying to attract nuclear development money by enlarging its population base and intensifying its other extractive industries, in a plan where uranium mining is, of course, a keystone. None of the above calculations factor in the amount of new energy required to build the cities around the plants – to supply and service the infrastructure required for the projected population growth, which is used to lure investment.

In a totally electrified economy, attempting to preserve something like the current consumer-goods based economy, the most likely option is to produce hydrogen electrically and also use it as an electricity carrier, to fuel electric cars and trucks. This implies a vast increase in the need for electricity and a complete renovation of road transport support infrastructure as well as vehicle design and manufacture. The corporations will demand profits from any new ventures. How are the Australian people going to pay for this? What are they going to need to give up for this? In Australia’s ‘trickle-down economy’ who is going to be left out? At the very peak of oil production, public priorities have shifted so far in favour of private enterprise that the Australian government is not capable of providing affordable housing for its constituents.

In the meantime the VAMPIRE index (Vulnerability Assessment for Mortgages, Petrol, Interest Rate Expenditure) is rising. The people at the high end of the VAMPIRE index are those locked into bloating mortgages in remote suburbs with little or no public transport, captive to rising gasoline prices for cars without which they cannot get to work, get their children to school, or get to shops to buy food.

Such hostages to sprawl are most in need of the Cuban route, but Australia’s systemic inability to plan and adapt infrastructures, industry and national resource use to radically changing conditions is perhaps its biggest problem.

Planning departments and tribunals palliate a bewildered electorate with superficial choice between styles, but, whilst allowing endless sprawl on the city-edges, continue to ram through intensified developments in the cities; to purposefully overshoot water resources and transport infrastructure in response to the growth lobby’s insatiable demand for big projects at public expense. These take the form of desalination plants, sewerage recycling plants, complex road-tunnels and expressways and, biggest of all, geological restructuring of seaports to accommodate giant container-ships for anticipated quadrupling in trade. With chilling disregard for the consequences, Australian lobby groups of planners, developers, builders and financiers have successfully campaigned for government led policies to increase population growth and energy demand.

An Australian monument to prominent members of the Growth Lobby

Mr Salt and Mr Peter McDonald (another growthist demographer), the members of the Scanlon Foundation, AATSE, the Multicultural Foundation, the Property Council of Australia, Australia 2020, APop, and a host of other persons, such as Mr Pratt (deceased), Mr Lowy, Mr Bracks, Mr Kennett, Mr Brumby, Mr Rudd, Mr Swann, and politicians in opposition who failed to stand up to this tyranny should have their names carved in stone in a public place so that the people of Australia will know who is responsible as our survival margins decline.

Taxpayers should not be funding handouts to help "restructure" this vile and cruel industry.

How dare John Kelly of the despicable commercial kangaroo killing industry ask for handouts due to the fallout from Russia placing a ban on kangaroo meat imports!

The ban has been in force since August, after the Russian government agency, Rosselkhoznadzor, first voiced its concerns about
possible contamination.

Now the struggling Australian industry is appealing for assistance from the federal government.

There is too much hiding behind the shooters code of practice, and publicity that the action is humane. That deludes the public that it's all done without pain or trauma to the animals being killed.

Kangaroos shot at in the dark are easily traumatized, and they are very stress-prone animals. How could all these shots be "clean" head shots, without near misses? The code of practice is not humane. Who is responsible for setting the guidelines for what is 'humane'?

(art work: courtesy of Carol Drew)

How is butchering joeys in the pouch "humane"? What about at-foot joeys killed by foxes, or starvation? There is nothing "humane" about these massacres of wildlife, and it lies heavily on Australia's reputation as being environmentally and wildlife "friendly"!

This industry is over, and they cannot continue to promote it as "sustainable" or "humane". It is hiding the real cruelty and unhygienic conditions of these killings. These employees need to be retrained and re-educated so that they can be employed in some profitable and ethical industry, such as wildlife officers or tourism.

A Russian government agency says a ban on kangaroo meat imports could be quickly lifted if Australia satisfies Moscow's concerns.
The ABC understands the ban will also be discussed at a meeting of Australian and Russian government representatives in Moscow.

(photo: courtesy of Bernie, from Googong kangaroo massacre, ACT)

The harvesting of kangaroos is being successfully promoted by the kangaroo industry as free-range farming producing a healthy meat alternative to traditional meats.
Kangaroo "harvesting" has even been celebrated by some as having the potential to
restore Australia’s pastoral lands by reducing the numbers of damaging hard-hoofed
livestock such as sheep and cattle on the land. This report demonstrates that the
industry’s claims are only partial truths or outright misinformation. This report exposes
the realities of the kangaroo industry which include extensive and alarmingly
unhygienic practices, unacceptable suffering of both young kangaroos and adults and
the manufacture of false hope that kangaroo harvesting will alleviate environmental
degradation in rural areas.

The kangaroo industry will contend that only one to six percent of adults are mis-shot (depending on the state); when considering the enormity of the harvesting industry this equates to too many breaches of ethical practice. An independent assessment of occurrences of mis-shot kangaroos suggests that the percentages are actually much higher, possibly up to 40 percent.

Dror Ben-Ami, PhD
On behalf of Animal Liberation NSW
2009

Food will also be on the menu in Russia during Premier Anna Bligh’s latest overseas trade mission. She will argue against a ban on kangaroo meat imports.
She told parliament that products such as kangaroo sausages, also known as "kanga bangas", were a favourite in her household where her family dined on kangaroo twice a week.

This woman is clearly no lover of wildlife, and she is representing the people of Australia to promote the wholesale slaughter of our iconic animals! Already koalas in Queensland could be extinct in 7 years, and endangered lungfish will be wiped out by her Traveston Crossing Dam in the quest for population growth!

This atrocity compromises us in directly intervening in Japan's illegal whaling and protests over Canada's seal slaughter. Our kangaroo killing industry is on a much larger scale than these wildlife massacres.

The commercial kangaroo killing industry is the largest on-going slaughter of terrestrial wildlife in the world!

“It’s embarrassing for Australia that we eat our own wildlife ....I’m here to tell you it’s just not right. Simply do not buy, use or eat kangaroo products.”

~ Steve Irwin

No kangaroo meat website
Learn more at Stop kangaroo killing

PETITION

Richard Gage, American Institute of Architects (AIA), founder and CEO of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth), presented a 40-minute version of the two-hour presentation 9/11: Blueprint for Truth to a sold-out crowd at the prestigious Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 8th, which was also live-streamed on AE911Truth's website. This event kicked off a very full week of engagements for the 8th anniversary of 9/11.

John Sutter, a member of the Commonwealth Club and an AE911Truth petition signatory, worked tirelessly behind the scenes to negotiate this strategic and opportune breakthrough. After the event was initially canceled due to its controversy, he worked diligently to restore this event, and after an internal battle at the club, he fortunately prevailed. The standing ovation received after Gage's presentation confirmed his instincts that the event would be well-received.

Founded in 1903, The Commonwealth Club of California has played host to a diverse and distinguished array of speakers, from Teddy Roosevelt in 1911 to Erin Brockovich in 2001. Along the way, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates have all given landmark speeches there. Outside the Bay Area, The Club's weekly radio broadcast — the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 — is carried across the nation on public radio stations.

The Commonwealth Club is the oldest speaking club in the United States, and has had such eminent speakers as David Ray Griffin, Christopher Hitchens, Patty Duke, Reza Aslan, P.J. O'Rourke, George Shultz, Madeleine K. Albright, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Meg Whitman and Ted Turner recently, and in years prior, Cecil B. DeMille, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Edward Teller, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Robert F. Kennedy, Benjamin Spock, Katherine Graham, Jesse Jackson, Queen Noor al Hussein of Jordan, Carl Sagan, Desmond Tutu, and Gore Vidal.

The event was preceded by the haunting melodies of internationally acclaimed musician Alan Tower on the huaca, a double-chambered, clay-fired flute. Tower is a 9/11 skeptic who used his exceptional talent to soothe what possibly was an uneasy audience, a little fearful that they were about to be confronted with information that would make them uncomfortable. They could not have anticipated the extent to which their preconceptions were about to be shattered by Gage's solid evidence.

Twenty-one people believed fire alone brought down the buildings, and 41 were unsure. Only two people still believed the fire hypothesis, and 15 remained unsure. While nearly one-third of the audience began the evening skeptical of AE911Truth's conclusion, more than 90% were convinced beyond a doubt that the buildings were brought down by controlled demolition, once they heard and saw even this abbreviated version of the evidence.

This success rate has been consistent in every venue, and in many cases there is a 100% conversion rate. This proves that logic, facts and scientific evidence can win over most skeptics who previously clung to the official story, which was inculcated through the mainstream media moments after the planes hit the towers.

Coming up: See Richard Gage and Dr. Steven Jones at The Hard Evidence, Down Under Tour. Tour dates: Sydney: Sat-Sun 14-15 Nov, Melbourne: Tue 17 Nov, Brisbane: Thu 19 Nov, Wellington, NZ, Sat 21 Nov. See thehardevidence.com for further information.

This article is an excerpt from "AE911Truth: From the Golden Gate to Ground Zero for the 8th Anniversary of 9/11" of 3 Sep 09.
See also: ae911truth.org, stj911.org,911truth.org, truthaction.org.au.

In the lead-up to International Day of Action (Oct 24th),
The Wilderness Society invites you to join us in the Central Highlands of Victoria, home to the most carbon dense forests on the planet.
On October 18th come and be part of a giant in a logged forest to show the world that protecting our native forests is crucial to reducing carbon in the atmosphere to well below 350ppm.
Aerial photographs will be taken on the day to capture our message and will be passed on via www.350.org
DATE, TIME: 10am Sunday Oct 18th
WHERE: Meet @ Wild Thyme Café, Warburton, then drive to local logged forest
WEAR: Red clothing
WHAT TO BRING: Lunch, sunshine
BE PART OF THE PICTURE!
To register interest please contact:
amelia.young[AT]wilderness.org.au
or (03) 9038 0888.
Transport Pooling from 288 Brunswick St, Fitzroy!

Madame the Mayor of Ambazac delivers her vote against privatisation of the French Post Office

In Australia we are watching the erosion of public services by changes to their statute ('authorities', 'corporations') turn into an avalanche of privatisation. The unions, who, by organising a general strike, could stop this rot almost immediately, bluster ever so quietly and shuffle symbolically.

We have seen outrageously undemocratic proceedings in the NSW parliament and in the Queensland elections.

In the first, Morris Iemma was finally toppled when the Labor Party which had placed him in power sacked him due to his perseverative campaign to privatise State Electricity despite the obvious disagreement of his party and the public and his own earlier promises. The unions and the ALP were remarkably slow and weak to resist this. The NSW Greens showed more leadership. In the end, the ALP did resist, but the person they replaced Iemma with - Rees - has persisted with privatisation moves and has gone ahead with other policies (here, for example) and here and here, quite shocking in nature and alien to Australian values.

In the second, the recent Queensland election (2009) the government consistently masked its policy and denied its intention to privatise more public assets. See "Queensland Elections". This democratic aberration met with almost no reporting from the mainstream media or resistance from other political parties. Even the Queensland Greens have been very weak on the privatisation of public assets in Queensland.

French democracy healthier than English-speaking countries' democracy

In France, democracy is doing much better. We bring this news to you to show you that the whole of the industrialised so-called "developed world" is not as enthralled by savage capitalism as Australia, America and Canada. The French (and most Western Europeans, except of course the down-trodden English) also don't suffer from politically engineered overpopulation and high immigration. [1] Yes, the French Revolution actually accomplished something useful and long-lasting between 1789 and 1846.

French Citizens organise nationally against road to Privatisation of the French Post Office

[Source: French News on France2 4 October 2009, 2000hrs]

In France the Government gave its assurance that, despite a mooted change of legal status, the French Postal Service (La Poste) will remain 100% public.

The Left doubted this and, at the beginning of October 2009, organised, with citizens, townhalls and unions, a national citizens vote via a National Committee against the Privatisation of the Post Office - ""Comité nationale contre la Privatisation de la Poste." See below for the signatories to the committee organising the citizens' vote.[2] Many or all of these votes were conducted in the local post offices themselves.

In the tiny village of Ambazac (Haute-Vienne) near Limoges, the 88 villagers voted 85 to 3 against privatisation of the Poste. The mayor delivered her own vote against privatisation publicly. She also said, "It would be unreasonable for a President of the Republic and a government to ignore the People's voice. In the rural region there are so many people who rely utterly on the public postal services."

The local postie took heart at the concerned and conscientious public reaction, which he could see taking place, since the ballot box was on the counter of the local post office.

All over France citizens voted in villages, towns and cities in this way.

French New Anti-Capitalist Party calls for Referendum on Privatisation

Responding to the news that already more than 2 million people had voted on the night of 4 October, Olivier Besancecot, spokesperson for the Anti-Capitalism Party (Le Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste) in France called for a referendum based on the enormous participation in the activist-organised citizens' vote: "If there are many more than a million people who have shown the way on that issue then we have a right to a referendum as to whether people want to change the status of the post or not."

The dominant political party in a multi-party government, the UNP, said, via its spokesperson, Frederique LeFebvre, that it was all a beat-up and that the UNP was never going to privatise and that if there were a referendum, no-one in France would vote for privatisation.

The French socialist alliance mobilised against privatisation where Oz left weak and ambiguous

Unlike the left in Australia, the Socialist Party in France, along with the Unions and other political parties and presences of the Left has gone solidly to bat against privatisation of French assets.

If you can understand French, the
Video interview with Alexandre Canet, spokesperson for Rouen Socialist Party tells you that the Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste) has worked with other parties on the Left, with unions, and with local town halls to organise a citizens' vote on this matter.

The spokesman states (along with French subtitles) that "The change of statute represents a move towards privatisation, which would cause a deterioration in services."

Change of statute represents move towards privatisation: History of Privatisation process in Australia

The Hon Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG*, went to the trouble in 2006 to warn Australians about the dangers of privatization removing important government functions to a position beyond the laws made to administer them fairly.

Kirby said “The ‘commercialisation’ of the public sector means that isolating the activities and decisions of government from those of the private sector is becoming a more complicated, and sometimes, seemingly, an impossible exercise.”(p.3)

“The exercise of public power is fundamentally different in character to the making of a decision in a purely private context. Decisions are then being made on behalf of the people, typically involving the use of money raised from, and power derived from, the people. Higher standards of accountability and responsibility are therefore attached to the decisionmaker. Public power imports public accountability, including before the courts.” (p.4)

“This reduction in accountability is a result of removing control over day-to-day actions and decisions from the relevant Minister and government departments to private sector bodies whose ultimate legal responsibility is to their shareholders, rather than to the public interest more generally.” (p.6)

He goes on to describe the outcome of a series of cases involving the High Court where the law encountered problems in getting public accountability. This problem arose in NEAT Domestic Trading Pty Ltd v AWB Ltd (2003) 216 CLR 277. It involved officials of the Wheat Board who had refused six applications from another trader(NEAT) to export bulk wheat. The AWB had acquired through its creation by government, the power to prevent by veto bulk wheat exports from Australia. It could do this by withholding approval. The power to approve or veto exports normally belongs to a government body because it is a legal power. As such it is normally reviewable and controllable through the courts. That is, the judicial representatives of “we the public” can ensure that Australian trade is conducted fairly.

The outcome of this case was that Australians had lost the power to control the nation’s wheat exports by giving that power to this private body.

Source.

NOTES

[1]Note that, in Australia where there is another extraordinarily far-reaching undemocratic policy to politically engineer population growth on behalf of the corporate commercial sector, one man has stood up to this fatal policy - Kelvin Thomson.

[12] CFTC Postes et Télécommunications • Confédération CFTC • Fédération des Activités Postales et des Télécommunications CGT • CGT Finances • CGT Banque de France • Confédération CGT • Confédération Nationale du Travail CNT- PTT • Confédération Paysanne • FO Communication • FNEM FO Fédération nationale de l’énergie et des mines Force Ouvrière • Confédération FO • SUD Crédit Foncier • Fédération SUD PTT • FSU Fédération Syndicale Unitaire • SUD Caisses d’Epargne • Union Syndicale SOLIDAIRES • Fédération CNT-PTT • ACU (Association des communistes unitaires) • Alter Ecolo • Alternative Libertaire • ANECR Association Nationale des Elus Communistes et Républicains • CAP 21 Citoyenneté, Action, Participation pour le 21ème siècle • Club Gauche Avenir • CNCU Coordination Nationale des Collectifs Unitaires pour une Alternative au Libéralisme • Debout la République • Fédération des élu/es Verts et Ecologistes • La Fédération pour une alternative sociale et écologique • Fédération Nationale des Elus Socialistes Républicains • Gauche Unitaire • GUE/NGL Composante française du groupe de la Gauche Unie européenne/Gauche verte Nordique • Les Alternatifs • Les Objecteurs de Croissance • Les Verts • Mouvement de la Jeunesse Communiste • Mouvement des Jeunes Socialistes • MRC Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen • NPA Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste • PCF Parti Communiste Français • Parti Communiste Ouvrier Français • Parti de Gauche • PRG Parti Radical de Gauche • PS Parti Socialiste • République et Socialisme • Action Consommation • AFOC Association Force Ouvrière des Consommateurs • AITEC Association Internationale de Techniciens, Experts et Chercheurs • Amis de la Confédération paysanne • Confédération Paysanne • AC Agir contre le Chômage • APEIS Association Pour l’Emploi, l’Information, et la Solidarité • ATTAC • CNR Conseil National de la Résistance • Convergence des Collectifs de Défense et de Développement des Services Publics • DAL Droit au Logement • Fondation Copernic • INDECOSA CGT • IPAM Initiatives pour un Autre Monde • Jeunes Laïques et Solidaires • Jeunes Radicaux de Gauche • Marches Européennes • M’PEP Mouvement politique d’éducation populaire • Réseau Européen des Missions Publiques • Résistance Sociale • UFAL Union des Familles Laïques • UNEF Union nationale des Etudiants de France • UNRPA Union Nationale des Retraités et Personnes Agées

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Population Trust POPULATION POLICY: EUROPE

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

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

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

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

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

• Encourage and enable people to save more for retirement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tired of waiting?

Fair Water Use is urging supporters to participate in its national campaign, which in-part calls for the declaration of a State of Emergency with respect to the Murray-Darling Basin and for the Commonwealth to assume control of its management via a truly independent and appropriately empowered national authority.

The Federal Government has the constitutional powers to do so.

We are hopeful that, should Mr Rudd receive sufficient numbers of post-bags full of letters demanding that he move on this issue, even if he cannot grasp the scale of the crisis, he will at least understand that it would be a sound political decision.

Please take a moment to print off and sign the letter to the PM which can be downloaded at http://www.fairwateruse.com.au/images/stories/pdfs/the%20hon%20kevin%20rudd%20mp.pdf, or via our home page, and post or fax (02-6273-4100) it to Canberra.

Steve Garlick, a professor in regional economics, and his wife, Rosemary, who is a general practitioner, spend a lot of their time going out to get injured Australian native animals and bring them back to their property. There they undertake comprehensive rehabilitation. They house the animals for a time and then release them.

Most of the animals - even the wombats - are pretty peaceful characters, but Denton Wombat was an exceptional character and this is a marvellous story. Don't let it prejudice you against wombats though! Read more about wombats here.

Not your typical wombat

Denton was never your typical wombat. Named because of all the dental work to fix a fractured jaw when his mother was killed by a motor vehicle, he was happiest sleeping in a red backpack. Initially this was alright but as he continued to grow this soon became impractical. ‘Attack’ was his mode of operation with anything that moved and several of us have the scars on our legs to prove it. He would get up on his hind legs and bring his teeth down into your flesh. He was impossible to outrun and he would knock our in-care kangaroo joeys over like nine pins given half a chance.

Denton takes the initiative

After being in care for 18 months and with spring in the air, Denton, now at 25kgs, had decided it was time to venture into the big bad outside world. We weren’t quite ready for this, we ordinarily release in-care orphaned wombats at around 30kgs and we had not yet found a suitable safe release area for him to go to where the conditions were right. But he was determined. Late one Saturday night he decided it was time to go. He found a weak spot in the corrugated iron wall of his enclosure, worked away at it and eventually clambered out.

Once the escape was discovered a full search was mobilised. After three days of looking there was a report of him being seen in a neighbour’s laundry. With reinforcements, sedation and a thick blanket a wrestling match ensued in the laundry with clothing being spread to the four winds. He was not a happy boy being captured and returned to his enclosure, which in the interim had been suitably reinforced with more iron, metal star pickets and huge boulders to prevent a recurrence of the escape.

Second escapade

Despite the repairs to the enclosure after a couple of days Denton escaped a second time discarding the iron, the pickets and the boulders like confetti. When a wombat makes his mind to go there is no changing it! Signs were put up "Missing Wombat (not friendly)" with the contact phone number. During the Sunday apart from searching for Denton we found several promising, hopefully unoccupied, burrows for him at his new release site. We stuffed the burrow entrances with newspaper to test whether the burrows were indeed still unoccupied after several days. Wombats can have up to six burrows spread around to use as escape hatches when needed.

Sightings of Denton

Various sightings of Denton were reported by neighbours on the Sunday but we always seemed to be 10 minutes behind him when we got there. One neighbour thought they had a burglar when all the shoes on their veranda went flying in all directions during the night. Convinced of their burglar theory they installed a closed circuit TV security system! I told them that it was highly unlikely a burglar would upset the orderly nature of their shoes and that it was more likely to be Denton. Another neighbour said he heard things being thrown around in his shed and when he went to investigate the wombat chased him around his house and then waddled down his driveway.

The search continued on Monday in all drain culverts and other likely wombat resting places. Per chance I thought I would look in our own drain culvert and fortunately there he was. By now it was getting dark and rain was threatening. I had a blanket in the car but no sedative. How would I get him by myself? Surprisingly he responded to my calling and he eventually emerged from the culvert. I threw the blanket over him and held him down - 25kg of writhing muscle. What to do now? With no sedation I wrapped him in the blanket and bundled him into the car and headed some distance up the hill to home. I left the car to get the sedation and because it was now quite dark left the engine running with the lights on. Not a good idea.

Denton at the wheel!

By now Denton had got himself out of the blanket and when I got back with the sedative he was pressing on the car's accelerator and the engine was revving loudly. While the gear was in neutral and the hand brake on it would have been easy for him to knock the gear shift into gear and set the car in motion. I could just imagine the car careering down the hill with Denton at the wheel! How would I explain that to the insurance people? Fortunately he didn't. Turning the engine off I didn't count on him leaning on the car horn continuously despite now being sedated. In fact he fell asleep leaning on the car horn. Fixing this up I let him sleep for a couple of hours until Rosemary arrived home to assist.

Options

Options. We could take him immediately to the release site however it was now quite late, he was too sedated, it was raining and we were still not sure the burrows we had identified were in fact unoccupied. So we decided to put him in one of our other, more secure, wombat enclosures for the night, but we would have to move the occupants (Osh and Gosh) out of their enclosure temporarily. This we did and Osh and Gosh obliged.

By this time Denton, despite being sedated, had made his way to the rear of the wagon so we took the opportunity of driving him to the now freed up more secure enclosure. Taking food into the enclosure for him, I fell into the newly dug trench for the next wombat enclosure we are building and got my foot stuck and couldn't get out. Meanwhile it was now pouring with rain and Denton was getting agitated in the car.

After some time we got Denton into the enclosure with a bag of fresh grass and got to bed ourselves at around 3.00am.

Property inspection

Next day we began plans to move Denton to the release site. When we entered his enclosure he dutifully came out, again in an angry mood (see picture at top of article). Another wrestling match ensued until we bundled him into the cage and the car for the 30 min trip to his new home. No dogs, no humans, good digging, water and other wombats. We positioned the cage near the entry to the burrow and opened the gate. We had expected Denton to just wander into the burrow and go to sleep. Not Denton. Never think you understand wombat behaviour. He went to the entrance of the burrow and came away and did this several times. He then chased Rosemary and I away and, as we watched from the safety of the car, he began to mark his territory in the usual way.

Still not convinced he would make the burrow his new home I tried to coax him into it by moving near to it. Denton thought this a great game and proceeded to chase me around and around the burrow until I was able to escape back to the safety of the car.

We will check on him over the next few days and give you some update reports and, hopefully some pictures in his new surroundings.

Sir (Hans) Wilhelm Ernst Hans Franz Heysen , OBE (8 October 1877–2 July 1968) was a well-known German Australian artist. He was particularly recognised for his watercolours of the Australian bush. He won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting a record nine times. Heysen was a conservationist far ahead of his time. He fought to preserve the flora of the Adelaide Hills—particularly the great red gums and white gums—and repeatedly warned of the dangers of destroying the natural environment. He also recorded the human activities of the region in great detail.

Hans Heysen's watercolours portrayed the river red gums as the guardians of inland Australia. He wrote: "The red gums in the creek beds fill me with wonder; their feeling of strength of limb, of vigour and life, suggest the very spirit of endurance."

Apparently, the “spirit of endurance” was no match for those in power who see not the forests but $$ in logging profits! If logging continues when 80 per cent of the landscape along the Murray has already been cleared, what is their future?

The NSW Labor government was once a conservation trailblazer. During the 1990s, forest management in eastern NSW was totally overhauled and in subsequent years millions of hectares of national parks were created towards a National Forest Policy targets for ecosystem protection in the escarpment and coastal forests and into the north-west.

However, even before the Victorian government’s outstanding decision to remove 90% of its forests from production, NSW forests provided five times the volume of timber compared to Victoria, from only 1.5 times the forest area.
.

This region is known to provide habitat for at least 69 plants and animals threatened with extinction, including species such as the Barking Owl, Regent Parrot and Southern Bell Frog.

National Resources Commission Report

Now a new Government report has painted a bleak picture for the future of the Riverina's iconic red gum forests.

A recent 260-page Natural Resources Commission (NRC) report finds the forests under serious stress, with many of the trees dead or dying and raises doubts about the capacity of some areas to continue to support wildlife.

The wetlands are a nationally important region recognised for sustaining large water-bird colonies. They form a part of the extensive lower Lachlan river wetlands and rely on river flows from the upper Lachlan, with the tributaries of the Belabula and Abercrombie Rivers.

If the drought conditions continue in line with climate change predictions, much of the existing forests that are home to numerous threatened species will not survive even in their current condition. The preliminary assessment of the forests was undertaken by the commission at the request of the Premier, Nathan Rees, following a long battle by environment groups to stop logging in the region.

The report says conditions in the Werai Forest are so bad that it could be gone within 50 years if drought conditions persist.

(dead red river gums - Wikimedia commons)

Gary Rodda, Forests NSW Riverina regional planning manager, said that in any given year about four per cent of the 110,000 hectares of river red gum available for harvest was selectively harvested.

“The red gum forests are sustainably managed for a range of social, economic, and environmental benefits that flow on to the community,” Gary said. “This harvesting process is carefully managed to ensure a patchwork of tree sizes and ages in the forest, which means there is a good selection of habitat for fauna and flora,” Gary said. Can anything in nature be harvested forever?

Recent History

In 2007 The non-government National Parks Association of NSW (NPA) alleged the Government had not completed the required environmental impact statement before allowing logging of red gum forests along the Murray River. In September, Primary Industries Minister Mr Macdonald suspended logging in the 11 red gum forest compartments the NPA had complained about. The NPA found two endangered species - koalas and the black-chinned honeyeater.

2008 , THE New South Wales Government was accused of illegally logging almost 20,000 hectares of listed red river gum wetlands in the Riverina. "An estimated 7202 hectares of Ramsar wetlands and 1043 hectares of superb parrot breeding habitat (were) being logged …or are planned for logging in the next three months." However, this was denied by Ian Macdonald! A truce was called when Mr Macdonald agreed to conduct an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the logging if the NPA dropped its legal action.

In May, 2009 , it was reported that A superb PARROT was about to cost 1000 workers their jobs because the Federal Government has ordered a NSW timber industry to shut to protect the bird! No mention that the parrot was under threat from logging its home, its habitat!

The Daily Telegraph then learned that Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett's department issued a stop-work order to the State Government, a move the industry claims could wipe out the entire southern NSW town of Deniliquin.

(swift parrot)

A Forests NSW briefing note obtained by The Daily Telegraph warned 11 sawmills would be forced to close overnight and 800 people would lose their jobs along with the closure of an industry worth $60 million to the NSW economy.

How often do we hear the argument of “jobs” and “economic benefits” to endorse environmental damage? The goalposts are continually moved in favour of communities and human benefits. It is a battle for the red gums vs a few short-term economic benefits and jobs that shouldn’t have been created in the first place. What about sustainability, often mentioned but rarely considered.

Tens of millions of paddock trees shelter livestock, nurture wildlife and save long-cleared farmland from appearing as bare as the desert. Surely if this devastation was caused by a “pest” species, shooters would be employed to “manage” them!

The Government in 2008 notes the National Parks Association report that has found a threatened species in the State's Red Gum forests. Detection of these species in State forests that have been managed for timber supply and grazing for many generations confirms that Forests NSW forest management practices are “environmentally sound”! Really? Nothing kills threatened species faster than loss of habitat.

The Ramsar listing that was supported by both the NSW and Federal Governments listed “timber harvesting” as one of the many uses of the Ramsar site. Maybe Ramsar needs to redefine conservation of wetlands.

UPDATE: August 2009
The Natural Resources Commission is undertaking an independent assessment of the River Red Gum Forests. This is a critical opportunity for us to press for the creation of new National Parks and as the NRC is accepting public submissions
The Red Gum forests act as filters for the river - if the New South Wales Government is serious about protecting the health of the Murray River, then it needs to protect our River Red Gums.

Write a submission for a new national park

Download a kit to write your own submission for the creation of a new national park.

An Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Forests NSW’s timber harvesting and associated road works in south-western NSW has gone on public exhibition today, Minister for Primary Industries Ian Macdonald said.

The EIS, prepared by independent consultants, covers red gum forests in the central Murray, lower Murray and Murrumbidgee, and includes the towns and surrounding communities of Deniliquin, Barham, Balranald, Narrandera and Darlington Point.

“Public submissions will be received by Forests NSW up until
The EIS can also be viewed and downloaded from the Department Industries’ website

Do “jobs” and “economic benefits” always have to win over the environment? The new national park should ensure a wildlife corridor for our diminishing waterbirds and other wildlife.

Email Premier Nathan Rees here by filling out the form

National Parks & Wildlife have given two licences to Bathurst Regional Council to shoot 140 kangaroos on Mnt Panorama, home of Bathurst’s car race to be held in 2 weeks.

The Western Advocate said they were advised this was for “public safety” for the race.

The NSW Wildlife Rescue and Education Service, WIRES[1] members have to continually deal with kangaroos at Mount Panorama tangled in fences, hit by cars, dispersing into suburbs etc.

These are the last of the actual town’s kangaroos – the last of thousands of generations that have been pushed into the small pocket of Mnt Panorama and managing to survive.

Out of proportion

140 roos is certainly much more than the 15% allowed in commercial killing zones, and observers who have walked the environs over many years specifically noting the kangaroos in the area, suggest this represents most of the remaining population there. NPWS reportedly refused to answer the question of what percentage it represents.

National Parks and Wildlife have also reportedly refused to answer the following questions, which should also be asked of Bathurst Council:

· How many kangaroos are actually up on the Mount and its “nature reserves” and environs?

· What consideration has been given to the wallaroos and swamp wallabies on the Mount – are they to be shot also?

· What is happening to the young at foot – who are still fed by their mothers?

· What about the young in pouch?

· What consideration is given to the big male roos, who represent the most important genetic lines for the future?

· Has any consideration been given to creating corridors to allow roos to disperse, eg at the back of the Mount?

· Where is the kangaroo management plan that has determined this is to happen after due consideration of all other ecological factors – or is this a knee jerk reaction to terrified kangaroos on the racing track at last year’s Big Race?

Do the race sponsors condone this cruelty?

Questions of the sponsors of the race – SuperCheap Auto; Lawrence & Hanson; XXXX beer; as well as the sponsors of the driving teams

· Would you be proud to publicise that 140 kangaroos were shot as part of the preparation for the Bathurst 1000 race?

Are you prepared to allow this to happen without a whimper?

WIRES spokesperson, Helen Bergen, in Bathurst, said, "Platitudes to do with 'public safety' (the big race) [and even with] with 'sustaining the kangaroo population' [!] do not provide answers to the questions above.

"Is this how we thoughtfully care for our wildlife? This is how wildlife disappears from our landscapes – and we accept it as inevitable, so make no noise as it happens."

What you can do

Bathurst NPWS, Bathurst Regional Council, the media and the race sponsors all need to realise that some people feel extremely distressed about this situation.

Motor Racing Circuit Bathurst (official Bathurst Regional Council website):-

http://www.mount-panorama.com/contact-us
PMB 17 or 158 Russell Street
Bathurst
NSW
2795

02-6333 6158
02-6331-7211

NOTES

[1] WIRES - NSW Wildlife Rescue and Education Service is the largest wildlife rescue group in the country and has branches across NSW.
The website is www.wires.org.au

Who is braver or more dedicated than the activists who protect our forests?

Victoria, Australia the World owe an incalculable debt to Jill Redwood and the other members and supporters of Environment East Gippsland. Every tree saved is also a bastion for democracy and freedom, against the malignant march of concrete burocracy and the development lobby who would turn every old giant into toilet paper if they could.

Support our forest warriors in this battle by donating here.

Tuesday 29th September ‘09

The Supreme Court today refused VicForests' application for up to $163,000 in security from a small environment group. VicForests was asking for this sum to be secured before a court injunction is granted to stop logging on Brown Mountain.

"If Environment East Gippsland (EEG) had been required to pay such a large sum of money, it could have stifled an important piece of public interest litigation", said EEG spokesperson Jill Redwood.

“This is a groundbreaking decision because no Victorian court has ever ordered an injunction on logging before. It is also a groundbreaking case because it is the first time that the Supreme Court has been asked to order a party in a public interest case to pay security of this type”.

"The judgment says 'this is an exceptional case', and that if logging was allowed to go ahead before the trial, there is 'a genuine risk' that the Potoroo habitat may be destroyed”, said Ms Redwood.

Justice Forrest said that the relevant laws “demonstrate the clear legislative intent that protecting threatened or endangered species such as the Potoroo is particularly important”.

“We feel vindicated by this decision today and look forward to having the case heard for the protection of the forests and rare wildlife on Brown Mountain”, said Ms Redwood.

The CSIRO recently released their Home Energy Saving Handbook – How to save energy, save money and reduce your carbon footprint.

CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet championed a high animal protein plan - lots of beef, lamb and dairy - which was perhaps not surprising, given that the research behind it was partly funded by the Meat and Livestock Industry and Dairy Australia.

Western Victoria state Liberal MP John Vogels, has slammed the CSIRO's Home Energy Saving Handbook, which promotes vegetarian diets to reduce agricultural green house gas emissions.

According to John Vogels, the CSIRO should apologise to meat and livestock farmers for stating what is scientifically clear - that a move towards a plant-based diet is not only a way to limit greenhouse gas emissions and environmental destruction, but also a route to a healthier diet. "It seems tofu-munching climate change extremists and animal libbers have taken over the CSIRO, wasting taxpayer funds to publish books designed to wipe out our agriculture industries with the ultimate goal of forcing farmers off the land,'' Mr Vogels said.

The book grudgingly admits that although all that meat requires high greenhouse emissions, eating "high-carbohydrate, healthy heart and vegetarian diets…..is an easy way to lose weight and one way to adapt to a lower consumption diet".

In 2007 this MP
attacked Philip Wollen of the Winsome Constance Kindness Trust for telling the truth about the negative impacts of the dairy industry, even going so far as to question his Australian of the Year award. According to him, he could “afford" to be vegan? Surely the diet is actually cheaper?

Vogels says that the Home Energy Saving Handbook was "thinly veiled propaganda advocating Australians change to a vegetarian lifestyle in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If the populace took this book seriously our beef, sheepmeat, pork, poultry and dairy industries would be at risk because the authors want everyone to move to vegetable diets to reduce personal carbon footprints…” Exactly!

Somewhat contradictorily, Vogels is “pro-life" – against abortions. Apparently this does not include the lives of animals that routinely suffer mutilations, confinement and slaughter to feed our commercial meat and dairy demands. His “pro”-life stand does not include protecting our future generations from the devastation of climate change, or consumers from cancers and other diseases associated with high levels of meat and dairy consumption.

According to the book, the average person’s carbon footprint is about 20 tonnes of CO2 per year (not including emissions from our exported goods) and the biggest contribution to this figure comes from the food, goods and services we buy (about 60 per cent of the total).

The agricultural sector is estimated to account for about 16% of Australia’s total greenhouse emissions (National Greenhouse Gas Inventory 2006) making it the second largest source of greenhouse emissions in the economy. Most if it is from livestock emissions, and that doesn’t include transport, processing and cooking!

With health, the environmental burden, animal welfare and climate change concerns of eating livestock products, surely it is time our diets came under scrutiny from numerous levels? Being enslaved to traditions and tastes should be challenged.

The world demand for food and fibre will double within a single lifetime, eclipsing climate change as the world's next great challenge, experts told the National Agrifood conference in Sydney on 24 September.

Being constantly on top of the food chain is an extravagance in terms of natural resource usage, as well as pollution and methane emissions. Maybe it is time for our Government to actually promote alternative “green” plant-based foods to alleviate the demand for livestock products and transform our agricultural industries so that they become more carbon-neutral. The dinosaurs like Vogels need to be challenged!

A recent CSIRO/NASA report on rainfall in Australia’s southeast revealed that the prolonged drought there may no longer technically be a drought - lower rainfall levels may be the new normal.

Economic considerations always seem to over-ride logic and reasoning!
Science should be objective, and the CSIRO should not have been sponsored by industries with a conflict of interests. They do not have to apologise!

We constantly hear the use of the arguments of JOBS and ECONOMIC BENEFITS to justify environmental consumption!

Some good clips in this, including one with Demographer Peter McDonald implying that excessive population growth in Australia is inevitable and that most of it is a natural response from workers looking for jobs. We don't have a population problem, he claims. Well, he would. Dr David Tribe pretends it's all just a matter of providing food, as if it was just fine for our lives to be reduced to that of beasts in feedlots - which is rotten for the animals we raise in our industrialised mass production society.

Such hilarious disingenuousness abounds on this matter.

Take a look and leave a comment to encourage Kelvin.

Also, check out the Scanlon Report on this site.

Phone in PM Rudd on Jon Faine - Immigration question

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

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

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

Media manages damage control and sells nuclear at same time

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

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

Bernard Salt says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freddy the blind environmentalist could see this coming.

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

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

Special enforcement squads - Ha ha

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

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

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

Press serves up Rudd with G20 and plenty of whipped cream

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

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

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

NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

State-sponsored human population growth is doing more harm to Australian wildlife and the environment than the dreaded cane toad!

(Illustration:Canetoad Anna B by Sheila N)

Anna Bligh's policies are turning the human population in Queensland into the equivalent of canetoads. Native habitat is being sacrificed to continuous development and humans are overwhelming indigenous species, just like the imported canetoad. We have far less excuse though, since we are able to control our population and we are supposed to be living in a democracy - not a developer-led dictatorship.

Canetoads

Cane toads, which produce large numbers of offspring, are colonising northern Australia at an increasingly rapid pace. Cane Toads are likely to colonise almost every habitat type before eventually moving further south.

In Australia it is officially recognised that the cane toad is a pest and an invasive species in many regions where it has been introduced. A particular concern is that its toxic skin kills many animals—native predators and otherwise—when ingested. The kinds of native animals that are most likely to be affected by toads are predators, like quolls (marsupial carnivores), large snakes, and goannas.

Humans just as out of control as toads, but with less excuse

Our iconic koalas, however, are under threat from a runaway human invasion! In fact, all native species have been impacted by the growth of human populations, and as koalas are competing with the same locations, they are losing out badly. This is not properly acknowledged officially; human development impact is being dealt with piecemeal, project by project, without reference to the total impact of total human development in the total koala habitat. This is either incompetent planning or a depraved policy to wipe out koalas by simply erasing their habitat in a patchwork approach.

(photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Southeast Queensland typically supports the highest densities of Koalas in the State, but rapid human population growth there is accompanied by loss of native vegetation and koala numbers are plummeting towards zero! A conservative estimate indicates a further loss of 23-25,000 ha of native vegetation, much of it koala habitat, in the next 20 years as human population burgeons. An upper estimate is 30-35,000 ha loss of native vegetation, further accelerating the decline of koala and other wildlife populations. Long before that, the koalas will all be gone!

The bulk of remaining koala habitat is legally unprotected

An estimated 80% of koala habitat has probably been destroyed since European settlement. Most of the habitat that is left is private land – almost none of it protected in law.

Extreme drought, ferocious bushfires and urban development could make koalas , extinct within seven years environmentalists are warning.

Erna Walraven, senior curator at Taronga Zoo, sees the koala as a flagship species , with the health of their populations serving as an indicator of the wider health of the wildlife of the bush, including bandicoots and wallabies.

Stress causes illness in koalas. Stress is another word for hardship. Stress is caused by loss of habitat and subsequent overcrowding. The majority of koalas in Queensland are believed to be infected with Koala retrovirus (or KoRV). This retrovirus can cause suppression of the immune system in koalas, leukaemia and lymphoma

The Queensland Government has announced it would protect 5.6 hectares of state-owned koala habitat at Alexandra Hills

Govt land handover for koalas a "shocking joke"

(Photo source: http://www.epa.qld.gov.au/about_the_epa/public_reporting/epa_bulletin/issue_48_june_2009/index.html)

State Climate Change Minister Kate Jones said the land, located on Windemere Road and of high commercial value, would be handed over to Redland City Council.

Honorable as this handover is considering the land’s commercial value, it is a drop in the ocean. The solution needs a more holistic approach. In fact there should be no more development in the vulnerable area at all.

We should be looking, not at what Minister Jones is 'sparing' but at what she is allowing to be taken and destroyed.

Koalas like to move about, and being surrounded by roads and developments, saving 5.6ha of key habitat will have little effect ultimately on saving the species.

The small Koala populations that remain cut off in fragmented areas of bushland are at great risk of localised extinction because a single fire may wipe out an entire habitat. Bushfires are extremely common in the summer months. Below habitat threshold points, a rapid decline in koala occupancy is likely. Fences, roads and cleared land can all create barriers to koala movement. These factors alter population dynamics, impede gene flow, and limit the ability for populations to recover from insult and depletion.

Without interlinking and continuous wildlife corridors and crossings, habitats remain fragmented.

According to Australian Koala Foundation chief executive officer Deborah Tabart, 25,000 koalas have died from dog attacks, cars and disease in the last 10 years in South East Queensland and that's because leaders have failed to plan effectively which land should be developed.

South East Queensland’s excessive population growth is no doubt stimulating economic growth - albeit debt-funded. Our leaders worship growth, but they fail to appreciate that koalas and other animals have indigenous rights and that to treat them in this way is depraved. Unless there is a stop to developments and housing and cap on human population numbers, the Bligh government’s greed will destroy Queensland’s natural wealth, including its biodiversity, and create a crowded, sterile and cruel wasteland!

Is Premier Anna Bligh happy to create, manipulate and profit from a human population explosion at the expense of wildlife habitat and to willingly make human invasions a greater threat to Queensland than those of the unwitting cane toad?

Any introduced species, with unchecked population growth, can become a “pest” species! The Economy should not over-ride our moral and ethical duty to protect the species that have a rightful existence in their land and whose survival dignifies our own.

#WhatYouCanDo" id="WhatYouCanDo">What you can do

Contact Premier Anna Bligh and let her know how you object to her Government making the plight of our endangered koala worse. Please send us any copies of correspondence to or from the Premier.

Her contact details are:

South Brisbane Electoral Office

E-mail: South.Brisbane[AT]parliament.qld.gov.au

Phone : (07) 3255 3615
Fax : (07) 3255 3627

Suite 1/90 Vulture Street
West End 4101 Qld

PO Box 5822
West End Qld 4101

Ministerial Office

E-mail : premier[AT]ministerial.qld.gov.au

Phone : (07) 3224 4500
Fax : (07) 3221 3631

Level 15 Executive Building
100 George Street
Brisbane Qld 4000

PO Box 15185
City East QLD 4002

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

Uncontrolled immigration blocks social housing for native-born

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pressure on social housing is set to continue:

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

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

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

Commenting on the research, Sir Andrew said:

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

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

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

She added,

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

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

Thousands of litres of oil, gas and condensate has been leaking into the sea from the West Atlas rig since August 21 from a wellhead near PTTEP Australasia's West Atlas oil rig, 250km from shore.

(photo Wikipedia Commons)
The spill measured 70 by 20 nautical miles, with sheen visible in 25 per cent of that area, Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said.

It has been reported that the slick — measuring about 30 meters wide and 15 kilometers long — is about 250 kilometers northwest of the Kimberley coast.

An estimated 400 barrels of oil a day is leaking from the well head platform, according to the company.

Despite comments from Federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson and WA Premier Barnett playing down the impact of this spill it is clear that a disaster of this scale will have serious and ongoing impacts on a range of marine life.

A relief well being drilled 2.6km under the sea to plug thousands of tonnes of oil leaking from a rig off the West Australian coast has passed the halfway mark, the company responsible for the disaster saying yesterday that it had now drilled 1.6km without incident. But PTTEP Australasia, which owns the stricken West Atlas rig, extended the deadline for completing the complex repairs, admitting it would take at least another three weeks.

The region where this spill is occurring is a ‘marine superhighway’ for a range of species including over 19 species of Whales and Dolphins, including the Humpback Whale. Sea Snakes, many bird species, fish and other wildlife will also be impacted. Dr Gilly Llewellyn, WWF Australia's conservation director, says the affected area is home to many rare species.

The federal Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts Department, Peter Garrett, confirmed some wildlife had been affected, although the full extent of the damage remains unclear. The Northern Territory Environment Centre says proof the oil slick is killing birds gives more weight to calls for new protected marine areas in the region.

The Opposition's environment spokesman, Greg Hunt, says it should pay for an independent organisation, such as Charles Darwin University or James Cook University, to carry out a survey of marine life.

The Australian Government says so far no whales or other marine mammals have been harmed by a large oil spill off the country's west coast despite the fact that fishermen are bringing in animals that have died as the result of the spill!

However, nine seabirds, four now dead, have been caught up in the slick, according to staff of the Environment Department working on Ashmore Reef.

There have been no checks so far around the rig on any effects of the oil on turtles, whales or sea snakes known to frequent the area. A private environmental consultant's report commissioned by the WWF has found 15 species of whales and dolphins, 30 seabird species and five turtle species could be affected by the oil slick. The report finds the spill could end up harming 30,000 sea snakes, which fisherman have already reported finding dead in the ocean nearby, and 16,000 turtles.

The diverse and ecologically crucial coral reef habitat of Ashmore Reef is also threatened should the spill reach this area 150km from the leaking rig.

The Kimberley region is home to one of the most significant coral reef provinces in the world. There is no good reason to put the Kimberley environment at further risk – certainly not economic. Mr Garrett is preparing to release areas in the resource-rich ocean north-west of Australia to become potential marine conservation zones.

In the 1970’s Australia said ‘No’ to oil and gas mining in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and went on to implement what was then the world’s largest marine park. The GBR now contributes well over $5 billion in sustainable income annually to the Australian economy and supports thousands of jobs.

The Marine Conservation Society's Prue Barnard says it is part of the Government's commitment to create a network of marine parks by 2012. She says the recent oil rig leak off the Kimberley coast underlines the need for sanctuaries.

“The region where this spill is occurring is a ‘marine superhighway’ for a range of species including over 19 species of Whales and Dolphins, including the Humpback Whale”, TWS said in an open letter to federal environment minister Peter Garrett on August 28.

From June to November each year, humpback whales make their way home to calving grounds just north of Broome, where they stay for four months with their calves. The Kimberley coast is crucial habitat for the humpback whale, a protected species in Australia. We wouldn’t plan a freeway through a maternity hospital and expect it to continue?

The Kimberley region of northern WA is one of the world’s great natural and Indigenous cultural regions. Its vast savannah landscapes, wild rivers, extensive wetlands, spectacular coast and rich marine environments provide a multitude of habitats that are home to an extraordinary diversity of species.

The Wilderness Society is calling on the Federal Government to declare a moratorium on further approvals and expansion of the oil and gas industry in the region.
Environment groups including the Wilderness Society are calling on the State and Commonwealth Governments to:
-Immediately place a moratorium on oil and gas development on the Kimberley coast until government planning processes are complete.
- Establish large marine sanctuary zones - with the consent of the Traditional Owners
- to protect the globally significant marine biodiversity in this region, including Humpback whales in the vicinity of James Price Point.

Pledge your support

Australian series

Andrew Robb, Federal Opposition member for Goldstein is the latest amongst a series of Australian politicians to announce a battle with mental depression.

I understand this illness is more prevalent in Australian politicians than in those of other countries.

I have had some thoughts about the reasons for this.

Are Australian politicians simply more inclined to come out public with the diagnosis or is depression among politicians actually more widespread in this country than in others?

A theory to explain

I can understand why the job might cause this state of mind in an intelligent and well meaning politician. Politicians must have to constantly make compromises and vote for decisions that they know are not in the best interests of their constituents, but instead in the interests of powerful lobby groups.

Eventfully they must have to delude themselves that they are doing the right thing.

Climate change policy as a cause of mental stress in politicians

Greenhouse gas and climate change policies are areas of particular parliamentary stress and Andrew Robb has been involved heavily in this area for the opposition.

Stress of Carbon-reduction policy example

We might also look at the case of Penny Wong (who has not so far announced depression), which I would have thought carried some big stressors. She was interviewed at the beginning of this week by Fran Kelly for the ABC, who on 21 September 09, asked her how she could reconcile a rapidly growing Australian population with a target of a marked reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Wong's answer to this question drew amazed gasps from the ecologically literate community. She said that targets could be achieved by de-linking the population numbers for the greenhouse gas emissions. Since she gave no further details to explain how such a thermodynamic breakthrough might be achieved for the first time in the history of the universe, one tends to assume that she is engaging in political wishful thinking.

Here is our transcript:

Interviewer:
"Minister, Australia's population is projected to increase by 65% to the level of 30m people by 2050. During that same period, the government is committed to cutting our carbon emissions by 60%. Aren't those goals or those facts mutually exclusive? How are we going to massively cut carbon as our population continues to massively grow?"

Penny Wong:
"Well, absolutely not, because the key issue with reducing emissions is that we have to de-link our levels of carbon pollution from economic growth and population growth. We have to ... Whereas the last few hundred years emissions growth - that is, growth in our carbon pollution - has essentially tracked our population and economic growth, we have to break that link and that the whole world has to break that link and so does Australia. So the key issue here is breaking that link, not, not trying to reduce population."

Perhaps, in fact, Penny Wong holds two conflicting pieces of knowledge in her head and copes with this by "de-linking" them. This is how the thinking might go:

"The population is growing dangerously fast and causing increasing greenhouse emissions.
We have to satisfy the public by promising to reduce greenhouse emissions.
We also want to avoid making the growth lobby angry by stopping ramping up population growth to unheard of heights.
This is impossible. I am going to go mad if I keep thinking this way. I can feel a depression coming on.
I know! I will de-link these two conflicting demands on my brain so that they will stop interfering with the logic of my policy statements and then we can all get some sleep."

Indeed, for an intelligent independent thinking person, this must cause some mental discomfort.

I really don't know if cognitive dissonance is the cause of the widespread depression in our politicians in recent years (Geoff Gallop, Jeff Kennett, John Brogden, Nick Sherry, Andrew Bartlett, Greg Wilton). Nor do I know why politicians overseas do not seem to be so prone to depression.

I do know however that most of them make me very depressed.

Maybe their $153.00 per week pay rise announced today will make them happier.

Although they will need to delink that from the mean earnings of the majority of the population or it will also cause cognitive dissonance with values of equity, equality, and a fair go.

Details of the Save the Koala protest are:
Time/Date: 11AM sign-in for a 12PM start, Friday, 25 September
Place: Brisbane Square (in front of Treasury Casino)
Contact: saveourkoalas[AT]gmail.com, www.koalarescue.org.au

See also: "Bald Hills community fights sand mining threat to flood plains and Moreton Bay" of 31 Aug 09, www.savethekoala.com

Appendix: recent comment about Koalas posted to feedback

16 Sep 09 I was just wondering how I could get involved in actively working to protect the Koala. I think it's disgraceful how the situation is being swept under the carpet by the government, who refuse to aknowledge the problem at all. I'd like to know how I can get on board and do something to actually make a change. When a government fails, the responsibility lies then with the community, i feel. Any advice for me would be greatly appreciated, I'm just a concerned citizen who's had just about enough of our beautiful country, our home, and its precious flora and fauna being destroyed at the hands of negligent government. Look forward too hearing from you.

Cheers!

Editorial Comment: In general, we encourage visitors to post directly into the comment form which should lie at the bottom of nearly every article, including this article but thanks for your encouraging feedback all the same. - JS

Schapelle Corby became a household name in Australia after her arrest in 2004 on charges of importing 4.2 Kg of marijuana into Bali.

Her subsequent trial and guilty verdict were covered extensively in the news, and in 2005 there was a groundswell of support from all over Australia due to the inconsistencies in the evidence against her, the main one being that the street value of marijuana in Bali is roughly one eighth of the Australian value. Why would someone take enormous risks to import a drug into a foreign country for a massive loss?

The weakness of the case against Schapelle was compounded by the fact that the Indonesian prosecutors could not offer a single piece of forensic evidence to support their case, despite repeated requests from Corby's defense team. The marijuana was not tested for its origin, finger prints were not taken and CCTV footage was mysteriously unavailable.

The case against Schapelle was based exclusively on circumstantial evidence, bolstered by (disputed) claims that her behaviour during the initial search demonstrated guilt.

The final twist was a "trial by media" which occured after Australian television program "Today Tonight" payed Jodie Power $100,000 cash to air extremely damaging allegations about Schapelle's sister Mercedes and the Corby family.

In May 2008, a New South Wales Supreme Court jury found that Channel Seven defamed Mercedes Corby, after which Seven Network settled the case for an undisclosed sum.

Schapelle's mental state is reported to have deteriorated dramatically in the past year. Psychiatrist Jonathan Phillips visited Schapelle in jail earlier this year, and described her condition as follows:

"She is lost in her own bewildering world where fantasy, hallucinations and bizarre ideas dominate her mind… I really fear for her."

"I know from experience that her illness will not get any better in the current situation, and will probably worsen with the risk of calamity."

"Whether she's innocent or guilty, her needs are medical."

"She is in huge trouble."

"I've never known a similar situation before and the things that might go wrong are beyond reckoning."

Tonight TNRA welcomes Roy Reeves, a close friend of the Corby family, to discuss these issues and the miscarriage of justice which now threatens Schapelle's life.

Originally published on Truth News Radio. Go there to retrieve broadcast. Interview concerning Schapelle Corby is 25 minutes into the program.

Podcast from Truth News Radio available here

Links for tonight's interview:

• Corby Family Police Record Transcripts: A | B | C | D | E
• schapelle.net
• freeschapelle.com.au
• Schapelle Corby 'insane'
• Schapelle Corby book sorts fact from fiction
• Holly Wilson - "When You Tried To Tell The World"
• Tara Hack - "Saya Tidak Bersalah"

See also: "Schapelle Corby is innocent, and the Australian Government knows she is" of 6 Sep 09.

Dear Minister Wong,

On 21 September 2009 you had the following exchange on the Breakfast Show on ABC Radio:

Interviewer:
"Minister, Australia's population is projected to increase by 65% to the level of 30m people by 2050. During that same period, the government is committed to cutting our carbon emissions by 60%. Aren't those goals or those facts mutually exclusive? How are we going to massively cut carbon as our population continues to massively grow?"

Penny Wong:
"Well, absolutely not, because the key issue with reducing emissions is that we have to de-link our levels of carbon pollution from economic growth and population growth. We have to ... Whereas the last few hundred years emissions growth - that is, growth in our carbon pollution - has essentially tracked our population and economic growth, we have to break that link and that the whole world has to break that link and so does Australia. So the key issue here is breaking that link, not, not trying to reduce population."

Please tell me exactly what theory and model you are relying on for this proposed delinking of energy from population numbers in a context of economic growth. Please tell me why you believe it is inconceivable to simply allow Australia's population to return to natural levels of growth rather than interfere to engineer growth ever-upwards.

I am aware of economic beliefs that energy calory decrease trends since the late 1970s meant that there had been a delinking of energy use from productivity. This, however, has been shown to be mistaken. What had changed was the choice of and quality of fuels used for different tasks. Overall fuel use (and concommitant carbon gas output) has continued to increase with economic growth.

If it had failed to do so then the laws of thermodynamics would have been repealed, and that is impossible.

Perhaps you are relying on centrifugal separation based nuclear power, which admittedly uses less electrical energy than the old gaseous diffusion type?

Nonetheless, surely you cannot be unaware that, to replace Australia's current electrical consumption would require at least one thousand MWe nuclear power plant for each million Australians, each supplying 25PJ, plus an average of 4.8 new nuclear plants per year to supply annual growth in consumption. And that is without replacing the energy that oil and gas depletion will leave unsupplied, and it is without catering to the total electrical output of electricity producers, much of which will never reach any purposeful productive activity.

I await your response with real anxiety. Please reply as soon as possible, citing your theory, data and sources.

Sincerely, Sheila Newman Population, Environment and Energy Sociologist Editor of The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto Press, UK, 2008

Observations on how we are being backed into a corner

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

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

Why this is important

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

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

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

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

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

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

Urban temperatures rising, trees and water disappearing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tired old platitudes

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

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

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

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

Shock doctrine techniques

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

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

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

Similar agendas - Howard and Keating

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

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

Hardly 'news'

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

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

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

Boat people

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

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

Sugaring dubious medicine

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

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

Appendix: E-mail sent to Richard Fidler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sincerely,

James Sinnamon

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

35 Million Australians by 2050?

The Age September 19th

Start preparing now:

Treasurer Wayne Swan is quite resigned to the fact that we will have “over 36 million” people by the year 2050! This is a dishonest understatement. According to our present growth rate, we will have doubled our present population of nearly 22 million by 2046. He clearly is being evasive or is showing a lack of understanding of arithmetic despite being our Treasurer. We will be facing more than 44 million by 2046, and the numbers will keep escalating.

At the present rate Australia will have a population of about 50 million by mid century and 100 million by the end of the century. If this sounds implausible, consider that at the end of World War II, just 64 years ago, Australia’s population was only 7.5 million, i.e. it has almost tripled in that time.

Online Opinion

The Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2008 models show Australia’s population on course 42 million by 2050, and Sydney and Melbourne's population each surpassing 7 million, on current trends.

Our Treasurer has released update population forecasts that confirm that now is the time to start "reshaping the way we live”. This means that despite our diminishing and threatened natural resources, climate change, loss of biodiversity, impending threats from diseases, starvation, famine, water shortages, ocean destruction, ecological collapse and atmospheric pollution, he is willing to risk all and keep adding more people for the great idol of “economic growth”!

“Reshaping the way we live” is an euphemism for higher density living, few private backyards, more concrete or living in outer urban sprawl areas with more travelling time, for higher costs for fuel and water, and for congestion and poverty.

“Sustainable” growth is pure fiction!

The “shift upwards” trend to create higher density living has been the goal of urban planners for some time, but this has been “stymied” by NIMBY-ism! Why should our lifestyles and our suburbs be a resource for developers and a growth phenomenon that is contrary to our interests? Why should our children be denied back yards and safe places to explore and play? Why should we be denied the right to grow our own vegetables, have pets and gardens? Already our democratic rights to justice are being threatened to speed up development approvals.

Mr Swan’s speech was delivered at the launch of a Sydney-based institute on population ageing, which he said was “arguably one of two of our greatest challenges along with climate change”! Really, older people are a threat, equal to climate change? On the contrary, older people usually consume less and are more conservative in their needs. Perhaps he would like a voluntary extermination program so that the ageing aren’t a financial burden to the growth industries!

Another major think-tank is Melbourne’s Grattan Institute to “promote vital debate about the city of the 21st century”. However, it will depend on the public being “engaged and persuaded”. Does that mean the public will be able to input into the debate on “why” or just add to the “how”? The Age newspaper is intending to play a leading role in this process. With Fairfax’s interest in land developments and the real estate industries, just how detached and objective will this input be?

The article conceded that many Australians will respond to all this with the “deceptively simple question - why not cap the population”? This question is not “deceptively simple” but IS simple! According to the article, the main reason that it is not a good solution is a “demographic one” – migrants are significantly younger on average than the general population. Only young people are considered desirable! This is not a demographic reason, but an economic one. Once our “baby boomers” from the post war baby boom finally expire (and I am one of them), without immigration, we should reach equilibrium and have either population stability or even decline. Our leaders worship growth, and youth, but neither can go on forever! They strive and worship economic GROWTH, and with their limited and short-sighted model for growth, it requires population growth.

Adding young migrants, no matter how educated they are, will not avoid them ageing! Immigration will never be able to keep our population young. Adding people to “compensate” or “replace” older people means our numbers will keep blowing out, and the following generation will have even more older people.

Fact Sheet, Australia's ageing population problem

The proportion of older people has been revised to be 22% by 2049, which is even higher than our present 13%! Where’s the logic?

According to World Book figures for 2008, a rising population is not necessary for economic growth. Sweden, Cuba, Norway, Russia and Italy all enjoy small population growth rates, and all have viable, if not growing, economies and healthy GDPs. However, many of our industries have been swamped and eradicated by globalisation. Maybe these countries will prove the sensible ones that survive better in the long-term.

Treasurer Wayne Swan, and our PM Kevin Rudd who is “excited” about population growth (link) because it will raise the “tax base”, are willing to sacrifice Australia’s landscape, native animals, heritage, culture, vegetation, lifestyles, gardens and green wedges, coastlines to developments and desalination plants, and destroy all that is good about Australia, all in the name of economic growth! This formula for growth will inevitably increase the base of customers for gigantic corporations and global industries but will increase poverty in Australia! Growth at all costs is malignant and will eventually diminish human rights and dignity, and disempower the majority.

Kevin Rudd, who professes to be a Christian, has sold his soul for the god of Mammon and materialism. God and Mammon

His masters are the corporations and business who shape these warped policies, not patriotism and love for our country Australia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more:

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

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

Where Does the PC Line on Immigration Come From?

By Mark O'Connor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

Rumours of early election if Opposition don't pass Planning Amendment bill

It is rumoured that the Government is suggesting that it will call an early election if the Opposition doesn't pass its loathed bill and that the Opposition may feel that it is not ready to govern yet.

Ms Pruneau, of MRRA, wrote to MPs today, saying, "In our view, if the government uses this flimsy excuse to call an election, it will be exposed for the short-sighted, minority-driven, undemocratic body it has become. Any compromise on your part will serve to endorse that behaviour. Please, let the government lose credibility, keep yours intact."

Indeed, let us remind the opposition that there is honour in standing firm and debating honestly, and that they have a duty to represent the electorate and to make the government do the same where it forgets its role and works, instead, on behalf of big business finance, materials, engineering, land speculation and property development.

In the excerpts of speeches published under the heading DACs 2, there are some notable examples of fudging on the government's responsibility in the whole overpopulation disaster which is Victoria. The opposition is also afraid to comment on this because they are under similar pressures and inducements to support developers over The People.

What more proof do we need to see that population increase leads to decrease in democracy in Australia?

Upper House rejects Planning Legislation Amendment Bill (No.2) motion today on standing order grounds

[1]

Introduction Received from Assembly.

The PRESIDENT — Order! I wish to remind the house that a bill of this nature was introduced, debated and the second reading negatived in this chamber in June this year. A standing order of this house in effect states that we cannot within six months of the same session debate two bills of similar content. Standing order 7.06 states:

No question will be proposed in the Council which is the same in substance as any question which has been resolved during the previous six months in the same session.

I note that this bill has been slightly amended, but in substance in my view it is still the same. I therefore indicate that I cannot accept a motion for the first reading of this bill at this stage. I do note, however, that earlier today the government gave notice of a motion for the suspension of standing order 7.06 in relation to this bill. Until that motion is moved and decided on by the house, this bill cannot proceed any further.

[1] http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/downloadhansard/pdf/Council/Jul-Dec%202009/Council%20Jul-Dec%202009%20Daily%2016%20September%202009.pdf

See alsoDACs 2: Highlights: Macedon Member Duncan makes bizarre statements about population growth in Victoria and DACs 2 Highlights: "The Bill is a very blunt instrument" (Mr Morris, Mornington, Victoria)

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

Jared Diamond on Australia's Sustainable Population

By Dr John O'Connor

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

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

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

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

Specifically, he concludes:

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

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

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

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

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

Editor: This is a comment about the Planning Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 2) Second reading Debate resumed from 15 September on a motion of Mr BATCHELOR (Minister for Community Development) made in the Assembly of the Victorian Parliament on 16 September and recorded in Hansard. [1] This Labor Government initiated bill is a source of enormous consternation for Victorians not completely roped in by the corporate media. The concerns are on democratic, planning and environment grounds. It was read for the second time and, after a very close call, its passing has again been delayed - this time until 13th October.

The Bill is a very blunt instrument" (Mr Morris, Mornington)

I want to initially come back to something the member for Bundoora [Mr Brooks, ALP] said when he was talking about the Dispute Resolution Committee process that has led to the current form of this bill. He referred to it as a democratic process with equal numbers from government and non-government parties, but of course the government has the right to elect a chairman and the government has the casting vote. So no matter what quality of debate there has been — and I understand there has been some good discussion and good work done and some of the nasties have been taken out of the bill — it is a long way from being a democratic process. In fact it is about as democratic as the are proposed to be.

The bill essentially is the death knell for community input into the planning process in the areas that have been nominated. It is a real symbol of the hypocrisy of the Australian Labor Party when it comes to local government, when it comes to local communities and when it comes to local interests. This is about getting the message right and getting the process right to suit the message. It is about spin. It is about saying one thing and meaning a different thing entirely. The claim is, ‘We are on side with the communities’. But the reality is that these are simply soothing words, lulling communities into a false sense of security, and then belting them on the head with a blunt instrument.

Members of DACs will be hand-picked

This bill is a very blunt instrument. This is not calling in one application and this is not calling in two applications; this is calling in the whole planning process. It is taking the entire planning process away from local government and the local community. It certainly gives lie to the government’s claims of partnership with local government. Every significant application in every principal activity centre in 27 areas of the metropolitan area, plus the city of Geelong, will now be determined by a committee hand-picked by the Minister for Planning. The people who will dominate these development assessment committees are not, will not and never can be independent persons. They will be hand-picked to push through the government’s agenda in this area.

Let there be absolutely no misunderstanding about that.

You simply need to refer to the bill, in particular proposed section 97MK, which deals with the membership of the development assessment committees. The chair will be nominated by the minister from a list of persons that he has prepared under proposed subsection 3. Proposed subsection 3 requires the minister to, firstly, prepare a list of names, secondly, to consult with the Municipal Association of Victoria and the Victorian Local Governance Association, and then to make his own decision. So the VLGA and the MAV are told who are contenders for the position. That is the extent of their input. They have absolutely no right to say, ‘Yes, we agree’, or, ‘No, we don’t agree’. It is the minister’s list, it is the minister’s decision, and they are dragged in to dress up the process and to make it look respectable.

Two members will be appointed directly by the minister. So that is three out of five. Two members will be appointed by the local council, and they will rotate. I understand there might be, say, one DAC for southern metro and two councillors from Glen Eira, two councillors from Frankston, two councillors from Kingston, or whatever. Those two councillors are, once again, simply to dress up the process, because you could wait until hell freezes over before they have any influence on a decision. They are there as the scapegoats. They are there to take the blame. That is all they are there for. and who is going to pay for the process? Do you think the people who have lost their influence over the process will be able to put the cost onto someone else? No, of course they will not.

I refer to proposed section 97MG at page 11 of the bill.

To enable a DAC to decide on an application, the responsible authority — in other words, the council — has to provide not only the application but also a copy of comments from a referral authority. They have to do the referral to start with and then also provide a copy of a report from any member of their staff, any other document that is relevant and any other document or information that has been reasonably requested by the DAC. In other words, if they jack up and say, ‘No, we are not going to do a report on this; we are not going to pay the officers to do these reports for someone else to make a decision on’, the DAC can come back and say, ‘Oh yes, you will anyway’.

The vast majority of the cost of the planning process is not the actual decision making. The costs are in officer time, the officer effort that goes into preparing the report and getting it into a form to go to the decision-makers. That cost will still be borne by the community.

Political mechanism called 'the blame game' to take heat off ministers in their local areas

The bill strips away any opportunity a citizen has to have an input into the bricks-and-mortar future of their community. In the second-reading speech the minister said the government is committed to strengthening confidence in decision making and to the state government playing a role in actively implementing state policies. If the government is that committed, why is it establishing these bodies? Why do we need to create another layer? Of course it is a tried and true formula, and it has been going on for the last 10 years.

It is called the blame game. It is about making sure there is someone else set up to take the blame. Many local councils are sick to death of being blamed. It has been standard government member policy. Any time an application comes up that the community does not like, government members say, ‘Look, the council is dealing with that; we can’t get involved’ — and quite properly they should not — the refrain is ‘It is not our fault’.

It is. The entire planning structure is a product of decisions of this government. The councils are simply charged with trying to knock the rough edges off and have some input. Once again statutory bodies are being set up in order to take the blame. The planning system is certainly in dire need of an overhaul and of a refocus.

There is now a huge number of development applications that are subject to appeal, and anyone who is involved knows that. This number of appeals did not occur 10 years ago.

They did not occur in the past when the appeal processes were not quite as effective as they are now.

These appeals did not occur before the introduction of Melbourne 2030. It is only the government’s meddling with the planning act, preventing people from having their say, that has caused this level of objection. We have a situation where local councils now cannot even commence a planning scheme amendment without the minister saying yes. Occasionally one slips through.

The C87 amendment — the Mount Eliza woodlands amendment — is a classic example; the minister did not like the outcome so it simply sits on his desk and he does not approve it.

All the planning in this state is now located at 8 Nicholson Street

All the planning in this state is now located at 8 Nicholson Street.

We have an epidemic, we have a tidal wave of objections, and the minister seems to have no idea what is causing it. But the solution advocated by the government, and this bill is living proof of that solution, is to strip councils of their powers, to put fees through the roof and to threaten objectors with costs in the event that they are unsuccessful — in other words, to try and scare them away from the process and to make it impossible for ordinary Victorians to have their views heard. That is the real message.

That is the intent of the bill — to take the process away from the hands of the people, to set up a body to take the blame, take the fire, deflect the anger from the government and to pretend, as we have heard in this debate again and again, ‘Oh, we have got urban expansion, is it not terrible?’. Yes, we do have urban expansion — because the government has set up the zones in that way. It has nothing to do with local councils. It has everything to do with the planning structure that has been set in place by this government, and it is time it stood up and took responsibility rather than trying to blame somebody else.

[1] Debate recorded in Hansard, 16 September, 2009 (Assembly)