population

The Demographic false alarm By Brian McGavin and Tim Murray Global warming and the demographic challenge of ageing populations are never far from newspaper headlines these days. Some governments are so worried they are now bribing parents at taxpayers’ expense to have more children and calling for more immigration to support us in old age. It seems the message is contagious. The United Nations Population Division reported in its 2005 summary of population policies that three quarters of Governments in developed countries and 42 per cent of developing countries now say that the issues of greatest concern, along with HIV/AIDS, are lower fertility and a reducing working-age population. In Latin America and the Caribbean, about two-thirds of the countries now considered population ageing to be a major concern, reversing the view that their population growth is too high. The International Monetary Fund claimed in March 2007 that the most developed countries face explosive debt in age-related spending without fiscal adjustments, calculating the potential gap in UK public finances caused by rising healthcare costs could be 4.8 per cent of gross domestic product - £58 billion at 2006 prices. In 2007 the influential Davos World Economic Forum ran a seminar on The Price of Becoming Old. OECD countries are discovering how expensive ageing can be, it said, claiming that countries like Italy and Germany will have to spend between 25 per cent and 30 per cent of their GDP on pensions and healthcare by 2030. Yet available data suggests an almost totally misplaced concern about ageing and concern needs to be focussed elsewhere. Increasing the number of young people and immigration to underwrite old age costs is unsustainable, leading to more and more older people who will need support. New immigrant citizens get old too. They are not going to conveniently leave a country at age 65 and say it's okay, I don't want my UK, US or Canadian pension. Adair Turner, economist and then chairman of the UK Pensions Commission, says projections show that just to maintain the ratio of 15 – 64 year-olds at their current level would need the UK population to rise from 59 million in 2005 to 136 million by 2050. The European Union’s population of 372 million would need to rise to 1,228 million in the same period, in an ever-increasing spiral – both completely environmentally and economically unsustainable. Similarly, a report by the C.D. Howe Institute, "No Elixir of Youth: Immigration Cannot Keep Canada Young"*, shows that for Canada to maintain its ratio of old-age citizens at 20 per cent, immigration levels would have to be 28 times their present level, bringing the national population to a staggering level of 165.4 million people in 2050. In a report to the British Government in late 2006, Turner showed that Britain spent about 6.2 per cent of its GDP on state pensions. “If we keep our state pension as generous as today, but still with the retirement age of 65, that economic burden will rise to 8.5 per cent by 2050,” he said. “If we increase the retirement age proportionately in line with life expectancy, as the government, following the Commission’s recommendations, now plans to, the rise is only to 7.75 per cent so that about a third of the problem simply disappears.” Even though Germany and Italy have more older people than some countries, this is nowhere near the Davos seminar claim, in timeframe or GDP. The EU average state pension is 60% of average working salaries compared to the UK's miserly 30.8% and some countries, like Greece and the Netherlands, give even more generous state pensions. There is plenty of scope for economic adjustment and compromise. Turner points out that: “It is important to understand that this negative effect of low fertility is offset by some powerful economic benefits of smaller families and low population growth. Smaller families mean less expenditure on rearing children and on education: increased public expenditure on pensions partially offset by less on public education. And smaller families mean that people on average inherit more housing capital, simply because if you are one of two children, you will on average inherit one half of your parent’s house, whereas if you are one of three, you inherit a third. And that inherited housing capital is then available at least in part to fund consumption in retirement. “The potential importance of housing equity is very large,” he adds. “The value of housing assets in the UK, even after mortgage debt, is considerably larger than all pension funds combined. The British think tank, Optimum Population Trust (OPT), says the economic costs of supporting an ageing population need to be balanced against the economic costs of population growth. These include the billions of pounds in higher taxes needed to build housing and other infrastructure---to accommodate ever-rising population numbers. It points out that in the UK 43% of young people go into higher education and can be dependants well into their 20s. Jill Curnow, of Sustainable Population Australia, says the spectre is presented of decreasing numbers of workers exhausted by their efforts to support increasing numbers of elderly. But in developing nations many children spend little time at school and as soon as they are able they assist in tasks such as grinding corn and attending goats. “To describe them as totally dependent until the age of 15 is false.” The ratio also gives a distorted picture of dependency in industrial societies. Very few children, age 16 are employed and paying taxes. Many stay in the parental home, continuing their education. At the other end of life, many people at the age of seventy are physically robust, have their own income, assist in the family business, own their home, mind the grandchildren and give time to voluntary organisations. No two-year-olds do any of these things. “Financial assistance is given down the generations (not up) on average until the age of 75. With less population growth, productive work can be aimed at improving quality of life, instead of building ever more infrastructure and housing.” A study done by the US-based Centre for Immigration Studies also found that the average immigrant to America was actually four years older than the average American and that immigration would therefore be of little help in changing the national age structure. British economist Phil Mullan, in The Imaginary Time Bomb, believes the preoccupation with an ageing population that will place intolerable strains on health and pensions plans has less to do with demographic fact and more to do with an agenda to cut back the welfare state. Mullan cites “the dependency ratio” as a crude device for assessing generational burdens. “The implication that everyone between 16 and 64 works is an absurdity,” he says. “The unemployed, students, early retirees and housewives do not generate tax revenue. “The increased number and proportion of the elderly needs to be set against the decline of health expenditure on children as a result of the decline in the birth rate. And the falling birth rate rates…also free more women to work, which grows the economic pie. Dependency and support ratios have acquired an economic significance which they don’t deserve. “Countries with much older age structures have out-performed those with younger ones, and business cycles and growth rates are demonstrably unconnected with the age profile of a nation,” he adds, “Wealth generation has nothing to do with either the average age of the population nor with demographic ratios.” By contrast, deployment of, or failure to deploy, new technologies massively affect output per worker.” As fertility rates drop, the reduction in the ratio of youthful dependents to working-age adults enables countries to improve their infrastructure, productivity and education – a demographic window of opportunity, as happened in countries like South Korea and Taiwan which saw a rapid rise in living standards. Mullan argues that industrial societies are already productive enough to provide for the present elderly population and with quite low growth could satisfy even the most extreme projections for the future pace of ageing.” Expenditure on health and pension services in the next 40 years will need to increase by only 12 per cent to maintain present levels and standards. A report for the UK-based Institute of Public Policy Research confirmed that “there is little correlation between ageing and increased health care costs.” In short, according to Mullan, no one has come up with a compelling financial case why ageing is so burdensome. He concludes: “There is no demographic time bomb. The anxiety about ageing that has become endemic in the 1990s is misplaced. It is entirely exaggerated. Sometimes commentators with particular obsessions or vested interests have manipulated it.” Former UK minister Peter Lilley observes: “The government is obviously dealing in economies without prices and is certainly forgetting to account for the future accruement of pensions for immigrants. By allowing a large inflow of less skilled workers we will depress the pay of the workers that are already filling those jobs within the country, and will in turn discourage up-skilling. Once pay is depressed and lower skills are relied upon then they become permanent.” Scaremongering to feed the short-term interests of pensions’ industry balance sheets is not a sound basis on which to call for a baby boom or large-scale immigration, with profound long-term economic and environmental consequences. There is a huge raft of expenditure supporting young people that is being ignored. Child allowances, tax credits, an expanding sector tackling social exclusion of disaffected youth and the cost of years of education. Crime and the criminal justice system is another area where young people are disproportionately over represented. Around 42 per cent of all first time offences in the UK were committed by18 to 20 year-old men, according to the UK Social Exclusion Unit in 2005. The 2005 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey in England and Wales found that a quarter (25%) of 10 to 25 year-olds admitted to committing at least one core offence in the last 12 months, and this doesn’t include those already in penal institutions. Young people are also disproportionately reflected in unemployment statistics. The percentage of 16 to 24-year-olds in England classified as unemployed in 2005 was 9 per cent, but the percentage ‘not in education, training or employment was twice as high, according to a report for the Prince’s Trust charity. Even worse, 15 to 24 year-olds made up 47 per cent of the total 186 million people out of work worldwide in 2003, according to the International Labour Organisation, while only making up a quarter of the working age population. The problem is even more pronounced in developing countries. A brief examination of the UK Government’s 2007-2008 total expenditure on services (Table 6.5) shows around £76 billion could quickly be linked to support costs for young people, with around £71.5 billion attributable to supporting the over-65s. For example, tax credits to help families with children now cost £16.3 billion this year, while public service pensions cost 1.2 billion (net). Health is another area where older people are considered a burden. In a study* of health costs, Professor Raymond Tallis of Manchester University found the total days of in-patient care for people who died at 90 was only about double that of people who died at 45. Eighty per cent of men over 85 are living at home, successfully looking after their personal care unaided. Even half the 95-plus age group were still independent and only one in five people ever need institutional elderly care. The prevalence of disabilities at older age is also falling, he says. In the 1980s it was predicted the number of strokes would rise by 28 per cent in 20 years, but by 2004 numbers fell by 29 per cent. Data from the UK Department of Health found it was only the 85-plus group where average health costs rose significantly. ** Social service’s support for vulnerable people in England in 2006/07 shows around £7.7 billion spent on adults under 65 and £5.68 billion on children and families, significantly more than the £9.04 billion to support people over 65. It is clear that our ‘demographic challenge’ needs to look further than ageing populations. “The way we relieve the "burden" of an ageing population is we use the money that would have been spent on the extra infrastructure for housing, schools and health services, trying to accommodate rising populations and immigration,” says Canadian analyst Tim Murray. “Why we need to replace our current exploding population level is a question never asked,” says Murray. “This is in a world of 6.7 billion people and rising rapidly, where each new child will likely produce more than 20 metric tons of green house gases annually and where “civilisation” everywhere, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, is in imminent peril as a result. All to serve a demographic Pyramid Scam that one day must collapse like a house of cards - our environment and any hope of a better life with it.” *Is the ageing population a threat to health care: The good news: we are living longer, Professor Raymond Tallis, Manchester University, September 2003. **Hospital and community health service expenditure, England: by age of recipient 2001/02. Age 0-4 £1,172; Age 5-15 £259; Age 16-44 £412; Age 45-64 £517; Age 65-84 £1,348; Age 85 and over £3,315; All £646. *The CD Howe report is available at http://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/backgrounder_96.pdf (2,200 words) A QUACK REMEDY FOR AGING: SPANISH PYRAMID SCAM GONE BAD Spanish Government burdens country with hundreds of thousands of unemployed, low-skilled immigrants in a misguided quest to offset ageing population. The following abridged article appeared under a different title by Dutch columnist Syp Wynia in Elsevier, as translated by James Schipper The Spanish Government is saddled with 100,000's of unemployed, low-skilled immigrants from Africa and Latin America. They have become such a burden that the government is offering them a $14,000 ‘departure bonus’ if they are willing to return to their country of origin and stay there for three years. Four years ago, the Spanish Government gave resident status to 800,000 illegals from Africa and Latin America. This was such an encouraging signal that 10,000's of Africans took the risk of getting into rickety boats in the hope of benefiting from the policy. Now the unemployment rate among the non-Spanish population is 25%. That's what happens when the wrong labor is imported for the wrong reasons. Spain thought that the boom would last forever and it did little to encourage its own unemployed to enter the labor force, allowing millions of foreigners to settle in the country in a few years. The socialist government believed in the fallacy that mass immigration is an effective remedy against the problem of ageing. Now that the construction sector, in particular, is being hit hard, the Spaniards are left holding the bag. Nobody is talking about ageing anymore." What's all the more remarkable about this is that the Spanish fertility rate started to drop only fairly recently. When a country's fertility rate falls, it obviously first affects the population under 20, which consists of non-producers. The short-term economic effects of a decline in fertility are actually beneficial, although naturally there will also be some losers, such as schoolteachers.

The title of the article is the clue to its meaning, "Populate without perishing". Ziggy Switkowski, who was on Australian Prime Minister John Howard's nuclear power team, is writing for the Murdoch press, which is always spruiking for population growth. If you read carefully, Switkowski doesn't actually say that Oz's 21 millions (plus) are bad; he says what they do is important. (Fine political distinction usually used to promote or excuse more population growth).

Ziggy is alluding to climate change, but he is not, I think, talking down Australia's population, any more than is Frank Lowy, of the Lowy [Climate Change] Foundation.

Why do I say this?

There are a bunch of investors and developers out there who seem to be creating a ... um... climate ... where the idea of population growth and fuel depletion and climate change can be used to promote the need for nuclear power and therefore to promote investment in it.

That might be defensible on the face of it, since the Energy Returned Over Energy Invested (EROEI) of conventional nuclear has become relatively defensible with the the centrifugal separation of U235 from U238, if some very rich men, associations, and politicians did not seem to be relying on further driving up population numbers to enhance the chances of schemes for giant new nuclear-powered cities getting up. They intend to invest, not just in nuclear - and nuclear may simply be the flagship that will take a loss further on after they get out early with profits from land-speculation - but in big cities which they have managed to goad Australian governments to promise them. (An early document talked about somewhere between 50 and 150 huge new cities all around Australia.)

Continuous massive development schemes rely for funding on gambling on profits from continuous land speculation, but this is not possible if there is no project, however unsustainable, upon which further population and industrial growth can be pinned. Some big development speculators would be interested in the land and infrastructure associated with big new cities that population growth they have been promised by politicians (without agreement having been obtained from the community) will bring, far more than in investing in the power and plants themselves. They have been more or less guaranteed large dependent new cities to consume the nuclear power. They will make money on selling off land in advance and in floating schemes for other infrastructure - at least this is what they hope for.

Never mind that the nuclear power plants - at one $2bUSD plant per million or so Australians, just to provide per-capita electricity needs now [1] (not future expanded needs or replacement of fossil fuel) will probably never be achieved due to the financial cost of these plants and materials in a debt-ridden country in a debt-ridden world (where ultimately population and demand will fall in line with fossil-fuel). The gamble is that the promoters of these big city schemes will get away with funding the initial big ideas, leaving a host of unseen costs and unresolvable debt to smaller investors, and a gutted economic and political system for Australia with vast numbers of people in worse poverty than landless Mexicans, without a wealthy USA close-by to emigrate to.

In Australia the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (AATES) put together a document for a scheme like this a couple of years ago for government, with the collaboration of the Australian Multicultural Foundation. Note that Scanlon has also invested in tollways. Article and links to it below:

Scanlon report underpins threat to Australian democracy
Posted April 23rd, 2008 by Sheila Newman

What organisation has only 24 members of which the first ten comprise the current Prime Minister and nine past and present Australian Prime Ministers or Prime Ministerial contenders? And why would they be so dedicated to an organisation with a focus so antithetical to democracy and Australians? Read on.

[1] Figure based on French nuclear electric provision per capita in 2009 as provided by France 2 News covering provision of electricity during interruption to gas supplies from Russia and during severe cold spell. Note that Australians actually use more electricity per capita than the French and they also use more petroleum and more coal.]

Contents: Massive aid programs have not ended African poverty, Wars and genocide in Africa, Population growth ignored, Problems compounded by wealthier nations' land grabs, Botswana, with its stable population, a model to follow?, Can further aid programs solve poverty if population is not stabilised?. It is 25 years since Ethiopia's globally publicised famine and Bob Geldof's famous 'Feed The World' campaign. In 2005 world leaders and celebrities, stirred again by the plight of Africa, pledged to increase taxpayers' support and cancel debts. Now the aid bucket is rattling again, as east Africa endures its worst hunger crisis in eight years. Will it make any difference? Massive aid programs have not ended African poverty Africa has had more than ten times the Marshall Aid given to Europe since the Second World War - a trillion dollars, or $5,000 for every African alive today. Yet many African countries are poorer now than in the 1980s. The UN has admitted that it won't meet its Millennium Development Goals in Africa but fails to explain the underlying causes for pessimism. Commentators point out that Africa has had more than ten times the Marshall Aid given to Europe since the Second World War - a trillion dollars, or $5,000 for every African alive today. Yet many African countries are poorer now than in the 1980s. Half of Africa's 700 million people live on 40p a day or less. Nigeria has squandered much of its oil wealth and Zimbabwe has moved from a relatively prosperous country to the brink of collapse. ... for every dollar the West lent Africa between 1970 and 2000, eighty cents was recycled back to off-shore bank accounts by African elites, while the World Bank estimated in 2004 that 40 per cent of the world's aid budget was going on paying consultants. We read that for every dollar the West lent Africa between 1970 and 2000, eighty cents was recycled back to off-shore bank accounts by African elites, while the World Bank estimated in 2004 that 40 per cent of the world's aid budget was going on paying consultants. Wars and genocide in Africa Much of the continent has staggered from one bloody turf war to the next, whether genocide in Rwanda and Sudan, chopping off arms and legs of children in Sierra Leone or shoot outs in the Congo over control of mineral wealth. It is a testament to the resilience of African people that they manage to pick up their lives and carry on. Now, more and more have Europe in their sights, seeking a better life. Population growth ignored Yet one huge issue is largely ignored. In 1950 the population of Ethiopia was just 16 million. By 2005 it had increased to nearly 78 million and is forecast to increase a further 80 million over the next 25 years, confounding the media image of people starving to death, though this is also true. The country already has massive unemployment and not enough food. How will it provide all the schools, jobs, hospitals and food to feed a population that is set to double in size? Across Africa, similar facts unfold. UN estimates point out that worldwide food production needs to double by 2020 to feed an estimated global population heading well over eight billion. Nowhere is that pressure felt more keenly than Africa. ... over 80 per cent of Africa's cultivated soils are seriously degraded and risk 'permanent failure' because the rapid increase in population has forced farmers to grow crops on the same fields rather than leave land fallow The director of Food Security at the Rockefeller Foundation, Gary Toenniessen, warned that over 80 per cent of Africa's cultivated soils are seriously degraded and risk 'permanent failure' because the rapid increase in population has forced farmers to grow crops on the same fields rather than leave land fallow. Even fertiliser no longer helps. Problems compounded by wealthier nations' land grabs Lured by cheap labor and untapped potential, desert countries with rapidly rising populations, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are snapping up farmland in underdeveloped African nations to grow crops for consumption back home. Amid this crisis, some of the world's richest nations are coming to Africa to farm. Lured by cheap labor and untapped potential, desert countries with rapidly rising populations, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are snapping up farmland in underdeveloped African nations to grow crops for consumption back home. The Emirates government recently signed a deal in Sudan for up to 70,000 acres south of Khartoum. In June 2008, the depth of environmental devastation across Africa was revealed for the first time by the United Nations Environment Program. Using satellite photos, taken over four decades, geographers constructed an atlas of environmental change. It reveals an image of destruction on a vast scale - of disappearing forests, shrinking lakes, vanishing glaciers and degraded landscapes. The fact that the Blair/Brown Africa Commission report said almost nothing in its 177 pages about the need to tackle demographic pressures while giving £8 billion of UK taxpayers' money to the continent is astonishing. In mid-2007, sub-Saharan Africa had 788m people, but will soar to 1.8 billion by 2050 according to the UN's 2006 population projections. Rapid population growth will fatally jeopardise Africa's development efforts. The large number of young Africans - 2 out of 3 people are under 25 - and persistent high fertility levels imply that high population growth will continue despite the Aids epidemic. In mid-2007, sub-Saharan Africa had 788m people, but will soar to 1.8 billion by 2050 according to the UN's 2006 population projections. Obstruction of population control programs may cause population to exceed even UN projections However, all this assumes a decrease in the continent's birth rate to 2.5 children on average, against an average 5.5 today. This rapid decline in fertility levels is far from guaranteed given the lack of recognition of the population issue by both the UN and aid agencies. A population of well over 2 billion in the region by 2050 is plausible if a major food crisis doesn't cause mass starvation first. In its latest 2008 report, the UN admits that its population projections for Africa will likely be subject to future upward revisions if fertility fails to decline. In March 2008 Nigeria's Catholic dominated Anambra State made it illegal to encourage the use of condoms and other forms of contraceptives. This in a country of 148 million people, set to double by 2050, where the average birth rate is 6 children per woman and its demand on resources is 40% greater than its bio-capacity. More than 3.9 percent of the adult population also have HIV/AIDS, and the rate is rising by around 300,000 a year, according to a 2006 estimate by the UN programme UNAIDS. Despite the International Conference on Population and Development's call for universal access to reproductive health in 1994, reproductive health and population was omitted from the UN's Millennium Development Goals and remains neglected. Botswana, with its stable population, a model to follow? Botswana is highlighted as a model by the Africa Commission, a country with one of the highest AIDS rates in Africa. It says: "Thirty years ago Botswana was one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world. Today the landlocked nation is one of Africa's biggest success stories. It has undergone consistent economic growth and is now classified as a 'middle-income' country. But Botswana has diamonds. Look across the continent and it is often precisely those countries with the greatest amounts of mineral riches that are in most trouble. But Botswana bucks the trend...Yet its diamond industry employs only about two per cent of the country's small population." Perhaps the lesson is that better governance and a population of just 1.8 million has helped to spread prosperity further - a point the Commission seems to miss. Can further aid programs solve poverty if population is not stabilised? In late 2007, seven major international aid organisations announced a multimillion-dollar Global Water Initiative to tackle declining supplies of fresh water for the world's poorest people in 13 countries – all but four in Africa. In these same countries, the US-based Population Reference Bureau predicts that between 2005 and 2050, populations will rise from: 13.9 million to 39.5 million in Burkina Faso; 77.4 - 170.2m in Ethiopia; 22- 47.3m in Ghana; 33.8 - 64.8m in Kenya; 13.5 – 42m in Mali; 14.0 - 50.2m in Niger; 11.7 - 23.1m in Senegal; 36.5 - 71.4m in Tanzania; and an astonishing 26.9 - 130.9m in Uganda. The industrialised nations have promised millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to help Africa tackle AIDS, yet rarely do we ask the complex reasons why nearly two-thirds of the world's 60 million AIDS victims are African – the sexual promiscuity of many adult relationships, prostitution and poverty. AIDS is a tragedy, but unless the huge population growth on the continent is also tackled, spending millions on AIDS prevention will see ever more Africans facing a life of unemployment, poverty and starvation. With many of the world's poorest countries already suffering huge unemployment and some of the highest birth rates, the potential for fuelling instability, extremism and a global tide of migration will present new security challenges for the world, says CIA Director Michael Hayden. The UN predicts that to keep up with a rapidly expanding global population, one billion new jobs need to be created over the next decade just to maintain current employment levels. With many of the world's poorest countries already suffering huge unemployment and some of the highest birth rates, the potential for fuelling instability, extremism and a global tide of migration will present new security challenges for the world, says CIA Director Michael Hayden. With unconscious irony, the Africa Commission says: "We have done our best to be blisteringly honest," quoting an old African Proverb: "Not to know is bad. Not to wish to know is worse." Unless a real world effort is made to help Africans challenge bad governance, devastating turf wars, corruption and a population explosion, there is no chance of 'making poverty history.'

Andrew Bolt, who works for the right-wing Murdoch-owned Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper, has political views, which, in many, ways conform well to those of his employer. He is anti-union. He supports US foreign policy including the so-called "war on terror" and he illogically holds environmentalists responsible for many of our problems. However, in contrast to the stridently pro-population-growth pro-high-immigration stance of his employer, he rightly condemns the ongoing idiocy of the policies of the federal and state governments to encourage population growth when, during the heat wave of the previous days, the infrastructure of Melbourne failed abysmally to meet the needs of Melbourne's current residents. By speaking the truth about population growth and immigration he may well be serving the public far better than many of his 'politically correct' detractors who still won't openly question population growth.

Andrew Bolt's article "Melbourne is wrecked and full" of 30 Jan 09 put the finger squarely on numbers and especially immigration numbers, in a robustly rhetorical way that will connect and generate emotion with readership. Without emotion the reader has little basis for memory let alone action.

Most writers fail to address the former. Those few who do most often fail at the latter.

Bolt has made indulgent and stupid statements about rivers and dams, as much to bash the Government as to exert his sense of macho human dominance over all things natural:

"Victoria is now paying the price for being too green, blind and thick to build basic stuff for a population we let grow far too fast."

"So incompetent are our politicians - so blinded by green ideology - that they even managed, in this vast continent, to run out of land for housing."

"It would break your heart to see where this lot scattered your money instead. On releases of precious drinking water into our rivers for 'environmental flows'. ..."

Nonetheless he has made numbers and immigration the primary focus overall:

"But now consider this: at the rate we're being growing lately, Victoria will add at least another 1.5 million to its population over the next 20 years.

"In fact, it could well be more. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last year cranked up our immigration intake to a record high - more than 330,000 a year, if you include workers on temporary visas. And that's not yet counting new births.

"A year ago, even before Rudd opened our door even wider, the Australian Bureau of Statistics noted Australia's population was now growing by 1.6 per cent a year, which means that if we don't stop this madness, there will be half as many of us again by 2050.

"And, of course, most of these new people will be trying to squeeze into our cities. Like Melbourne.

"Imagine Melbourne growing 50 per cent bigger in your children's lifetime, if not your own. That's 50 per cent more people, cars, houses, gardens, air-conditioners and train travellers. Everywhere where's there's two, imagine three by 2050.

"Forget the social stresses of simply getting on with so many more immigrants, or of trying even to find a little elbow room.

"Consider this more basic problem: how on earth are we going to give all our new neighbours power, water, roads, land and trains when we don't have enough for the people here already?"

If, within that overall view, the case for rivers and against dams can be well-argued then the numbers have to be reduced even more.

Bolt is promoting an important but nearly invisible debate placing the core matter at its apex. I dislike the man but give credit where it is due and take opportunity where it arises. It's worth responding to re-inforce the importance and point of primacy within Bolt's position. Argue the natural resource issues secondarily as a function of social security. As an utterly vital input to society, water resource exploitation must afford soundly generous buffers for direct supply (water consumption) and ecological services (fisheries, biodiversity in general). The more security wanted the less people fit into the equation. We can fill the landscape horizon to horizon with a thickening clot of citizens, but supplies of water, energy, etc become russian roulette on any given day. How lucky does everyone feel? Can we have a vote on it perhaps?

Bolt even stabs the desalination fraud in the heart when he cites its energy demand in context to the energy supply that wasn't even available to meet existing demand. So we can have desalinated water but not on really hot days? How good is that? The real point here is the inherent incapacity of this or any Govt. to assure reliable provision of increasingly complex and expensive supply systems. The public need to realise this incapacity and be rightly afraid of it.

In "Council amalgamation costs blow out another $100 million" in the Courier Mail of 29 Jan 09 Hannah Davies, reported:

"THE cost of Queensland's controversial local council amalgamations is spiralling, with ratepayers set to fork out a further $100 million to foot the bill.

"Despite State Government claims that merging councils would save money, many are struggling to offset the costs of amalgamation and are asking for extra funding.

...

"Council lobby group the Local Government Association of Queensland said amalgamation costs had been severely underestimated.

...

"(Acting director Greg Hoffman said,) "We are estimating the government will need to spend $100 million over the next 10 years to enable councils to implement the changes.

...

"As reported in The Courier-Mail this week, Moreton Bay Regional Council - formed from merging Redcliffe, Caboolture and Pine Rivers - will have to spend almost $1 million on new uniforms for staff."

This is on top of $3.5 million to equalise staff wages and $1.9 million to align computer systems.

...

On 30 Jan 09, Johanne Wright responded in a letter entitled "Merger cost predictable":

"As president of a residents' association which supported genuine local government reform, but was appalled at the seriously flawed and undemocratic, forced amalgamations, it comes as no surprise that the costs of this process were seriously underestimated by the Sate Government.

"It should come clean and spell out what savings will accrue and when we will see these. Our research shows that there will be negligible to no savings. Any that might occur will take five to 10 years to accumulate."

In the meantime, both Queensland taxpayers and local ratepayers will continue to pay for the anti-democratic amalgamations of 2007 rammed through by then Labor Premier Peter Beattie and then Local Government Minister Andrew Fraser (now Qld state Treasurer) made at the behest of the Property Council of Australia. This is on top of the ever-escalating increases in charges of water, electricity, transport, housing, etc. caused by the Queensland Government's policies of privatisation and enforced popoulation growth.

The Property Council demanded amalgamations because it regarded smaller councils, such as the now abolished Noosa and Douglas Shire Councils, which were more responsive to the wishes of local residents, as impediments to their plans to impose urban development and population growth.

However, the forced amalgamations were opposed by a massive grassroots opposition in all of the local government areas to be abolished. In every local government area in which residents were consulted, amalgamation was rejected overwhelmingly.

Of course, the Courier Mail is now silent on its own support for amalgamation which flew in the face of Queensland public opinion and the hard evidence. At one point, during the heigh ot the controversy, pro-John Howard Courier Mail even seemed to cynically welcome the prospect that then Federal Opposition leader Kevin Rudd would pay a political price at the 2007 elections for the conduct of his Queensland state Labor counterparts. This was in spite of the fact that Rudd, unlike the Courier Mail, had at least gone on the public record as being opposed to the council amalgamations.

If ever Queenslanders are ever able to fix up the shambles created by the Beattie and Bligh governments, it won't be any thanks to the Courier Mail.

Treasury Gardens when well-watered
At the same time as I received a report on Bob Brown's speech on endangered species at Brown Mountain Forest, I also heard really disturbing... awful... news of time spent in the adjacent Treasury Gardens on Wednesday, when temperatures were well over forty degrees.

These gardens are known for their fountains and ponds and large shady trees. Captain Cook's cottage was imported from England and now resides here.

Apparently birds were going around with their beaks open, their wings extended, parched and distressed because there was NO WATER in any of the fountains and ponds there.

I thought that the Parks and Gardens had some kind of water recycling program, to mitigate the awful damage that the governments forced population program is doing to our water reserves.

Apparently not.

The person reporting this to me was so appalled that she emptied her make-up purse and filled it with water from the taps in the Ladies' toilets and placed it on the ground for the animals.

If the commodification of water has come to the pass where we will allow all the animals and possibly the trees in our parks to die; if our governments are going to show this degree of callousness, they must be pursued to the wall.

The following action was reported to me: A representative of Melbourne City Council was rung yesterday and told of the situation. It is reported that "he sounded genuinely sorry about the birds and agreed that drinking fountains with receptacles for overflow water for birds and humans was a good idea and will initiate it."

He said, however, that it obviously can't be straight away but he said it sounded as though it should be done.

He was asked if he could get something rigged up as an interim measure for birds during this terrible heat and he said he would look into it.

Mind you, he also said that he was about to go on vacation.

He also agreed that there should be lot more water fountains all around the city.

Note: prompt action by this person will be greatly appreciated, but who is responsible for this situation arising?

There have also been reports that animals are falling into the new plastic lined waterways that the Victorian government has allowed to be constructed. They cannot climb out on the slippery plastic, and drown. It is hard for me to imagine a dialogue with public servants and politicians so far removed from the reality of natural hydraulics that they would actually deprive the earth of water. What destructive buffoons rule this State.

Yesterday I rescued a bird from a bathtub full of water and lilies in my garden. She had gone in and become too wet to get out. I placed some plastic netting in the bath, where it formed a good bird-platform. I put her on the platform and she sat there until her wings dried off. I had also placed bowls of water around the garden and on the garage roof, with rocks in them that birds and other creatures could sit on or climb out of the water on.

If people do not take these measures for wildlife, not only will the wildlife suffer, but they will become extinct even more rapidly.

Please be kind and responsible to our fellow creatures, even if the Victorian government is barbaric in this regard.

See also: "A Place to die" of 31 Jan 09, comment The last of our urban wild life of 22 Jan 2011.

photos of Bob Brown by Jill Quirk

Vic Government not doing its job for Brown Mountain

Today Bob Brown decried the situation on Brown Mountain, where amateurs are having to do work which is the responsibility of the government, in discovering and documenting endangered wildlife at Brown Mountain.

Brumby Government doing bidding of big end of town

He said that the Brumby Government is failing the people of Victoria by doing the bidding of the big end of town, and not what is in the best interests of most Victorians.

Brown answers questions on population policy for Australia

Towards the end of his press conference, Bob was asked a few questions about population policy and numbers in Australia.

He pointed out very emphatically that the Greens are the only political party with an environmentally based population policy, and that a population policy is needed for Australia.

He fielded questions about humanitarian aspects of immigration and refugees knowledgeably and honestly, pointing out that business migration was the larger component of the immigration program, and that people with money are more welcomed by the government than refugees.

He was asked how many people he feels that Australia can support. His response was to throw the question back at the interviewer.

He illustrated the combined impact of population numbers and lifestyle on our environment by saying that if living standards were to be at Australian levels, we would need four earths - and we do not have four - we only have one.

Brown appeared comfortable and confident with this topic.

A Re-Classification of Devilbend is critical to preventing the total demise of wildlife on the Mornington Peninsula: designation change from a ‘Natural Features Reserve’, to a ‘Nature Conservation Reserve’. Interconnecting wildlife corridors, through private land, minimum 200 metres in width and the rigorous preservation and restoration of Devilbend as a central core Reserve are essential.

Re-Classification of Devilbend is critical

by Maryland Wilson, President of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council

[Editor:See Background to this Campaign at the bottom of this article for the wider politics and land-use planning history]

A Re-Classification of Devilbend is critical to preventing the total demise of wildlife on the Mornington Peninsula. A designation change from a ‘Natural Features Reserve’, under Section 4 (1)(m) (and Part 3 of the Fifth Schedule) of the Crown Land Reserves Act 1978 to Devilbend as a ‘Nature Conservation Reserve’ under Section 4(1)(0) (and Part 1 of the Fifth Schedule)of the same Act, is absolutely critical if we are to save remaining native species on the Mornington Peninsula. Interconnecting wildlife corridors, through private land, minimum 200 metres in width and the rigorous preservation and restoration of Devilbend as a central core Reserve are essential to reserve the area for ‘the propagation or management of wildlife or the preservation of habitat'

Precautionary principle

The precautionary principle: “We must act together to prevent impacts, particularly where there is potential for serious or irreversible damage to occur. A lack of scientific certainty or information should not delay these actions., towards working towards restoration as an intact haven for wildlife.” Parks’ Guiding Principles Appendix 1 Devilbend Reserve Community Workshop, 22.11.07 P5 Sect. 3

Population dispersal needs

Genetic dispersal and variation is the genetic key to survival of species. The prime reason why re-Classification of Devilbend as central core habitat link for wildlife corridors is critical. It is to prevent genetic drift so species have genetic diversity /variability dispersal through wildlife corridors, to ensure their survival. Native species are trapped in isolated, fragmented areas of habitat, and populations without interconnecting habitat in which to move, breed and live, eventually implode and die-out, causing local extinction.

Holistic approach needed

A holistic approach is needed to manage Devilbend Reserve as a necessary tool of management to save rapidly declining species from certain demise if we do not heed their vulnerable state, now subject to drought and climate change. With roads and railways proposed, dredging on both sides of the peninsula, massive population growth and industrial development, inappropriate recreational users of Devilbend, birds and animals are threatened. Devilbend is not monitored to a degree sufficient to prevent illegal activities already occurring, let alone on a scale proposed in the Draft Mgt Plan 2008.

Current management failing

The Mc Phail Report slates Victoria for failing to protect native species, clearing more land than any other state in Australia. The critique of Victorian bureaucrats impacts directly on the importance of Devilbend as core nucleus habitat, on the Mornington Peninsula, which must be preserved as a sanctuary.

An AWPC Devilbend leaflet produced with Malcolm Legg ecologist and Glenn Ehmke of Birds Australia reveals our strong conservation concern for the future survival of wildlife:

“When wildlife is lost from a landscape/region, the number of species decline and local extinctions result. Extinction however, is a process, not an event, and the time scale over which species loss occurs is highly variable and species-specific. Therefore, despite the fact that major changes are in many cases yet to be fully manifested. This “time-lag” between landscape change and species loss is termed “termed “species relaxation” or “extinction debt”.

A number of studies both overseas and in Australia where landscape modification is very recent (-200 years) have identified extinction debt as a significant concern for biodiversity conservation in highly modified landscapes. Even in the absence of further direct loss and fragmentation of habitat, degradation of habitats will continue as weed invasions, dieback, edge effects and other processes impact isolated remnants, and isolated populations will continue to suffer the effects of genetic drift, inbreeding and susceptibility to chance events. Thus, the local populations of some species may be expected to decline to extinction over time. This is reflected in the large number of threatened and declining species in the region today.”

Devilbend as a wildlife sanctuary

It behoves government to pay more respectful attention to expertise and public opinion the Devilbend Foundation and AWPC bring to this inquiry. Government's job is to adapt to our demands, not to impose the demands of developers and big business on us or the rest of the people and creatures on the peninsula. Our very strong opposition to developing Devibend as a playground for recreational users, with all the negative ecological impacts on native birds and animals continues to be ignored by Parks.

Kangaroo Management in Devilbend and the Mornington Peninsula

Existing habitat in parks and reserves on the Peninsula is not good kangaroo habitat- Kevin Street, retired Wildlife and Fisheries officer

• the role of Devilbend as core nucleus habitat - Devilbend could support a significant kangaroo population but seems so sparsely populated, due to unfriendly fencing, hunting in years past by leasees and others.
If we are to sustain significant kangaroo numbers on the Peninsula then we need to come up with a management plan that may include such things as:

• habitat improvement in existing reserves and parks
establishment of important wildlife corridors linking Devilbend to Greens Bush, Arthur’s Seat, etc so that range animals like kangaroos can have freedom of movement for genetic dispersal
• Grazing leases are incompatible to conserving and protecting biodiversity
• Natural regeneration approach focusing on highest quality areas to start
• Identify wildlife corridors in reserve and linking outside

Ecologist Hans Brunner wrote:

“The total disappearance of the Southern Brown Bandicoot on the Peninsula is a classical example of the Government’s ignorance. There were thousands and now there are none left. We always get politely steam rolled. It is most disheartening.”

Background to this campaign

(Candobetter editor's note)

Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, where Devilbend is located, is a biodiversity hotspot and, until Premier Jeff Kennett came to power in 1999, it was a rural area.

Because of that government and the following Bracks and Brumby governments' undemocratic pro-development agendas, it was re-termed part of 'Greater Melbourne'. This was meant to make it incapable of resisting a massive development program, which to date includes mass movement of people to many new suburbs, talk of a second city to Melbourne, and a 400 ha industrial development at Hastings.

In the mean time a toll-way is scheduled to splice the Peninsula from North to South, cutting through and affecting major remaining habitat.
Arguably it is these kinds of expansionary activities, requiring huge amounts of fuel and materials and funded on debt, which have brought the world economy to a skidding halt.

At the same time, bizarrely, the area became a UNESCO 'biosphere', but ecological activists who worked to have it declared a biosphere were successfully dissuaded from commenting on government plans to massively ncrease population on the Peninsula, even though it was obvious to 'Blind Freddy' that this would destroy unprotected grasslands and the fauna habitats. The carrot and stick approach was used.

And Devilbend, until recently a reservoir, now decommissioned, only narrowly escaped becoming a housing estate. An unsuitable compromise was instead unilaterally inflicted by the Bracks Government, in a sort of activities theme park, with little or no effective sanctuary for our terribly ill-treated Peninsula wildlife. All big animals are on the wane - notably kangaroos and koalas. We must have a fauna protection and promotion policy.

Maryland Wilson, of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council, has the key to this in her promotion of Wildlife Corridors.
Editor

Australian palm forest (photo by Sheila Newman)

Mark O’Connor and Bill Lines’s Overloading Australia has only been out for a short time and the growthists are becoming hysterical. Their arguments are as hopeless as ever. One Telegraph journalist, Tim Blair, has even attacked Mark O’Connor for being a marriage celebrant. In a sort of three-year-old’s idea of getting married,

“Interestingly, O’Connor is a wedding celebrant. How he combines that with his opposition to population growth is anyone’s guess.”

Doesn’t Blair know anyone who practises contraception?

It must be hard working for the Murdoch Press, where no-one writes sensibly about serious democratic and environmental concerns, presumably because they will affect sales on realestate.com.au which rely on continuous population growth of course.

And just when you thought it was safe to read Fairfax again (after the decent article on page 3 on Overloading Australia) they drag the recent expatriate, Brigid Delaney, in from the cold (she has just spent three years in London) to do a number on O’Connor and Lines.

Just an old-fashioned cringe

Delaney starts out with some very old-fashioned cultural cringe. Holding up her subjective ideals of [battered] New York and [impoverished] London as ‘models of innovative and successful cities’, she stigmatises stopping population growth as ‘stagnation’. She implies that O'Connor and Lines's book calls for no immigration. This is not true.

What stopped her from urging Australia to have cities more like Calcutta and Mexico City, I wonder?

This does not compute

She says that Australians live 'high on the hog', then, instead of suggesting we should be less materialistic, she proposes more economic growth and lauds imported 'work ethics'. Is she really so stupid that she doesn't realise that work and economic growth mean more material production and consumption?

She even tries to sell the idea that failing to surrender our remaining quality of life to overpopulation for ‘diversity’ in order to have ‘economic growth’ may ‘slow the development of our inner lives’!

Frankly, if Brigid’s ‘inner life’ is as bereft of originality and cogency as her writing, I would urge her to seriously review her lifestyle goals.

The article reads as if she fell asleep between paragraphs and woke up forgetting what she had just written.

Fails to address content of O'Connor and Lines' book

Unable to counter the environmental concerns raised by Mark O'Connor's and Bill Lines's book, Brigid instead tries to frighten people away from the serious nature of these concerns, by implying that they are dangerous to articulate because they could be used by people to cloak a dislike of immigration for other reasons. She doesn't dare to directly slur the authors themselves, who are both seriously accredited environmentalists; instead she tries to stigmatise their subject as socially dangerous.

At the end she is conflating environmentalists wanting to reduce population with Nazis in Berlin wanting to stop immigration, because one might provide a cloak for the other! To me, it is Brigid’s arguments that are dangerous, because they seem contrived to polarise people away from their democratic right, of voicing their opinions about unsustainable political, environmental and economic policies.

She talks of how immigrants “energise their adopted countries; they bring new skills, culture, views and work ethic,” then later she describes xenophobia as rife in Britain.

Does she not realize that the people she describes as xenophobic are exactly the kinds of British immigrants we are accepting in droves here? People who will tell you openly that they came here to get away from the high immigration there, and, far from hiding under an environmental cloak, express no environmental concern or interest at all?

Cloaked agenda of mass immigrationists

For one with such Macarthyist ideas, Brigid doesn't seem to care that the mass-immigrationists use their purported love of 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism' to hide their real agenda for Australia, which is to make an enormous amount of money at the expense of taxpayers and grab more political power at the expense of democracy and to hell with the environment. I hate to say this, but those selfish vested interests find most of their support and many of their members, in the mainstream media (which they also own, I forgot to say). Brigid's thesis in her article is unsettling for the reason that she really doesn't seem to know what she is talking about, but she is prepared to slur a seriously documented concern, and by association, the authors of Overloaded Australia, presumably to make a buck.

Australians should all be aware that Fairfax Press makes enormous amounts out of marketing Australian property globally through its domain.com.au, as well as in those forest-destructive pages and pages of real-estate advertisements and consumer lifestyle images.

Sad journalism

It is sad that that is about all that the mainstream press can find as a response to widely shared and felt environmental concerns and despair about wildlife, water, soil and democracy. And it is sad that a journalist shows so little human concern for the feelings and intelligence of her fellows. It seems as if, only those who come from elsewhere, might have intrinsic worth. And, only other cities, not ours, might be worth living in.

Right at the end she comes out with what seems to be a bizarre confusion of high immigration with ecological diversity:

"A society without immigrants will be the social equivalent of what's happening to our gardens — less colour and movement, less diversity, a sort of homogenised, sun-bleached patch where the only things growing are the plants we've seen before."

Blind to real diversity

This isn't Shakespeare. And she seems to be a true ecological illiterate. Apart from the counter-intuitive assumption that people cannot bear to live without constantly changing environments, right to the plants in their gardens, her statement doesn't make any sense.

Fruit bats in an Australian garden (Photo by Julia Buch)

What does she mean by there being 'less colour and movement, less diversity' in our gardens? The only way that is true is where we have concreted them, deprived them of water, and where immigrant plants and animals: pencil cyprus, privet, aloe-vera, African agapanthus; Indian mynas and Euruopean blackbirds, European wasps and cane toads, domestic cats and dogs – not to mention the humans, of course - have taken over en masse and annihilated the indigenous diversity; the quolls, potoroos, snakes, lizards, butterflies, microbats, flower-wasps and rosellas, cuckoo-shrikes, honey-eaters, wattle-birds, magpies and kookaburras, which is so much more intense in Australia than in most places – making concrete New York and grey London seem like dead planets.

Why is it that the Australian government, and other governments, principally in the anglophone world, deliberately encourage population growth when common sense and intuition, not to mention the hard evidence, tell us that a larger population cannot possibly be in the interests of the current inhabitants of this country or of the rest of the planet?

Republished on Eye on Immigration and Online Opinion (in a slightly abridged form) together with forum discussion.

See also: "Bligh Government tramples on community rights to impose over-development" of 11 Jun 08, "Redland City to pay with increased water charges for population growth" of 19 May 08, "More chickens of population growth come home to roost in Queensland" of 14 May 08, "About immigration" of 14 May 08, "Shared accommodation a necessity and no longer a choice for many in Brisbane" of 30 Apr 08, "How to end the Queensland economy's addiction to population growth?" of 26 Apr 08, "The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections" of 30 Mar 08, "The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth" of 30 Mar 08, "Rent gouging threatens Brisbane inner city retail community" of 8 Mar 08,
Sheila Newman's 2002 Master's Thesis: "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France" downloadable from here, in individual chapters plus five appendices and here, the whole main thesis.

Why is it that the Australian government, and other governments, principally in the anglophone world, deliberately encourage population growth when common sense and intuition, not to mention the hard evidence, tell us that a larger population cannot possibly be in the interests of the current inhabitants of this country or of the rest of the planet?

We are long past the point where adding extra numbers in any way increases the synergy of the inhabitants of this country. Consequently any additional population growth must necessarily make each and every one of us poorer on average as the per capita access to natural resources necessarily decreases in proportion to the increase of the numbers of people.

However, it gets even worse than that, because of the dis-economies of scale inherent in large populations. An obvious example is that Australians are paying extra water rates to finance costly water desalination and sewage recycling plants required to provide water for additional people.

Had we stabilised our population, this would have been totally unnecessary. We could all have been adequately supplied by our existing less unnatural and less technologically complex water infrastructure.

Similar points could be made about transport, electricity, health, education and other services.

To cope with increasing numbers, it is necessary to destroy ever greater tracts of native bushland, to abuse our topsoil and waterways, and to unsustainably dig up ever more of our finite endowment of mineral wealth.

Three and a half decades of extreme 'free market' economic policies have further compounded these problems. These policies hinder governments from making use of what economies of scale are possible. They prevent effective planning in the interests of all members of society. Obvious examples include the huge inefficiencies of the private property market and the shambolic state of Australian urban planning, a result of the dismantling of Whitlam's Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in the late 1970's.

In some ways it may be the case that immigration does indeed enable the transfer of wealth into, as well as out, of Australia:

• The purchase of a home by wealthy or middle class immigrants as a means of buying Australian citizenship, which is effectively a transfer of wealth from the source country into Australia;
• The poaching of skilled workers, often trained at the expense of taxpayers of other countries, including of poor third world countries - a practice, for which the Queensland Bligh Government has become infamous;
• The selling of Australian university degrees and vocational training, which has notoriously become yet another means of purchasing Australian citizenship₁.

Little, if any of this wealth trickles down to ordinary Australians and whatever benefit they do gain is more than negated by the loss of previously available educational, training and employment opportunities, and consequent housing inflation (also discussed below). Even if it can be shown that Australia, as a whole, gains, rather than loses wealth through immigration, that wealth will most likely evaporate within this generation₂.

In any case, on a global scale such wealth transfer is a zero-sum game, at best.

All things considered, it seems far more likely that we are not only becoming more impoverished, but we are becoming even more impoverished than we might expect to be if we had simply divided the existing wealth amongst larger numbers of people!

In a perverse way, it seems to me that this may have actually made it harder, rather than easier, to argue the case against population growth and immigration.

Whilst I can't know for certain if this was true for others, I will try to summarise some of the ways that this fed into my own conscious and sub-conscious thought processes and caused me to avoid questioning our high immigration policies for many decades.

My own intuition caused me to conclude that, if, somehow, immigration made us worse off on the whole, it would surely be harder, rather than easier, for any group to gain from immigration. Therefore, when faced with the strident assertions from all the seemingly credible authorities that immigration was economically beneficial, I found it easier to deny my own gut instincts and not to make the considerable investment of emotion and time necessary to question this pervasive message. Instead, I just quietly hoped that the advocates of immigration, who promised me a more prosperous, vibrant, interesting and sophisticated society, were right.

Alternatively, on occasions when the economic arguments did not seem to quite ring true to me, then the only other likely plausible motive would have been an underlying altruism of an enlightened elite more willing, than the ordinary, backward, redneck, xenophobic masses, to share the wealth of this country with others less fortunate than ourselves.

However, the conclusive evidence, after many decades of this social engineering, is that Australia has, instead, become a poorer and more dependant country as consequence and this has not been brought about because Australia's elites are self-sacrificing and altruistic.

Contrary to what I expected, a small group has, paradoxically, not lost, but rather gained from this chaos and suffering, at our expense. That group is the growth lobby. First identified and described in detail in Australia by Sheila Newman in "The Growth lobby and its absence" (2002) and Growth lobby thesis without appendices.[1], it is really a group of land speculators and landlords operating in an organised way on a corporate level.

Land speculators and landlords openly welcome the way that growing demand increases the price of vital resources over which they have acquired a monopoly. They profit from commodifying and then controlling access to resources and services which include water, land, power, housing, roads, food production and transport, which each one of us needs in order to live a dignified life, or even simply to live.

As one consequence, in Brisbane at the start of 2009, even previously well-off professionals are being impoverished by insatiably greedy landlords, who exploit these circumstances to increase rents at every possible opportunity. A surveyor, who lives near me (who acknowledges that his own work entails the destruction of bushland to build new housing developments to cope with population growth), told me how he was unable to travel back to Germany this year for his holidays, because of being personally affected by recent rent increases.

The growth lobby also includes property developers, financiers, building companies and suppliers of building materials. There are also others that gain from population growth through high immigration, such as immigration lawyers, employment agencies and cheapskate employers.

Whilst these activities may provide a facade of economic prosperity, none are capable of increasing the underlying ability of this society to provide for its own needs.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh in April 2006, then Deputy Premier, ludicrously defended population growth on the grounds that it was necessary to keep people in the construction industry employed₃.

How could Premier Bligh, supposedly an intelligent person, have failed to ask herself the obvious question: How are those additional people then to be employed? Must we build yet more houses to keep them employed and import yet more people to Australia in order to provide a demand for those houses?

At some point such 'growth' has to end and Queenslanders must be able to find gainful employment by meeting the needs of other Queenslanders instead of

future inhabitants.

The longer Australians put off stabilising our population and establishing a steady state economy, the worse will be our circumstances.

But the growth lobby wants this situation to continue indefinitely. To ensure that the forced march to dystopia continues, the growth lobby pours funds into the coffers of Australia's major political parties, including Anna Bligh's Labor Party. It creates obligation and dependency in our political parties and governments. In turn, our governments endlessly facilitate the real-estate economy, in the face of every democratic objection, merely to keep themselves in Government.

If we are to hope for any kind of a decent future for ourselves and our children, these corrupt arrangements must be brought to an end and the power of the growth lobby must be broken.

The above article has been expanded upon the original version, published on 24 January - JS, 26 Jan 08

Republished on Eye on Immigration and Online Opinion (in a slightly abridged form) together with forum discussion.

See also: "Bligh Government tramples on community rights to impose over-development" of 11 Jun 08, "Redland City to pay with increased water charges for population growth" of 19 May 08, "More chickens of population growth come home to roost in Queensland" of 14 May 08, "About immigration" of 14 May 08, "Shared accommodation a necessity and no longer a choice for many in Brisbane" of 30 Apr 08, "How to end the Queensland economy's addiction to population growth?" of 26 Apr 08, "The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections" of 30 Mar 08, "The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth" of 30 Mar 08, "Rent gouging threatens Brisbane inner city retail community" of 8 Mar 08,
Sheila Newman's 2002 Master's Thesis: "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France" downloadable from here.

Footnotes

[1] Sheila Newman's theory on the Growth Lobby: "The Growth Lobby and its Absence :The Relationship between the
Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France", Masters by Research, 2002: downloadable from here, in individual chapters plus five appendices and here, the whole main thesis. UPDATE: See also more recent publications including three books by Sheila Newman here. http://candobetter.net/node/1882

1. ↑ See ABC Radio National Background Briefing program "Paying to be permanent" of 17 Aug 08.

2. ↑ As Sheila Newman put in "Expanded Australia" in the June 2006 edition of the Sustainable Population Australia newsletter:

"For these unimaginative and exploitative reasons, we are losing access to bushland, water, good soil, beaches and pleasant lifestyle for everyone, in favour of an 'economy' built on land speculation, class division, middlemen, and with a complete absence of recognition that we are trashing the last great Pacific paradise in return for money that will evaporate within this generation, leaving us a poor and overpopulated island, similar to all the other Pacific islands that have become victims of colonisation since the 18th Century."

3. ↑ "Qld govt rejects population cap" in the Age of 22 April 2007. (A similar story was published in the Courier Mail around the same, but the URL is unknown.)

Cycling is a popular sport because bikes are less polluting than cars and bike riding is good exercise and a great form of transport. In recent years cycle races have become fashionable, especially for 30-somethings.

Sport needs to show respect for nature

The Tour Down Under is a very large professional cycle race held each year in and around the Adelaide hills in January. It attracts many overseas riders and enthusiastic supporters. But how many of these cycle-sport fans realise that the event is dreaded by wildlife carers in the area because the organisers seem not to take into consideration the impact of hundreds of cyclists, helicopters, police sirens, motor vehicles and screaming fans as they move through roads winding through South Australia's fragile and fragmented bushland with a total impact that recalls the march of armoured tanks?

Wildlife presence clearly signed; why no appropriate planning by council?

The event consists of several races which span over 6 days. Day 2 of the race circuit was around the area of Mylor, Bradbury, Longwood and Stirling. The cyclists travelled along roads which are clearly signed indicating Kangaroos live in the area. The Mylor, Bradbury Longwood section was cycled around 3 times. This is an area where habitat is being eroded in a competition between housing and agriculture. The animals in this area are continually stressed and have no place to run to when the noise of humans and their machines, particularly helicopters, cause them to believe they are under attack.

This charming image of a visiting sports-hero proud to be seen with a baby kangaroo drew unexpected reactions.

A wildlife carer described the experience this year: "Not much to laugh about here. The ‘tour down under’ bike race was hell. The helicopters hovered above my house on and off for 3 hours. The noise terrified the animals I was caring for and obviously disturbed wildlife for tens of kilometers around."

Baby roos trained to wait for mother's return

When mother kangaroos think that the mob is being chased, they deposit their joeys and hop away to attract the threat away from the little kangaroos. Little kangaroos are trained to stay and wait where they are left. When things settle down, the mother kangaroo comes back to get the baby.

Kangaroos panicked; nine joeys missing

The carer told us that, "All the joeys seem to have been separated from their mums in the areas I check. Some of them did not survive. I found a beautiful little joey dead on the main road this morning. A fox had ripped her throat out, then must have dropped her as it crossed the road."

"I am so upset. There are about nine joeys missing from their mums here now."

"This tour down under will be here again next year and this just cannot happen again."

Even Lance Armstrong , the major draw card rider, complained about how low the helicopters were and the trouble the wind they caused made for the cyclists. He also mentioned the continual drone of copters above him during the 4 or 5 hour race.

Mike Turtur designed the race and is the race director.

From an article, "Panic Grows In Ca As Welfare Checks Set To Stop,
by SmileySam, Sat Jan 17, 2009 at 10:18:20 PM PST

Imagine living hand to mouth already, barely squeaking by. Come Feb 1 the State has warned you may not see another check for months. No Rent money, no money for food for medicine and even worse for some of the disabled, your Caregiver that comes by daily to feed, clean, shop, and generally make sure you are cared for, isn't coming anymore.

California's fiscal future lurched yet another step toward oblivion on Friday as state Controller John Chiang announced he could no longer make payments for services to disabled and blind people who need the money to pay for rent and food.

Chiang said payments would most likely have to be stopped by Feb. 1.

"Delaying these payments will hurt real families," Chiang said.

About one million people would be affected by the non-payments, Chiang said.

Disabled, Blind People to Lose Disability Payments

* SmileySam's diary
*

I am disabled but my check comes from Social Security, but my Sig. Other, who is also disabled, gets her check from the State. It's not that much but helps with the bills like the cost of the electricity to run her oxygen machine that runs 24/7. She also has a daytime Caregiver paid for by the State because I cannot care for her like I used to. Her caregiver also rents a room from us which helps with the rent, but since he is going to be laid-off we are really going to be screwed.

I don't want to get too much into our personal business but to show just how damaging this will be just to my family alone I will have to use a few more details. I'm a chronic pain sufferer. I have what are known as Cluster Migraines which are just like your everyday migraine except they never go away. They don't have a clue what causes them but we do know that stress makes them much worse. I also have a extremely bad back and neck, emphysema, and a few other problems. My SO has Diabetes, COPD, CHF, emphysema, Fibromyalgia, and is considered Terminal. She is bedridden most the time and uses a electric wheelchair when she can. She can neither cook, or bath herself any longer, and can barely dress herself most the time. You can see why her Caregiver is so important to us. He does the shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry as well as taking her to the Doctor at least once every two weeks. He does much more but that should give you a sense of what my life will look like after Feb.1 and I'm not alone.

Even if State Controller John Chiang finds a way to make these payments Arnold is trying to make major cuts on the backs of the Disabled and Poor. Arnold is good republican after all.

The Governor’s proposed cuts – including those proposed by the Governor and enacted by the Legislature in previous budget years, include major cuts proposed to Medi-Cal, regional centers, mental health services, CalWORKS (State’s "welfare to work" program that includes thousands of parents and children with special needs), In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS), SSI/SSP (Supplemental Security Income/State Supplemental Payment) grants to the lowest income persons with disabilities, the blind and seniors, the Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI) that provides small state funded grants for legal immigrants with disabilities, the blind and low income seniors who do not qualify for SSI, cuts that impact public and accessible transportation and housing and cuts to public education that impact special education for over 650,000 children with special needs.

Hundreds Protest Against Governor’s Spending Cut Proposals

It's my hope that someone on the Obama Team will read this and see that the States like Ca. aren't let out of the coming Stimulus Money because it doesn't seem that the Republicans and some of the Democrats in Ca. aren't in any hurry to fix this coming disaster. I now know how those in New Orleans felt as they watched Katrina come and go and no one there to help. This will be a State of Emergency in my home and millions like mine. Somehow I don't think FEMA or the Red Cross will be handing out food and water anytime some. I wrote about this whole deal in a open thread earlier and I made a comment about how I feel. I should give you a hint at how many people feel.

Who can afford to sue ? The perfect victim, one too poor to have a atty. I have not found one article about blowback on the rebate cks we didn't get. Who will sue Arnie if they don't have a apt, phone or food ? The poor are treated as invisible, which for the most part we are. We are too afraid of losing what little income we get to rock the boat.

I don't have the answer here but I am hoping someone who does will read this, or that someone pass it on to someone who does. I haven't reached my limit yet, but it's coming fast. For someone who worked hard for over 30 yrs and paid all my share of taxes and dues this is a hard place to be and getting harder by the day. In some of the larger cities I believe we can expect growing violence if this isn't fixed and quick.

Source of illustration http://awliya.wordpress.com/

Progress ideology and colonial racism in 19th, 20th and 21st century US politics

Margaret Sanger, nurse, feminist, and family planning pioneer, has been accused of a racist agenda to reduce the black population of the US, but this is to single her out unfairly among her peers. Her project was really a neo-malthusian one which attempted to empower poor women, black or white. Her most strongly held policy was that it was up to the woman to decide whether she wanted a child or not.

She has been quoted as if she were advocating eugenics for the black population of the US but that case: "We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members," [Source:Robert Marshall and Charles Donovan, Blessed Are The Barren; The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood, Ignatius Press, 1991, pp. 17-18.] relies on misinterpretation. It seems pretty clear that Sanger, despite her upper social-class blinkers, was attempting to empower black women by appealing to black spokespeople so that US blacks would not mistaken her efforts as eugenicist. She succeeded and one of her spokespersons was Martin Luther King.

Right to Life and similar associations have often mis-used the above quote as a political tool against contraception, abortion and feminism, but pro-life banning of abortion and contraception has been misused in turn to promote large populations of labourers among the dispossessed for centuries. They have also been used to promote war - for instance by Hitler and Petain. In these cases, rather than look at racism in pro-lifers or in neo-malthusians, it would be better to ask the question, "Who benefits?"

Racist ideology then and now

The ruling classes of the 19th and 20th century colonial world used racist ideology to justify as progress the empire's oppression of the peoples it dispossessed. Most people accepted this ideology without question, because they learned it from the newspapers, from schools, and in universities. How could millions of immigrants have justified the massive dispossession of Indian nationals, Indian Americans, Black Africans and Aboriginal Australians and the disempowerment and political disruption of Chinese and Japanese, Pacific Islanders and so many others - in any other way? Otherwise intelligent people rarely had occasion to question this view of the world, without which so-called 'economic progress' could not and cannot continue. Humanitarians among the upper classes saw it as their duty to assist the unfortunate or the oppressed to rise somehow out of what was seen as their natural and historical state. Most of the time they would not have had any idea of the depths to which their own governments sank. See for instance this record of experiments on Africans by the US government until 1972.

The Celts as backward peoples

Malthus himself evolved his political theory in a society where the Irish were deemed congenitally stupid and recalcitrant and this had been used as an excuse from Elizabeth 1's time to dispossess them violently, destroy their forests for wood, and force them to labour for Anglo-settlers. A reading of Chrétien de Troyes' Le Conte du Graal (written in 1179) will show that, in Roman times on the continent, Celts were treated as hapless fools as well by their Roman dispossessors,

"Sire, sachiez tot entresait
Que Galois sont tuit par nature
Plus fol que bestes en pasture."

["Sire, everyone knows that Celts are all by nature sillier than grazing cattle"]

( Source: Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal[1179], ed. Charles Mela, Livre de Poche ( Lettres Gothiques 14 ), Paris, 1990v. 236-238 )".

Depending on the sectarian perspective, in the past and today, 'improvement' might be brought by 'bringing civilisation' as the Romans called it, preaching Christian or other religions, through education, through the provision of 'jobs' and industry, through hygiene and mechanised agriculture. Anything but returning land to people and getting out of their countries. Anything, even promoting larger populations of the dispossessed and the new possessors, which can only, of course, make things worse for all.

There is little difference between colonial ideology and corporate ideology in globalism, as we can observe in so many examples - from the ongoing calvary of 'free' Nigerians living near Nigerian oil-fields or of Australians in Australia (which remains a British possession), as land-prices and population are inflated to please property developers and mainstream press (which markets property), contributing to the re-dispossession of black and white Australians alike.

Racism and counter-racism arguments focus away from land-rights and dispossession

Obviously new methods of birth control are a poor second to not stuffing up the original steady-state societies of exploited countries. Malthusian and neomalthusian approaches, however, whilst usually not recognising the original damage and fault, nor restoring land-rights, nonetheless attempt to empower those who, through dispossession and authoritarian population-boosting, are exploited through their numbers and vulnerability.

Most of us swallow culturally vectored political stupidities whole

With any political program, it is necessary to always to look at the pieces that make up the whole, and discard the bits that don't make sense.

Sanger was born in 1879 and died in 1966. Although she had an enlightened attitude to women's rights, which was reflected in support from women who appreciated her efforts on their behalf, like many of her educated fellows, Margaret misinterpreted Darwin's theory in Spencerian terms. Here, for example are her ideas about human development, in which she says ghastly things about Australian Aborigines.

"It is said that a fish as large as a man has a brain no larger than the kernel of an almond. In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets." Source: Sanger, What Every Girl Should Know, 1920, p. 47

Ironic in a neo-malthusian, if you know that Malthus's first work was inspired by Joseph Banks's observations about the low birth-rate and small population of Australian aboriginals, whose lot he compared favorably to that of the overpopulous British of the late 18th century. See: "Thomas Malthus and Australian Thought"

Sanger, like most doctors and nurses of her time, was also frightened by masturbation:

In my experience as a trained nurse while attending persons afflicted with various and often revolting diseases, no matter what their ailments, I have never found any one so repulsive as the chronic masturbator. It would be difficult not to fill page upon page of heartrending confessions made by young girls, whose lives were blighted by this pernicious habit, always begun so innocently, for even after they have ceased the habit, they find themselves incapable of any relief in the natural act. [...] Perhaps the greatest physical danger to the chronic masturbator is the inability to perform the sexual act naturally.

Source: Sanger, What Every Girl Should Know, 1920, p. 47

At least she had moved on from the general belief that siphilis was caused by masturbation. In fact she was persecuted for her militant attempts to educate people in how to avoid infection from siphilis and other venereal diseases. Siphilis, in common with HIV, has a long, virtually silent lead-up time. In the pre-antibiotic era it was a leading reason for long-term institutionalisation in physical and mental hospitals, but also for many still-births and congenital malformities. In mental hospitals it was known as 'General paralysis of the insane', cause, 'masturbation'. [Interestingly for Australians, in the first volume of the Australian 3 novel work by Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, writing as Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1930) we read of how the narrator's father, a doctor, was ferried across the Yarra River to the psychiatric hospital ('round the bend') because he had succumbed to general paralysis of the insane.]

Faked photograph

This photograph is faked for ideological purposes; it is a mock-up from Jill Stanek's Pro-life Pulse. There is a website that holds a contest each year for the best PhotoShopped creation depicting the event.
http://margaretsanger.blogspot.com/2008/12/winner-of-2008-margaret-sanger-at-ku.html It looks like they have expanded to video this year.

There is no real information about the event, no copy of invitations, her speech, or her motivations to talk to the Klan meeting. At the time, the American Birth Control League was trying to organize birth control leagues in NJ and gather support for legislative bills.

Sanger's account of her trip to talk to the Klu Klux Klan

Source:Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger An Autobiography 1971 reprint by Dover Publications, Inc. of the 1938 original published by W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 366-367.

"All the world over, in Penang and Skagway, in El Paso and Helsingfors, I have found women's psychology in the matter of childbearing essentially the same, no matter what the class, religion, or economic status. Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.

My letter of instruction told me what train to take, to walk from the station two blocks straight ahead, then two to the left. I would see a sedan parked in front of a restaurant. If I wished I could have ten minutes for a cup of coffee or bite to eat, because no supper would be served later.

I obeyed orders implicitly, walked the blocks, saw the car, found the restaurant, went in and ordered some cocoa, stayed my allotted ten minutes, then approached the car hesitatingly and spoke to the driver. I received no reply. She might have been totally deaf as far as I was 1 concerned. Mustering up my courage, I climbed in and settled back. Without a turn of the head, a smile, or a word to let me know I was right, she stepped on the self-starter. For fifteen minutes we wound around the streets. It must have been towards six in the afternoon. We took this lonely lane and that through the woods, and an hour later pulled up in a vacant space near a body of water beside a large, unpainted, barnish building.

My driver got out, talked with several other women, then said to me severely, "Wait here. We will come for you." She disappeared. More cars buzzed up the dusty road into the parking place. Occasionally men dropped wives who walked hurriedly and silently within. This went on mystically until night closed down and I was alone in the dark. A few gleams came through chinks in the window curtains. Even though it was May, I grew chillier and chillier.

After three hours I was summoned at last and entered a bright corridor filled with wraps. As someone came out of the hall I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses. I waited another twenty minutes. It was warmer and I did not mind so much. Eventually the lights were switched on, the audience seated itself, and I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak.

Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand.

In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York. Under a curfew law everything in Silver Lake shut at nine o'clock. I could not even send a telegram to let my family know whether I had been thrown in the river or was being held incommunicado. It was nearly one before I reached Trenton, and I spent the night in a hotel."

Sanger can be seen as an imperfect human being like all human beings, but who rose above most of her fellows and did great good with great courage. This document and others available about the context and personages in the history of family planning and population policy are of great importance for human beings to understand the political systems we live in today. They contain both inspirations and cautions.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project is a historical editing project sponsored by the Department of History at New York University. The Project was formed by Dr. Esther Katz in 1985 to locate, arrange, edit, research, and publish the papers of the noted birth control pioneer.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project has published a two-series microfilm edition, the Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition Smith College Collections and the Collected Documents Series. Work on the Smith College Collections entailed the rearrangement and organization of over 50,000 Sanger documents in the Margaret Sanger collection and seventeen other collections at the Sophia Smith Collection and Smith College Archives. Work on the Collected Documents Series included a ten-year international search of over 1,500 archives and private collections, photocopying material and organizing over 9,000 documents for publication. Both series have been published with a printed reel guide that includes an item-level index by University Publications of America, a division of Lexis-Nexis.

The Project is currently working on a four-volume book edition of Sanger's Papers, to be published by the University of Illinois Press. The first two volumes, subtitled The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928 and Birth Control Comes of Age, 1928-1939 have been published.

The Project also published an electronic edition of a small sample of documents related to Sanger's Woman Rebel and is working on a larger electronic edition of Sanger's speeches and articles.

"As a nurse, I was in contact with the ill and the infirm. I knew something about the health and disease of bodies, but for a long time, I was baffled at the tremendous personal problems of life, of marriage, of living, and of just being. Here indeed was a challenge to “build beyond thyself.” Where was I to begin? I found the answer at every door. [...]

For these beliefs I was denounced, arrested, I was in and out of police courts and higher courts, and indictments hung over my life for several years. But nothing could alter my beliefs. Because I saw these as truths, I stubbornly stuck to my convictions."
See also: "Progress ideology, colonial racism, right to life and family planning"
Image source was http://www.nwhm.org/ProgressiveEra/birthcontrol.html

Only in 1965 did the practice of contraception become legal between married couples in the United States, through a 1965 Supreme Court decision, Griswold v. Connecticut. Only a few months later, on September 6, 1966, Margaret Sanger, a nurse, and the founder of the US birth control movement, died at the age of 86.

(See bottom of article for details of summer internships at the Margaret Sanger institute.)

Margaret Sanger's 1953 speech about standing up to the authorities to defend her convictions

This I believe, first of all: that all our basic convictions must be tested and transmuted in the crucible of experience–and sometimes, the more bitter the experience, the more valid the purified belief.

As a child, one of a large family, I learned that the thing I did best was the thing I liked to do. This realization of doing and getting results was what I have later called an awakening consciousness.

There is an old Indian proverb which has inspired me in the work of my adult life. “Build thou beyond thyself, but first be sure that thou, thyself, be strong and healthy in body and mind.” To build, to work, to plan to do something, not for yourself, not for your own benefit, but “beyond thyself”–and when this idea permeates the mind, you begin to think in terms of a future. I began to think of a world beyond myself when I first took an interest in nursing the sick.

As a nurse

As a nurse, I was in contact with the ill and the infirm. I knew something about the health and disease of bodies, but for a long time, I was baffled at the tremendous personal problems of life, of marriage, of living, and of just being. Here indeed was a challenge to “build beyond thyself.” Where was I to begin? I found the answer at every door. For I began to believe there was something I could do toward increasing an understanding of these basic human problems. To build beyond myself, I must tap all inner resources of stamina and courage, of resolution within myself. I was prepared to face opposition, even ridicule, denunciation. But I had also to prepare myself, in defense of these unpopular beliefs, I had to prepare myself to face courts and even prisons. But I resolved to stand up, alone if necessary, against all the entrenched forces which opposed me.

Supported by patients; harassed by authorities

I started my battle some forty years ago. The women and mothers whom I wanted to help, also wanted to help me; they, too, wanted to build beyond the self, in creating healthy children and bringing them up in life to be happy and useful citizens. I believed it was my duty to place motherhood on a higher level than enslavement and accident. I was convinced we must care about people; we must reach out to help them in their despair.

For these beliefs I was denounced, arrested, I was in and out of police courts and higher courts, and indictments hung over my life for several years. But nothing could alter my beliefs. Because I saw these as truths, I stubbornly stuck to my convictions.

Something had to be done

No matter what it may cost in health, in misunderstanding, in sacrifice, something had to be done, and I felt that I was called by the force of circumstances to do it. Because of my philosophy and my work, my life has been enriched and full. My interests have expanded from local conditions and needs, to a world horizon, where peace on earth may be achieved when children are wanted before they are conceived. A new conciousness will take place, a new race will be born to bring peace on earth. This belief has withstood the crucible of my life’s joyous struggle. It remains my basic belief today.

This I believe–at the end, as at the beginning of my long crusade for the future of the human race.

From a speech made by Margaret Sanger, a population activist, in November 1953, known as "This I believe".
The original electronic source is at http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/news/this_i_believe.html

Listen to an

mp3 recording of Margaret Sanger's November 1953 broadcast

on Edward R. Murrow's This I Believe radio program, provided to the Sanger Project by the National Public Radio. The text of the speech below comes from Margaret Sanger's Papers at the Library of Congress (130:620). Several earlier drafts of the speech appear on the Sanger microfilm, but this version is the closest to the one spoken by Sanger.

Summer Internships at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project in New York

Contact: Cathy Moran Hajo [mailto:cathy.hajo[AT]nyu.edu] Sent: Fri 16/01/2009 15:54 Subject: Summer Internships at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project in New York The Margaret Sanger Papers Project is pleased to announce its summer internship program for 2009. We seek applications from graduate or advanced undergraduate students to work with the editorial staff at the Project's offices in New York City. This is a wonderful opportunity for students to become proficient in primary and secondary research, and the process of editing historical documents for publication. Interns can apply for internships working with the book or digital edition.

BOOK INTERNSHIP: Interns will be working on Volume IV of the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, covering the years 1920-1966 and focusing on her efforts to create a global birth control movement. Interns will work under the supervision of editors on specific topics, tracing people, places, events and issues covered in the documents. The research will be used to produce annotation and introductory material for the volume. Research will be conducted in the Project's offices, using the comprehensive microfilm edition and other primary sources, as well as at local libraries and with resources available on the Internet.

DIGITAL INTERNSHIP: We have two digital projects available for interns this summer.
1) We are preparing a digital edition on Margaret Sanger's 1922 trip to Japan for the Women and Social Movements web collection. Interns will transcribe, encode, and conduct research for essays and interpretation on the documents for this small collection.

2) We are also continuing work on our digital edition of Sanger's speeches and articles, focusing on texts written by Margaret Sanger in the 1930s.

Interns will be proofread the texts, add XML encoding, and draft subject index entries for the documents. Interns will conduct research as needed to verify dates, titles, and publication information, or to identify the names of people, organizations and books mentioned in the documents.

More information and application information can be located on our website, at:
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/aboutmspp/internships.html The deadline for applications is March 1, 2009.

Cathy Moran Hajo, Ph.D.
Associate Editor/Assistant Director The Margaret Sanger Papers Project Department of History, New York University
53 Washington Square South New York, NY 10012 (212) 998-8666 (212) 995-4017 (fax)
[email protected] Visit our website at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger

Photo source: http://nativenotes.net/tag/black-family/

January 19 is Martin Luther King day. It has been my tradition to trot out one of his most unknown speeches. Circulate it widely, please. I was a teenager when he appeared on so many talk shows. Apart from his captivating and stirring speeches, his calm reason and supreme intelligence---on so many issues---still impresses me. He was a giant. And he was more literate than Obama on the ecological facts of life, obviously. But then, so many more were in the late sixties too. See also this article about the 1999 civil trial which found that the US Government conspired in King's assassination.

Family Planning — A Special and Urgent Concern

by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (May 1966)

Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain.

There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.

What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.

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

Please see Planned Parenthood's page in which Martin Luther King's acceptance speech was published. (The link previously given here is broken. - Ed)

Image built from original here: http://www.workingamerica.org/healthcarehustle/

The Global Population Speak Out aims to break down the barrier to public discussion of the population-environment link.

Boulder, Colorado - Scientists from around the world have pledged to speak out publicly in February, 2009 on the problem of the size and growth of the human population. Speaking out as well will be environmental and science writers, social activists, and representatives of environmental groups. The event, called the Global Population Speak Out (GPSO), aims to weaken a decades-long taboo against open discussion of population issues.

So far, GPSO has received pledges from scientists and others in 17 countries, all agreeing to speak out during February. Many will do so through the print media. Others are planning interviews, talks, and conferences.

Endorsers of the project include, Stanford University scientists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel, and co-author of The Limits to Growth Dennis Meadows.

Those pledging to speak out include botanist and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Peter Raven, Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, University of Delhi professor of community medicine Jugal Kishore, University of Tehran environmental scientist M. F. Makhdoum, and social activists Jerry Mander and Harvey Wasserman.

One of the project's endorsers, Ohio State University anthropologist Jeffrey McKee, said, "If you look at the key issues and goals of our time -- economic prosperity, clean water, sustainable energy, and biodiversity survival -- they all have a common denominator. They all point to the need immediately and responsibly to stem the growth of the human population, and to return our population size to sustainable limits."

But, said environmental writer and GPSO organizer John Feeney, "Despite its central role in nearly every environmental problem, many have for years viewed the population topic as politically unpopular. In fact, despite the urgent need for solutions, it's become taboo to state publicly that population growth must be humanely stabilized and reversed."

He added, "Environmental groups have been reluctant to talk about it because they know it will trigger criticism and may compromise funding. Scientists have hesitated too, knowing any mention of population is sure to stir controversy."

GPSO is designed to make it easier for participants to raise the issue by bringing together a collection of voices so participants know they are not alone in speaking out.

The project grew out of a simple idea, said Feeney. "We wondered, what if a large number of qualified voices worldwide, many of whom might not have emphasized the topic previously, were to speak out on population all at once? With any luck it will nudge the subject closer to the center of public discourse."

Another goal of the event, said Feeney, is to bring new voices to the population issue. "This is a matter of profound importance. There are experts, such as the Ehrlichs, who address it regularly. But we need many more voices. We hope GPSO might help bring a few to the world's attention. Our hope is that after February it will be a little easier to talk about population and there will be more people doing just that."

Contact: John Feeney globalpopulationspeakout [ AT ] gmail.com, +1 303-447-0973

See also: gpso.wordpress.com

Who is liable for the damage done to our society by despotically created 'Authorities'?

In its statement of its values, the representatives of this new horror, the 'Growth Area Authority' state that "we" act "with honesty and openess, are publicly accountable for our actions and are respected for our high quality advice, expertise and impartial decision making."

It is as if the 'value statement' were capable of actually changing the reality. Statements, however, are only words. How can any of us hold the authority to its words? We know that those words will be minced up to suit the values of the authority; not to protect our values.

The Board contains no ecologists, wildlife activists, nurses or doctors, local agriculturalists or permaculturalists, ethicists, civilly concerned social scientists or community activists. It only represents big business.

This board will act to enforce growthism

The problem is that this board can only act in one direction - for overpopulation and inflation linked to scarcity of all resources and against Victorians' human rights for self-government and to maintain a democratic society.

The 'Authority' talks of its 'vision and values', which include 'promoting employment opportunities' and 'foster[ing] the development of communities'. We are going to hear a lot more about 'jobs' because this is the 'carrot' which will be used to cover up the protests against the sticks which such an authority must condone.

"Fostering" community

We will hear more about 'fostering community' too. That won't change the fact that every new development destroys and fragments communities and that local governments have been dismantled and government planning departments have been all but contracted holus-bolus out to corporations of developers, to satisfy Kennett's, Bracks's and now Brumby's growth addiction. This is how our system of democracy has been destroyed by growth. 'Fostering community' will boil down to building new suburbs, importing new people, and sidelining the real communities.

Folks, we are being herded by people who think that they are better than the rest of us because they have managed to seize power from us and call themselves our government. But for nearly two decades now, liberal and labor have had increasingly similar policies and have refused to give the voting public details of differences in policies. Articles at Propaganda Watch, show how the mainstream press and even the ABC have supported this decline in democracy.

Hollow, faulty financial system overwhelms democracy

When it gets down to it, the Victorian government is not governing for voters; it is acting for, financing or defending and supporting developers - financers and builders of new suburbs and infrastructure. Bankers, engineers, construction corporations, acting through the medium of planners - who have recently exploded in numbers, like economics grads and 'financial advisors'. These corporations have made their wealth from high immigration driving up the cost of land and creating an infrastructure boom. This is the system which has brought the Western world to its knees and our government, like the US government, is now a captive of that system.

We must break through. We need to talk about what is happening and reach a consensus to resist this malignant force.

No-one willingly gave the Victorian government this power to hand over our taxes and power to development and finance corporations; they have taken it.

The faces of authority

The following people are the public face of this 'Authority' - the 'Board'. They are in the development business. They are not in the business of government or democracy; they will function to minimise any remaining vestigial opportunities for citizens of Victoria to stand up against the bulldozer of development which is destroying our democracy, our safety and our quality of life.

Their names are public property, listed at the Growth Area Authority site.

Chaired by Chris Banks AM, other board members are Felix Blatt, Frank King, Di Fleming, Ann Keddie and Ian Munro.

The Board reports to the Minister for Planning under the Planning and Environment (Growth Areas Authority) Act 2006.
- Chris Banks AM Chairman.
Chris Banks AM brings a developer's perspective after many years in the housing industry as Chief Executive Officer at Delfin and AV Jennings.

Felix Blatt is the Chief Advisor Project Management for Rio Tinto and has extensive experience managing greenfield engineering projects.

Frank King.
As a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Treasury and Finance, Frank King is a member of the audit committees for the Departments of Treasury and Finance, Sustainability and Environment and Justice.

Ann Keddie.
With extensive experience within the industry, Ann Keddie is a Director of Ann Keddie Architects. She is also a sessional member of VCAT and a member of the Priority Development Panel and Planning Panels Victoria.

Di Fleming.
Di Fleming is a former Victorian Telstra Businesswoman of the Year, associate professor in Digital Design at RMIT University and director of lab.3000. She steered lab.3000's evolution to become the state's first Centre of Excellence in Digital Design.

Ian Munro.
Ian Munro PSM, is a consultant for the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development (DIIRD) after formerly holding the position of Deputy Secretary and CEO, Invest Assist for DIIRD.

Source: http://heykidscomics.com/

The big question

Are these people liable for the impact of their decisions to promote infrastructure for population growth? If not, who is?

This article was first posted as a comment to an article by Tim Murray, but I decide to turn it into my own blog entry after it was pointed out that the size of this comment caused Tim's article to be dwarfed.

Tim Murray, in his excellent article "Is the home-building industry the prime mover of our ecological ruin?" of 31 December 2008 wrote:

"The former Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, once offered Australia a choice. It could sustain jobs and economic security by using its brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products it produces and by transforming manufacturing. Or it could continue to be a 'lazy Australia' that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building homes and shopping malls. And that is indeed what is it has done, adding a third to its population in less than three decades."

These words point to the essence of the problem.

Population growth is an 'easy' way for those, who have guided this country's destiny for at least the last three decades, to enrich itself. But, the evidence, not to mention, common sense and basic intuition, tells us from the point of view of this society as whole, we can only become poorer and not richer as a result. Firstly, the access of each one of us to our natural resources must necessarily be reduced on average, and secondly, although, less intuitively obvious, increasing population size, once an optimum population size has been passed, creates dis-economies, rather than economies of scale. It costs more per head of population as our cities become more packed, to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary to provide, transport, water, electricity, health care, education and other essential services. However, paradoxically, as we become poorer an average and as we steal ever more wealth from future generations, a small elite become wealthier.

The way to become wealthier as Carr implied was to build up a manufacturing and science base using the talent we already have within our shores. This indeed happened, when Australian had a population of only 7 million between the First and Second World Wars. Although not a well understood fact Australia, as a result became largely self-sufficient and, through the strength of its manufacturing base able to sustain a navy and air force and an army with eight fully-equipped divisions by July 1942, was able to deter the Japanese from persuing their plans to invading Australia in March 1942, even before their defeat by US forces at the Battle of the Coral Sea. This country was a world leader in technology. This is the thesis of Andrew Ross's "Armed and Ready - the industrial development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945" of 1995. Although largely ignored since 1995, it has yet to be challenged bay any comparable work. This was the subject of a discussion on Online Opinion and I made use of it in an article "The myth of the Howard Government's Defence Competence" of 21 November 2007.

Had Australia maintained that technological lead, I believe that we would have been a more prosperous nation as well as a more equitable and democratic nation and we would have stood a greater chance of achieving sustainable technological base. However it seems that it appears that it suited an elite within our society which has come to guide our destiny to throw all that away in order to be able to enrich itself at the expense of the rest of us and this process continues today.

Notwithstanding Bob Carr's very apt comments, I just cannot accept that he was ever sincere. Of course, he always sounds sincere, but his actions, and even his words, on other occasions belie these words.

Listen to Bob Carr's moving words, at an ABC sponsored public 'forum' on 18 September 2008, about how we were all warned as far back as the 1970's about the perils of global warming and then ask yourself how a man with this knowledge could have then been responsible for the massive expansion in NSW open cut coal mining which is not only helping to fuel global warming, but also destroying NSW's own environment.

Although this was supposed to be a 'forum', in the typical style of Bob Carr who, throughout his career has avoided critical scrutiny even more determinedly than the fabled Count Dracula avoided sunlight, limited question time to 10 minutes.

However, the written comments at the end of the page give an overwhelmingly damning verdict of his legacy. Here are some:

"Bob Carr should have done a lot more reading when he was in office -- reading the reports about the shocking state of the health, education, transport and infrastructure of NSW. Then perhaps he would've done something about it. Or perhaps he would have arranged a succession plan when he vamoosed out of politics before it came crashing down.

"Or perhaps he should've spent less time reading job offers from banks with connections to road-building firms.

"Bob Carr has always had pretensions of gravitas, but we don't have to prop up his delusions.
We are paying for his superannuated retirement, so could we give no public air time to his irrelevant ponderings -- his actions mean that his mental meanderings have no credibility."

This drew a defence:

I don't find Carr enormously stimulating, but you clearly don't have anything coherent against him - apart from his unsatisfactory chin. Harold Bloom - he of the Western Canon - paid tribute to Bob Carr as the only senior politician whom he respected as an intellectual: www.podcastdirectory.com/podshows/2890398.

... which, in turn drew a further response:

"I'm not searching for deep intellectualism in my politicians. If I were, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott would rank well ahead of Bob Carr on sheer intelligence (although I know intelligence is not the same as intellect). I would say Harold Bloom didn't get around enough if he really thought Bob Carr was the only senior politician whom he regarded as an intellectual, or maybe he never met Edward Kennedy, Sir Edward Heath, Enoch Powell or dare I say it, Edward Whitlam ₁ (what is it with Edwards?).

"You are being disingenuous when you say we complain only of Mr Carr's chin. We are complaining about his sale of public assets, his close relationship with businesses that profitted under his government, and the general ineptitude of his government."

Further comments:

"... Then was the disgraceful Workers Compensation Reform. Instead of making those who caused the problem pay he made the workers and community pay. ...We do not deserve these indecent preaching pratts but we have them."

"The collective disdain toward Carr in this blog gives me a glimmer of hope in humanity. There are actually people out there who are switched on to just how ridiculous this country has become. Our governments consist of individuals that could be considered criminals by any rational court."

"Give me a break. 'Human Decency' would demand an apology from this 'retired', at great public expense, ex-professional politician that never had real job or a degree from the university of life and probably the worse leader ever of this state, to the long suffering taxpayers and people of theONCE great State of NSW, for what he and his party have done to us. He should have the "Human Decency" to apologize. Tsk, Tsk ..."

"This is the man who recently gave his full moral support to Morris Iemma's and Michael Costa's attempt to privatise their electricity assets of NSW in spite of the fact that Iemma had ruled that out prior to the 2007 elections and in spite of the fact that 79%-86% of NSW residents opposed privatisation - all quietly forgotten, at least, that is what he no doubt hopes.

"It is most strange how Carr seems so much more passionate about events in other times and the politics of other lands than he ever was about the political and events in the time and place, where as state Premier and potential federal Labor leader and, hence, potential Prime Minister, he could have made a lasting and positive impact on Australian and, possibly, world history. Of course, it is a matter of record that he did not and his administration will be remembered as one of the most inept, secretive and anti-democratic in the history of this county.

"I wonder if Bob Carr has ever contemplates how figures like himself are likely to be viewed in future times by people trying to understand this age through the fictional and non-fictional works of our time." - James Sinnamon

"It is sad indeed that Australian political life is so reduced that Bob Carr passes as 'interesting' and an 'intellectual'. In general Australian politicians lag about 20 to 30 years behind informed opinion on matters outside of their field of interest - personal power and privilege."

"Bob didn't show much human decency when he sold off Prince Henry Hospital, when before he was elected he promised he would save it.

"Long term illnesses, such as aids, mental illness and long term heart recovery, just to name a few, had this beautiful position on the coast to recover in. But he sold it off under the pretence of changing the laws to protect coastal lands, which actually just gave him the power to do what he wanted.

"Medical teams were disgusted and sad, because they knew they would never have such great teams and means for recovery again.

"Where is the decency in that? So I guess we have answered the question."

"Demonstrably, Mr Carr must have only a theoretical interest in human decency.
Practically, he squattered the housing boom in NSW during the 10 years that he was Premier with the result of infrastructure breakdowns, health meltdown, etc of essential services.

"Pity that a well read man such as Bob Carr only make sounds which practically signify nothing in what he did.

"There are basic flaws in a political system that rewards such hypocrisy."

"He is giving himself credibility but NSW knows bob the builder of tolls and tolled tunnels and fire sales of Acer Arena lowest bid wins and Sydney Showground foxy giveaways

"We get to pay the pension indexed to their former self served salaries... in addition to an office with staff a minder and a travel expense free ride....

"Parasites never leave the host until the host is totally consumed.

"If they have obviously stitched up a consultancy job in the private sector with prior intimacy ... then the perks should be suspended until they are needy.

"It would be 'humanely decent' if they gave up the perks until they are retired at 65 with a pension closer to the average wage and fund their own office and staff and carr transport.

"Take the Ted Mack pledge not to drain our Treasury for the purpose of supporting the people not the servants of the people... Ted was decent, nobody else has the decency he walked the talk and left no toll for his life's work."

"Bob carr.

"Decency?

"Why this man isn't in gaol is unfathomable.

"I notice that the very bank who owns the toll roads in sydney is now his employer.

"If this man is a letter of letters then the best place he should be writing his comments and memoirs should be behind a locked door. It is people like Bob Carr who have become a gnawing cancer in society, from their actions they encourage more illegal activity, thus throwing Australian society into the depths of the developing world. ..."

I could write pages more about Bob Carr's many other crimes against the environment, democracy, accountability and social justice. Whilst his environmental accomplishments were substantial in his early years, particularly his massive extension of NSW's National Parks, I think those accomplishments and all his fine words about population control should more properly be regarded as 'bait' to cause people environmentalists to forgive him for a massive slew of other pro-business and anti-environmental policies. To get an idea how 'bait and switch' is used , view Barrie Zwicker's deconstruction of the phony US dissident Noam Chomsky in the YouTube broadcast "The Shame of Noam Chomsky and the Left gatekeepers". I think Carr is a kind of fake-Malthusian variant of Noam Chomsky.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Edward Gough Whitlam is more widely known as 'Gough Whitlam'. Bob Carr has repeatedly spurned the legacy of Gough Whitlam, but had Gough's Government retained power, he would have prevented the population growth that Carr claimed to be against. Furthermore the Department of Urban Planning (or something with a similar name) which was abolished by Malcolm Fraser would have constrained the damage that developers were able to cause to our cities. For all of his flaws Gough Whitlam is an intellectual giant in comparison to Carr as the poster pointed out. Moreover, unlike the do-nothing government of Bob Carr, Gough's Government implemented far greater number worthwhile reforms (although most have been, sadly, subsequently dismantled).

Economic house of cards, ecological devastation

That the home building industry is the prime mover and catalyst of our ecological ruin was never more clearly illustrated than by statements recently made by University of West Florida economist Rick Harper, director of the UWF’s Haas Centre for Business Research. Harper argued that the real estate market would never recover from the current recession until population growth soaks up existing housing inventory and prices consequently begin to appreciate. “If we don’t stimulate population growth…we are going to take 10 years or more to recover from this recession”, he said, “we’ve had a huge overbuilding of the housing sector, there was just too much investment in residential structures.” He therefore advocates an easing of immigration standards to allow more people of higher education and net worth into the country.

Bob Carr

The former Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, once offered Australia a choice. It could sustain jobs and economic security by using its brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products it produces and by transforming manufacturing. Or it could continue to be a “lazy Australia” that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building homes and shopping malls. And that is indeed what is it has done, adding a third to its population in less than three decades.

Bush administration

The Bush administration followed a similar course. By outsourcing decent working class jobs and tolerating the blatant mass employment of millions of low wage “undocumented” service sector workers they not only relegated 5 million Americans from the middle class but eviscerated what was left of the manufacturing sector. Land speculation and homebuilding assumed a greater importance in this new economy with a hollow core. Like a drug addict who has forsaken proper nutrition for energy, the new economy of real estate growthism relies on an immigration fix (and birth incentives to a lesser degree) for energy.

One fix never enough for an addict

But each succeeding fix requires greater injections to achieve the same jump start, and the cycle of boom and bust plays out with greater and greater consequences. More severe labour shortages, that call for more foreign injections, and the devastating ecological results, largely unsung, manifested in massive losses in prime farmland at a frightening pace and a cost in wildlife habitat that lies at the perimeter of expanding urban boundaries. Not to mention the greater energy consumption, waste disposal and pollution involved with never-ending urbanization. North American studies reveal that at most, rational land use planning could only mitigate half these problems. The other half are the inevitable consequence of largely immigrant-driven population growth.

Never enough fuel, never enough money

But real estate development itself requires fuel. It requires a favourable interest rate climate, and local governments bought and paid for together with their planning departments, staffed with growth managers who can converse in “greenspeak” and greenwash to assuage anxieties about their development plans. And of course it requires home buyers. People. The more the merrier. And where do people come from? Through the airport or the maternity ward, and the federal government is the gatekeeper at the first and most important port of entry, and quite influential in manipulating the volume at the other port too. Home buyers, in turn, have a requirement too. Financing. This holds the key, at least in Canada, to the demographic pyramid scam of the immigrant-propelled economy. For the big Canadian banks and credit institutions are not only the essential lubricants of home purchase and land development, but potent immigration lobbyists and influence peddlers as well.

Royal Bank of Canada

In fact the president and CEO of Canada’s dominant Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in 2008 reiterated the position taken by an October 2005 RBC report that the government should hike its annual immigration intake from its present approximately 240,000 to some 400,000. No doubt he would be speaking on behalf of his competitors in that ambition. What is most impressive about Mr. Gordon Nixon’s political strategy is that is conducted on a broad front. RBC realizes that the federal government may be the gatekeeper, but the environmental movement is the barking dog which must be silenced if the gate is to be left open wide for the avalanche of consumers that it wants.

Financing entropy

So RBC laid out a Machiavellian plan. To cover their quest to underwrite the conversion of Canada’s best farmland to sprawling subdivisions and hundreds upon hundreds of species at risk to extinction in the process, they concocted an “Environmental Blueprint” that would signal to the environmental movement that “(they) support environmental sustainability”. They declared that would not for example“engage in new financing activities with corporations operating unsustainably in tropical rainforests or High Conservation Forests”. But the trees of urban Canada were presumably fair game, as are the rich fields of BC’s Fraser Valley and the Class 1 farmland of Ontario that is being developed at a pace of perhaps 60,000 acres per year. One might think that this kind of ecological damage, not to mention this threat to our national food security, would meet with the outrage of our environmental NGOs. Apparently RBC thought so too. That is why they bought their silence.

Silencing the barking dog

To prove their determination to “direct a significant portion of our philanthropic efforts to environmental causes”, they arranged to steer money to the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) for each client who switched to electronic bank statements. A cute deal for both parties. NCC, always thirsty for dough, got a corporate bag man, and RBC got to wear a green cloak over its mercenary endeavours. It was not done for the environment, it was a strictly commercial transaction, ecological dispensation for suburban sprawl in return for cash and acquiescence.

Failure of environmental flagships

Many of us have been dumbfounded by the failure of flagship environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club of Canada or the David Suzuki Foundation to publicly contest the federal government’s mass immigration policy. NCC not surprisingly has been silent too, even though population growth is an obvious culprit in habitat loss. How could environmentalists ignore the Elephant in the Room? How could they ignore the obvious ecological impact of immigrant-driven population growth in Canada? Why didn’t they take the release of the Census report of March 2007, which revealed that Canada had the fastest growing population of all G8 countries, as an opportunity to attack government policy on this issue, and to educate people that population growth is a key variable of environmental degradation? That reducing per capita consumption without containing population is a futile enterprise.

Ideological myopia and donor bases

The answer was not to be found primarily in their ideological myopia, but in the examination of their carefully guarded donor base, which should, but isn’t, made easily available for public scrutiny. A look at the accounts of the David Suzuki Foundation reveals that the Royal Bank of Canada not only gave an award to the good Doctor, but is a significant contributor to his foundation. No wonder that Dr. Suzuki will not publicly say what he says privately. That the importation of people from low consuming third world countries to Canada so as to convert them to “hyper-consumers” is, in his words, “nuts”, and that industrialized countries are already overpopulated.

Demographic lockjaw

The Sierra Club is equally gripped with demographic lockjaw. The 2005 Report of the BC Sierra Club, the country’s largest, showed that the Toronto Dominion Bank and the Van City Credit Union empire, both big real estate lenders, were prominent contributors to their “environmental” organization. Given these contributions, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is retrospectively clear why it has been difficult to make Sierra Club directors understand the environmental significance of mass immigration “if their salary depends on not understanding it.” Or is it that they understand it, but they tell “the silent lie”. The lie of knowing that something of vital importance is true and needs to be told, but deciding not to tell it. In this case, to protect a donor base at the cost of the raison d’etre of the organization, and the environment itself. Bureaucratic self-preservation seems to take on a life of its own. Truth, integrity and courage are its casualties.

Arguably then, homebuilding is not the prime mover of ecological ruin after all. Nor is it the greed of developers or the banks that finance them, or the dreams of the people that flood in to buy houses. It is, in my judgment, the ‘green’ watchdogs who haven’t barked because big money has thrown them a bone.

Tim Murray,

Quadra Island, BC

December 29/08

December 15, 2008

Surprise, surprise! The Federal Government has welched on its emissions-cut targets to mitigate climate change.
The Herald Sun reported today that the reason given is that the Rudd Government doesn't believe "the world will get its act together on climate change soon."

The global emergency is being treated like some kind of board game. Why don't they simply cut population growth?

You might just as well ask a bunch of lemmings not to take a running jump.

This is from Monday's ABC radio national PM programme. Kevin Rudd comments on the emissions targets that have just been set: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2446990.htm

" The Prime Minister defends his 2020 target with the option of going higher if the rest of the world moves, saying it's comparable to Europe's response.

KEVIN RUDD: 'The EU's 20 per cent target announced over the weekend is equal to a 24 per cent reduction in emissions for each European from 1990 to 2020. Our five per cent unconditional target is equal to a 27 per cent reduction in carbon pollution for each Australian from 2000 to 2020 and a 34 per cent reduction for each Australian from 1990.

That is because Europe's population is not projected to grow between 1990 and 2020. By contrast Australia's population is projected to grow by 45 per cent over the same period.'

Note that Rudd totally misrepresents what is happening: The growth is 'projected' ... as if it happened all by itself. Europe has cut back on its growth since the first oil shock. Rudd is setting out purposefully to grow Australia's population enormously. It would not grow much at all by itself and, without his interference (despite the interference of Howard), would stabilise and hopefully decline within a couple of generations. People should understand that Rudd is forcing a population growth policy on Australians and is selling it to them by pretending he has no control over it; allowing them to infer that this is a natural phenomenon. It is not. It is a conscious, coercive political policy carried out by the Federal government with the complicity of the States.

Comment on Rudd's speech from a disgusted correspondent on [email protected]: "This means that the Labor Party is fully aware that population growth makes it more difficult to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but have decided to grow anyway. Australians will be faced with making larger cuts in living standards than people in Europe in order to feed the growth monster. We will be sacrificed on the altar of the housing industry by a government that represents business before the people."

.

Invest in growth but go live on another planet

I have friends with money who occasionally discuss with me how they should invest it, because I write about land-speculation and resource depletion, railing against population growth, in absolute contrast to their professional investment advisers. I tell them they should invest it in all the things they are morally against. The old adage that 'money is the root of all evil' can also be switched around: "Evil is the root of all money." They should buy land in the path of environmentally destructive, overpopulation-facilitating, new roads and railways. They should invest in coal, uranium, agribusiness, and they should invest in water. Then they should leave this planet and collect their dividends from somewhere safe.

About fifteen years ago I published an article in the Weekly Times (which was buried on about page 70) about how continued population growth in my state (Victoria, Australia) would lead to water scarcity and cause the city to draw water from the country. I was right then and I am right now: it is going to get worse. Seeing the fulfilment of my prophesy has taught me a lot about the economic and social system most of us reading and writing in English live within. It seems to be no different from the political systems which have brought official third world countries down, despite what we are constantly told by the media and mainstream environment groups about being rich 'first world' citizens living in a democracy. Not a natural capitalist or even endowed with much spare cash, I have never been able to bring myself to invest in my country's downfall, or I might have bought shares in water, as well as in property development, coal and uranium.

Permaculture

I did, however, invest in permaculture. With the help of a friend who was doing a permaculture course, I planted an orchard and began cultivating a vegetable garden, the better to survive the financial crash which we both thought anyone with remotely sparking synapses should be able to see coming. (That was in 2003 or 2004).

A few years later, the confluence of the rising tide of population and declining rainfall was used by the Victorian government as an excuse to raise the price of water and drastically reduce its supply to suburban homes. "We've all got to get used to the reality that the climate is drying and the population is growing", the government said, as if the pressure of population had nothing to do with their invitations to come to Victoria and their redesignation of every part of the state as a region in need of immigration.

Vale Victoria the "Garden State"

Before 1992 Victoria was called, "The Garden State". This term was actually embossed on licence plates. Then came the shock merchants. First a conservative (Liberal) government dominated both houses of parliament, led by Mr Jeff Kennett. It rammed through severe changes to land-use planning, removing many rights from citizens about what could be done to the state and their neighborhood and amalgamating and renaming local boundaries in a confusing way.

Kennett tried to boost population numbers but only succeeded in stemming the flow to Queensland, a state then known for its cheap land. But he literally paved the way for overpopulation by normalising the removal of democratic barriers to intensification of development. After Kennett, in 1999, a Labor Government dominated Victoria, led by Mr Bracks, a Catholic.

Mr Bracks out-did the conservatives, teaming up with a slew of developers and engineers and the mainstream media (which sells real-estate all over the planet and funds life-style and home-improvement programs on t.v.) to transform Victoria into a kind of single-industry real-estate economy. Like a kind of smiling, evil genius, he actually convinced Victorians that their population was falling, instilling a fear that perhaps they were all going to go extinct, yet, at the same time, convincing them that Victoria needed more houses for the growing population. Bracks and his side-kick, Mr Thwaites, having started off a population-juggernaut, suddenly jumped ship and left the State in charge of their back-seat driver, the Treasurer, Mr Brumby.

Brumby racheted up Victoria's population growth to extremes it had never reached before, giving rise to this arcane remark by Ms Danielle Green in Parliament on 16 April 2008:

"(...) it is now expected that the population growth predicted in 2001 is actually going to be here in 2020 rather than in 2030. (...) - it is like 1 million people coming around to your place next Sunday and expecting a sausage at a barbecue."

From being able to water whenever you felt like it, now - because of the 'big barbecue' the government had scheduled without consulting the rest of us - you could only water twice a week between the hours of 6 am and 8am. This is the time when nine to fivers are on their way to work and shift-workers are sleeping. At the same time we hit mid-summer with scorching heat that turned leaves to crisps and caused the native trees to drop their branches. Along the Murray Darling River system, our major food-basin, ancient red-gums that had survived European settlement until then, were giving up the ghost.

Water hysteria

Victorians became obsessed with water. Australians became obsessed with water. Not only was water restricted, but you had to 'invest in' - hell, you had to buy - new trigger-devices so you could turn your hose on and off like a gun, whilst you held it, or run the risk of arrest. I bought a couple that were supposed to fit any diameter hose, only to find that they didn't fit my hose. Taking them back to the store would have cost me a fortune in petroleum (the price of which was also rocketing up) so I worried instead.

I had a very small metal tank (pictured at the top of this article), but every time it rained I gathered the water in baths and buckets, with the sense that my life-blood was slipping down the drain. It was never enough. Fruit fell off the trees before it ripened and it was all I could do to stop the trees themselves from dying. How I hated the government and idiotic Victorians who prattled on stupidly about 'saving water' instead of running out of town the contemptuous and well-paid 'economists' and politicians who were preparing Victorians for the idea that they should pay up to 5% of their incomes for water in the future because of Victoria's population growth.

The logistics and hygiene of water conservation and use were confusing and tiresome. If one 'saved' water by brushing one's teeth using a glass of water instead of running the tap, should one then pour the rest of the water glass onto the tomatoes or should one use it to rinse the sink. If you took a quick shower and saved the water at the base of the shower, how long could you leave it until you used it? Could you use it on the vegetables? One could spend hours in the hard-ware shop choosing ribbed hoses to connect to the washing-machine and laundry drain-pipes, only to find that the joints would leak under the house. "It's all guess-work," the shop-assistant said, shrugging her shoulders.

Tension in the suburbs

Tension rose in the suburbs. We were reported to the police for 'wasting' water after someone turned our front garden hose on for a prank. This happened twice, until my nervous mother disconnected the hose and hid it. A friend’s wife picked him up from day surgery and, as they entered their driveway, he pointed to a neighbour who was hosing her four-wheel drive down in the street, and complained somewhat groggily of how he himself was unable to keep their garden alive. His wife then went up to the neighbour and accused her of water-profligacy, and not only that, on her use of a SUV in a time of imminent petroleum depletion. The two neighbours dueled verbally on the footpath and things have never been the same between them again. In another case a man succumbed to a heart attack after he was attacked by a passer-by for hosing his garden (with tank water as it turned out.)

The money required to purchase and install a large tank was a huge outlay for me. I kept the radio turned off in order to avoid the government's incessant dishonest moralising about "Saving water for future generations" when I knew that it was touting for immigrants simply to boost the price of water and land, and scheming to divert water to agribusiness.

My new tank

Eventually, however, I 'invested' in a large tank. I had intended to install it myself but discovered, to my consternation, that it would not fit in the place I had meant for it to go, which had a down-pipe in situ. I thought about the problem for months, and how I might connect it to other down-pipes, but the problem overwhelmed me, so I thought I would have to call a plumber. Only because of the construction down-turn, was I able to get one to come. I was amazed and impressed by the comparative grandeur of the system he designed. First he tilted the gutters on my large tin roof so that all the water converged at a single point. He then connected that point to a pipe that went down into the ground, then up into the rotund plastic reservoir perched picturesquely under the loquat tree. He then ran another pipe out of the big tank, underground, then up again to the little tank, which would take the overflow. It crossed my mind that a series of short pipes between the tanks would have used less material and not have required three men to dig pits, but I was too glad to see the plumber to argue with him.

The joy of capitalism

I was riveted by my new water-wealth. Suddenly I was experiencing capitalism at its rawest. Shakespeare's 'gentle rain that falls, unstrained', [Portia's speech inThe Merchant of Venice, in case you had forgotten] had triumphed until then, but, now that I owned the means of production, this suddenly changed. I could collect the stuff in vast quantities. If the drought continued long enough, I could sell glasses of it to passers-by as they struggled up the hill in the heat. Water became a source of fascination. I found contemplation of the habits of piped water fascinating; the fact that it will run up-hill so reliably, as long as it starts higher than the final destination seemed magical. I couldn't wait for it to rain to prove this to myself. Luckily we soon had an exceptional downpour and the big tank half-filled up in one afternoon. It rained for several days after that. I spent a lot of time tapping the big tank to work out how much water was in it. I felt that soon I would hear water coursing down the out-pipe to my little tank. Each time it rained, I pressed my ear to the out-pipe where it surged up like a serpent from the ground, awaiting a percussive modulation as the water flowed through it to the metallic tank and splashed to meet the somber mosquito nurseries within. The big tank seemed bottomless; there was no overflow. I began to wondered about blockages and air pressure.

The Woes of capitalism

Then, one awful night, I heard a new sound like a massive waterfall outside the bathroom. The rain was smashing down on the garden and forks of lightening alternated with deafening thunderclaps in a kind of infernal disco. I raced out in my pyjamas with a torch. Water was gushing out of the tank like a volcano, roaring down the side, forming a river in the front garden which was flowing under the house. I grabbed a ladder and climbed up the side of the tank to peer into the fountain, with the locat tree clawing at my head and face, and mosquitoes dining off my ankles and arms. The tank was full to overflowing. More aghast than anything that I was losing all this water, I ran about in the rain looking for bits of hose and gutter to use to divert the fountain from the big tank into the hole in the top of the little tank, but nothing worked, and the fury of the storm eventually chased me back inside.

The torrential downpour continued over several days. The plumber came after it stopped. The sand at the base of the tank had eroded and the tank was leaning over to the left. The plumber diagnosed the problem in the fact that the height of the outlet pipe exceeded the height of the inlet pipe. I tried not to even think about the oddness of a plumber making such a mistake. The only thing to do was to drill a new hole and insert the outlet pipe lower down. If I allowed him to empty the tank (all 2,500 L) he would be able to straighten it, but not before. But I knew that if I emptied the big tank we would immediately enter a drought. There was no danger of the tank rolling down the hill and killing anyone. I suffered at the idea that, due to its angle, the big tank's capacity would be diminished by an amount approximately equal to the capacity of the little tank, around 500 L.

Downturn: Reservoir capacity reduction

As a water capitalist, I had been counting on having at my disposal about 3000 L. I despaired at the idea of being reduced to only 2500 L. It was like Scrooge McDuck being told that his millions would stagnate, devoid of interest due to a mistake on the part of the bank, which would cost him more to rectify than it was worth.

The irony is, of course, that I will not earn any money from this water I have supposedly invested in. I paid, all up, somewhere in the region of $2,500 to connect the new tank. I will be paying more for water. I will not be selling from my garden for a profit; it isn't big enough. I only want to be able to supplement my diet in times of hardship, or, if necessary, trade with neigbours. The only people who will ever make a profit out of my water are the tank manufacturers, salespeople, those who transported it, the pvc pipe manufactuers (Mr Pratt, the pipe-manufacturer who helped the Victorian government to market the piping of water all over the State) and the plumber. When I planted my orchard there was no problem with using tap water. Now, simply to keep the trees alive, I had to get a tank. Even the water I have saved, I once would have had for free.

Corporate trolls under bridges and farmers walking off the land

One of the greatest evils of this age is speculation on water and its privatisation. It reminds me of the early kingdoms, which were not tidy little territorial blocks, but rather positionally advantaged perches and fortresses at crucial passes. Perhaps one of the first positional advantages exercised was when a tribe upstream diverted water to exert pressure for favours from a tribe downstream.

Such is the situation of the water capitalist, who buys up water then speculates on it, taking it above the purchasing power of most ordinary farmers. And the infrastructure merchant, who pipes the water, adds to the insult to injury by charging farmers fifty and a hundred thousand for the pipes and pumps to bring the water onto their land. No farmer can farm without water. At this point the capitalist offers the farmers money for their land, which is cheap since it has no water and they have no bargaining power. PlugThePipe farmers are in this dire situation and the Victorian Government is in public private partnership with the corporate group who are taking the incumbent farmers' water from them.

Your garden may be all that stands between you and starvation as we enter permanent economic contraction

In all seriousness, the situation of the suburban gardener who cannot get enough water to keep his plants alive, is of great importance in these times of financial hardship. We need to slow down the economy to cope with petroleum depletion and so as to avoid increasing greenhouse gas production. People who once relied on income from full-time jobs can no longer count on this. The corporations and firms engineered the situation where people became absolutely dependent on their providing work for wages. They encouraged policies that ended in us giving up food-gardens and they pushed to commodify water. They urged governments to increase population so that the price of land for housing they invested in would rise exponentially.

Big Business and Government must return water to citizens

Now, at the very least, the world of business that so transformed our democracy, owes workers land for food-gardens. Huge changes in land-use planning will be needed to restore the capacity for the bulk of the population to supplement their survival by growing food. Big business and government should resile from promoting population policies which further increase demand for land and water.

It has now been raining solidly for two days. This afternoon I went for a walk in the rain in the bush for two hours and got thoroughly soaked. On the way back I passed three well-dressed suburban children who were running back and forth outside their home filling a variety of receptacles from the stormwater flowing in the gutter. It will be good practice for when they grow up and have to carry water for kilometers from the water-merchants. Or perhaps they will become water merchants themselves and no-one will any longer remember that time when water was almost free – as indeed, were we. (Big sigh)

Oh, come on! We've got to fight this harder!

Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Developer reveals last minute meeting with Planning Minister and Council bastardry condemns Western Sydney Woodland at ADI Site.

These sites and sounds files reveal just how important and beautiful this site is. Anyone should be able to see that not to preserve it is to defile traditional Australian values as well as environmental integrity.

Residents shocked as their democracy trashed for development

Concerned residents sat in amazement last night as Penrith Council voted to condemn hundreds of hectares of Cumberland Plain Woodland which NSW Scientists claim is verging on extinction. Council voted 14/15 to enter into a Planning Agreement with developer Delfin Lend Lease to build 3500 houses and clear approx 300 ha of Cumberland Plain Woodland from the ADI Site.

Penrith Council had recently exhibited Delfins Western and Central Precinct Plans as well as the Planning Agreement. Concurrently the Planning Minister had exhibited amendments to the zoning plan for the ADI site allowing the public to call for radical changes to the development.

Councillors were urged by residents that addressed the meeting to defer their decision to enter into the Planning Agreement if they did not understand fully what it is they were voting on and in any case until after the Planning Minister publicly made her final determination and after Councillors had assessed and adopted the Precinct Plans.

Delfin urges Councillors to dismiss views of residents

Arthur Ilias, Delfin Project Manager, addressed the meeting and urged Councillors to dismiss the views of residents urging the protection of more of the site. He went on to claim a meeting occurred that day with Kristina Keneally the Planning Minister and that she assured Delfin that the NSW Government would not amend the zoning plan to protect any more of the site.

Residents Action Group ADI alleges undeclared vested interest

According to Geoff Brown, spokesman for the Residents' Action group, "Several Councillors who supported Delfin Lend Lease, including the Mayor, failed to declare a pecuniary interest. Council Officers presented a clearly misleading email to Councilors prior to the meeting from Peter Goth, a Dept of Planning bureaucrat, claiming the Planning Minister had limited authority to rezone and protect more bushland. Council officers also led councilors to believe there would be further community consultation on the Agreement and that there was also the spurious claim by Planners that the NSW Government may at any time put restrictions on how Councils can collect and use developer levies and therefore the need to rush and lock in this decision."

Brown claims that "The 6 Liberal Councillors who supported the developer voted in contradiction to NSW Liberal policy which since 2003 has been to seek a 100 ha reduction in Delfins housing development."

In his opinion, “This was one of the worst, most undemocratic decisions of all time. These Councillors had no idea what they were supporting and clearly wanted it that way."

Councillor Kevin Crameri alone stood up for Woodlands

"Only one councillor, Independent Kevin Crameri, voted against it. Crameri declared a 'non-pecuniary interest' in that he lived near the proposed development. Prior to the vote he stood up and peppered the council officers with questions on detail, eliciting very confusing responses."

Brown says Council appeared confused

Geoff Brown, who addressed Council for the Residents Action Group, states that these responses seemed to him to indicate that the Councillors had not gone into the matter seriously. On the morning after the Council meeting he said that it had appeared to him that the council were all confused.

"They showed no concern that in allowing the clearing of hundreds of hectares of endangered Cumberland Plain Woodland that they were pushing it towards extinction. They seemed to have no concern with locking ratepayers into a deal with a developer before they had even debated and adopted the Precinct Plans. They had no concern for the fact the Planning Minister had yet to make a final determination on public submissions calling for more of the site to be protected.”

Mayor is himself a real-estate agent for the region and other councillors have pecuniary links

Brown gave his opinion that, “Jim Aitken the Independent Mayor, who heads the massive Jim Aitken and Partners Real Estate group, should not have voted as he will eventually make money from this development approval." He added, "I think that, arguably, Greg Davies the Labor Clr should have declared a pecuniary interest as he is employed by Diane Beamer the Member for Mulgoa and Delfin have financially supported the re-election campaign of Diane Beamer. The evidence for this is available from NSW electoral office. We intend to explore this dodgy approval process further. This is yet another sorry chapter in this planning debacle.”

Residents Action Group will seek urgent clarification from Planning Minister, Kristina Keneally

“These Councillors did their parties a great political disservice and this may play itself out at the NSW Election. We will seek urgent clarification from the Planning Minister about her position as she told the Sydney media only a week ago she was considering protecting more of the site,” said Brown.

Further Comment Geoff Brown 0431 222602
Source Media Release and interview with Geoff Brown
ADI Residents Action Group

In 2001 I made predictions about Australia's current predicament, at the end of a statistical appendix on population and energy for Australia and France (pdf 2.8M). Throughout my thesis I discussed these looming problems and their drivers. It seems appropriate to cite the short predictions from the appendix here, because Australian governments constantly pretend that no-one could see what was coming. The people who formed government from the 80s to now should be held formally responsible.

[Written in 2001]
"Australia's recent history is a strong indicator that population growth is likely to remain rapid or accelerate in the next half century. Between 1946 and 2001, Australia's population grew by 11,849,099 persons, or by 157.58%. From 1946 to 1974 it grew by 85.76%. From 1974 to 2001 it grew by 38.65%. Between the year of the French base projections, 1990 and 2001 Australia's population has grown by approximately 12.8% from 17,169,800 to 19,368,345 or an average of 1.6% per annum. Australia's growth, up to 1966 was affected by baby boom high fertility and high net migration. Although fertility declined rapidly after this, the high immigration continued. With increasing longevity this means that the population has continued to expand rapidly. We can assume that most of the Australian baby boomers will die between 2027 and 2051. If high immigration continues, however, the population will have continued to expand and will require more intense land-use, more infrastructure, and more technology to maintain its economy, even with similar per capita footprints. With exponentially expanding drylands salinity and other forms of desertification, plus massively degraded waterways, together with micro-climate changes brought about by local vegetation removal (without considering the possibility of macro-global climate changes) it is difficult to see how such a large population will survive without severe declines in quality of life, standard of living, health and longevity. As well as other bio-diversity die-off, the chances seem high for considerable human die-off due to the effect of desertification on the economy and environment. Petroleum based energy shortages are likely both to increase poverty and misery as cheap fuel becomes much less accessible to ordinary citizens. Pollution is likely to increase as coal and other lower grade fuels are substituted, since Australia has not invested in alternative energy sources. Poor design of built and transport infrastructure will add to the difficulty in reducing and satisfying energy demand for both personal and economic use."

On the other hand, under a different system:

"France's recent history is a strong indicator that population growth is unlikely to accelerate in the next half century. Between 1946 and 2001, France's population grew by 18,914,482 persons, or by 47.13 %. From 1946 to 1974 (28 years) it grew by 25.4%. From 1974 to 2001 (27 years) it grew by 17.32%. Between the year of the base population for these projections, 1990, and 2001 France's population has grown by 2,462,713 people or approximately 4.35%, or and average of 0.39% per annum from 56,577,000 in 1990 to 59,039,713. France's growth up to 1974 was affected by both the high fertility of the baby boom and high immigration. After 1974 the contribution of both these factors declined sharply. Increased longevity means that the population remains large, although its base is reducing. If we consider that the Baby Boom went from 1947 to about 1966, and assume longevity of between 80 and 85 years, then between 2027 and 2051 the baby boomer generation will die off. With no other changes this will leave the French population several millions smaller. Since France, like most Western European countries is under considerable environmental stress due to the intensity of land use required by its economy, a smaller population even with similar per capita footprints would lessen this stress and the long-term need for greater infrastructure and technology for the maintenance of the population and its economy. If, as seems likely, petroleum based fuels become rarer and more expensive, France is ahead of a lot of other countries, including Australia, in the spatial organisation, planning and technology for transport and other built infrastructure mediating economic and personal fuel needs. It currently has access to alternative fuel sources and technologies and potentially to others."

Today (8 September 2008) Premier John Brumby unveiled his ominous Victorian Transport Plan in a briefing at Federation Square before an audience of transport heavies.

The Plan no longer includes, however, the proposal encoded in Recommendation 4 of Sir Rod Eddington’s Investing in transport - East West Link Needs Assessment of March 2008.

This proposal, which lies at the very core of his Review, read “Planning work should commence on the staged construction of a new 18 kilometre cross-city road connection, extending from the western suburbs to the Eastern Freeway.”

Concerned people in Melbourne understand that this “cross city road connection" referred to road-tunnels planned for inner Melbourne, to transect Royal and Holland Parks and the Newell Wetlands; and to traverse Sunshine and Footscray in the Western suburbs along elevated roadways.

The East West Tunnel has done a disappearing act

To the citizens of Melbourne's great relief, the East West Tunnel has done a disappearing act!

Rod Quantock, Actor and Activist, and Deputy Convenor of the Royal Park Protection Group Inc. (RPPG) stated that his group interpreted the deletion of the East West road tunnel and freeway from the Brumby Victorian Transport Plan, as "a win for commonsense and the common people."

Quantock described how the groundswell of opposition has grown from June and July this year. It was around that time that councils in the path of road tunnels and toll-ways - Brimbank, Melbourne, Moonee Valley and Yarra Councils - voted unanimously “No Tunnels,” in the face of massive community outrage.

Grass-roots opposition and the dramatic decline of the Labor vote

Convenor Quantock said that there was a general feeling that:

"Grass roots opposition, the dramatic decline of the Labor vote in recent local government elections and the threat to sitting State and Federal Labor Members of Parliament may well have helped persuade the Government against including Sir Rod’s tunnels and freeways in today’s Transport Plan.”

Julianne Bell, Convenor of Royal Park Protection Group (RPPG), told how RPPG has been at the forefront of opposition to destruction of our parks, our local neighbourhoods and heritage streetscapes by the retrograde, ill-conceived transport plans of the Brumby Government.

The long war for democracy and public space is ongoing

Ms Bell stated,

"We have campaigned for 10 years against the expansion of the Eastern Freeway through Royal Park and, during this year, against the onslaught of the Eddington road tunnels. We are grateful that Royal Park, with its open bushland and wetlands, has seen a reprieve from what could have been almost fatal destruction at the hands of bulldozer drivers working on the tunnels.

"The Zoo animals can breathe easy now that a tunnel won’t be constructed next to their home. The State Netball and Hockey Centre can rest assured that games won’t be disturbed by the blasting next door in underground tunnels."

She warned, however, that no-one can afford to relax for long in the current frantic climate of incessant construction. Miss Bell explained:

"The Brumby Government continues to pay lip service to the philosophy of sustainability but appears intent on destroying the urban environment with incremental expansion of roads."

Patrick White, [the great Australian novelist, and author of Voss], sagely observed in 1972 when addressing a rally in Centennial Park, Sydney:

“Parkland is valuable and greedy eyes see the money in it. So you must always be on the alert. Hang onto your breathing spaces in this developing and already over congested city. Protect your parks from the pressure of political concrete.”

Julianne Bell says that RPPG will continue to campaign for sustainable public transport and will be eternally vigilant about proposals by any Government, no matter what colour or persuasion, to build more freeways or tollways through inner Melbourne.

For more information, contact Rod Quantock on 0438862079 & Julianne Bell on 0408022408

What are State of the Environment (SoE) reports?

State of the Environment reports (SoE) www.ces.vic.gov.au/CES/... are made on two levels: state and national. The National Reports are made on the following themes: Atmosphere, Biodiversity, Coasts and oceans, Human settlements, Inland waters, Land, Natural and cultural heritage, Australian Antarctic Territory.

The last published State of the Environment Australia Report was in 2006.

Most Australian states have prepared full SoE reports since the early 1990s, but Victoria has only just published her first, in 2008. Any previous reports were minor and had little or no comparability with the standard and methods that full SoE reports are expected to have.
Unfortunately, this report has a very poor standard. It isn't really a report; it is a policy document, which cites other reports, second or third hand ones.

Legal status

Since 1999, Australian Government legislation mandates the preparation and tabling of the national state of the environment report in Parliament through the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (section 516B)

1. The Minister must cause a report on the environment in the Australian jurisdiction to be prepared in accordance with the regulations (if any) every 5 years. The first report must be prepared by 31 December 2001.
2. The report must deal with the matters prescribed by the regulations.
3. The Minister must cause a copy of the report to be laid before each House of the Parliament within 15 sitting days of that House after the day on which he or she receives the report.

States and territories

[This para newly inserted on 10 December 2008] These reports are not made under the same legislation as the Commonwealth SoE Reports and their comparability is moot. Under the Australian Constitution the States have control over many aspects of the Environment, particularly with regard to land and water. It is not clear what, if anything, might be done where Commonwealth and State Reports and recommendations contradict each other.

Most State and Territory governments prepare state of the environment reports on a regular basis, and it is a legislative requirement in New South Wales, ACT, Tasmania, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia. In New South Wales local governments are legislated to prepare regular SoE reports.

The first ever real Victorian State of the Environment Report (2008) is finally out.

The dead give-away that this isn't a serious ecological report is that it treats us as 'consumers' instead of citizens. [Citizens contribute fully to their country; consumers just hand over cash and go away and shut up].

It contains informed statements which make Victorian economic growth policies look stupid and dangerous to public safety. Unfortunately this report, pretending to be critical, sets objectives which often look as if they would be impossible to coordinate (although some might be achieved briefly through combinations of strong propaganda and force) and which are mutually contradictory. This was probably the result of having a committee which could not really reach agreement between scientific reality and economic ideology, so what we get is a cognitively dissonant mix. My heart goes out to the sincere participants in this compilation.

Most of those whose backgrounds have been made available to the public in the document (you have to click the links) are economics, business or management. Trish Caswell used to be the ACF President, and when she was, she was very vigilant to ensure that population policy was kept off the agenda. I would call her an industrial relations person. There is a dairy irrigator, a council CEO. A primary industry veteran. These people are billed as having knowledge of sustainability, but, most would not have scientific knowledge of ecological systems. I think we are again victim to the Victorian government's idea that 'sustainability' is an economic concept. Can this really pass muster under the EPBC Act? It doesn't have to.

You can read the credentials of the reference group here.

Co-Chairs: Dan Atkins,Kate Vinot,
Members: Alex Arbuthnot, Cheryl Batagol, Dr Sarah Bekessy, Patricia Caswell, Catherine Dale, Russell Higgins, Gillian Sparkes, Mick Murphy, Terry Walshe, Rob Gell, Kelly O'Shannassy

Sarah Beckersley is the only one who inspires confidence in me as an ecologically educated person, however there are three in the unhighlighted list who I don't know.

It is actually pretty amazing that a committee with such obvious business bias and apparently poor aggregate biophysical science background has been allowed to put forth such a report. The report is full of cliches and lacks the profound knowledge of the 2001 State of the Environment Report. We can see why.

The Report, such as it is:

The trick is to go to the end first, but I'll start at the beginning here.

A good beginning:

The Victorian State of the Environment Report 2008 says that:

The future cannot be an extension of the past

Australia’s total material requirements are increasing and are more than twice that of other OECD countries.

Victoria's population growth is a major driver of environmental degradation.

Population growth, settlement and consumption patterns, and climate change are the key drivers of environmental degradation in Victoria.

"Population growth and settlements Victoria’s population growth, increasing affluence and the expansion of our cities and towns, have contributed to unsustainable levels of resource consumption and waste production. This has direct environmental impacts through changes in land use, from conservation and agriculture to cities and towns. To supply our cities and towns, we harvest water for residential and manufacturing purposes, change river flows, discharge wastes to land and sea, remove native vegetation and send damaging gases into the atmosphere."

"Lifestyle factors, such as the demand for larger homes and the rising cost of city living, are increasing the demand for development on Melbourne’s edges. These areas are poorly serviced by public transport due to low urban density and a focus on motor vehicle dominated urban design rather than transport systems which have the least environment impact, and which reduce our vulnerability to future economic shocks."

"Changing social patterns have led to a reduction in the number of people per household. At the same time there has been an increase in the size of houses which are often poorly designed for the local climate with low thermal and water efficiencies.These trends, combined with a growing population means we need more houses than ever before. This drives demand for household furniture and appliances, as well as heating and cooling and has led to an increase in the consumption of raw materials, water and energy."

"Victoria is largely banking on carbon capture and storage to deliver major reductions in our State’s emissions. Reliance on a technology that may not be ready until 2030 or later risks emissions continuing to rise for some time."

"Business as usual isn’t going to work."

"We must take strong action, not just make further aspirational policy commitments."

Yes, they must - only, unfortunately, they don't.

"The last assessment of river health in 2004 found that only one fifth of major rivers and tributaries in Victoria were in good or excellent condition. In 2008 nine out of ten Victorian basins in the Murray Darling Basin were found to be very poor health."

"The plants and animals which depend on our inland waters also indicate the health of rivers and wetlands."

"Unfortunately the news is not good. 21 fish species, 11 frog species and 29 species of waterbirds are threatened, and only 14% of riverside vegetation along major rivers and streams in Victoria was found to be in good condition, with most being patchy and interspersed with weeds."

"Wetlands are also very important for environmental health, but no statewide study of the extent of our wetlands has been undertaken since 1994.At that time, more than a third of our naturally occurring wetland area had already been lost and over 90% of the wetlands on private land had vanished – often drained for agriculture or housing developments. In August 2008, groundwater levels in half of the most highly developed or potentially stressed groundwater areas were the lowest on record."

"Water management in Victoria is rapidly increasing in sophistication and accountability, and Victoria is recognised for its leadership in water management."

That remark about leadership in water management and others about Victoria's Water Our Future are a dead giveaway that the Vic Government had influenced the report, if only in the language - you can tell by the empty cliches. In fact, one of the 'reference group' is Cheryl Batagol, currently the Chair of Melbourne Water.

(Personally I don't recognise Victoria as a leader in water management; I think it's a leader in water propaganda. PlugThePipe and PipeRightInc and FairWaterUse would agree, I think.)

"However, the degraded state of many of our rivers shows that the way we manage our water resources has not secured the health of our inland waters."

"Millions of dollars are being spent on efficiency and securing supply, but the impact of climate change means that water allocated to the environment may not be enough to secure environmental health. Sharing water between competing uses ultimately involves social and therefore political choices. To date, the environment has been the loser. Difficult decisions must be made as water availability declines and pressures on our environment increase. Many inland waters are in poor condition and in the context of ongoing drought and climate change, their future health is uncertain."

But these ...um... policy-writers are prepared to keep on growing our population and infrastructure! Have they no shame???

"Victoria is Australia’s most cleared and most densely populated State. More than half of our land has already been cleared and we are continuing to lose native vegetation at a rate of some 4,000 ha per year, mostly from endangered grasslands. Our State has the highest proportion (48%) of sub-bioregions in Australia in poor condition, with four out of Australia’s five most cleared bioregions found in western Victoria."

"Land clearing for cities, towns and farmland has contributed to a biodiversity crisis in Victoria. Most of our high quality native vegetation is found on Victoria’s public land in National and State parks and forests."

"Native vegetation remnants on private land are often small, patchy, isolated and degraded by human activities."

The next two paragraphs are really important, but, read through the report... and you cannot imagine the lot in charge of Victoria ever doing anything for flora and fauna except packaging it up for food until it is extinct. Effective laws would prevent that.

"Laws and policies for managing our natural environment have been developed over many years but need to be reformed. Victoria is committed to a joined-up approach to catchment, land and biodiversity management. Current management arrangements are complex and involve all levels of government, as well as public and private land managers. This has resulted in an extensive and complex range of regulations and legal requirements for land managers, and variable compliance and enforcement."

"Reform is needed to simplify environmental legislation and to align the environmental objectives of all levels of government to drive improvements in environmental condition.
The Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 is failing to meet its stated objectives and needs to be reviewed to address Victoria’s natural environments and their vulnerabilities to climate change. It also needs an adequate long-term allocation of resources to ensure effective achievement of its objectives."

BUT... The report wusses out. It almost says we cannot go on increasing our population but it doesn't. This means, to my well-honed senses for bull-dust and bowing to pressure, that the Victorian population is about to be subjected to severe price rises and subjugation in order to allow continued population growth, and so as to protect the elites from an impact on their profits as much as possible.

I predict that this report will be used to ram through new planning policies which will totally remove Victorians' ability to affect how development proceeds. It will be used to remove most of our rights to control our local environments. It is appalling that Victoria, having finally produced a 'state of the environment report' seems to have sunk to a point of exploiting the opportunity for the aims of some ego-bound, terribly rich developers and their planning and political friends who are trying to maintain profit in the face of world economic crash - and the hell with the rest of us.

"PART 5 Living well within our Environment Key findings • The wellbeing of Victorians is ultimately dependent upon the health of the natural environment. The ecosystem services upon which we depend have been, and under business-as-usual scenarios will continue to be, compromised."

BUT ... the main quality of business as usual in Victoria is "Growth" and the architects of this report won't even go near that one. In fact the section on growth of population and consumption is the only section with no recommendations. It contains a blank box for recommendations. How coy!

"• Social and economic systems are vulnerable; as a result, so is human wellbeing. Urgent and fundamental changes are needed and government must provide transparent, exemplary leadership."

Hard to see how the leadership of a government that persists in importing more and more people could ever be exemplary. This report is so 'sophisticated', it is hard to believe that the authors would recognise transparency.

"• Vulnerabilities are partly the inadvertent by-product of increasing efficiency, reducing the capacity of Victoria to adapt to looming sustainability challenges. Current vulnerabilities include the dependence on brown coal and petroleum and, globally, the ability to supply food under conditions of expected climate change and global population growth."

Actually, they do counsel the government to reconsider its food export ambitions, which is very ominous seeing as they refrain from counseling the government to reconsider its people importing ambitions.

"WR10 The Victorian Government should carefully consider its food and fibre export target of $12 billion in light of external economic factors, current knowledge regarding current and future water availability, river health implications, and potential to achieve higher levels of irrigated production through improved water use efficiency."

• Victorians have proven talented and innovative, and, with government support, they are well equipped to deal with the challenges of moving into a post-carbon economy. Victorian industries want strong leadership and certainty from government as they adapt to this future.

There it is again, that 'challenge' word. And the 'leadership and certainty' wanted from the government by industry... That's engineers and property developers lobby jargon. It means, "Make sure those 'customers' of yours tow the line, Mr Brumby."

• While it is essential to ensure that future development is within sustainable limits, Victorian society is unsustainable now. Refocusing on current patterns is necessary and possible through use of the term ecologically sustainable use (ESU). ESU is applied in this discussion to make the point that present uses affect the state of the environment as much as do growth and change.

Sounds so reasonable, doesn't it. If only the expectations of growth were not there and the subcurrent of awful coercion and absolute uncompromise, which gives away the insane agenda.

• ESU becomes a reality when decoupling (a separation between an indicator of wellbeing and an indicator of environmental pressure) is demonstrated. Relative decoupling has commenced in many sectors, but ESU will only be realised when absolute decoupling is achieved.

I.e. The 'consumers' will learn to be happy with less and we will be happy as long as there are more and more consumers, living with less and less. And, um... let's just drop that 'citizen' word forever, eh?

• Resilience is so fundamental to sustainability as to be almost invisible. Essential ecosystem services and liveability, valued by all Victorians, can only be maintained when resilience – the ability to adapt to system shocks – is re-established within ecological systems and in society.

The writer of the Summary did admit that he had not sought consensus. So what I hear here are the sane words of a biologically literate on the panel, coupled with the ideological demands of the economically ... um...sophisticated ... on the panel. The same cognitive dissonance clangs in the two statements below:

"• In the context of the scale of the challenge, environmental governance is disparate and inconsistent. The current nature of environmental challenges means that governance must become strategic and future-focused. The technique of strategic environmental assessment should be used to address the long-term and wider implications of planning and policy."

"Technology has a significant role to play in reducing environmental pressures. However, due to associated inherent risks such as the rebound effect and the paradox of efficiency, technology alone must not be seen as a ‘silver bullet’. The environment doesn’t care
how efficient our technologies are if overall pressures continue to increase."

Although it flags population growth as a major driver, and talks about the importance of biodiversity, as a long-suffering Victorian, I was looking out for any comments which accept continued population growth, increasing density as an environment saver as an excuse for growth... I was on the look-out for anything that sounds like the Engineering or housing lobby.

And I found it - right at the end:

"Growing together"... (uggh)

"Recommendations LW1 The Victorian Government develop and use a single robust and clearly defined vision of an environmentally sustainable Victoria, incorporating environmentally sustainable use of natural resources, and use this to develop an update to Growing Victoria Together."

These guys are incorrigible! Sounds like something out of Bananas in pyjamas.

"LW2 The Victorian Government should ensure that the value of ecosystem services is factored into economic decision-making, as water and climate are starting to become. Agencies should become as adept at valuing and accounting for ecosystem services as they are economic and social services."

"LW3 The Victorian Government develops Growing Victoria Together to monitor and report on holistic wellbeing using consistent, valid and statistically verified sustainability indicators that, as a set, comprehensively cover each of the environmental, social and economic values of importance to Victorians."

Yep. Unfortunately, your usual market hype. They hope to overwhelm us with cliches until we go into a trance and simply follow their orders quietly.

"LW5 When considering ecologically sustainable development, the Victorian Government should take into account the present and short-term (as well as longer term) impacts of the development process and use all available development opportunities to achieve reductions in absolute environmental pressures."

Okay, so, how are they going to do that without stopping population growth? One way: they raise prices for every vital resource so that they can make a lot more money out of a huge population of people paying most of their incomes for food, water, housing, heating and transport. Democracy will be cancelled, of course. But they will be taking care of that in the ... um... education section.

LW6 That decoupling of wellbeing from environmental pressures should be a major policy objective of the Victorian Government. Targeted policy, as well as public education programs, should be introduced to reduce the dependence of economic wellbeing on high consumption and its attributed environmental pressures.

"LW7 That the Victorian Government comprehensively integrates decoupling, its stages and importance, into all Victorian Government decision-making at the strategic level."

"LW8 That the Victorian Government, generally, employs better data collection, monitoring and reporting regimes, with a stress on long-term, consistent data sets."

"LW9 That the Victorian Government, wherever possible, prevent the perpetuation of shifting baselines, particularly in regard to natural systems for which the crossing of thresholds are known and would constitute ecosystem collapse."

"LW10 That the Victorian Government factors in likely compounding pressures such as the expected effects of climate change when setting targets for ecological restoration."

"LW12 The Victorian Government should develop and monitor indices of social resilience, measuring all its elements (for example, innovation, diversity, distributed systems and the ability to embrace change)".

Note the jargon: 'embrace change'; 'diversity'. Diversity, the way the government means it, is not an element of social resilience; it is an element of disconnecting networks so that populations are easier to manage, more passive, disempowered and quietly - they hope - dysfunctional.

LW21 That the Victorian Government continues to investigate and implement market-based instruments to achieve positive environmental outcomes using prices set to account for the full value of ecosystem services. Any interventions should be by way of budget allocation and not through the creation of market distortions."

So, you can see in these exerpts, sane interspersed with greedy and insane. The 'leadership' in this report is about a small self-identified elite who think of the rest of us as children - oh, pardon - 'customers', with very few rights to be cajoled and coerced to serve them.

This is ecological reporting on an intellectual par with management in "Are you being served?".

Now you know why the corporate press took it seriously - it's made to order for them and their mates.

The report is available as a collection of pdf documents directly or indirectly linked to from www.ces.vic.gov.au/CES/...

Some of the pdf components are: Part 1: Introduction (564MB), Part 2: Driving Forces (1.1MB), Summary (2.5MB).

Good reading and please send comments and article!

Editor's comment 10 December 2008: Changes were made to this document today to correct the date of the last State of the Environment Report Australia, from 2001 to 2006 and to make clearer the lack of relationship between the State and the Commonwealth reports. After the question, "Can this really pass muster under the EPBC Act?", the comment, "It doesn't have to," was also inserted.

It is as if the people who managed to get into Victoria's Parliament don't realise that the Electorate can read transcripts of everything they say and do. On 2 December bi-election neophyte, Ms Kairouz, feeds the Premier the questions and Brumby makes fools of all of us:

SOURCE: http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/downloadhansard/pdf/Assembly/Jul-Dec%202008/Assembly%20Jul-Dec%202008%20Daily%202%20December%202008.pdf
QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Tuesday, 2 December 2008 ASSEMBLY PROOF 3

Picture: Mr Brumby & Ms Kairouz, who narrowly beat Les Twentyman (Independent) in a bi-election in June 2008]

Population: growth Ms KAIROUZ (Kororoit)

- I refer to the government's commitment to making Victoria the best place to live, work and raise a family, and I ask: could the Premier inform the house of how the government is planning for Victoria's future, with Melbourne expected to reach a population of more than 5 million people by 2036?

Mr Brumby's rhetoric on Victoria's population predicament

Mr BRUMBY (Premier) - I thank the member for Kororoit for her question. As we all know, Melbourne is renowned for its livability and affordability. We are now in the midst of a population boom, which is the largest in the state's history. It is a population boom that is larger than the population growth of the postwar years and larger than the gold rush years of the 1850s.

By the way, just today - totally coincidentally - the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) released its June 2008 population growth figures. They show Victoria's growth over the last year at 1.8 per cent. The national growth rate was at 1.7 per cent.

Of course it is a huge contrast with the figures of some years ago. We recall the figures of the 1990s, when Victoria was losing population in vast numbers to other states.

This morning, with the Minister for Planning, I released Melbourne @ 5 million - a planning update that delivers on our commitment to prepare the longer term plans for Melbourne. The population data we released today in Victoria shows that Victoria will grow by
2.3 million people between now and 2036, with something like 1.8 million extra people expected to be living in Melbourne. The policy released today refines the key directions of Melbourne 2030 to ensure that we can accommodate an additional 600 000 dwellings in Melbourne over the next 20 years.

Because our population is ageing, because the baby boomers are ageing, the rate of new dwelling construction and approval will grow at a faster rate than the rate of population growth. Our record in terms of livability and affordability was confirmed again yesterday. The Real Estate Institute of Victoria survey of housing affordability showed again, I am proud to say it, that Victoria is the most affordable capital city on the eastern seaboard for those who are looking to buy a home.

That comes as no surprise when you consider the generous assistance packages that we have on offer to first home buyers in Victoria. It comes as no surprise when you think of the off-the-plan duty concessions we provide; and when you think of the pensioner stamp duty concessions, which are the most generous in Australia.

There are a number of features of Melbourne @ 5 million. Firstly, through Melbourne @ 5 million we move from a single node city to a multicentred city, so there will be central activity districts in Box Hill, Broadmeadows, Dandenong, Footscray, Frankston and Ringwood.

We will also be promoting very strongly three major employment corridors across Melbourne. We are also preparing a development strategy for the Werribee employment precinct to unlock employment in the west.

The second feature is the review of the city's urban growth boundary over the next nine months. That is to accommodate 134 000 of the 600 000 new homes outside the current UGB. Thirdly, there are the native grassland reserves, where we are working with the federal government to establish two reserves near the Wyndham growth area. This will be a significant improvement on the practices which have been in place in the past.

We are also ensuring that we have the right infrastructure for our communities, with significant investment occurring in the areas of health, education and, course soon to be announced, transport.

The previously announced state infrastructure contribution has been significantly reformed and modified as part of this announcement for new land brought inside the UGB as proposed today for inclusion in 2009. We will pay a contribution of $95 000 a hectare, reflecting the windfall that occurs from the rezoning of that land and bringing it in from the UGB; and secondly, for land that was bought within the UGB in 2005, that charge remains at $80 000 a hectare, the same as was announced at that time.

I am pleased to say in terms of housing affordability that the government has decided to remove the contribution for land that was already within the UGB in 2005, and that will save something like $546 million in costs for more than 60 000 new homes that will be built within the existing UGB boundary. At a time when affordability is so important, notwithstanding that Melbourne is the most affordable capital city on the eastern seaboard, this is a very positive initiative.

Finally, the funds raised through the infrastructure contribution will average around $60 million a year, of which $30 million will be directed to state infrastructure in those areas, and of the remaining amount, the bulk will be devoted to a new growth areas development fund from which councils in the growth areas will be able to apply for funding for infrastructure projects in a way that is very similar to the Regional Infrastructure Development Fund.

This package today is all about affordability, livability and sustainability. It confirms our city and our state as the best place to live, and it will of course be reinforced next year when we release our regional statement, the preparation of which is being overseen by the Minister for Regional and Rural Development, the member

Public Transport

Public transport: government performance Mr MULDER (Polwarth) — My question is to the Premier. Given that the Premier has previously blamed the problems in public transport infrastructure on Jeff Kennett, John Howard, population growth, petrol prices, Connex and now the Rudd government, at what stage does the Premier actually take responsibility for the public transport chaos in Victoria?

Mr Brumby's ripost on Public Transport

Mr BRUMBY (Premier) — I thank the honourable member for his question, and I am proud to say that our public transport system in Victoria is carrying more passengers than it ever has in its history — by a long way. Our rail system alone is handling 201 million passenger movements this year. That is the highest number of movements in the history of our state. It is more than in the post-war migration years and considerably more than in any recent decade. We are carrying that number of passengers because we have made investments in the system. Before the end of the year we will be announcing further investments so that we cater for the strong growth that is occurring in our public transport system.

The honourable member who asked the question referred to a former Premier from the 1990s. Our system today is carrying well over twice the number of passengers that it was carrying in the 1990s, and we are doing it because we have made investments in the system and because we have strong population growth and a strong economy.

Just in the last year — since 30 July 2007, when I became Premier — we have purchased 50 new V/Locity carriages and committed to the $501 million north-east revitalisation project with the Rudd government, which is the biggest rail project in country Victoria in decades. Also, we have launched the new timetable with over 633 extra train services a week. We have rolled out the early bird scheme. We have purchased eight extra new metro trains, which brings the total order to 18.

We have opened the new electrified line to Craigieburn; with new stations at Roxburgh Park and Craigieburn, Tuesday, 11 November 2008 ASSEMBLY 4459 and we have added new services at Craigieburn. We have rolled out new bus routes between North Melbourne station and Grattan Street and the Royal Melbourne Hospital. We have upgraded the St Kilda Road tramway.

In the 2008–09 budget we announced a $794 million infrastructure boost to improve public transport. There was $275 million for improvements at Laverton, Westall and Craigieburn; $3 million to upgrade Prahran and Windsor stations; $10.4 million for design works for the extension of the Epping line to South Morang; $32 million for around 1700 new car parking spaces at 10 stations and the upgrading of Noble Park station to premium status; plus $14.7 million to expand bus and coach services to South Gippsland and the Bass Coast; $254 million for the maintenance of country rail lines; and $64 million to boost the NightRider service.

All these things represent the most significant investment we have had in public transport in this state.

What we are endeavouring to do is turn what has been a low-volume suburban system into a modern metro system. We will — — Honourable members interjecting.

The SPEAKER — Order! The opposition will cooperate!
Mr BRUMBY — As I have indicated on numerous occasions, before the end of the year we will respond to the Eddington report with the Victorian transport plan, and that will put in place the framework for the further long-term growth of our system. It will provide short-term, medium-term and long-term measures and create in Melbourne and across the state a transport system which is the best in Australia.

Today Jill Quirk, President of Sustainable Population Victoria, deplored the Victorian government's irresponsible growth policies.

The Victorian Government plans to extend Melbourne's growth boundaries, benefit major property developers whose profits may well have fallen with the global economic crash, as speculation on housing met with predictable limits.

Brumby pushing people envelope to breaking point

But the Brumby government is again pushing the envelope by pushing the boundaries of common sense and democracy to keep the illusion of profitable growth going.

As Mervac, Delfin Lend Lease, MAB Corporation, the Dennis family and Villawood queue up to a development-mad Premier for dispensations from only recently extended boundaries,[1] Victorians are reeling at their government's extremism, the Labor Party's supine acceptance of a dictator at the helm, and the tragic impact on our social and natural environment.

Victoria is running out of water. Public transport is stressed beyond any prior experience. Sparse and disconnected native flora and fauna reserves and bitterly defended "Green Wedges" of open space are being criss-crossed and dissected with a rash of extremely expensive multi-lane toll-ways and housing estates. Although population growth is out of control, along with transport and water, the Premier's way of dealing with these terrible problems -- which his government caused and continues to make worse -- when they are raised in Parliament, is to reconstruct them as if they were great triumphs, simply steam-rolling every objection.[2]

Road-makers part of the problem

The spread of housing depends on the rolling out of roads. Railways aren't quite so popular because you cannot just keep adding to them in order to supply new suburbs. With roads it is a lot easier. Nonetheless, Peter Newman is famous for pushing new railways, the better to connect them with light rail and new roads - and more houses and more people.

Huge corporate developers stand to gain from Melbourne people's distress

Pointing to headlines in the Age, Ms Quirk said, "Look who's happy about the extension of the urban growth boundary-BIG-NAME property speculators!" They were celebrating yesterday, with the proposed stretching of Melbourne's city limits, which brings despair to the actual electorate. The stretching is, according to the Royce Millar article, "set to deliver windfalls of many millions to some of Australia's largest developers". Shaking her head in disbelief, Ms Quirk quoted the title:"Property giants pop cork over city stretch."

Ms Quirk reminds us that, "In case anyone had not noticed who is likely to benefit for population growth while the average person is struggling to cram himself into the morning train to get to work- it's the big end of town who do not have to catch peak hour trains! Neither do these people have to worry about the cost of water as it inevitably becomes a scarce and expensive commodity into the future."

Government catering to anti-social forces

President Quirk says, "The property developers are self serving and the government is reprehensible in catering to their greed by pushing for greater and greater population growth. They thumb their noses at the rest of us and treat wildlife whose habitat gets destroyed with total disdain."

"Melbourne will never be better than it is today as it is on a rapid downhill journey to greater overpopulation with no end in sight and the loss of all amenities that made it a unique liveable city."

To contact Ms Quirk email the author of this article.

[1]http://www.theage.com.au/national/property-giants-pop-cork-over-city-stretch-20081202-6psg.html?page=2
Property giants pop cork over city stretch - article by Royce Millar, December 3, 2008
[2]http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/downloadhansard/pdf/Assembly/Jul-Dec%202008/Assembly%20Jul-Dec%202008%20Daily%202%20December%202008.pdf
Questions without notice, Tuesday, 2 December 2008 ASSEMBLY PROOF 3, "Population Growth".

The The Final Energy Crisis (2nd edition), Pluto Press, UK, 2008 is a book like no other on the topic of energy and peak oil of which I am aware.

It went well beyond the usual formulaic basics and it satisfied my appetite for stimulation rather than repetition and reinforcement. It is designed to be read in parts and in no particular order. However, nearly all of the articles are a subject in their own right, to be absorbed and considered slowly. The sections and chapters are:

1. Introduction by Sheila Newman

Part I: Measuring Our Predicament

2. 101 Views from Hubbert's Peak by Sheila Newman
3. Prediction of World Peak Oil Production by Seppo Korpela
4. The Assessment and Importance of Oil Depletion by Colin Campbell
5. Coal Resources of the World by Seppo Korpela

Part II: Geopolitics

6. The Caspian Chimera by Colin Campbell
7. Update to the Caspian Chimera by Sheila Newman
8. The Battle of the Titans by Mark Jones
9. Dark Continent, Black Gold by Andrew McKillop
10. The Chinese Car Bomb by Andrew McKillop
11. Venezuela, Chavez and Latin american Oil on the World Stage by Sheila Newman

Part III: The Big Picture - False Solutions, Hopes and Fears

12. No Choice but International Energy Transition by Andrew McKillop
13. Population, Energy and Economic Growth: The Moral Dilemma by
14. by Ross McCluney
15. Peak Soil by Alice Friedemann
16. Notes on Terra Preta by Sheila Newman
17. Nuclear Fission Power Options by Sheila Newman
18. Fusion Ilusions by Michael Dittmar
19. Geothermal by Sheila Newman

Part IV: After Oil

20. France and Australia After Oil by Sheila Newman
21. North Korea: The Limits of Fossil-Energy Based Agricultural Systems by Antony Boys
22. How will Japan Feed itself without Fossil Energy? by Antony Boys
23. The Simpler Way by Ted Trainer
24. In the End: Thermodynamics and the Necessity of Protecting the Natural World by Sheila Newman

Like other books on the subject of 'peak oil' The Final Energy Crisis, (with engineering professor, Seppo Korpela and oil geophysicist Colin Campbell) does examine and test Hubbert's theory - for gas and coal as well as oil (and gives you the maths to test yourself in an appendix) - but the book doesn't stop with the usual (updated) depletion curves.

It is really the beginning of the elaboration of a new paradigm, which seriously examines (among other possibilities) nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, geothermal, terra preta/agrichar and the logistics of energy distribution in different social systems. It is like most books before this were explaining that society depends on fossil-fuels, but this book assumes you know that, and discusses the world within that knowledge perspective. It is for people who have already looked into the subject broadly but would like help to understand the limitations of different proposed technologies and political solutions. I read somewhere that the Editor had said that it was written for people who dealt with problems and fear by learning as much as they could.

Not limited to the 1000 word article or the one minute sound-bite, it also engages relevantly in original and sophisticated geopolitical and economic analysis, for instance about the history and future of Latin American oil and the possibility of realignments among ex-Soviet Union and third-world oil and gas producers.

The "Battle of the Titans", written in 2002 by the late Mark Jones, and also included in the first edition, is a prophetic piece which shows how the reckless and wasteful 'free market' energy policies since the days of President Reagan have caused the economy of the US to have become vastly less efficient than those of Europe and Russia. In coming months and years the energy vulnerability of the US will compound the problems caused by the collapse of its finance sector.

Newman assumes that her readers will be intelligent and adventurous and doesn't limit her authors to basic reviews of simple flow-energy technologies. Rather, she invites us to jump in the deep end and follow particle physicist, Michael Dittmar, as he dissects nuclear fusion technology in the 10 billion Euro International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project on the basis of the durability of nuclear 'carpets' and the half-life of tritium.

Dittmar's description of the staggeringly complex and difficult technical problems to be overcome before the dream of unlimited cheap power held out by the proponents of nuclear fusion is to be realised left me in little doubt that further expenditure on ITER is a massive wast of public resources.

Similarly, in the chapter, "Peak Soil", Alice Friedemann, shows, in a lively and pithy analysis, that industrial bio-fuel production on a large scale will only make our energy and environmental circumstances worse and not better. Friedemann plunges head-first into a meter of topsoil to see the damage which destroying crop-stubble for cellulosic ethanol might pose to world food supply by destroying an environment which supports "ten 'biomass horses' underground for every horse grazing. Sadly, some of Friedemann's forebodings have become reality in recent months as the diversion of agricultural production to bio-fuels has caused food shortages in many countries.

Other technologies, which are somewhat more promising than the above two described in the book are geothermal and the other more familiar forms of renewable energy such as wind, solar, hydro-electric, tidal, etc, and even nuclear fission. However, as Ross McCluney shows in the chapter "Renewable Energy Limits", all have their limitations and problems. Ultimately we have no choice but to scale back our consumption of energy. We must certainly dispense with any expectation that we can continue to raise both our own material living standards and those in the Third World in a planet with an ever increasing population.

Nuclear fission writing is usually limited to very polemical argument for or contra. These polemics are discarded and nuclear is examined from a host of unusual perspectives, including the importance of trade economics and income from fuel recycling in preserving certain nuclear proliferation treaties, the influence of insurance costs in preserving old designs, why no-one is building thorium fueled fast breeder-reactors, but why India might take a lead in breeder reactor technology and thorium fuel. Newman admits that it is very difficult to evaluate the costs and returns of nuclear power plants, including the dangers, but describes a relatively simple method by which one might begin to evaluate and compare any fuel source and technology, including nuclear.

In the chapter "How Will Japan Feed Itself Without Fossil Energy", agricultural scientist, Antony Boys explores Japan's carrying capacity in the Edo period (1603-1867) and contrasts it with import reliance and nitrogen overload in the twenty-first century.

Already some societies have been forced to confront the challenge of depletion of fossil fuel, particularly petroleum. Two examples are given, both from the 'socialist' camp, Cuba and North Korea; one reputedly successful, the other a disaster. As Cuba transformed itself, in the 1990's, to cope with a dramatic drop in oil imports following the collapse of the Communist bloc in 1989, North Korea, also without its own deposits of gas or oil, descended into famine when its imported oil and gas supplies fell by more than 50% after 1990. This is described in the Chapter "North Korea: The limits of Fossil Energy-Based Agricultural Systems" by Antony Boys.

Sheila Newman, in the chapter "France and Australia after oil", raises the "Cuban solution" as an example of the principle of relocalisation. After analysing pre-fossil fuel France and her options for the future, Newman makes surprising and frightening political predictions for Australia, based on whether it adopts relocalisation or 'big' power options, such as nuclear and massive coal-operations. She identifies the big power options with the interests of infrastructure development lobby groups that are promoting big power developments in the expectation that these will service huge new cities of new immigrant consumers, supplied by Australia's huge and unpopular mass immigration program. Newman points out that the democratic interests of Australians are unlikely to be served by these corporate agendas, which she notes have also distorted the Australian water supply situation. She also seriously questions the costs of financing such schemes and the logistics of building and maintaining them. Reading her analysis, one starts to seriously doubt that the 'important people' who decide these things have actually done the maths.

For me, this is one of those rare books which left few questions begging. It seems as if the editors and the contributors had already gone nearly everywhere I had intended to go and a good many other places, besides, and had thoroughly researched the issues and thought through the questions posed. The orthodoxies of the mainstream environment movement and scientific community are held up to critical scrutiny and often rejected. This is particularly the case with the last two sections which are focused on proposed solutions and future prospects. Andrew McKillop's critique of 'free market' 'solutions' to the energy crisis, in particular the 'carbon finance and credits circus', in the chapter "No Choice But International Energy Transition" was particularly satisfying.

This is an enlightening rather than a depressing book. The editor, who writes the introductions for each section, has a good feeling for the absurd and finds humour and hope in unusual places. A message comes through not to panic, but to think. For all the absurd beliefs and ugly outlooks exposed by the various authors in this book, we find hope in unusual and unexpected places and a sense that, although answers will not necessarily come from the expected authorities, and the problems we face are extraordinary, there are ways we could slow down the crisis to a manageable pace, there are choices about the values that dictate our decisions, and politics are important.

See also: Review of The Final Energy Crisis by Mark O'Connor author of Overloading Australia (RRP AU$20) on page 8 of the December 2008 newsletter (pdf 923K) of Sustainable Population Australia, other customer reviews at amazon.com.

(lire la version française)

"Soon all men will be brothers"

We are told that we are in a time of globalisation. Soon all men will be brothers. The Internationale will be the new human race. The sin of Babel is forgiven. The sole language of tomorrow, English, is the chosen one. Already borders no longer protect the bad guys: all the virtuous are united against bin Laden, the butchers of Bosnia are tried in Holland, Interpol hunts burglars. Like Capital, the Proletariat will soon have no country either. The most marvelous thing is that this prodigious work was all done whilst we were sleeping; in the most natural way, apparently; without any special effort.

But then the alarm clock goes off and we open our eyes to a completely different reality.

Walls

Migratory patterns thousands of years old, as vital to human ecology as marine currents are to the life of oceans, have been criminalised. We try to make escape from the human reserves of Africa as difficult and as dangerous as moving from one neighborhood to another in Berlin once was. Sailing northwards, fear of the police, within sight of the Rock of Gibraltar, can pull you to your death. In this street, they have been at war forever with hereditary enemies on the opposite footpath. Europe is, of course, in process of unification, but little Belgium is no longer able to maintain peace between her Flemish and Walloon populations. Sporting matches open with processions of flags and screamed national anthems reminiscent of incitement of hysteria before big military bloodbaths. Indeed, how many peoples have known nothing but war for decades?

So… Are we living in a period dominated by globalisation or by the persistence or even the exacerbation of bellicose sanctification of flags and borders?

The Seven plagues of globalisation

Clearly, we are currently at an early stage of globalisation where only the seven plagues are globalised: globalization of mafias, commerce, financial robbery, man's exploitation of man, subordination of women, ransacking of natural resources and planetary poisoning… Against this background, the economic game is based on the simplest kind of rule: work travels to wherever it costs less. Your wages are not too terrible, you have reasonable social benefits, your government really tries to provide effective public education, health, transport, nature conservation services, DANGER, unemployment awaits! In the countries known as democracies, many people have understood this and have elected governments which are most likely to overturn social progress achieved over a century, and to feign a response to ecological emergencies, without taking the radical measures necessary. The day that British workers return to 19th century conditions, England will once again be the workshop of the world. It’s the law of competition, one of those famous incontrovertible ‘economic laws’.

Utopias

Here and there, however, a few utopians resist this suicidal course.

A utopian is someone who believes that humanity can and must use intelligence to guide his destiny, rather than laws - laws which, since the death of God, are no longer divine - but called ‘natural’ to hide the fact that, in reality, they only exist to protect the interests of the powerful.

Well, as it happens, here are some reflections that globalisation has inspired in one such utopian.

Globalisation is a formidable process which should be intensified.

It is true that competition profits peoples which have the most skillful workers, the most inventive engineers, the rarest minerals, soils and climates specially favourable for particular crops …

But, when the success of a product comes from its low price and that is due to meagre salaries, work done by children or prisoners, at the cost of public health services, education, transport, and to lack of respect towards natural environments, we should say, “We don’t want that money!” and send it back.

We don't want that money

It is relatively easy to work out how much of the cost of a product has been cut through lack of ecological and social policies. Industries which have their products manufactured in places where the costs are smallest, know very well how to do this. They know the value of that “economic and social differential” which causes them to knock on one door rather than another. The price of imported products would then be increased by a sum proportional to that differential, to compensate for the unhealthy basis of their cheapness. No customs taxes, which profit importing countries, would be involved, since the money obtained would be entirely reimbursed to the exporting countries. “We don’t want that money!” It would be up to the exporting countries then, whether they used this money to better the social condition of their population and to preserve their environment, or to add a few diamonds to the crowns of their oligarchies.

According to another – perjorative – meaning, the term ‘utopia’ refers to an absurd, impossible dream. Recent events have shown that nothing could better illustrate that notion of an aberrant utopia than a belief in progress based on the continuing unrestricted freedom of those who have taken all the worlds wealth for themselves.

Francis Ronsin
(Translated by Sheila Newman)

Francis Ronsin was Professor, Department of Contemporary History, at the Université de Bourgogne (Dijon). He has published several books and numerous articles that focus on the relationship between political struggles and private life: La Grève des ventres - Propagande néo-malthusienne et baisse de la natalité en France 19ème-20ème siècles (Aubier, Paris, 1980); Le Contrat sentimental - Débats sur le mariage, l'amour, le divorce, de l'Ancien Régime à la Restauration (Aubier, Paris, 1990) ; Les Divorciaires - Affrontements politiques et conceptions du mariage dans la France du XIXème siècle. (Aubier, Paris, 1992); Le Sexe apprivoisé -Jeanne Humbert et la lutte pour le contrôle des naissances (La Découverte, Paris, 1990) ; and La population de la France de 1789 à nos jours. Données démographiques et affrontements idéologiques (Le Seuil, Paris, 1997); La Guerre et l’oseille (Syllepse, Paris, 2003). He is also the principal organizer of the international research seminar Socialism and Sexuality.

Rights of partial or full reproduction of this article are forbidden without permission from Francis Ronsin.