North Bank redevelopment proponents decline invitation to debate
On 31 March Brisbane's Courier Mail Newspaper reported that the proponents of the proposal to build a high residential development on a concrete slab above the Northern half of the Brisbane River adjoining the Central Business District had declined to put their case at a public debate to be organised by the Brisbane Institute.
Peter Skinner a lecture in Architecture at the University of Queensland and an an outspoken critic of the proposal had issued the invitation to Queensland Premier Anna Bligh ,a principle backer of the proposal. When she refused claiming that it clashed with another commitment, an invitation was made to Deputy Premier Paul Lucas who also declined. Multiplex, the developer who is hoping to build the residential complex also declined an invitation.
As I wrote in a letter published in the Courier Mail of 1 April 2008:
... Given that at least the Premier and Deputy Premier must surely have satisfied themselves beyond any reasonable doubt that their plans to entomb much of the Brisbane River adjoining the CBD beneath a giant slab of concrete is in the best interests of the public they serve, what could they possibly have to fear from an open public debate?
NASA Scientist calls for Australian coal halt
Rising Tide Newcastle is calling for an immediate response from the Federal Government after one of the world's foremost climate scientists wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd calling on him to halt plans for more coal mining and exporting, and put a ban on new coal fired power stations.
The letter's author, Dr. James Hansen, is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. His letter states that:
“ ... there are plans for continuing mining of coal, export of coal, and construction of new coal-fired power plants around the world, including in Australia, plants that would have a lifetime of half a century or more. Your leadership in halting these plans could seed a transition that is needed to solve the global warming problem.
“Choices among alternative energy sources - renewable energies, energy efficiency, nuclear power, fossil fuels with carbon capture - these are local matters. But decision to phase out coal use unless the CO2 is captured is a global imperative, if we are to preserve the wonders of nature, our coastlines, and our social and economic well being. If we continue to build coal-fired power plants without carbon capture, we will lock in future climate disasters associated with passing climate tipping points. We must solve the coal problem now.”
Climate action group Rising Tide Newcastle have been calling for a ban on new coal projects in the Hunter Region, and said today that the Federal Government is under international scrutiny for our massive coal industry expansion. Group spokesperson Steve Phillips said: “This letter, from one of the most respected climatologists in the world, makes it clear that a ban on new coal projects is a common sense and necessary response to the global climate crisis.”
“There is increasing international pressure on Australia to get serious about climate change, as this letter shows. Our single biggest contribution to the problem is coal exports, and our national response to the problem must confront that reality.
“Kevin Rudd has so far ignored community demands for a ban on new coal projects. He surely cannot ignore the same demands from the world's leading climate scientists.”
James Hansen will be sending a similar letter to the Premier's of Australia's states. The letter can als be viewed as a pdf file here.
Move over Mr Legrain, the floodgates are open
Philippe Legrain's puerile veneration of globalization and free market economics is, for its outrageous simplicity, alluring to some in the same way that Ayn Rand's uncompromising fantasies drew a cult following. His call for open borders is so boldly brazen that it disarms many of his incredulous audience in the manner that Milton Friedman or Julian Simon did theirs. But a glance at any best sellers' list will reveal that is typically those who stake out extreme and provocative positions without solid empirical foundation who attract readers and the favour of publishers. While those authors and commentators who are better informed of a broader and deeper knowledge, on the other hand, often lose their market edge because a more balanced account is inherently less exciting.
In fact, in his book review of Immigrants:Your Country Needs Them, Australian critic Mark O'Connor characterized Philippe Legrain as essentially "ill-read", "a rhetorician, not a thinker", who in his euphoric assessment of a world where mobility was unimpeded "ignores inconvenient issues of resources, spaces, greenhouse emissions and environmental degradation."
Like a tireless door-to-door salesman of a quack remedy that subsequent lab analysis would show to be lethal and fraudulent in its claims, the infamous open-borders advocate, economist and journalist Philippe Legrain knocked on French Canada's door recently to speak to the biweekly magazine L'actualitie. The message was practically the same one he has given to the Economist, the Guardian, the Financial Times, The Times, Prospect Magazine, to the BBC and many foreign publications.
Actually Legrain did not say that verbatim, but in so many words. For one thing he has no evident concern or awareness of any ecological consequences from his miracle cure. It is enough for him that bringing down national borders would allegedly double the size of the world economy. The effect of this on greenhouse emissions or biodiversity is simply not on his radar screen. But it is on the radar screen of the Royal Academy of Sciences who according to Monbiot has virtually stated that economic growth will have to be halted if we are to escape that critical two degree rise in global temperatures. Clearly Legrain's economic utopia would be an environmental dystopia.
When asked by L'Actualitie why we should abolish all borders and open all countries to freedom of movement, Legrain responded with the same line that he had given the New York Times six months before in October. "It is first of all a moral question. We should end this global apartheid by which we set the door wide open for rich and well-educated foreigners but close them for poor ones thereby forcing them to stay in their poverty. It is also a humanitarian question", in that according to the IMF immigrants send $300 billion in remittances to their home countries, "which go straight to the pockets of local people." But unfortunately he doesn't appreciate that from the pockets of local people it goes straight back into the pockets of corrupt policemen and officials as bribes. Remittances take the edge off the worst of third world poverty and emigration allows incompetent regimes to export their poor, providing a safety valve so that corruption and overpopulation never gets solved. How many potential Nelson Mandelas and Lech Walesas would be lost to emigration under a global free movement protocol?
I must confess that I find it somewhat galling when an economist of any stripe should protest like Legrain that "it is abhorrent that the rich and the educated are allowed to circulate around the world more or less freely, while the poor are not." Mr. Legrain should know that there are lots of things that the rich can do with their money that the poor can't in the marvelous free-market economy that he champions. They all can drive hummers if they want to, for example. Does that mean that, as a matter of equity, every one in Bangladesh should be afforded a hummer? Migration has vast ecological consequence too. If Mr. Legrain wants to vent his closet socialist conscience, why doesn't express abhorrence over the low wages that his unskilled immigrants are making everywhere in the developed world?
Thomas Sowell also stated that people are not commodities, as commodities are consumed, while people generate more people, and immigrants impose a cost on the country. In his Canadian interview, Legrain argued that immigrants consume goods and services and generate economic activity, making the U.S. an economic powerhouse. What he did not mention, however, was the 2004 report by the Centre for Immigration Studies that showed that illegal immigrants consumed $10.6 billion more in services than they paid in taxes. Nor did he comment on the 1997 metastudy by the National Research Council that concluded that while immigration raises over-all output, the aggregrate additional net benefit to the U.S. native-born is nugatory--wiped out by taxpayer funded transfer payments to immigrants.
As for Britain, a House of Lords committee reported on April 1st of 2008 that ten years of record immigration has produced virtually no benefits to the country. The report argues that the 6 billion pounds that foreign workers supposedly add to the nation's wealth each year must be balanced against their use of services like health and education and the growth of the population. The error of conventional government assessments of migrant benefits to economic growth (15-20%), according to Professor David Coleman of Oxford University, is that it has excluded costs from crime, security, race relations and imported ailments like TB. And, according to visiting Professor Richard Pearson of the University of Sussex Centre for Migration Research, "these migrants are likely to be displacing, and reducing the incentive on employers to recruit and train low-skilled, indigenous workers."
If these are the results of a Labour government that critics say has lost control of the nation's borders, issued too many work permits and should not have exposed the labour market to Eastern Europe, what would have been the result if they had followed Philippe Legrain's formula for success and thrown open the borders entirely? One pill makes you sick so you take three or four more?
Legrain of course, can no doubt conjure up a study to show wage improvement in the wake of mass immigration, but other studies by more eminent economists like Borjas can counter them. But can't Philippe Legrain be honest here? Does he really believe that big employers lobby governments for more immigration so that they can raise wage levels? Is that why Bill Gates went to Congress to ask to loosen H-1B visa regulations and raise caps, as a philanthropic measure to improve the wages of IT workers in America? Give us a break, Mr. Legrain. It is as Garrett Hardin said, "immigrant labour pauperizes local labour." What is most sickening about Legrain's argument is that he presents it mostly as a cause of social justice for the global poor while it is in fact, really a cause to bring cheap labour to the developed world and improverish its indigenous working class. As socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont observed, five million middle income workers in America have been caught in a vice between out-sourcing and cheap immigrant labour and have dropped into the ranks of poverty during the Bush era. Even more sickening than Legrain's hypocrisy though has been the collusion of leftists and liberals in it. Imagine if Charles Dickens had teamed up with the Manchester school. Contemporary leftists are not internationalists. They are globalists, unwitting collaborators in the pyramid scam of runaway population growth that cloaks the naked profit motive under the attractive guise of cultural diversity and human rights.
Now for the old chestnut. The one Legrain repeats ad nauseum in countless interviews and essays in reference to several countries. The famous "they do work that locals won't do" routine. For example, he recently stated in his blog that "with France's growth slowing, its sclerotic labour market could do with an infusion of foreign blood—of hard-working , enterprising people who are willing to do the jobs that French people can't or won't." There is always an inference that native workers aren't hard-working, or "enterprising", and as far as a "sclerotic" labour market in a slow growing France is concerning, there is an alternative translation for that. The workers of France are benefiting from a "tight" labour market in a "stable" economy. As one should know, but many including Legrain apparently don't, there is no such thing as jobs that Frenchmen, Americans, Canadians or Australians "won't do". Merely jobs they are unwillingly to do at the wages offered. The phrase "they do work that locals won't do" evidences equivalent ignorance to other phrases that have consigned to the lexicographical museum like "I drive better when I'm drunk" or "my wife had it coming."
Legrain's open borders recipe, aside from presenting monstrous adjustment problems for recipient countries, would also pose problems for poor countries, one would think. When asked by L'Actualitie if they would not be crippled by an exodus of doctors and engineers, Legrain was cavalier and dismissive. Émigré doctors would only meet 12% of current needs if they were forced to return now, so therefore it was better just to assist developing countries in training more doctors. And then what? So they in turn could leave for the First World? Is that Legrain's vision? India and Africa as a big medical school for the West?
Philippe Legrain is not very re-assuring about terrorism either. Since "99.99% of immigrants aren't terrorists" then border controls don't make sense as a deterrent to terrorists. OK, Mr. Legrain, since 99.99% of all air-line passengers aren't bombers, on any plane that you are boarding, we won't bother to do any security screening or luggage checks.
It would seem reasonable, would it not, that when toying with the fate of 6.7 billion people and 194 plus countries that before unleashing a sweeping change of Philippe Legrain's prescription we first test the waters by leaving one or two nations defenceless against incoming hordes. Actually the experiment has already been conducted. Does anybody know how things have working out for Tibet the last little while? How have the ethnic Serbians made out in Kosovo? How did the Poles like their open borders in September of 1939? Must admit, those hard-working enterprising Germans did work that the Poles would not do.
I think it prudent then, despite Legrain's assurances, to first test the market as it were by granting an unlimited number of visas to all third word economists who wish live and work alongside Mr. Legrain in the UK. With an economist coming out of every manhole cover to bid for jobs as columnists with the Guardian and the Times and so forth, and as commentators on the BBC, Philippe Legrain could test his hypothesis that immigrants raise the wages of local labour.
If this pilot project was pronounced a success and British sovereignty subsequently dissolved, then I could look forward to moving into Legrain's London flat, with a host of my relatives, who have always fancied living in the great city. Even if it contained only the 76 square metres of space that the average British dwelling does, I am sure Mr. Legrain, as a matter of logical consistency, could have no objection to moving over and making room for us. After all, a man who favours open borders can hardly oppose open houses.
Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
28 March 2008
The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections
The editorial writers of newspapers from Rupert Murdoch's News Limited, including the Courier Mail and The Australian, are not shy in showing their contempt for public opinion whenever it runs counter to the powerful vested interests they represent. Examples from recent years include their support for:
- The privatisation of Telstra
- The privatisation of NSW's electricity generation
- 'Work Choices'
- The Iraq war
- The Mary River Dam#main-fn1">1
- Queensland forced local government amalgamations
Naturally, in 2007, with local governments such as the Douglas Shire Council and the Noosa Shire Council receptive to the wishes of their constituents to stand up to developers, the News Limited editorial writers gave their full support to the Queensland government's forced local government amalgamations inspired by the Property Council of Australia#main-fn2">2.
However, the hopes The Australian held out for in these amalgamations came unstuck when, on Saturday 15 March, anti-development candidates standing in the amalgamated shires were able to overcome the additional difficulties posed by their having to campaign in larger shires and were able to defeat candidates backed by developers. These included the Cairns City Council into which the Douglas Shire had been forcibly amalgamated and the Greater Sunshine Coast Council into which the Noosa shire had been forcibly amalgamated. In at least two other large local government regions, the Gold Coast City Council and Redland City Council, anti-development tickets won control in spite of extravagant developer-funded advertising campaigns against them.
In response, on 18 March an editorial entitled "Queensland faces a tougher job on regional development"#main-fn3">3 was published. It commenced:
Queensland's local government elections demonstrate the difficulty that beset public administrators trying to manage the competing demands of population growth.
The 'difficulty' being that electors in those council areas were not prepared to put up with the further degradations to their quality of life necessitated by continuous population growth. As has become the established practice with the Murdoch Press, the question as to whether population growth is an issue over which affected communities should have any say, is not even posed, rather population growth is treated implicitly as a given over which no power in Heaven or on Earth can have any control:
... the Queensland (state government) must grapple with an influx of thousands of new residents each week and deliver, health, education and other public services.
In fact, the choice is being made, but instead of it being made by the affected communities, it is being made by politicians, like Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who serve the same vested interests as does the Murdoch media. They include principally the aforementioned Property Council of Australia, whose members gain from population growth, through land speculation and property development, at the expense of the rest of the community, the environment and future generations.
To be sure, there is a moral ambivalence to this issue as many who oppose today's population growth were part of yesterday's additions to the population to those areas and the editorial writer seeks to gain from this the high moral ground:
... much of the growth comprises city refugees making a sea change to what they consider their own piece of paradise. From Cairns to Coolangatta, it was easy to detect a determined anti-development flavour to much of the voting on the weekend's election.
A 'flavour' that the editorial writer makes clear he/she wishes to be ignored by the state and federal governments. It is interesting that The Australian is silent on what the sea changers were seeking 'refuge' from, namely the over-crowding of Australia's capital cities, which has been greatly encouraged by the Murdoch media through its past promotion of population growth.
Of the triumph of Val Schier over the long-serving pro-developer Cairns Mayor Kevin Byrne, the editorialist opined, this "will test the state Government's willingness to use independent panels to make decisions on development applications". Supposedly 'independent' panels are made up of people who, unlike popularly elected councillors, are not accountable to the residents who will be affected by their decisions. In this way it is hoped that the opposition to over-development can be swept aside.
The editorial acknowledges that the "new batch of local leaders can legitimately argue that they have a mandate to resist change." It, nevertheless, concludes:
Amalgamation has happened, but given the weekend results, the reform push is clearly unfinished business.
Can we come to any other conclusion from this editorial except that the 'reform push' is expected to be 'finished' by the use of dictatorial state government powers to over-ride the democratic wishes of Queensland communities?
Footnotes
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. See The Australian newspaper backs environmental vandalism in the Mary Valley of 5 Jan 08.
#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. See story Cate Molloy : Forced council amalgamations planned by Property Council of Australia of 7 Sep 07
#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. Unable to obtain URL for this editorial.
Gympie Times fabricates evidence to hurt candidate
The following article was printed in the free community newspaper Gympie Life on 20 March 2008. The Integrity Gympie Team were unsuccessful in either the Mayoral elections or the Councillor elections#main_fn1">1.
This is no joke!
The multinational daily went into a late frenzy of fear and deception on Friday and Saturday to avert voters from thinking clearly and constructively on polling day (Saturday 15 March).
Friday's election eve cover story sought to discredit Ron Owen as having purposefully connected his campaign web-site to community group web-sites and identities so as to improperly claim their support for his campaign.
The facts prove the story to be a vicious beat-up. The most obvious and shocking of these facts is the fraudulently constructed front-page picture used to launch the attack.
This cover image (reprinted to the right) was a photographed web page containing a google search. The typed search terms shown in the picture, and stated in the article, are 'little haven gympie'. The top 'hit', supposedly returned from this search, is the 'Ron Owen for Mayor' website.
From this image is spun the story that Ron Owen coded his web site to appear whenever a range of Gympie community groups are sought on the web.
However a close look at the image shows that the actual search made to deliver the search result was not 'little haven gympie' but 'little haven ron'. This is proven beyond all doubt by the words that appear embedded on the page title bar, the search tittle bar, the search results bar, and the bolded type in the search result (all circled in red on the picture).
The words in bold in these four circled locations are generated by google coding and are the exact search terms used to deliver the page results. They are locked within the page structure. They cannot be changed without making a new search.
However the typed search field can be changed whilst the existing search results remain in place. Which is exactly what the multinational muck-rakers did. The search field term 'ron' has been deleted after the search was complete and replaced with 'gympie'. The altered page has then been photographed and printed as 'evidence' to shock and convince readers. The evidence is fraud. The whole story is error, exaggeration and defamatory vapour-ware.
Deft Dealings in Dirt and Denigration
According to Alan Caulfield, the developer of the web-page in question, the actual issue is nothing more than a simple and explainable misunderstanding. Mr Caulfield said that the paper could have easily checked and included the facts behind the published assertions prior to printing them. He says he did get an enquiry from the Times journalist, but it was looking for dirt not daylight. None of what he correctly explained to the journalist was included in the printed story.
"After reading Friday's printed article", says Mr. Caulfield, "I immediately sent them an outline of the technical facts that prove their assertions to be wrong. I requested they print this letter on the next day as some fair response to this concocted damage. It wasn't printed".
Checking both sides of the story before printing accusations, and giving timely right of reply after making accusations, are both basic journalistic standards. Neither was done. Both omissions were purposeful.
Mr Caulfield says we now have a much bigger issue, in fact a huge one: how and why has this paper purposefully manipulated a non-event to deliver personal damage, rather than acting to fairly and responsibly inform the public interest?
The Saturday edition of the daily then let fly with both barrels (the editor and the general manager) in an explicit and vitriolic attack upon the standards of the Gympie Life and all that is associated with it.
Considering the photo fraud, and its clear intent to derail the fair composure of the election, this is gross and despicable hypocrisy. Worse, it follows a criminal breach of the Electoral Act.
So then, to respond to Saturday's huff and puff editorial, who really is the gutter press?
Usually, and repeatedly, the Times cons its readers by what it doesn't print. It accuses and insinuates without giving right of reply. It beats the drum of developers and their tame politicians whilst avoiding printing any of the facts and the injury that exist on the other side of the story.
This works because it is deft. People naturally have trouble noticing what isn't visible. It works because it is relentless, drumming its skewed messages of favor and attack into our brains like clockwork. People may pick up on some anomalies, but the sheer torrent of it seeps in regardless. The only certain cure is don't read it.
To actually construct and commit a fraud as material and obvious as Friday's front page is remarkable. Quite obviously the stakes within Saturday's election were high enough for that paper, and whomever it is that really runs it, to risk this very extreme action.
The Life prints the facts and, as much as it can, the full facts. These can be confronting, and can sometimes be confounding given they appear nowhere else. Nonetheless they are the facts. If they weren't the Life would be sued. The paper does often opinionate upon those facts. However, given the facts, everyone can make and share their own opinion.
What the Life does not do is manipulate public opinion by censorship and distortion of fact. Neither does it fabricate untruths. It acts to shine light on things that need to be visible. Sometimes these can be shocking, even frightening. But do we want to live in the dark?
Gympie Life thinks not. We will continue to print the truth, as we know it, and all of it, for those who do not want to live in the dark.
Greg Wood, 19 March 2008
Footnotes
#main_fn1" id="main_fn1">1. Neither Ron Owen nor any of the eight Integrity Gympie councillor candidates won office. Undoubtedly, dirty tricks at the hands of the Gympie Times played their part in this outcome. This would have been compounded by former Mayor Mick Vernados' peculiar choice of using the undemocratic first-past-the-post system for both Mayoral and Councillor elections. Mick Vernados also failed to win office. For the Councillor elections, the 8 divisions were abolished and single combined electorate, in which 42 candidates contested all the positions, was created. This turned the councilor elections, in particular, more into a lottery than in an exercise in popular will, with 5 of the 8 the successful candidates not achieving the 4% of the vote required to get their deposits back from the Queensland Electoral Commission. Their votes ranged from 3.41% up to 5.94%.
Should we destroy our environment for housing affordability?
The Queensland Government’s so-called "affordable housing strategy," signed in July with no community consultation, establishes an Urban Land Development Authority with sweeping powers, including the power to amalgamate land, to acquire land in its own right, and to on-sell their land with development rights to particular private developers.
The justification provided for such sweeping powers being given to the new authority is to speed up approvals. It has long been a complaint of industry that the approval process for development is slow and therefore costly resulting in higher prices to home buyers. The enabling legislation pushed through Parliament, again without any consultation and with unseemly haste, of course strips away some current protections.
Under the new legislation, the Minister can declare areas of land for urban development or as major development areas. In these areas, the Act removes the community’s right to appeal approvals, overrides provisions in local government planning schemes that protect steep slopes, floodplains and waterways and removes restrictions in state legislation designed to protect endangered vegetation and waterways from destruction. It also removes the requirements for assessment with regard to contaminated land, heritage places and many other values.
With these policies, "ecological sustainability" has been abandoned in favour of "growth at any cost" development. Premier Beattie, once seen as a bit of a champion of environmental protection and community participation in the planning process, has, after removing the hard-won environmental gains of his nine years as Premier with this legislation, now handed over the reins to an eager new Premier Anna Bligh.
In response to media earlier this year calling for a population cap, Ms Bligh said that we need more growth "in order to create demand to maintain the jobs of people currently employed in construction." At the same time, the state government also claims that we need more skilled migrants to build the infrastructure needed to cope with the demands caused by Queensland’s population growth (also, no doubt, more taxpayers to pay for these major infrastructure projects). In other words, we have no choice but to grow our population in order to deal with problems caused by past population growth!
Housing affordability is an issue for all of the community and there are many ways to make housing more affordable, not the least of which is to lower the demand. The declaration of land as urban without any regard for the views of existing residents, the costs of infrastructure, the provision of open space or the local constraints to development is a betrayal of everything the Beattie government said that it represented. Now it seems they believe they have no choice but to continue to grow the population. It appears the Queensland government has fallen for the growth lobby’s arguments hook, line and sinker.
By Sheila Davis a member of Sustainable Population Australia
How $3 trillion war caused America's economic crisis
Mass immigration, urbanisation, and industrial agriculture
The original article can be found on sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com.
It was a different world in the 1940s. Nearly half of Canadians and 40% of Americans lived outside urban areas. People grew much of their own food. During the war many had "victory" gardens and my parents had a farm in the Fraser Valley. As a boy my memories were that some things just were not available "out of season". No one expected that the full range of fruits and vegetables now exported from California and beyond should be provided as a matter of right. One other memory, when you ate a tomato or orange, you almost had to eat it over the sink. They were rich and obviously dense with nutrients.
That was a Canada of 10 million people (18 by 1960). Could a Canada of three times that number be fed that way? What happens to agriculture when it must serve an artificially high population base? When 18% of Class 1 farmland is covered with subdivisions to house more people, two-thirds of whom are imported? When to increase the productivity of that farmed land the soils are stripped of nutrients and filled with chemicals? What happens to our food? Thomas Pawlik answers that question in his book The End of Food.
Pawlik notes that since 1950 supermarket potatoes in Canada haven’t contained Vitamin A and their iron content has been reduced by 57%, along with their Vitamin C. Tomatoes have lost 61.5% of their calcium, 35.5% of their iron and 50% of their Vitamin A while gaining 200% more sodium. Of course, what’s got into livestock is an entirely new chapter. Bottom line: I have to eat five times as much of what I did in the 50s to get the equivalent amount of vitamins and minerals. We’re over-weight and yet under-fed.
We must ask some serious questions about agriculture in the face of runaway population growth and the collapse of the oil economy. We expect to feed a country like Canada which has only 5-7% of its land base as legitimately arable, with comparatively poor quality soil in relation to America, Britain and France and a population of 33 million that is currently growing faster than any G8 country. When the oil runs out, Canada and the United States might expect between one half to one third of its population to starve. (cf. Eating Fossil Fuels, Dale Pfeiffer).
According to an analysis by J.R. Wakefield of Komoka, Ontario, a typical Canadian city like London, population 400,000, in the heart of farm country, could not feed itself, despite conscripting all of its labour to replace petroleum dependent farm machinery. 200,000 draught animals would be needed, but even then, productivity per acre would drop dramatically, and of course, food could not be frozen for storage. "Relocalization" for the population we have is, as Wakefield has shown, a joke and a pipedream.
If that scenario is not to your liking, try climate change. James Lovelock says that the United Kingdom, to survive global warming, will have to confine human habitation to one-third the island’s land surface, devote one-third entirely to wilderness, and the last third to intensive agriculture. Here’s the trade-off. One can deliver low-nutrient food to a high volume of people, or high-nutrient food to a low volume of people. It is unlikely that 61 million British people, or more if current immigration rates persist, are going to fed by mechanized, oil-based, soil-depleting methods, so strike off the first option.
Whenever one warns of global warming, of course, Mary Poppins chimes in that this is good news for northern countries who could use a longer growing season. Yeah, but could we use the tropical pests and droughts? Australia is an object lesson on the dangers of letting land developers and politicians determine your population level without bothering to notice how climate change and water shortages will affect agricultural productivity.
In Canada post-carbon agriculture should give us a better product, but not for the market that has been built up the last 50 years. Agribusiness and its criminal mistreatment of the land is but the inevitable creature of the population explosion, not simply an extension of wicked capitalism. Its welcome demise with the death of oil and the re-emergence of small farming and backyard gardens will, like renewable energy sources, not even begin to save the day for the masses. Instead more labour-intensive farming that relies on manure and crop-rotation will provide nutrient-dense food for far fewer people.
We have been living on borrowed time. And some of us will survive to eat the way we were meant to----eating local produce, and eating it in season. Others, like myself, will likely succumb to disease, malnutrition or illness untreatable by a medical system that has collapsed under the weight of too many foreign passengers that developers, cheap labour employers and human rights activists have lobbied to bring to our shores.
Tim Murray
Historic NSW holiday retreat for workers' children threatened by developers
A beautiful and historic holiday retreat for workers' children bought by the NSW union movement back in the '40s in the Ku-ring-gai National Park north of Sydney is threatened by developers, assisted by their bidders at the helm of the NSW government, Premier Morris Iemma, Treasurer Michael Costa and Minister for Planning Freank Sartor. The group Friends of Currawong has launched a public campaign to prevent Camp Currawong being turned into yet another playground for the world's wealthy elite, "something ike St Tropez".
This story will be told on tonight's (Thursday 27 March 2008) viewing on ABC television's The 7.30 report.
Sold for $15 million in February 2007 by Unions NSW secretary John Robertson, Currawong is now in the hands of the developers Eduard Litver and Allen Linz, who are at the same time turning Bondi waterfront into "something like St Tropez". The broker of the sale was one David Tanevski who is also linked by a maze of business deals to Linz, Litver and formerly to one Michael Costa, as secretary of Unions NSW and now NSW treasurer.
Currawong is a developer's wet dream. Or would be, were the beachfront not currently occupied by a charming collection of shacks and a farmhouse described by Heritage NSW as possessing "state historical significance as the most intact remaining . mid-20th century, union-organised workers' holiday camp in NSW and probably Australia".
The developers have persuaded Minister for Planning and Heritage Frank Sartor that Currawong is scarcely worth noticing, much less listing, while simultaneously claiming it is so significant it is a Part 3A State Significant Development Site (automatically suspending all heritage and environmental safeguards).
Currawong is too important and sensitive to be governed by the Heritage Council. Too important and sensitive not to be exploited for a fast buck by ALP-connected developers. And too important and sensitive not to have the minister's personal thumbprint on such development.
Friends of Currawong are still in there fighting to save it. It would take about sixteen paragraphs to tell you about the ups and downs. It is great that (at least part of the saga) is on the 7.30 Report tonight#main_fn1">1.
Our best
Jo Holder & Shane Withington
Co-convenors, Friends of Currawong
Jo - 0406 537933
Footnotes
#main_fn1" id="main_fn1">1 See transcript at www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s2201091.htm
Drug harm minimisation group seeks evidence-based drugs policies
Brian McConnell, President of the ACT group Friends and Families for Drug Law Reform (www.ffdlr.org.au) wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on 6 March 2008.
The Hon Kevin Rudd MP
Prime Minister
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600
An open letter seeking evidence-based drug policies
Dear Prime Minister,
A number of days ago you said that you were preparing to make an announcement on illicit drugs. You have also said that you are determined to tackle homelessness, mental health, education, child protection, and other social problems and that you would bring evidence to bear in policies of your government.
Evidence shows that drugs are a potent factor in a high percentage of all these social problems. No substantial headway in removing the social problems that you have so clearly identified will ever be made unless drug policy is seriously examined. Priority must be given to improving functionality of people with drug problems. But should not necessarily be making them drug free nor attempting to rid Australia of all drugs.
It is these latter issues that has formed the core of thinking about and the implementation of Australia’s drug policy.
The outcome of that policy has been somewhat different from that which was expected. We now have a very large profitable black market that has more and better resources than law enforcement; we now have more potent concentrated drugs that are easier to smuggle, some of which need to be injected or inhaled for effect – practices that are not without their extreme dangers. The black market appears to be unstoppable and when squeezed responds like a balloon, bulging with a new more potent drug or the emergence of a new, more cunning Mr Big.
There have been costs - financial costs of in excess of $7 billion a year for governments and business. Despite the best evidence saying that $1 spent on drug treatment is up to seven times more effective in reducing supply of drugs, Australian governments spend three times more on law enforcement.
And yet we do not evaluate the effectiveness of our law enforcement approach. The national Crime Authority, shortly before it was abolished, stated that law enforcement only captured about 13% of the heroin that came into the country. Thus failing to capture 87% of the imported heroin in that year. Experts have indicated that a capture rate of better than 60% is needed to have any impact on the drug market – a figure that is unlikely to be achieved under current practices.
Laws have been tightened and harsher penalties introduced and yet we have the worst epidemic of the drug "ice" coupled with the resurgence of heroin. The outcome of those laws has not effected the market but has widened the net, potentially capturing more users, not dealers, and expanding the population of our jails of which about 80% are there for drug related reasons.
But there are social costs also of our present approach to dealing with illicit drugs. There is an incalculable cost to families. We also know that treatment services are needed yet they are under-resourced. The potential clients of those services have been marginalised and ostracized by society such that many are reluctant to use those services. They are treated punitively by many services that should be there to help and often without thought of the consequences – in the case of my own son, at the time a recent university graduate, who had overdosed and awoke in hospital to the police at the end of his bed eager to make a bust. My son panicked, took a hurried holiday and overdosed and died away from the treatment and family support that he desperately needed. It was an opportunity and a life unnecessarily lost. Many families have similar tragic stories.
Prime Minister let me be clear, I am not saying that drugs are without danger. They all have dangers, including alcohol as you have noted. It is simply that our attempts to stop their use has not been as effective as it could be and that our approach has introduced many more dangers, sometimes more dangerous than the drugs themselves. Addictive substances whether they be illicit drugs, alcohol or tobacco are not ordinary commodities and should not be treated as such. Nor am I saying all those who use drugs are saints. Many are foolish or reckless young people. But they do not deserve to die because of our indifference to the need to provide the right services. Nor do they deserve to have their life chances destroyed because they have attracted a criminal record for their foolishness.
I know that finding the right balance of solutions will not be easy. We have yet to find that balance. Illicit drug policies need to be based on evidence and importantly all such policies need to be objectively evaluated from a broad perspective at regular intervals. The results of that evaluation would inform the next iteration of drug policy.
Before making your policy announcement on illicit drugs I ask, no plead that you subject it to at least the following tests:
- Does it provide the best return on investment, in social as well as economic terms, and does it cause the least possible harm to individuals as well as society;
- Has the past primary focus on the elimination of supply been the most effective means of reducing harms or is there a better and more balanced alternative?
- Does this policy response best address problems associated with those who are dependent on illicit drugs and those users who are not?
- Are these measures likely to be most effective in reducing availability?
- Does it adopt different strategies to deal with particular drugs having regard to their different harms?
Prime Minister I am at your disposal should you wish to discuss these matters further.
Yours sincerely
Brian McConnell
President
My close encounter with the most majestic of raptors
Why the Brisbane Mayoral elections should not have been 'boring'
There was a fascinating pay-off in James Sinnamon's predictably unsuccessful bid for Lord Mayor in the recent Brisbane elections. In his "Courier Mail provides 'boring', yet unbalanced, coverage of Brisbane City Council elections"#main-fn1">1 (March 17-20, 2008) correspondence between Sinnamon and Emma Chalmers, the Courier Mail journalist responsible for much of that paper's election coverage, provides a valuable sociological tool for what it reveals about the media and politics.
Teachers, students, and citizens, take note.
Mr Sinnamon's dialogue demonstrates that the Courier Mail does not treat all candidates in an election equally.
In their defense that newspaper might say that equity and fairness are up to the formal process of the election and that newspapers just publish the news.
But some might say that it is the mainstream press that determines the outcome of elections, or at least, who is really in the running, which is not the same thing as who is actually running.
On page 11 of the Courier Mail of election day Saturday 15 March, journalist Emma Chalmers asked: "Have these been the most boring Council elections?"
In response, James Sinnamon points out that Ms Chalmer's coverage of the elections made them boring. He later says that he realizes he cannot hold Ms Chalmers responsible for everything that is wrong in the Brisbane Courier Mail's coverage of Brisbane council policy and practice, but, as he adds, he can only address these problems by asking the journalist questions, taking her work at face value.
Indeed, how responsible is Ms Chalmers for the quality of political analysis in her articles? In an Anglophone world of internationally syndicated political blanding, Emma Chalmer's writing is entirely appropriate. There is a theory (which seems self-evident) that media owners choose media editors and those editors choose the journalists in a self-perpetuating cycle of intellectual and political supineness#main-fn2">2.
If crucial elections are reported in an incredibly boring way, Mr Public will hold them in contempt, and protests about democracy and the information distribution monopolies will remain minimal.
Can others recognize these trends? For so many Australians, compared to television and sports, electoral participation remains a chore of mysteriously over-rated importance because, due to the destructive skill of mainstream media, this supremely interesting area which would normally eclipse Neighbours, since it is about real neighbours, comes across as if it does not concern anyone but a few blandly suited men, who have inexplicably risen to the top of the pile. In the case of the Brisbane Mayoral Elections, only two men in suits were given more than token importance. One looked as if he strayed out of a men's clothing ad, and the other, in shirt-sleeves, a salesman ready for the Saturday morning customers. Apart from these minor differences in style, there was little to tell them apart.
Yes, it was not the election which was boring; it was the exceedingly limited but repetitive coverage.
For this election contained a really new, important 'angle,' indicative of a fundamental desire for political and economic change. And that was that FOUR candidates, not just James Sinnamon, declared that they had policies against population growth.
Of course these candidates for a major policy change ran right up against the big vested interests in a business-as-usual outcome for the Brisbane Council election. Those vested interests are the property development industry and its upstream and downstream dependents, which include the Courier Mail. Many are grouped under the umbrella of The Australian Property Council. Such industries have chosen to structure themselves around continuously increasing population growth, without which most would not survive.
To this end they naturally prefer mayors and councilors who will not seriously challenge their objectives. "Can Do" Newman has been giving them what they want and telling Brisbanites that this is what Brisbane needs, for years now, in what the Property council of Australia describes as the "Council's high quality working relationship with the State Government" and "the cooperative relationship between the State Government and Liberal Lord Mayor Campbell Newman."#main-fn3">3
The other candidate taken seriously by the press, Mr Greg Rowell, a retired professional cricketer, and the ALP counterpart to Campbell Newman, has been employed by the Property Council of Australia as a 'senior policy advisor' since 2005, working "extensively with the State Government and Brisbane City Council." #main-fn4">4
The Property Council sent questionnaires to all the candidates, promising a later press release. The questionnaires were, not surprisingly, looking for supporters of more and more development, with fewer restrictions and fewer costs to developers.
Four candidates openly stated they opposed the unfettered development resulting from the turbo-charged population growth which blights Brisbane and costs ordinary people money, time and comfort, ruining amenity and the natural environment, raising the cost of housing, water and land.
Four candidates lined up to represent the side that opposes growth.
Yet Newman and Rowell were promoted as the only show in town through mainstream media's extremely boring treatment of this potentially riveting, not to say crucial, election.
Ms Chalmer's view of the Brisbane elections gives almost no coverage to anyone other than what she calls, the 'major contenders'. She writes, "we have an obligation to adequately scrutinise the promises being made by the major parties and major contenders." But not the major issues, apparently.
Democracy in Paris and in Brisbane: two different systems
Brisbane can't hold a candle to the recent mayoral elections in Paris. There the press treated respectfully a 27 year veteran street mendicant in the swish suburb of St Germain des près (6th arrondissment), and he actually retained 3.7% of the votes.
That is, at 577 out of 15,000, slightly fewer than James Sinnamon, who, with almost no publicity, achieved less than one per cent of the Brisbane vote.
The big difference for these two unknowns was in the attitude of the press and the public towards democracy and values over social and strategic position.
French mainstream media has nothing like the connections to property and population growthism that afflict Australia and other Anglophone countries. The French electoral system also permits many more parties and individuals to make a running.
This is perhaps not surprising in the country which symbolised a successful revolution by storming the Bastille in 1789, only one year after Australia became a penal colony for political prisoners of poverty. Child of the revolution, himself, politician and author Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables, in which escaped convict, Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing bread, becomes Mayor by popular demand because he is so good and kind.
Here is how TFI, French television online, reported on the person and policies of Jean-Marc Restoux, street-dwelling candidate for the Parisien mayoral elections:
"Even if he doesn't have the political bearing, he has the rhetoric and the determination. His remarks are well thought out, his words are well-chosen, his ideas considered. [They quote him:] 'Today, in the 6th arrondissment, buildings are resold to luxury brand-names, rather than being made into public housing. There is nothing left here except luxury businesses'.(...). 'Exorbitant rents push old people out. We must, at all costs, maintain the local businesses, in the knowledge that wealth lies in their diversity', he exhorts, wishing 'to show another way to people' and to integrate into the social dialogue more people who, like himself, survive precariously . Among his ideas is one of encouraging people to mentor and assist people in difficulty. 'That those who are able to, assist the homeless by offering them a place to live with low rent and help with administrative tasks, providing a leg-up for them. It should not be forgotten that accidents in life can happen to everyone.' #main-fn5">5(My translation)
James Sinnamon's program#main-fn6">6 was not dissimilar, but received no similar interest from the Australian media of course.
A different land-use planning and housing system
At least in Paris property speculation is severely hampered by speculation and inheritance taxes and the state has an obligation to see that everyone is housed. This year it became possible to sue a European state if you are homeless. Paris does not have the insane problem of out of control development and mass immigration from other states and the rest of the world, albeit it does have a problem with family reunion and a stock of 'clandestins' which ebbs and flows with the seasons. Not only are citizens owed shelter by the State but so are any legally present immigrant workers. Population-building for the simple purpose of enriching land-owners would cost too much to publicly funded programs for ordinary citizens to allow it to happen. Paris real-estate does have a problem of its capacity to attract the rich, chic business and the corporations, which have an upwards impact on rents. But France and Paris ceased to pull down buildings to intensify development when they abandoned their costly policy of population numbers-building in 1973. Since then the accent has been on restoration and structural insulation. In fact, over the period 1973-1975, due to the pull-back by the state from the policy of expansion and intensification of development, many developers and builders went broke. Those who survived adapted to a relatively steady-state situation. No major influence in France developed power through population building in the past 35 years.
Australian information production, treatment, and distribution
In Australia a few semi-dynastic media owners have obtained from successive leaders what amounts to a license to control the distribution of most of the information in the country and to decide what will be treated as important and what and who will be sidelined or ignored.
Our political, legal and business figures depend on those media-organs for almost all their profile and influence. By providing the powerful with a voice, the media derives more power through their authority. From this arises a situation where the public has been educated to take seriously only candidates who have press profile. To gain that profile, public figures (with the possible exception of notorious criminals) are generally notable for saying nothing which will make the media look upon them unfavourably. This seals the situation where the media confers authority upon certain ideas, individuals and industries, in a rim of brilliant limelight, whilst casting a shadow over most of the rest of the planet and its people, plants and animals.
This might not be so awful, were the media merely a dynastic system, ruled by variously colorful or petty kings. The problem is that the media is a monster network of corporations of which newspapers, television, radio and digital media are only the face and mouth. Behind this public façade are financial, land and commodity interests permeating every facet of human enterprise. Perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching of these interests is the property development empire that the great bulk of Australian print media is intimately involved with.
Whilst many readers probably are aware that newspapers carry huge amounts of real-estate adds, and those readers may assume that those papers are therefore reliant on the patronage of property marketers, few realize that the situation goes much further even than this.
The fact is that Australian newspaper corporations now own and control the bulk of Australian property marketing on an international level. Our newspapers do not rely on getting advertisements; to a large degree they control the Australian portal to the entire world property market because they control the distribution and diffusion of information about this market and for several years they have been in the business of actually marketing the property market itself at local, national and global level.
This has been made possible on a level never previously conceived of due to the global Internet, through property dot coms like www.realestate.com.au and www.domaine.com.au, but also through very rapidly converging and mushrooming of industries and professions across government and private sector, so that we have, for instance, on the one hand, at the Federal level, the National Foreign Investment Review Board (NFIRB) positively facilitating foreign investment in local real estate and facilitating purchases by temporary immigrants for high turnover, and, on the local level, realtors touting local property internationally with the assistance of privatised migration agents and local solicitors, and at State level (where land use planning is controlled), organizations like the Property Council of Australia (APC), closely involved with determining government policy.
In a document called its "Report Card," summarising policy, the APC demonstrates nationally coordinated planning and international objectives, and massive reach for political power in every area of Australian politics. It is clear from this report that the APC believes it is responsible for major press articles and detailed government policies in areas of tax, planning, trade regulation, and international borders (to name just a few big areas). What is still not clear is whether there are any direct business links to media ownership or control. #main-fn7">7,#main-fn8">8
With knowledge of the evolution of this system of corporatised government and media, one finds oneself wondering if the Australian Property Council (and its dependents, allies and similars) run Brisbane (among other states) and the Courier Mail helps them. Unless it is that the Courier Mail (News Ltd/Murdoch) runs Brisbane and the APC helps it. If this is the case, with the entire city and region given over to aggressive property development, one cannot help but wonder if any real government or citizens remain, or whether the whole Brisbane region (and indeed Australia) has simply been transformed de facto into privately owned, publicly managed real-estate, inhabited by renters and rate-payers with no more real say in government than feudal serfs.
I should conclude by saying that I do not think this situation is hopeless. I do not for a minute believe that the property development lobby groups and the media are consciously homogeneously malevolent forces. What I do hope is that, by bringing the impact on government and the environment of their perseverative success to public notice, I will stimulate a conscientious response to solving this problem. It will take serious electoral coverage and voter involvement on the one hand, careful government and law-making, and serious cultivation of overlooked principles of ecological and democratic well-being by the property, finance and media industries. For the good of Australia and for the good of the world, the Australian property industry and its dependents, must turn off their overly successful money-making machine and start to plan for the winding down of business to one of consolidatory long-term infrastructure maintenance in a consolidated democracy. It is time to stop growing bigger and taller. It is time to grow up and become responsible and kind.
Footnotes
#main-1" id="main-fn1">1. See candobetter.net/node/371
#main-2" id="main-fn2">2. "The House of Representatives Select Committee on the Print Media report, News and Fair Facts The Australian Print Media Industry (March 1992) acknowledged the importance of editorial independence, but rejected calls for legislative requirements for mechanisms to support it." Kim Jackson, "Media Ownership Regulation in Australia," Analysis and Policy, Social Policy Group, Parliamentary Library, Australia, http://www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/SP/media_regulations.htm
#main-3" id="main-fn3">3. pcalive.netattention.com.au/act/page.asp?622=280779&E_Page=17720
#main-4" id="main-fn4">4. www.qld.alp.org.au/01_cms/details.asp?ID=37 as retrieved on 16 Mar 2008 19:26:19 GMT.
#main-5" id="main-fn5">5. See tf1.lci.fr/infos/elections-municipales/0,,3721508,00-clochard-qui-voulait-etre-maire-.html
#main-6" id="main-fn6">6. See candobetter.wikispaces.com
#main-7" id="main-fn7">7. In its report card, which summarises policy, demonstrating nationally coordinated planning and international objectives, and massive reach for political power in every area of Australian politics. It is clear from this report that the APC believes it is responsible for major press articles. What is still not clear is whether there are any direct business links to media ownership or control. www.propertyoz.com.au/PowerHouse2010/Congress2007_Reportcard.ppt
#main-8" id="main-fn8">8. In its online policy publication, "Powerhouse 2010 advocacy priorities, 2006/2007", www.propertyoz.com.au/PowerHouse2010/Congress2007_Reportcard.ppt, APC National President informs members that "In our tenth year as the Property Council, your association's political influence continues to grow and pay dividends in advocacy wins. 2006/2007 sees a big focus on economic development, infrastructure, tax and cutting red tape." The claim is borne out in this remarkable document, which indicates that the APC takes responsibility for stimulating various state governments to engage in what the many environmental and democracy activists would call extreme levels of development, debt and population growth.
Here are some extracts:
"Governments will cut property taxes when presented with persuasive arguments for economic growth.
Over the past two years the Property Council negotiated close to $1.7 billion of property tax cuts with state Labor governments. The Property Council's goal is to increase the tax savings pyramid every year.
"Kick starting the growth debate
Ten years ago, urban strategies, economic development and infrastructure were off the agenda. Now they will dominate political debate for the next decade"
"Long term growth strategies
After months of lobbying, the Sydney metro strategy has been released incorporating three quarters of our recommendations, along with draft plans for other regions and key regional cities."
"Plan to Deliver Melbourne 2030
The Property Council stepped in to fill a policy vacuum in the Melbourne 2030 debate by releasing the discussion paper, Plan to Deliver Melbourne 2030. We are now in discussions to make these recommendations a reality."
"Melbourne 2030 demonstration projects"
Melbourne 2030 gained momentum after the Victorian Government agreed to Property Council calls for the development of demonstration projects, such as the Dandenong Transit City."
"Increase use of borrowing
The Victorian Government almost doubled borrowings to deliver much needed infrastructure. The Government's recognition of the benefits of sensible borrowings comes after years of campaigning from the Property Council."
"Land Tax thresholds increased
The Property Council has ensured that the State Government honour its commitment to increase land tax thresholds for individual land tax payers in line with rising unimproved values, saving private investors hundreds of thousands of dollars in land tax each year."
"Water reform
Representations, submissions and public comment by the Property Council have resulted in the State Government acknowledging the need to reduce the considerable water and sewerage infrastructure backlog and undertake structural reform of these council owned businesses."
Do claims of higher immigrant wages answer objections to record Australian immigration levels?
Rupert Murdoch's Australian Newspaper in an article Migrant workers scoring top pay" has made use of figures which which purportedly show that immigrants earn more, rather than less than their Australian equivalents, , as if to answer any possible objection to Australia's current record high rate of immigration.
SKILLED temporary migrant workers are earning on average $15,000 more than their Australian counterparts, undermining trade union claims that the system is being abused to undercut local wages.
Figures obtained by The Australian show that holders of 457 visas, which allow temporary skilled migrants to work in Australia for up to four years, are earning more than the average salaries of local workers across all industries in which they are employed.
The figures have reignited the debate over the use of foreign workers, with the Opposition seizing on the data as "dispelling the myth" that temporary skills workers are driving down wages, but unions and the Rudd Government insist that many visa holders are exploited by unscrupulous employers.
Of course, notwithstanding these purportedly average figures, there still remains many documented examples of ruthless exploitation of immigrant workers, and their depressing on the value of the labour of many in Australia's current workforce and this remains a valid reason to oppose high immigration.
However, even if it were not true as the figures in the Australian purport to show, the case against immigration should not begin and end with that question alone, rather it should most of all concern what serves the best interests of the existing inhabitants of this country. Displacing existing workers by immigrant workers, whether those workers are paid more or less is not in their interests.
If we are to believe the free market economists, then the unstated conclusion to be drawn these statistics is that immigrant workers are paid better because they are more productive and skilled than their Australian counterparts.
However, other factors may help increase the amounts that skilled immigrants earn. One would be that they are inherently more mobile and hence more able to move to where better wages are on offer.
At this moment in time the Australian economy is hardly a typical economy by world standards. The ever-escalating level of exports of our finite endowment of mineral resources as well as the subdivision of bushland and agricultural land for residential development means that there is a wealth available for those with the niche skills required for this economic activity that would not be available in other economies. It should not be altogether surprising if much of this finds its way into pockets of skilled migrants, but this economic activity is unsustainable in the longer the longer term, and the wealth generated is at an unacceptable cost to the environment and future generations. Without these distortions in the Australian economy the picture would be very different.
Wherever the ultimate truth may lie in claims and counterclaims about relative wage levels in Australia's highly dysfunctional economy, this article is typical of the shallow self-serving treatment given to the complex and socially divisive issue of immigration by the Murdoch press. Amongst the many other questions not even acknowledged here or in any of its other pro-population-growth propaganda is the well understood effect of population growth adding to housing hyper-inflation, traffic congestion, destruction of bio-diversity, water shortages, demands for services that our governments can no longer meet and the ongoing decline in our quality of life.
See also Immigration myths demolished by economics journalist, Immigration as the quick fix
Can Canada's health care system survive mass immigration?
If the Canada of 1965 could have been preserved in aspic its medicare system might have been viable. But how is it now to contend with the massive numbers who make major claims on hospital services? Tim Murray, Director of Immigration Watch Canada describes the strains that runaway immigration levels have placed on Canada's health system.
A cynic might characterize Canada's medicare system as the universal, free, democratic and egalitarian access to a two-year waiting list. You jump the queue only if you have the bucks and the referral to jump over the 49th unless a life-threatening emergency sends you to the OR.
America's health care system on the other hand is discriminatory and expensive, but it offers immediate access to the best medical treatment in the world.
In both cases timely care for everyone is an elusive goal.
In any event Michael Moore's take on Canada is superficial, euphoric and unrealistic. New technology, abuse and the insatiable demands of an ever expanding clientele of elderly relatives sponsored by Third World immigrants is breaking the bank. It has been calculated that each sponsored immigrant in that age group will cost the Australian medical system $250,000. Since roughly 75% of Canadian immigrants and refugees, drawn from largely "non-traditional" sources, in fact consist of their unskilled dependent children, a terrifying portrait of the toll that Canadian immigration policy is taking on medicare could no doubt be drawn.
A recent article featured in the London Free Press (Thursday, March 13, 2008 "Hospitals forecast deficits") recognized population growth as one principal reason why the Canadian health system was on the brink of deficit financing, with half of Ontario's hospitals facing service cuts to meet the legal requirement for a balanced budget. Seventy percent of Canada's population growth is driven by immigration.
It was economist Milton Friedman who commented a decade ago that "It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state." As Robert Rector explained, to be properly understood, Friedman's observation should be viewed as applicable to the entire redistributive system of benefits, subsidies and services that lower income groups disproportionately enjoy at the expense of higher income groups.
Unfortunately this superstructure of benefits and services rests not only on an economic foundation but a cultural one as well. A people that is very much alike is more inclined to trust one another, and this trust translates into a willingness to vote for redistributive policies. But we are no longer a mostly ethnically homogeneous society with a shared respect for institutions and a shared sense of civic obligation. When a significant portion of the population is from another hemisphere, another culture or even another generation with different values, the welfare state is perceived as an unlocked candy store with services to be exploited to the maximum.
Redistributive policies like medicare are inversely correlated to cultural diversity. Rather than confront this reality, Canadian leftists demand yet more financial IV injections into the morbid body of the health care system. They refuse to acknowledge that even the Swedish Social Democrats, their role models, were forced to discover the "Laffer curve". That is, push the tax rate up beyond a certain level and tax revenues fall in response. Tax payers will not keep working and producing if they can't keep enough of their income. There are limits to what can be funded.
The Canadian model is not sustainable. It works only if there is enough public money to fund it and not enough patients with doctors to help them abuse it.
Those days are gone forever
Topic:
Courier Mail provides 'boring', yet unbalanced, coverage of Brisbane City Council elections
Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper recently posed the question "Have these been the most boring elections?". This triggered an exchange of e-mails which began when Independent Mayoral candidate James Sinnamon wrote an open letter to the Courier Mail's City Hall reporter. See further below for Emma Chalmers' #reply1">reply and James Sinnamon's further #reply2">response.
Dear Emma Chalmers,
On page 11 of the Courier Mail of election day Saturday 15 March, you asked:
"Have these been the most boring Council elections?"
Given that your newspaper has systematically excluded any views which clash too markedly with the orthodoxy of the Courier Mail's editorial writers, is it any wonder?
And given the striking similarities between the policies of both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party, I would have thought that the Courier Mail, if it had wanted to inject any excitement into the campaign, let alone be objective and balanced, would have given more coverage to alternative views about how our city should progress.
As far as I can tell, all that Brisbane residents were able to learn from the pages of Courier Mail newspaper of my policies was contained within one sentence at the end of your article "Newman wary on rates as Rowell dithers on costings" of Friday 14 March#main-fn1">1 :
"... Mr Sinnamon ... wants a population cap."
Have I missed something?
It's not as if I had not provided you with material about me and it is not as if I didn't have something to say that was not relevant to the campaign or that was not different to what had been said by others. I sent you two media releases including links back to my web site (candobetter.wikispaces.com, candobetter.net #main-fn2">2). You interviewed me at City Hall on Thursday 14 March and you would have heard my contribution to the debate amongst the candidates.
Why was it not possible for your articles not to have fleshed out my views a little more? As examples:
- Why couldn't you have reported my point, backed up by the views of the Local Government Association, that it would have been impossible for Greg Rowell to keep his promise to keep rates at less than the rate of inflation without sacrificing current service levels service if population growth continues#main-fn1">3?
- Why couldn't the point I made during the debate on Friday, linking of Brisbane's current crisis of extreme housing unaffordability to Queensland's population growth, recklessly encouraged by Lord Mayor Campbell Newman, the BCC Labor Councillors, the Queensland State Government and, I would add, the Courier Mail, itself, have been reported in Saturday's Courier Mail#main-fn4">4?
- Why couldn't the point raised by members of the audience, and taken up by me, about Campbell Newman's failure to honour his 2004 election promise to Cannon Hill residents to save Minnippi Parklands, have been reported?
I will concede that I have been far less prolific than I wanted to be, due to time constraints, but I still believe that what I did provide you with certainly warranted considerably more than less than half of one sentence of coverage.
I believe that Lord Mayor Campbell Newman's unprecedented personal triumph of yesterday owes much to the Courier Mail's unbalanced reporting of the campaign and its unbalanced reporting, in past years, of issues at stake in Saturday's election - the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Hale Street Bridge, population growth, clearing of bushland, the water crisis, housing unaffordability, the second airport runway, the proposal for a new passenger ship terminal to cater for luxury passenger cruise ships, the bizarre proposal to entomb one third of the Brisbane River adjacent to the North Bank under concrete, etc.
As a result, Lord Mayor Campbell Newman intends to take this result as a mandate to continue with his extravagant plans to construct an alternative transport network underground and many other plans which, if not stopped, will destroy what remaining quality of life Brisbane has left to offer and its long term sustainability. Mr Newman's road infrastructure plans, given their ever-escalating costs and the ongoing depletion of the world's stocks of petroleum, make as much sense as the construction of pyramids by the Mayan rulers in the midst of the growing ecological crisis which was to ultimately destroy their civilisation.
The Brisbane residents will learn, to their cost, of the mistake they made on Saturday, and, when they do, I think many will reflect upon what factors influenced them to vote the way they did on Saturday.
As one intending to stand for office in 2012, I will have a lot to say about this in coming years. Will the Courier Mail be prepared, from now on, to report more objectively on these issues than it has in the past?
Finally, I have posted this to my web site. If you don't believe I have been fair to you in this letter, you are welcome to state why. I will post any response from you immediately below this letter, if you wish me to. Also, please feel welcome to phone me about this.
yours sincerely,
James Sinnamon
Footnotes
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. See "Newman wary on rates as Rowell dithers on costings", Courier Mail, 14 March 2008. I would also like to point out that I don't think the photo of me does me justice. I did cooperate with the cameraman by looking down at him at an odd angle. I would have with appreciated either being advised to pose differently or having a better photo of me selected.
#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. The domain names begining with 'candobetter' predated any thoughts of my challenging 'Can Do' Campbell for election as Lord Mayor of Brisbane. I would have chosen 'wecandobetter.net', but that was taken. Nevertheless, I believe that Brisbane residents would have found the domain name to have been true of myself had I been elected.
#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. For further information, see, also, my response to the questionnaire from the Property Council of Australia.
#main-fn4" id="main-fn1">4. See "Newman's Liberals close on Brisbane majority", Courier Mail (online) of Friday 14 February. This story was at the URL www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23376890-952,00.html, but is seems that the story at that location has been over-hastily removed and replaced with the story Landslide means Campbell Newman must deliver promises of Saturday 16 March.
#reply1">
Emma Chalmers response of Monday 17 March
Dear James,
Thank you for taking the time to put together a comprehensive email.
From what you have written it appears that you have already made up your mind about the reasons you feel that you didn't get adequate coverage during the election, so I don't feel that there is much I can say that will change your view.
As you would appreciate, we have many demands on space in our paper and, while a number of mayoral aspirants around Queensland would have liked greater coverage, we have an obligation to adequately scrutinise the promises being made by the major parties and major contenders. I note you secured 700 votes on Saturday.
As you would also appreciate, even if you were to be elected Lord Mayor, the agenda of one of the major parties would end up prevailing because you would not have the numbers on the council floor to push through your policies.
I will point out that you did manage to get your photo prominently in the paper on Thursday, a feat not managed by the bulk of the mayoral aspirants in Queensland, let alone in Brisbane.
Kind regards,
Emma Chalmers, City Hall Reporter
#reply2">
James Sinnamon's further response of 20 March to Emma Chalmers
Dear Emma Chalmers,
Firstly, thank you for having taken the time to read my e-mail and respond to it. I have posted it to my website, immediately below my original letter. Please let me know if that is not OK. You are, of course, welcome to respond further, as is anyone else who wishes to either defend or criticise the Courier Mail's recent coverage of the Brisbane City Council's elections.
You wrote: From what you have written it appears that you have already made up your mind about the reasons you feel that you didn't get adequate coverage during the election, so I don't feel that there is much I can say that will change your view.
I believe that, to the contrary, I can fairly state that I am always open to persuasion by the evidence. I try to live by Keynes' dictum:
"When the facts change, I change my mind."#reply-fn1">1
At the moment, the overwhelming evidence is that, for the past four years at least, the Courier Mail has not provided balanced coverage of the issues at stake in last Saturday's elections. These include, as referred to in my earlier e-mail, the North South Bypass Tunnel and the Hale Street Bridge, in favour of which the Courier Mail has repeatedly published editorials, ignoring mountains of contrary evidence provided by experts, concerned citizens, and affected residents. I will pursue this further below.
You wrote: As you would appreciate, we have many demands on space in our paper and,while a number of mayoral aspirants around Queensland would have liked greater coverage ...
If you had only slightly reduced your newspaper's lavish, uncritical and fawning coverage of almost every word coming from Campbell Newman's campaign machine, I believe that you could easily have found the the space to give the independents more reasonable coverage.
Whilst I appreciate the Courier Mail's efforts to cover all of the local Government elections in Queensland, the Courier Mail is principally a Brisbane newspaper. So I would have thought it should have been able to manage, at one point over the past four weeks, to print a modest profile of each of the Mayoral candidates. If the local newspapers, B magazine, Qnews, with much more limited space, could have managed to do this then why not the Courier Mail? Certainly this could have been done with utmost ease on-line.
You wrote: ... we have an obligation to adequately scrutinise the promises being made by the major parties and major contenders. ...
But the fact is you did not. A case in point is the story of Thursday 13 March "It's plane to see, this Mayoral race has gone green" with a photo depicting Lord Mayor Campbell Newman accompanied by Virgin Blue flight attendants in front of a aeroplane pushing trolleys with seedlings . That planting a few trees around Brisbane can in any way offset the destruction of vegetation caused by land-clearing and infilling residential developments in the suburbs of Brisbane, let alone Mr Newman's efforts to make Brisbane more car-dependent than ever before, is hotly disputed by many. This is classic greenwashing. In case you wish to better understand how corporations and governments employ greenwashing in order to cover up their environmentally harmful activities, can I suggest you read the transcript#reply-fn2">2 of Radio National's Background Briefing documentary "Greenwashing" of 10 February 2008. The point made by Cannon Hill residents and myself during Friday's debate about Campbell Newman's failure to honour his 2004 election promise to protect the Minnippi Parklands was certainly relevant and, I believe should have been reported on those grounds alone.
In regard to the Hale Street toll bridge, far from scrutinising the case for the Hale Street Bridge, the Courier Mail has enthusiastically clamoured for the bridge to be built and has systematically censored from its pages nearly all views critical of the bridge.
The Courier Mail did not publish the media release#reply-fn3">3 of 24 February from the "Stop The Hale Street Bridge" group nor did it publish the informative and well-written feature article "What price for City Hall accountability?"#reply-fn4">4 submitted by Darren Godwell, President, West End Community Association on 5 March. Moreover, David Bratchford of the "Stop The Hale Street Group" tells me his letters are not published, including one in response to an editorial in favour of the Bridge.
Whilst the Courier Mail does, on occasions, carry stories about some of the more overt adverse consequences, including the traffic chaos anticipated in the Hale Street Bridge's construction and cost-blowouts, they seem to be quickly forgotten by your editorial writers or when pro-bridge propaganda from Mr Newman is reported.
The case for these extravagant white elephants in the face of looming world-wide depletion of petroleum supplies simply does not exist. I believe that if the Courier Mail had scrutinised Campbell Newman's case for these projects and his overall record, as you claim to have done, he could not have won last Saturday's election and those who had unambiguously stood against these polices would have received a much higher vote.
These examples are only the very tip of the iceberg of the Courier Mail's unbalanced reporting in favour of Campbell Newman.
You wrote: ... I note you secured 700 votes on Saturday.
As of now, it has reached exactly 800 votes#reply-fn5">5. Still, at only 1.5 per thousand formal votes cast, I won't attempt to claim that that was a resounding vote for me. However ...
My point of contention still stands. I had views which differed substantially from those of the major candidates and I believe that the Courier Mail should have reported those views, especially as you, yourself, had correctly observed how boring your unbalanced focus upon the major candidates, with little tangible policy differences, had made your coverage of the campaign. Had this happened, I believe my vote would have easily been much higher.
You wrote: As you would also appreciate, even if you were to be elected Lord Mayor, the agenda of one of the major parties would end up prevailing because you would not have the numbers on the council floor to push through your policies.
Thanks. I greatly appreciate that you have taken the trouble to speculate on an outcome that may not have been likely last Saturday. Had I had been elected, I think it would have also been likely that City Council would have consisted of many councillors other than those from the major parties. If, to the country, the council were to have been dominated by the major parties, I would, nevertheless, have continued to argue within the council and publicly for policies I believe to be in the best interests of the people of Brisbane. In such an unlikely scenario, I would hope that my views would be reported by the Courier Mail. As I believe my reasons to be sound, I see no reason why I would not have gained broad public support, in which case there would be no reason to assume that the Councillors could not be convinced to support my policies.
In contrast, I believe that if Campbell Newman's polices of the past four years had been truly in the interests of the people of Brisbane, then he would have had little difficulty in overcoming what he has labelled as 'obstruction' on the part of Labor majority leader David Hinchliffe. In most cases the reasons for Hinchliffe's 'obstruction' was well-founded community opposition to his white elephant projects, which, as I repeat, was not fairly reported in your newspaper. I believe that Lord Mayor Campbell Newman can count himself lucky that, instead of standing up for the affected communities, Hinchliffe gave in to him. I don't believe Campbell Newman would be Lord Mayor today, had David Hinchliffe stood his ground.
You wrote: I will point out that you did manage to get your photo prominently in the paper on Thursday, a feat not managed by the bulk of the mayoral aspirants in Queensland, let alone in Brisbane.
Of course I am grateful, but I had expected some publicity in return for my effort to be at the City Hall for that event. However, I was, frankly, aghast when I saw how that photo#reply-fn6">6 turned out. I did not recognise myself until after I had read my name under the caption under the newspaper. Others, who knew me, tell me that they were barely able to recognise me either. Perhaps, I have to get used to the fact that my thinning hair doesn't always lend itself to the photographic portraiture I would wish for, However, the Quest Newspaper photographer took some effort to make sure the photo he took turned out well. If your photographer had let me know how looking down at such an odd angle but not at the camera in the way I did had affected my appearance, I would certainly have posed differently.
I also believe that words describing what I stood for would have been more helpful to me than even a photo which had turned out well.
Finally, I realise that you may not necessarily be personally responsible for all of the matters of which I complain. Nevertheless, I have to deal with these issues at face value.
I still greatly appreciate the time and effort you have taken and your courtesy.
Yours sincerely,
James Sinnamon
Footnotes
#reply-fn1" id="reply-fn1">1. See en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
#reply-fn2" id="reply-fn2">2. See transcript of Radio National's Background Briefing documentary "Greenwashing" of 10 February 2008 at www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2008/2155943.htm.
#reply-fn3" id="reply-fn3">3. See "Hale Street record set straight in runup to Gabba ward election" of 24 Feb 08 at www.stopthehalestreetbridge.com/downloads/media releases/HSL_media_release_240208.pd, candobetter.net/node/336.
#reply-fn4" id="reply-fn4">4. See "What price for City Hall accountability?" of 5 Feb 08 at www.stopthehalestreetbridge.com/downloads/media releases/OpEdPieceFeb2008.pdf, candobetter.net/node/337
#reply-fn5" id="reply-fn5">5. See www.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/local/lg2008/BrisbaneCity/results/Mayoral/summary.html
#reply-fn6" id="reply-fn6">6. See www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23369923-3102,00.html
THE UBIQUITOUS RATIONALE OF GROWTHISM Vancouver and Melbourne victimized by the same sophistry
OVERPOPULATION AUSTRALIA 2008 - Surprising admissions in McDonald & Withers latest beat-up for mass worker immigration
Immigration as the quick fix
The World is under attack! by Tim Murray, Canadian activist
Rent gouging threatens Brisbane inner city retail community
Article also published on candobetter.wikispaces.com web site for James Sinnamon's campaign site or Lord Mayor of Brisbane
It is not only renters and home buyers who are suffering from rising land values these days.
Three years ago Latrobe Street Paddington was run down. However, a number of hard-working local businesspeople have set up retail stores there and, in doing so, changed its character. Businesses include the Urban Grind coffee shop, which attracts loyal customers from as far away as The Gap, the Green Tangerine women's accessories store, the Mary Rose Gift Shop, Pet Supplies and the Biome organic life-styles store. These businesses have striven to sell locally produced products in preference to cheaper overseas imports. They have worked cooperatively and have been in the practice of making joint trips interstate in order to obtain merchandise.
Now, as reported in the Westside News local newspaper of 20 February 2008#main_fn1">1 these businesses have become victims of their own success. Landlords have recently demanded rent increases which have forced four of these businesses to close down and threatened the viability of two more. The annual rent of Urban Grind, which will be closing down, was increased from $42,420 to $59,943 in one hit. Another's rent was raised from $54,000 to $90,000 and the rent for a business in nearby Given Terrace was raised from $89,000 to a staggering $228,000. Local real estate agents have actively encouraged landlords in raising these rents.
This business community fears that this will be the start of a trend which could see the whole character of Latrobe Street changed as chain stores move in.
A group to fight to preserve the Latrobe Street retail community has been set up, but will not be able to save four of the businesses from being closed down. Whilst legal avenues to challenge these sudden rent increases exist, they simply did not have the resources to utilise them.
How to end fleecing of small businesses by landlords?
At a public meeting at Bardon Hall on 20 February, all three local candidates contesting for the Brisbane City Council Ward of Toowong expressed sympathy and pledged to do what they could to help. Sitting Liberal Councillor, Peter Matic, somewhat at variance with prevailing philosophy of the Liberal Party, suggested that the businesses form a union. Other local government candidates in attendance who showed sympathy for the Latrobe Street retailers included Yvonne Li from the Labor Party and Anne Bocabella from the Greens.
However, how these businesses can ultimately hope to prevail against the economic forces that are increasing the value of the land under their feet is hard to envisage unless legislators are prepared to tackle those forces head on.
The rent hikes faced by the traders are part of the price to be paid for the runaway property boom of recent years. The wealth gained in this boom did not fall out of the sky. Rather, it had to have been taken out of the pockets of other Australians.
Objectively, property speculation is of no benefit to the Australian community as a whole. Accordingly, Brisbane City Council, as well as state and federal government policy, should be aimed at reducing, rather than increasing its scope within our economy. Furthermore, they should cease actively fuelling real estate hyper-inflation by allowing record levels of overseas immigration. Whilst immigration proponents like to pretend that they are motivated by lofty motives of compassion for new arrivals seeking to begin a new life, the reality is that they want high levels of immigration#main_fn2">2 to drive up the demand for real estate.
Interim measures to mitigate the effects of rising land values could include:
- Local, state and federal governments becoming the landlords themselves and cut out from the equation, private landlords. Governments, as far a possible, must retain every piece of property they currently own with a view to making these available to suitable small businesses.
- Set up a Council funded fighting fund, so that businesses, such as Urban Grind, which do have good prospects of legally challenging excessive rent increases within relevant government jurisdictions, can do so.
For my part, if elected on Saturday 15 March I will adopt these and whatever other other measures I am able to in order to curb such excesses on the part of rapacious landlords.
James Sinnamon
Candidate for Lord Mayor of Brisbane in the 2008 elections
Footnotes
#main_fn1">1. Boom to Bust, Westside News 20 Feb08, page 1
#main_fn2">2. For example, refer to "An inconvenient truth about rising immigration" by Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald of 3 Mar 2008.
Bartlett calls for Government Inquiry into wool industry bribe allegations
Media Release from Senator Andrew Bartlett 8 March 2008
Queensland Senator Andrew Bartlett has called on the federal Labor government to set up a public inquiry into allegations of bribery and intimidation by Australian government and wool industry officials.
Newspaper reports say many large clothing retailers in Sweden have banned Australian wool products; Sweden's Minister for Agriculture Eskil Erlandsson has urged consumers to boycott Australian wool and there are alleged bribes by a representative of the Australian Wool and Sheep Industry Taskforce, accompanied by an Australian Embassy official.
"These are serious allegations which need to be openly investigated," Senator Bartlett said.
"It is bad enough that people from taxpayer backed bodies and industries are alleged to be trying to silence animal welfare activists who want to expose cruelty to Australian animals. But the allegation that an Australian Embassy official in Sweden has also been involved is extremely serious.
"Australian Wool Innovations has a history of intimidating those who try to highlight the cruelty involved in mulesing of sheep and the live export industry, including trying to misuse the Trade Practices Act to run drawn out and expensive legal action against ordinary Australians."
"The live export industry has also used disinformation as a regular tactic for many years to try to deflect repeated evidence of immense cruelty.
"Despite these practices and the continuing animal cruelty, both major parties have continued to support government resources being put into maintaining and growing these industries.
"These industries and the federal government have the right to put an argument as to why the cruelty involved in the industries might be justifiable. But they should not be trying to silence those who disagree, particularly at the taxpayers' expense," Senator Bartlett concluded.
Media contact - Tracee McPate - 0417 607 655
t: 07 3252 7101 local call cost (Qld): 1300 301 879 f: 07 3252 8957
e: senator.bartlett|AT|aph gov au web: www.andrewbartlett.com
New South Wales Greens demand residents have a say in who runs their Councils
These articles came to me by way of the NSW Greens E- brief from the NSW Greens Office. To receive a regular e-brief, email andrewm AT nsw greens org au
Residents must have a voice in who runs their council
With local government elections scheduled for mid-September this year, the state government has been busy sacking councils to try to divert attention away from its Ministers’ relationships with property developers. The State government has ignored the democratic right of residents of Port Macquarie and Wollongong to elect the people who represent them on local councils, and instead imposed an Administrator who is totally unaccountable to the local community. With elections only a matter of months away, if genuine incompetence and corruption has occurred, it would have been appropriate to appoint an Administrator until the scheduled elections, but it is totally inappropriate for that Administrator to hold power until September 2012.
See also NSW govt sacks Port Macquarie Council
Royal Commission needed into relationship between Labor donors and ministers
Sylvia Hale called this week for a Royal Commission into
the relationship between property developers, their political donations and the decisions of Labor government Ministers. See also SMH story Sartor and One Burwood project of 27 Feb 08.
Independent Mayoral candidate calls for root cause of housing unaffordability to be tackled
Independent Mayoral candidate calls for root cause of housing unaffordability to be tackled
Media release 3 March 2008
by James Sinnamon : Independent Candidate for Mayor of Brisbane>
2008 Brisbane City Council Election
James Sinnamon, an independent candidate for Lord Mayor of Brisbane, called upon Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to tackle the real cause of housing inflation rather than to apply band-aid measures at the expense of taxpayers.
"When all policy is supposed to be driven by hard economics, it is astonishing that the added demand for housing caused by record high immigration is barely discussed," said Mr Sinnamon.
"Back in 2004 when profits from property investments momentarily slumped, the property sector demanded, and got, from Prime Minister John Howard, record high immigration[1]. As a result, Australia's population has risen by a further 1.2 million in just four years[2], housing costs have hit the stratosphere, and housing repossessions have reached 800 per week with a further 300,000 households at risk with the latest threatened interest rate rise[3]."
"Property investors have got their wish," said Mr Sinnamon, "and the rest of us are paying the price."
"Mr Rudd needs to decide whether he will continue to serve the interests of the property sector or whether he will provide ordinary Australians with affordable housing, but he cannot do both."
Contact phone 0412 319669
For further media releases, visit candobetter.wikispaces.com/Media
Footnotes
1. "She's one in 21 million as Australia comes of age", Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Jun 07 and Australian Bureau of Statistics population clock.
2. An economist representing the real estate industry on Radio Australia's "Australia Talks back" of Wednesday 20 May 2004 said repeatedly that increasing immigration would fix the claimed woes of property investors.
3. House Flu , The Age 24 Feb 2008
UK Ministers warned of nuclear 'albatross'
Reality as a linguistic filter of growthism
REALITY AS A LINGUISTIC FILTER OF GROWTHISM
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thought-crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it." A character in Orwell's 1984.
Acquiring a language I think is like taking a trip to the optometrist. You see the world broadly if somewhat less sharply at a certain range and then the doctor places a lens in front of your eyes. Suddenly what you were looking at becomes clearer. But at a cost. The perimeter is less clear. That lens is your native language and you don't recall the trip to the optometrist because it seems you've always worn glasses.
If you acquire an advanced degree, or pursue a certain profession, you find that another lens is placed in front of that one too. That lens may be the obfuscatory jargon of the law profession, a scientific discipline, law enforcement, or economics, for example. This lens will allow you to see one area of life with even more clarity and precision than commonplace vision, but a cost. Vital information about life will fall out of focus.
If in the pursuit of higher education, or foreign travel, you gain fluency in a foreign language, you find that all these lenses will be cast aside in favour of a new one-the new language. Objective reality may remain the same, but the classification system of each language-its structure, substance, gender, number, time and vocabulary assist the users to perceive the world in a certain way, but also limit that perception. To speak a different language is to think in that language and therefore to think differently because you perceive only what your language allows you or pre-disposes you to perceive. Your language shapes your world view because it acts as blinkers. Speakers of different languages, therefore, have different world views. People do not live in an objective world, but one where we are at the mercy of languages as both as a medium of expression and filters that admit only selected parts of reality into our consciousness.
As a university student I was struck by the fact that students who majored in various other disciplines seemed to inhabit perceptual solitudes that made cross-disciplinary communication difficult at best. It wasn't simply the fact that each sector of students were informed by a different knowledge base, or even that each student spoke the idiom of his field of study, but that that idiom , that jargon, did not give him the conceptual tools to interpret information from another student's area of study. Fostering cross-disciplinary discussion in this academic Tower of Babel seemed a more daunting task than arranging a conference at the United Nations.
It would seem obvious that some languages would be more equipped or more handicapped at describing certain concepts or objects and that if it was an environmental requirement to describe them adeptly a speaker of that language would be able to discern them more ably. He would not only be able to report his experience with the right linguistic ammunition, but experience it differently. This linguistic construction on experience can be illustrated by an example drawn from within a language, that is, between an American and a British dialect. Let me contrast the way I experienced a Wimbleton tennis match , the same match, as mediated by American English and then by British English. Two languages, one event, two realities.
The loquacious American commentators were incapable of saying anything with economy. One sportscaster would spend 60 seconds fumbling for words in an attempt to explain why the favourite was not at the top of his game, while his BBC counterpart tersely remarked "the champion lacks resolve." What was so extraordinary about the British telecast was the silence. Often four, six points would go by before a soft and carefully enunciated crisp British voice would say "extraordinary shot, that", reminding me that there were indeed commentators viewing the action. The long interludes of silence between volleys would allow me to become part of the match. I would hear the swells of crowd noise, the soft pop of the racquets striking the balls and the drama of the event, reminding me of how differently the two language styles could frame the experience. I didn't hear the over-the-top American superlatives. Instead of "blistering returns" there were "imaginative replies", a badly hit shot was "an awkward ball", a "killer" volley was a "clever bit of improvisation" and a temper tantrum was described as "a piece of patented brinkmanship." For Americans, silence is a dreaded void to be filled with flat-screen TVs that pollute every bar. That point here is, the spectator experiences the same sporting event quite differently in the Queen's English than he does in the version across the Atlantic.
The concept of language as a kind of lens or filter, or even straitjacket, cannot be over-stated. Wittgenstein said that the limits of language are the limits of one's world. By that token, bilingual or multilingual people have broader vision. It is not what we look at, the poverty, the injustice, the overpopulation, the environmental degradation, that is paramount. But the linguistic construction built in to filter that reality, to bring it into sharp focus, or make us blind to it.
The question becomes then, whose lens are we wearing? What filter are we looking through? How do we remove it?
In 1984 George Orwell revealed that the purpose of Newspeak, the language of his fictional totalitarian regime, was to rid old English (Oldspeak) of all adjectives and unnecessary words so that people would be not be able to feel or think. If one could not describe sadness, one could not feel it, and if there was no word for democracy or justice one couldn't complain about the government. By eliminating words, Newspeak would eliminate the range of thoughts.
Lancaster University's Professor Tony McEnery concluded that computer games and MP3 players have accomplished much the same thing in teenagers. ("Technology Isolation Syndrome"). His 2006 study of speech, blogs and questionnaires found that teenagers used half the average words of 25-34 year olds and that 20 words accounted for a third of their speech.
It looked for a time that a subtle totalitarian language would emerge from the Human Potential Movement in California in the 1970s. As R. D. Rosen dubbed it, "Psychobabble" was a mode of confession "that confessed nothing" and in its attempt to escape the confining vocabulary of Freudianism it substituted a jargon that had no theoretical roots. But it gave way to a puritanical tsunami that swept over every major institution in the English speaking world. "Political correctness". It's objectives are classically Orwellian. The notion is that if we don't label people or things by conventionally harmful terms, then people will desist from thinking of them in those terms. And if politically acceptable euphemisms are substituted and repeated ad nauseum, the ideological brain-transplant will be completed. Whilst dangerous, some politically correct neologisms can be quite funny.
For example, the homeless are now the "involuntarily undomiciled". And a drunk is "a person of differing sobriety." While a junkie is merely someone with pressing pharmacological preferences. Someone who is untrustworthy is just "ethically disoriented" while a lazy man is only "motivationally deficient". Someone chronically late is "temporally challenged" and a prostitute is not a streetwalker or a whore but a "sex care provider" presenting themselves as a commodity allotment with a business doctrine. As a white man, I am a "mutant albino genetic-recessive global minority", and the diction I practice is in reality just the style and writing imposed upon the world by "patriarchal white lexicographers." Standard English is "capitalistic patriarchal hegemonic discourse."
Each vested interest and lobby now seems to have its own "politically correct" euphemisms. The Pentagon were groundbreakers in this respect. A "clean" bomb was a nuclear device or neutron bomb that kills people but leaves infrastructure intact. Civilian deaths could be disguised as "collateral damage". Assassination is "wet work", bombs that hit civilians as "incontinent ordinance". Dead soldiers are just "non-operative personnel or "terminally inconvenienced" or "non-viable". Bombing an unintended target like a hospital could be dismissed as an "accidental delivery of ordinance equipment." And military failure, like President Carter's ill-fated Iranian desert raid, could be termed as an "incomplete success."
Ministers of Labour, meanwhile call their union-busting legislation "right to work" laws and the scabs that are used to break strikes are accorded a more morally sanitized name, "replacement workers". Trade union officials that haven't the guts to tell their membership that they calling for amnesty for 'illegal' workers instead say they wish to "regularize" them. And they are not illegal, they are undocumented, even though they used forged documents to get into the country. Finance Ministers call the stock market crash "an equity retreat" and warn we may experience "negative economic growth". Couldn't use the word "contraction" if it killed them. Conservation officials call the mass slaughter of wild animals "game management" and the Environment Ministry describes the explosive destruction of a nuclear reactor core like Chernobyl's as a "core management event".
The nuclear industry has conducted its own unique detoxification of plain English. An explosion is an "energetic dissembly" and a fire is "rapid oxidation". Plutonium contamination is "infiltration" and a reactor accident is to be referred to as a "normal aberration". "Spin" is a new breed of deceit three decades in the making which attempts to effect damage control by the use of euphemisms. And what are euphemisms essentially but a kind of linguistic Demerol to diminish painful truth by re-labeling it.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is gifted in that department. They once decided to sanitize their lexicon by banishing the "hazard" because it allegedly triggered panic in the American public. Health "hazards" were not to be mentioned and the Office of Hazardous Emergency Response was re-established as the "Office of Emergency and Remedial Action". And Enforcement Personnel became the more friendly "Compliance Assistance Officers".
But it is in Growthism where language makes it most incursive, dangerous and decisive intervention in the determination of what we perceive to be real today. The ideology that economic and population growth is beneficial, necessary and inevitable prevails, to a large extent, because the language which mediates that message has colonized academic forums, radio and television studios and print media. Consequently the reality of environmental Armageddon is seen by the audience through rose coloured glasses that are worn by the presenters, their guests and researchers and tinted by the vocabulary they use to interpret that reality. The audience therefore never sees or hears that every economic "boom" is an environmental "bust" and only comes to know "growth" via positive connotations.
For example, when Statistics Canada released its Census Report in mid March of 2007, those localities like British Columbia and Alberta which gained people from the previous census, were anointed census "winners" by the media as if a prize was going to be awarded for more pollution, GHG emissions, congestion, farmland and habitat loss. Prince Rupert, BC and Saskatchewan, on the other hand were designated as census "losers" for having fewer people than five years before. Newscasters consistently report that Canada "enjoyed" record growth or that the Maritimes "suffered" a "stagnant" economy with "sluggish" housing starts. The concept that Canadians might "enjoy" a steady state economy that didn't cover arable land and habitat with subdivisions is foreign to news script writers.
The word "growth" itself has undergone many makeovers in recent years to make it palatable to those of us who wouldn't swallow it otherwise. Growth has become "managed growth", "deflected growth", "smart growth", and the ultimate oxymoron, "sustainable growth". It seems that urban planners concoct a new label every year for the same snake oil it. To preserve all those wonderful green spaces that we love, planners propose to cram more and more of us into smaller and smaller urban compartments. But if we don't like sprawl, we like density even less. So Great Vancouver planners tried to package it under the name of "compaction". When ratepayers wouldn't buy into that garbage, planners re-marketed it under the label "Coreplan". No dice. Now its back as "Eco-density". Density with green paint over it. The one name you won't ever hear from planners though is "growth-control". That is outside their frame of reference.
Our culture abounds with so many sweet-sounding buzzwords like "sustainable", "livable". "affordable", "diverse", "vibrant", "inclusive", "pro-active", "choice" ---the vocabulary of deceit. Attach these adjectives to anything you want to sell or run past the planning objectors---any self-serving development scam for example---and you can jam it through as easily as candy down a baby's hatch.
The filter of growthist language in Anglophone societies is combined with the filter of multiculturalism---a smokescreen of left-wing tolerance that cloaks the right wing development agenda. Cultural diversity is much like a leaky air mattress that can only be kept afloat by constant pumping, the air being people from abroad. The language of diversity and tolerance is thus recruited to rationalize the policy of mass immigration and economic growth, always couched in the most positive terms. Growthism and Multiculturalism are a lexical duopoly.
How then do we remove their lens? The first answer is to substitute it with our lens. Ecological economists are attempting to do just that by developing indices of real economic performance, as if the planet mattered. We have to continually challenge media terminology and offer our own. When the CBC boasts that the country is diverse we counter by saying that is culturally fragmented and has lost cohesion. When the CBC says that immigration is the solution we have to demand that they prove that there is a problem. When the CBC states that the population of Newfoundland has stagnated we must declare that it has stabilized.
The second answer is to be found in the pages of Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception": "We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems: for it is by means of them and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively, but at the same time we must preserve and if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through the half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too-familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction."
Huxley is not suggesting that we abandon symbolic reasoning, but broaden our perception to grasp the real and not just its symbols, so we can appreciate the relationship of words and things. Words are, after all, just a proxy for experience, a shorthand to build or explore new avenues. Better to imagine how a piano could be carried up a staircase than try by trial and error. But conceiving and planning are not to be confused with the actual lifting of the piano. Words are not to be confused with reality, nor lifeless abstractions with life itself. Objective reality is not a linguistic construction.
When I was 19 years of age, under controlled clinical conditions, I walked through one of Aldous Huxley's doors of perception, and I saw a reality that four years of intense undergraduate study had not shown me. The experience was very much like a journey, or "trip" to use the vernacular of the time, and it yielded insights that I have never had before or since. My brother was administered the same psychotropic, and it changed his worldview irrevocably. He abruptly quit his good career and moved his family into a 42 foot boat that he built at the back of his home, abandoned urban life and consumerism and spent the rest of his days close to wilderness. His decision recalled a comment by Carlos Casteneda: "Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have little influence in altering the course of our lives."
It is ironic that mescaline is classified as an hallucinogenic drug, for surely it is those who believe that infinite growth can continue on a finite planet who are hallucinating. I would speculate that if somehow mescaline was dispensed on a mass scale the grip of Madison avenue would be broken and the concept of destabilizing society and nature to chase higher profit margins would seem absurd. So far, only North American indigenous peoples are permitted the use of peyote to embark on vision quests.
Some might be outraged by any suggestion here of advocacy of pyschodelics. I oppose the recreational use of drugs and would prefer that people employ deep meditation and study to expand their minds. But I suspect that more damage is done by benzodiazepines than was ever done by "acid". Did some have bad trips and go mad?. In my entire campus life I never heard of one, but I'll take your word for it. I have, however, heard of many people dying of an anaphylactic shock from eating a peanut, or of liver cancer from alcoholism, and they all died unenlightened. And I have read of 3-4 billion people who will die in a generation if there is not a radical change of consciousness. No matter, this is quite academic. Mescaline therapy won't happen. The point here was only to say that stripped of language, a new understanding and a set of new insights can be revealed.
There is a dormant awareness that can be awakened, but the filters must first be removed, the lens put aside. It might take a psychedelic experience, an emotional upheaval or shock or a reality-mediated revelation like the long emergency of resource depletions and ecological collapse, but the consciousness which now seems set in concrete and apparently needs a jackhammer to break apart will indeed emerge. Whether it will be in time to save us is doubtful. In the meantime, all we can do is appeal to the limited awareness that people have using an alternative vocabulary to the one they have been given, or in the words of population sociologist Sheila Newman, exploit that "chink left in peoples' consciousness and expose those marketed absurdities as shimmering but empty dust motes in the mad attic of culturally induced agnosia."
Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
March 1/08
Port Phillip Bay fishermen dispute dredging's clean bill of health
This was originally published on the www.bluewedges.org with the Title "Fishermen prefer caution". Earlier the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun newspaper, echoing claims of the Port of Melbourne Corporation (PoMC), had given dredging a clean bill of health in the story Port "Phillip Bay given all-clear after dredging" claiming that miracuously that "water is now clearer at Rosebud than before the $1 billion project began".
“With the dredge in the South, the water is getting more murky and cloudy, and there aren’t many fish either”. Mr. Buck has received reports from fellow anglers from as far north as Parkdale that water quality has dropped dramatically since dredging began. “I have also been told about sick and dead penguins and scallops showing signs of obvious distress in the south of the bay. The murky plume is easily seen even from the MODIS website satellite photos, stretching towards the north of the Bay. There’s no doubt it is affecting water quality, but at least it’s not toxic as well as murky - yet. It will be a different story if the dredge starts work on the underwater hazardous waste facility for storing the toxic Yarra sludge” he says.
Mr. Buck says rather than trust the PoMC data he would prefer to listen to the advice of independent scientists such as Mr. Chris Mardon#main_fn1">1 who says:
“Ideally the sediment should not be disturbed at all. Toxins attach to fine clay particles and will be partially released into the water if the Yarra bed is dug up. Many of these particles will be carried down the bay towards Ricketts Point by natural currents. PoMC data indicates beaches from Port Melbourne to Brighton will be affected by the dredging plume.”
“Dredged Yarra sediments will be carried by barge to the proposed dumping ground in the middle of the Bay west of Ricketts Point. Recent experiments where clean mussels were brought from the south of the Bay and suspended over the existing spoil ground showed that the mussels became contaminated in a matter of a few weeks#main_fn2">2.
PoMC’s consultant (Golder) undertook a fish contamination model to estimate likely contamination in a limited number of fish species. Technically, their data met an Australian standard (ANZFA MRL), but that is because that list is limited in its scope. They totally ignored some toxins and one toxin they chose to evaluate is not listed (PAH, or Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons). PAH is both toxic and known to cause cancer.
The Victorian EPA used the US EPA screening values in its recent study #main_fn3">3 into the suitability of fish for human consumption from the Lower Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers. That study resulted in the Victorian Department of Human Services warning to keep consumption of fish taken from this area to very small amounts, especially for pregnant women and children. If the EPA values are applied to the PoMC’s fish data, (and why weren’t they?) the results ring alarm bells, especially PAH in mussels from the Yarra, Hobson’s Bay and St. Kilda areas. PoMC’s own data indicates the concentration of PAH in fish tissues could be hundreds of times the safe levels recommended by the Victorian EPA and the Victorian DHS (see summary spreadsheet compiled from PoMC data).
The Victorian EPA study found mercury and dioxins in fish from the Yarra, so the absence of mercury and dioxins information in the PoMC data is curious to say the very least. Dioxins are extremely hazardous environmental pollutants which bioaccumulate, attaching to fat cells in the body, and are known to cause birth defects, cell mutations and cancer.
“Why would you want to fish in the Bay if the PoMC ever start the toxic waste facility?” asks Mr. Buck.
Blue Wedges spokespersons: Trevor Buck, John Willis: 0407 053 484, 0427 777 747
Footnotes.
#main_fn1">1. Mr. Mardon is a chemical engineer, who worked in the chemical industry for 5 years then as a research scientist with CSIRO until his retirement.
#main_fn2">2. Bioaccumulation Study SKM April 2006
#main_fn3">3. EPA publication: Maribyrnong and Yarra estuaries: investigation of contamination in fish January 2007
Links
These were obitained with a google news search using the terms:
Port Phillip Bay dredging
Dredging muddies waters: opponents ABC Online - 28 Feb 2008
Dredging off Brighton The Age - 28 Feb 2008
Queen of the Netherlands set for toxic dig Melbourne Herald Sun - 28 Feb 2008
New review planned for dredging The Age - 28 Feb 2008 (Comment: on this issue, the Liberal and National Parties in Victoria are taking a stance in favour of the environment and accountability. For this they should be applauded, whatever might otherwise be critically said of the environmental records of these parties at both the state and federal levels.)
Nationals back Libs on dredgingThe Age - 28 Feb 2008
Conspiracy of silence and exclusion
Seaweek - Sea World and Seagrass Watching
Act now to protect Moreton Bay's endangered sea turtles and dugongs!
Please help Moreton Bay's threatened marine wildlife today. Give 5 minutes
of your time to sign this online letter to the Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation asking for greater protection in the Marine Park, then forward to your friends and family.
Over the summer the Queensland Government released a draft zoning plan for Moreton Bay, earmarking a mere 15% protection in Marine National Park zones. These are areas where we are free to enter- to swim, boat, dive, and snorkel - but where all wildlife is safe from harm
While 15% is better than the current protection of less than 1%, it does not go far enough for our threatened wildlife.
Marine scientists around the globe say that it is critical that at least 30% of all ocean habitats, such as seagrasses and corals, are given Marine National Park status.
Our chance to support our turtles and dugongs is closing fast. Public comments are due by 5pm Friday 7 March 2008. Moreton Bay Marine Park is only reviewed every ten years, so this is a once in a decade opportunity.
How you can help
- Click here! Act now and sign the letter;
- Once you have had your say please forward this email to your friends and family asking them to sign and circulate it to their networks.
With overwhelming public support we really do believe that the Government will provide more than just a mere 15% protection for our precious marine wildlife.
Don't let this chance go by. Our turtles, dugongs and other wildlife need your support today. Your grandchildren will thank you for it.
See also:
- www.savemoretonbay.org.au
- Australian Marine Conservation Society (www.amcs.org.au)
- Sustainable Seafood Guide
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