population

Finally, something sensible and well-written to counteract the marketing horrors of the growth merchants. MarkO'Connor and Bill Lines’s next prose book on the topic Overloading Australia is due out in late 2008  from Enviro Books, Australia. O'Connor hass co-authored with William Lines (whose latest book is Patriots, a history of the Australian conservation movements). Here is a collation of extracts: Extracts from Overloading Australia :

• Colin Clark and the myths of growth economics
• The Monbiot Fallacy
• The Replacement Rate Fallacy

Colin Clark and the myths of growth economics Denialist claims have changed remarkably little in 35 years. Almost all the arguments and tactics were already on show in 1973 when the internationally famous Australian economist Colin Clark published a pamphlet with the British Catholic Truth Society, Putting the ‘Population Explosion’ in Perspective. He followed this a few months later with a small book, The Myth of Over-Population. Conservative think-tanks and rightwing church groups remain fond of recycling its pungent assertions. Clark had the ability, rare among economists, of writing simply and clearly. Unfortunately, this great virtue exposed his errors and muddled predictions. Let’s take the scientific howlers first. Clark assures his readers that carbon dioxide is harmless so long as it can be ‘discharged into the atmosphere.’ As for greenhouse effects, it is clear that recent fluctuations in the Earth’s climate ‘are not due to the burning of fuel.’ Despite being supposedly a chemist and an agricultural economist, Clark displays near total ignorance of agriculture. For instance, he assures us that the then heavy use of fertilizers would soon fade away: ‘Farmers now apply fertilizers heavily, to make their soils more fertile. Once these have reached a satisfactory level, fertilizers can be applied more lightly.’ Perhaps for this reason, Clark was sure that world food production ‘could easily be increased to 50 times its present level’. This would be easy if all suitable land ‘was properly farmed or grazed’. Clark persistently confuses the maximum yields of experimental plots, under ideal conditions, with what can be expected in the field. For instance he notes that meat production of 1000 pounds per acre a year from grazing lands has been recorded in temperate regions. From this he deduces that since grass grows faster in the tropics, five times the yield should be possible there! In practice tropical yields are often lower. Like latter-day deniers, Clark is contemptuous of the very notion that resources are limited. He argues that most of the things we call resources, like wood pulp or fish are really products of human labor. This is a classic case of an economist treating the natural world as a ‘free good’. Clark could not grasp that fish-catches and lumber-extraction depend not just on investment and labour but also on nature’s fecundity. Instead, he assures us that fish supplies are increasing much faster than population. He defends DDT as a blessing to mankind, claiming that scientists ‘cannot find that its levels have done any harm to human health’. He assures us that climate change is natural. Alarmists like Paul Ehrlich, he claims, ‘want to have it both ways, and prove that we are in danger of making the world hotter and colder simultaneously’. This perverse misunderstanding of warnings about climate instability is still a standard tactic for Clark’s successors. One can make allowances for Clark who was meeting a new idea, but not for those who perpetuate his muddle. Despite his scientific ignorance, Clark had no hesitation in predicting the future — wrongly. He ridiculed the idea that our use of fossil fuels might change the climate but did concede that ‘Some centuries hence, our descendants may decide that it is unwise to add further carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.’ In fact just two decades later governments began negotiating the Kyoto agreement on greenhouses gases. Clark also assured his readers that serious energy problems will come only when world population is ‘over a million times what it is now’. He mocked Ehrlich for suggesting that the US (whose oil production, unmentioned by Clark, had peaked in 1970) was already having some trouble in buying in enough foreign oil. Clark claimed the only problem the US had was ‘restricting the quantities of oil which other countries wish to supply’. (Today the quest for overseas oil dominates US foreign policy.) In any case, said Clark, cheap abundant energy from nuclear fusion was coming soon, and ‘will be vastly more efficient’ than the nuclear fission of current reactors. Thirty-five years later nuclear fusion remains a distant hope. Clark’s current disciples overlook these embarrassing errors while citing his authority and persisting with the same assumptions that produced the errors. But Clark’s ignorance of history and science was not quite what it seems. He was perversely erudite in ferreting out scraps of fact that might suit his theories, yet studiously ignored well-known facts that didn’t. In short, Clark, like most later deniers, is betrayed less by ignorance than by powerful prejudices that distort his vision. The Monbiot Fallacy Some environmentalists invent ingenious arguments for not thinking about population. In early 2008 the British environmentalist George Monbiot invented the Monbiot Fallacy. As a man who prides himself on recognising that economic growth is incompatible with preserving environments, Monbiot has long argued that total economic growth is a good surrogate for total environmental destruction. Granted that economists demand a minimum of 3% growth per year, he predicts massive destruction of the natural world by the year 2100. This seems right, since at that 3% rate we will see the world’s economy double four times — grow 16-fold. Yet current projections are that in that time the world’s population will only increase by half. Therefore, Monbiot suggests, that ‘economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth.’ He thus feels justified in not being too bothered about Britain’s rapid population growth — and in hinting at unpleasant views of those environmentalists who are. Yet as we saw at the end of Chapter 5, even if the planet could provide such a quantity of services and products, there is no precedent for assuming that economic growth can owe so little to population growth. Existing statistics show population growth and growth in per capita consumption as almost equally important. In Australia for instance ― as John Coulter pointed out to Monbiot ― over the past 25 years the economy has been growing at 3.2% while the growth of per capita GDP has averaged 1.9%. This indicates that, in terms of growth in environmental impact, 60% of the growth is due to rising per capita demand and 40% to increase in population. Monbiot has also scrambled the maths. Even on his figures, 16-fold economic growth divided by 1.5-fold population growth, means about 11-fold per capita growth: a ratio of about 1 to 7 between the two factors, not 1 to 32! A better way out of the Monbiot Fallacy is to argue thus. If the nature of our economy ensures a doubling of total consumption every 20 years or so for ever, then most hopes of saving the environment and warding off climate change are lost. The present population of the Earth, plus the increases in per capita consumption that economists will demand of them, is enough to doom the Earth. However if we are serious about fighting such runaway growth, then both the factors that drive it (population and per capita consumption) must be kept as low as possible. Granted that per capita consumption, even of necessities like energy and food, may need to be voluntarily pinched in, the larger the number of individuals to be supplied and fed, the less chance there will be of them agreeing to do so. Monbiot should also have considered the scenario where nature or lack of resources does the job for us — relieving the pressure on the environment but giving us the problem of human misery to alleviate. Imagine that peak oil bites sooner than expected, the economy goes into recession, there is so little fuel oil that private cars can run only by permit and homes can be heated only a few hours a day. Will not these privations be crueller for an expanded population than for a smaller one? Numbers matter.   On the Replacement Rate Fallacy   The late pro-natalist B.A. Santamaria once informed his readers in The Australian that for Australia’s population not to fall rapidly the average woman must have 2 surviving children.  Such views are quite common, and often lead to a false belief that population is either falling or about to fall.  Thus in July 2008, when the Pope visited Sydney for World youth Day (just after World Population Day), Australia’s Cardinal Pell told the media that Western nations faced a population crisis fuelled by ‘ruthless’ commercial forces, and that ‘No country in the Western world is producing enough children to keep the population stable.’ If Pell was thinking about his native Australia he was right―but not in the way he imagined. Australian women are having far too many babies to keep the population stable. In fact almost twice as many as necessary. Births in Australia (about half a million a year) are twice deaths (about a quarter of a million) and have been so for the past twenty years―even though Australian women have been averaging significantly less than two children each for at least that long. Clearly there is something cock-eyed about this “replacement rate” argument. It involves a common, but elementary, error in demography. Can  you spot it? In fact to keep stable and just replace itself, a relatively young population like Australia’s would currently need something even lower than Western Europe’s rate of around 1.3 children per completed family. More like 0.93. And that’s without immigration! Misunderstandings like Pell’s often come from those who a decade earlier might have tried to argue that we need more people for defence, or for “respect” in the world. As those older props are discredited, more weight has fallen on the Replacement Rate Fallacy. Underlying all this is a natural bias of human beings towards pro-natalism   The replacement rate was a useful, if theoretical, concept back when couples everywhere were having 4 and 5 children as a matter of course. Since couples often justified this by saying that the world must be populated, demographers would point out that all a couple need do to replace itself, was to have 2 children. More exactly, about 2.05 children, to allow for the odd child that dies before reaching reproductive age, and for the slight excess of male births. But basically, if women in their reproductive years average two surviving children, or one surviving daughter, a generation will simply replace itself, won’t it?    Well, no! Humans are not fruitflies, where the generation of parents dies as their offspring are born. Children don’t replace parents, or even grandparents these days, but more often they replace great-grandparents. Hence if a generation of parents were to produce an equal-sized generation of children this would not mean the population had stabilized. In fact the population would not stabilize, at that rate, until the last generation to have more than 2.05 children had departed the scene. For instance, if India achieved so-called “replacement fertility” now, with all its couples in future averaging just 2.05 children, its population would still double, adding an extra 1 billion people! Demographers need to clearly explain to journalists the difference between the Theoretical Long-Term Replacement Rate (TLTRR) and the Current Replacement Birth Rate (CRBR). The latter is the birth-rate that would currently (though not indefinitely) produce as many births as deaths.  The only replacement rate that Australia could claim to be safely below is the Theoretical Long-Term Replacement Rate (TLTRR) of just over two children per completed family. But that is the replacement rate of an imaginary Australia, an already stabilized Australia, a society in which there would now be equal numbers in each generation. By rights we should distinguish birthrate from fertility rate. The birthrate is the number of babies born per thousand people per year (and hence the replacement birthrate is that at which births per year would equal deaths); whereas ‘the fertility rate’ is the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime ― which is the demographers’ justification for speaking of 2.05 children per woman as ‘replacement fertility’. If only non-demographers could be got to observe this distinction, Santamaria’s error could be succinctly described as confusing the birthrate with the fertility rate. Since fertility rates are always below 10, and birthrates may be nearer to 100, the two terms ought not to be confused! However one must despair of getting the media to distinguish between birthrate and fertility rate. The ANU demographer Dr Christabel Young has pointed out another hole in the replacement rate argument. When you take Australia’s current fertility rate of around 1.8 children per couple and factor in even a low net migration gain of just 80 000 per year, she calculated, it is still the equivalent of having a total fertility of around 2.4 children per woman. That of course is well above any estimate of the long-term replacement rate. And in reality our current net migration gain is now some 178,000 per year.   Some demographers are simply careless in talking about “the” replacement rate to journalists who almost invariably misunderstand “below TLTRR” as meaning “below the CRBR”; but there may also be pro-natalist demographers, and politicians, who do so deliberately to create concern about “our falling population”.  For instance the pro-natalist Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) recently put out a media release that suckered ABC TV News (26 February 2008) into reporting that Australia’s low birthrate was a disaster because there were, "not enough babies being born to replace people dying." In fact AIFS had merely said that fertility in Australia was “below the level required for population replacement” –which left them free to blame the ABC (and several other news media) for the error. Similarly, some of the business-lobby groups who try to create concern about “falling population” may be well aware from their own research that population is in fact rising rapidly. (Australia’s is rising at 1.6% a year, faster than Indonesia next door, and one of the fastest rates in Asia.) Reporters who are tempted by such nonsense” should  apply a common-sense reality-check. Anyone who drives around Australian cities ought to be aware that population growth is extremely high!   NOTE: The above is not an exact quotation from the book but combines passages from several chapters.

When do we let our political judgements be swayed not by a rational analysis of the facts, but by self-interest, wishful thinking, superstition or just plain irrational prejudices? Whether rapid climate change is taking place and is caused by human activity is surely a matter of scientific analysis, on which I suppose one may hold different perspectives, e.g. one may return from an unusually mild southern Greenland only to witness subzero temperatures in Madrid. One’s objective analysis during a Spanish chill may sway against the global warming hypothesis, but if one used one weather event selectively to discredit much more voluminous to the contrary that would be bias. Supposing, as a mainstream newspaper pundit, I wished to prove a majority of Iraqi people supported the US/UK liberation of their country despite all the trouble, with sufficient funds I could easily arrange for a group of pro-occupation Iraqis to acquiesce to a little public relations. Indeed I could simply choose my sample in an area renowned for its support of the US/UK invaders, such as the Kurdish north. What I’m alluding to is our ability to construct a reality that matches our aspirations and prejudices by picking the facts that suit our agenda,

Some of us might like to think only others are prone to biased constructions of reality. Indeed the very accusation of prejudice often serves as useful rhetorical weapon to defeat an argument, otherwise well supported. This often follows fuzzy logic, e.g. “You claim there are too many people in London. The BNP (xenophobic British National Party) makes the same claim. The BNP is irrationally racist. So are you. Therefore, I conclude only a warped racist could possibly believe London is overcrowded” or consider this “You claim we should take action to cope with climate action. So does the mainstream media representing big business, so you must be wrong”. Well let’s consider these assertions. First the portrayal many tend to exaggerate the arguments of their adversaries. A statement like “planet Earth cannot support six billion human beings at current rates of consumption in the long term” soon becomes simplified to “We’d better start culling excess humans now, so the rest of us can continue enjoy the same standard of living”. Next comes a bold assertion about a common bête noire, an extremist grouping or demonised tyrant with whom is simply not done to sympathise. Sometimes media may have been so successful at marginalising dissident idea that the bête noire in question may actually present rational ideas, but the existence of genuine extremists and assorted nutters serves the establishment’s mind control agenda very well. Suppose a small radical Islamic sect called for the liquidation of all US millionaires.

The Problem Reaction Solution and Counterreaction

The basic difference between the infamous Italian Mafia, Camorra and Ndragata clans running protection rackets and modern states lies essentially in their size, influence and control of the mainstream media, but effectively they act as immature microstates within states often offering many of the same services. Paying a pizzo or protection money to your local Mafia boss may seem extortion, but effectively it’s what we do when we pay taxes. Sure, to some extent, government money trickles back to the general populace providing many of us with jobs and redistributing wealth in an inherently unjust corporate economy. Here are just a few examples of classic problem reaction solutions:

• We have rampant crime, therefore we need more police, more surveillance and tougher sentencing.
• We have terrorists and political extremists in our midst, therefore we need more monitoring of people’s everyday lives and clamp down on hate speech.
• We have unsustainable immigration, therefore we need tighter immigration controls, more police, more social workers, more new houses, more money spent on integration etc…
• We are facing an environmental crisis, therefore we should trust our leaders to impose greater controls on our irresponsible behaviour as private citizens.

Thankfully many of us don’t buy this logic. Why should we accept greater hardships because of macro-economic decisions taken by remote business leaders and politicians? All the above problems, if indeed they are problems, are created by an absurdly unsustainable and unbalanced economic system hooked on perpetual growth. Instead of asking “how should the state combat crime?”, “how should the state deal with troublemakers?”, “how should the state control the migration of human beings in a never-ending rat race?” or “how should the state and big business address climate change?”, we should ask “Why do people turn to crime?”, “Why do people resort to violence and hateful ideas?” or “Why are we facing an environmental catastrophe?”. These more rational questions do not negate the existence or perception of real problems, but turn the questions raised by the mainstream media on their heads.

Nevertheless many of us react by negating the reality of the problems. A common notion on the liberal left is that “We don’t need Draconian legislation” (a conclusion I agree with) because crime has not risen recently and may have actually declined, a perception only possible if you live in a leafy suburb somewhere. Likewise we should value free speech, again a view I wholeheartedly agree with, because everyone is so tolerant and nice in these enlightened days, a perception only possible if you genuinely believe in the benefits of over twenty years of neo-liberal economics and social engineering. Next consider the conclusion that “we should not deport illegal immigrants, (and I would be loathe to trust the state to do so in anyone’s interests but their own), because we need more immigrants to boost our dynamic economy and do jobs we don’t want to do and besides this country can host tens of millions more (as long as we can continue importing cheap food)”. Once again this conclusion tends to appeal to those who are doing fairly well and can afford to steer clear of the adverse side effects of unplanned economically driven migration. We see two sections of the mainstream media engaging in a phoney debate over immigration with both sides supporting the unsustainable model of perpetual growth that drives immigration in the first place. Some on the left are simply incapable of admitting that overcrowding will exacerbate the very socio-economic tensions we wish to eradicate, hiding behind a façade of cultural diversity, interethnic tolerance and international solidarity while relying on a globalised economy controlled by a small number of supranational corporations.

We see the same fuzzy thinking behind the looming environmental catastrophe, except here we see a distinct trend towards outright denial or downplaying of the evidence before us. To some extent it would be easier to argue with some left-leaning climate change deniers, if the mainstream media denied its reality. Why should we rely on former Vice President Al Gore to warn us of a pending disaster caused by human hyperactivity in large part due to his own country’s grotesque overconsumption?Yet we have let TV, Cinema and commercial Web services dominate our lives to such an extent, some of us only ever believe something when Hollywood-style edutainment movies endorse it.

The Rense Dot Com Mindset

Personally I’d treat many articles promoted by http://www.rense.com with the same degree of scepticism as I reserve for the Daily Mail, the favourite newspaper of Britain's disgruntled middle class. They remind us of some home truths, correctly identify some social problems and then pursue their own agenda. Rense Dot Com has recently featured numerous articles challenging the notions of Peak Oil and manmade climate change, while simultaneously providing a platform for one of the US’s most vehement anti-immigration crusaders, Frosty Wooldridge. That unsustainable immigration is driven by unsustainable overconsumption does not really occur to a narrow conservative American mindset that just wishes to conserve their uniquely prosperous way of life threatened by low-paid immigrants and politicians attempting to increase fuel taxes.

The Greg Palast Mindset

I’ve covered the strange case of the Frank Füredi sect (RCP => LM Mag => Spiked Online) with their characteristic form of technocratic polemicism. However, much more commonly on the left we encounter an ideological refutation of environmental hard truths to support an unremitting optimism for the human progress. Such social optimists are willing to identify and expose the reactionary or unprogressive nature of today’s ruling elites. They rightly participate in the rhetorical crusade against Bush, Blair, the IMF/World Bank and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, but somehow deep down still believe in the enduring myth of Western enlightenment capturing the hearts and minds of an oppressed underdeveloped world. Many on the left view the world in terms of good causes and are thus very susceptible to the emotional arguments of mainstream pundits promoting hidden agendas. Few could pretend life was easy for Afghani women under the infamous Taliban. I certainly would not like to live in a society in which women become little more than the property of their husbands kept in ignorance and under veil, but what right do we have to impose our worldviews on an autonomous community. Human rights is very relative concept with many trade-offs. When the warlords of the Northern Alliance gained power before the Taliban imposed its variant of Sharia law, women were regularly raped and many actually welcomed the protection these drastic laws claimed to provide, possibly in the same way many people in this country welcome the installation of CCTV cameras at every street corner, e-mail snooping and lynching of suspected paedophiles. The spectre of extreme misogyny served to dampen opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan and steer attention way from the true geopolitical goals of the exercise. Likewise leftwing immigrants rights campaigns fail to address the true causes of socially and environmentally unsustainable migration, often acting against the immediate interests of their own native working classes,

The Immigration Conundrum

The traditional difference between the left and right, at least in my simplified way of thinking, is that the former stands up for the rights of common people in general and the downtrodden in particular, while the latter defends the status quo often appealing to the forces of reaction against subversive and destabilising elements. In the fantasy world of the radical left working class British workers struggling to pay their mortgage or rent, forever in debt with their bank and doing overtime to settle bills and loan repayments, will, once politicised and enlightened, unite in struggle with the oppressed masses of the not-so-prosperous world. While we can cite many examples of Western European striking for better pay, improved working condition or against cutbacks or privatisation, we can cite few in which the same workers have taken industrial action in solidarity with much lower paid workers elsewhere. Indeed all evidence shows working class Europeans flocking to retail outlets to buy the very consumer goods whose deceptively low prices are only permitted only by favourable exchange rates or rather an injection of virtual money by banking cartels into high consumption economies. Whether you like it or not migration nearly always flows from economically and/or environmentally disadvantaged regions to more prosperous or more environmentally sustainable regions. The British didn’t colonise Australia just to get a suntan or enjoy a more outdoor lifestyle, but because by the late 18th century the growing population of Britain’s newly industrialised regions had become too much of a burden, so the excess population either died early through hunger or disease or emigrated. The same is happening today, except we see a movement away from countries currently undergoing structural readjustment to countries with plenty of virtual money, most of which have been or still are colonial powers. At the same time we see a smaller movement by the propertied classes away from the bustling metropolises of the wealthier countries to the greener and sunnier pastures of low-income countries. So while Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians flock to London, many Londoners are buying up properties at knock-down prices in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Qatar, France or Spain. However, in both cases we see the resurgence of 19^th century divisions between a servant class and their professional masters. This is just fine, if you happen to own a house in London (currently a modest four-bedroom semi can fetch around £500,000 in many boroughs) and you don’t mind retiring or relocating. Many opt simply to move to the surrounding home counties and rent their London property. Indeed whole residential streets are now rented out to London’s new migrant classes with several families often sharing a Lilliputian three-bedroom house. The new immigrant classes fill two key gaps in the labour market, traditional hands-on skilled jobs that fail to appeal to young Britons and low-paid service-sector-servicing roles. The latter category encompasses anything ranging from bartenders, childminders, care assistants, bus drivers to newspaper distributors, but the apparent gap in the labour market would cease to exist if the clientele had less expendable cash and more indigenous young people were prepared to do these jobs as they did until recently. Currently a high proportion of home-grown fruit and vegetables are harvested by migrant labour. If we paid home-grown farm workers a decent wage and sourced all crops suited to our climate locally, prices would inevitably rise even more than they are now as a result of fuel crops and soaring oil prices, but we’d adapt by consuming less junk. The immigration wave of the early 21^st century has in effect enabled an unsustainable consumer-led service-oriented economy to stay afloat. In one extreme case a Polish family doctor flew every weekend all the way from Poznan, Western Poland, to Glasgow, hired a car to drive all the way to remote area of Aberdeenshire to earn £2000 as a weekend general practitioner owing to a temporary shortage of qualified GPs willing to work in the area. As budget airline Ryanair announce cutbacks following recent rises in oil prices, we may wonder how long this absurdity can continue, burning umpteenth barrels of fuel to cope with the consequences of unsustainable hedonism and a rat race that attracts the best minds away from their provincial to the citadels of power and corruption.

The Sick Man of Europe

Back in the 1970s Britain, as we then called England + Wales + Scotland, was known as the sick man of Europe, strike-prone, inefficient and basking in the glory of a bygone era of imperial and industrial strength. Thatcherism proved a very bitter pill to swallow, with unemployment rising officially to over 3.5 million and unofficially to over 6 million and millions of manufacturing jobs gone forever. The economic resurgence of the mid and late 1980s saw mainly the growth of services and trade. While the early years of the Major government saw a brief resurgence in the manufacturing sector through inward investment and a low pound, the current administration has overseen the almost complete outsourcing of what remained of Britain’s manufacturing base. Besides services, three industries dominate UK industry, military hardware, energy and pharmaceuticals, all relying on imported components and raw materials. In an idyllic past each community had the right mix of professional farmers, manufacturers, craftspeople and service providers. We all need and expect housing, furniture, plumbing, electrical power, domestic appliances, food, restaurants, roads, public transport, schools and healthcare, yet for some reason the professions essential to the provision of these goods and services do not appeal very much to young Brits, by which I mean anyone who grew up mainly in England, Scotland or Wales. As a result numerous essential professions were by the mid 1990s severely under-resourced. On a simplistic level people management, sales, media and leisure-related professions appeal much more to a generation raised on TV, pop music, movies and now video-games and the Internet. However, on a structural level we can observe that many traditional professions only exist as human resources within a larger organisation rather than self-employed workers and small tradespeople offering services to their local community. Rather than encourage entrepreneurism, the gradual takeover of a handful of supermarket chains and retail outlets of not only the food supply, but also furniture, clothing, DIY and commodity appliances restricts the scope of small businesses to essentially franchisees or minor service providers, or rather contractors, of larger corporations. If you grew up in a sprawling suburban housing estate, went shopping once a week at large supermarket, while your parents worked as loyal enforcers in a state-corporate system to earn credit to buy readily available goods, you may be tempted to opt for the easiest and least stressful means of making money. Thus the prospect of becoming a baker or plumber only becomes attractive, if the potential earnings offset the enormous effort required to learn the tricks of the trade and other members of one’s extended family or local community serve as professional role models. Instead too many people in this country have grown to consider such tradespeople as simple low-end and easily replaceable human resources or possibly quaint characters portrayed on TV sitcoms or seen in exotic backwaters. TV chef, Jamie Oliver, recently took his healthy school meals campaign to the wilds of rural Lincolnshire, only to discover school catering staff unaware of local vegetable suppliers literally a stone’s throw from the school grounds preferring instead to visit their nearest supermarket. Yet down on the ground farmers are compelled to hire cheaper migrant labour in order to maintain the low prices that the big supermarket chain impose. As always there are two sides to a story. Polish smallholders have been driven off their land because foreign food chains like UK-based Tesco and the French Carréfour group have taken over large sections of the distribution chain preferring to buy from a smaller number of large agribusinesses rather than from thousands of smallholders that had until recently dominated Polish farming. The resulting conglomeration and restructuring inevitably caused rampant unemployment and a huge pool of cheap labour. Not surprisingly many Polish newcomers to the British Isles consider the natives here lazy, spoilt little brats.

Would not have been better for the English, Scots and Welsh to relearn the skills we need to fend for ourselves, and leave Eastern Europeans to develop independently and sustainably rather than emulate the ultimately soul-destroying and unsustainable Anglo-American neo-liberal model.

The ABC reported last week that the irrepressible Chris Peters of the ACT Chamber of Commerce and Industry had rejected calls for a cap on Canberra's population. Mr Peters is reported to have said: "We have the fastest ageing population in Australia and unless we grow our population with younger people ... unless we have an increase in population, there'll be no people left to provide medical, health or any services we need," According to Mr Peters, Canberrans age faster than other Australians - apparently in contravention of the accepted laws of human biology and space/time. But I think I get what he's trying to say. His message is that we have a significant number of people approaching retirement age; and that we should all be fearful about who'll care for us in our old age. Is he right, though? My own impression of Canberra is that a lot of public servants come here at a later stage of their careers. Having served in regional areas with Centrelink, Defence, border security agencies and the like at the start of their careers, many accept more senior administrative positions based in Canberra when they're into their 40's. This would tend to skew the age distribution of Canberrans upwards. But the other thing I've noticed is how a lot of retirees can't stand the cold. Many retire away from Canberra, either to the NSW South Coast or further north. So perhaps the flow out of Canberra at retirement goes some way to balancing the flow in when middle management public servants get transferred here? Well anyway.. Mr Peters prediction of Canberra filling up with doddering OAP's incapable of fending for themselves looks vulnerable to begin with. But what of his proposed solution? Grow the population. With young people only, presumably. After all - there's no point just bringing in a cartload of oldies. They'd just add to the problem, wouldn't they? Even people in their middle age are of limited value since they'll age too and soon become part of the problem. In fact, the only way to keep ahead of the problem in the longer term is to progressively grow the population - with young people - at an ever increasing rate to service the growing numbers of older residents encouraged to come here in previous years! Sound sustainable? Who cares?!? Think of the economic growth in the short term. No. What we really need in Canberra is exactly the type of migrant that succesive Federal Governments pine for - the sort that never ages. Peter Pan and Wendy. Stand by for Chris Peters next media release where he calls on the Rudd government to target skilled migrants from Neverland, with special categories of 457 visas for the Lost Boys. .

No room at nature's feast? How do governments deal with catastrophic mistakes?

How does a government deal in parliament with something embarassing but also catastrophic, like its total loss of control over a program for forced population growth? Only a few years ago, this was the kind of question one might apply to Mexico or Jakarta, but now, most unhappily, it applies to Melbourne.

Matter of Public Importance

On Wednesday, 16 April 2008, at a session known as "Matter of Public Importance" in Victorian Parliament, Ms Green, Member for Yan Yean set the topic.

Under the general heading of "Government: performance", Ms Green's "Matter of Public Importance," was:

"That this house congratulates the Brumby government for ensuring Victoria is the best place to live, work and raise a family for a million more Victorians."

Big Barbecue

In an understatement which should go down in history, Ms Green went on to describe how the way Victorian government's population drive has gone into massive overshoot was really like a big barbecue where too many guests came too early.

"At the outset I referred to the 1 million additional people coming to Victoria. In 2001, when we delivered our 2030 plan, we were planning for that level of growth to occur by 2030 but, because of the popularity of our state and what this government has done with its infrastructure and its people, it is now expected that the population growth predicted in 2001 is actually going to be here in 2020 rather than in 2030. To express it in terms that those opposite would understand - 2020 is only 12 years away - it is like 1 million people coming around to your place next Sunday and expecting a sausage at a barbecue. (...)."

She then burbled on to say that "We have to prepare for that growth. We have to be welcoming to those people who will come here. (...)"

"We" have to be welcoming

"We" have to be welcoming. Hmm. And just who invited all these people, Ms Green? Does the member for Yan Yean intend to put them all up in her back room or something? Is Mr Brumby going to lodge them all on his wife's farm? Maybe members of the Brumby Government are going to give out a million permits to camp in the treasury gardens. Mr Bracks and Mr Thwaites may have retired into big business, but they did send out a lot of the invitations to the barbie before they scootled. So they really do need to open up their homes to the overflow, and perhaps give up their children's places in schools and universities to newcomers, to show they are really welcoming. I am sure there would be plenty in the community prepared to help them pack and leave some room for the rest of us, and maybe a bit of democracy as well.

Ms Green continued, mentioning, among other things, that "Well-known and respected demographer Bernard Salt" has projected that "in the late 2020s Melbourne will again become Australia's largest city. This means that we have had to make some changes to our planning systems."

Bernard Salt is a salesman for growth to the people who market products, Ms Green. Will the Victorian people be able to hold him accountable for decisions which you and the rest of the government may make on his advice? Don't forget that, we, the people, on the other hand, have an entire department full or professional statisticians called the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Why don't you consult them? They are actually independent sources without any vested interest in growth. They are there to inform governments and we paid for them with taxes just so you could consult them.

Ms Green: I welcome the Premier's recent announcement of zoning changes ...

Ms Green continued. "I welcome the Premier's recent announcement of zoning changes and the speeding up of zoning within the urban growth boundary which will allow Melbourne to accommodate family growth. Those changes mean that about a year will be taken off the time required for building lots to come onto the market."

It sounds to me as if Ms Green has been introduced to some of the government's associates, possibly from the Property Council of Australia, or APop, or maybe she has had some contact with the Multicultural Foundation or the Scanlon Foundation, or ATSE (although they seems to be more for Federal Politicians).

This barbecue is sure going to cause us all a lot of inconvenience. I wonder if it's really worth it just to sell a lot more chops and sausages?

After a lyrical excursion into the wonders of a Stockland development where she had opened a new road called Mernda Village Drive, and the Catholic community there, the preservation of the river gums, (but not the kangaroos; this is an area known to the Australian Wildlife Protection Council as a wildlife-catastrophe zone) Ms Green (Yan Yean member) concluded her paean to out-of-control population growth:

"I commend this matter of public importance to the house. It is important that we are forward-looking and do not sit on our hands and say, 'Well, we will say “G'day” to these people coming round to the barbecue on Sunday'. We have to do more than be welcoming, although I know Victorians and Melburnians are welcoming.

With the usual logical irrelevance, she adverted to cultural diversity, marketed by successive Victorian governments as an unassailable justification for the high rate of immigration which has impacted in homelessness, wildlife devastation and the disorganisation of communities:

"We are a very culturally diverse community, which is another reason why people are moving to the state."

She insisted unreally: "We are a government that is forward-looking, investing in these people and being welcoming, while retaining our livability at the same time."

'Livability'; a vexed concept

Well, not everyone agrees on this point of retaining our 'livability'.

The member for Ferntree Gully, Mr Wakeling, exclaimed, "How disappointing that, with all the things the government could deal with in this house - the problems with public transport, problems with the health system, and the problems with education - the most pressing issue it can find facing this state at the moment is to congratulate the Brumby government on making Victoria the best place to live, work and raise a family.

"What a disgrace; what an absolute sham! For those people expecting this government to start listening to the concerns of the Victorian community and identifying ways to improve our services, this is the best that those opposite can come up with," he said, referring to the members in government as 'those opposite'.

(...) "I will tell members one thing: it is the worst place to live, work and wait for a delayed train. It is also the worst place to live, work and have reduced police on our streets; the worst place to live, work and be stuck on a trolley waiting for surgery; and the worst place to live, work and be educated by this country's lowest paid teachers. Those opposite should hang their heads in shame. While those opposite sit and laugh about the plight of teachers and about the problems besetting public transport, police and other important issues in this state, we on this side of the house are out there listening to the concerns of the community and expressing those concerns in this house. I call upon those opposite to follow the lead and to take on board the concerns of the Victorian community." (...)

"I will touch very briefly on the member for Yan Yean's comments about Melbourne 2030. What an unmitigated disaster! Melbourne 2030 is the planning blueprint to take the state forward to the year 2030, but the government made one slight mistake: it got the figures wrong. It was not one year out, it was not two years out, it was not three years out - -"

Mr Burgess (Member for Hastings) asked, "How many?"

Mr Wakeling replied, "It was 10 years out - in its own 30-year plan. What a disgrace! Melbourne 2030 is predicated on infill development and unit development in local communities. It was going to include the provision of upgrades to infrastructure - that is, public transport." (...) "My community got the worst of both worlds. It got the infill development and, more importantly, it did not get any public transport."(...)

Mr Northe, the member for Morwell, pointed out some more of the costs of population growth:

(...) "The assertion is that in the near future Victoria will have a population growth of some 1 million residents. That begs the question of how well Victoria is positioned to cater for those future additional residents, and from my perspective, what impact it will have on the growth of regional Victoria. Of course population growth equates to an additional demand upon essential services and infrastructure, and issues arising from that have been highlighted in recent times.

"They include the congestion on our roads, the overcrowding on our public transport, the waiting lists in our health system, the shortage of police resources, and disputes that are ongoing with the nurses, police and other public servants.

"An increase in population will create additional pressures in all these areas and will create increased demand for electricity, gas and water." (...)

"The Minister for Health (...) would be well aware of the growing waiting lists and the statistics that unfortunately are worsening with each revelation that comes out through the statistics. With population growth comes an additional demand on our health services. That is indicated by the population growth within Traralgon and the Latrobe Valley in recent times. It has put an enormous burden upon our hospitals and community health centres. That is indicated and verified by some of the statistics that are produced, not only by the Latrobe Regional Hospital, but also the Latrobe Community Health Service, and particularly the dental waiting list over time. It is very difficult for us to try to attract and retain health professionals in rural areas. So as the population grows it is imperative that we have systems in place to attract people to the health-care system in regional areas."

(...)

"Recently we have seen disputes with the police about the lack of police resources. I talk to police officers in my local area on a regular basis; they inform me they are struggling to make ends meet. They do not have the opportunity to be on the beat, where they should be, to protect the community, and they have grave concerns about that.

"An example is the town of Churchill, which has a population of somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 people, and does not have a 24-hour police station. That is of grave concern to the community of Churchill.(...)"

(...)

Mr Thompson (Sandringham): "'Victoria is a great place to live, work, raise a family and speak in clichés"

Mr THOMPSON, the member for Sandringham's speech indicated that he perceived a certain slickness in the Matter of Public Importance (which was, you may recall, "That this house congratulates the Brumby government for ensuring Victoria is the best place to live, work and raise a family for a million more Victorians"). He claimed that, "One of the great political lies perpetrated on the Victorian people in the last decade was the Labor promise that it would build the Scoresby freeway, the EastLink freeway, toll free. Victorians for the next 30 years will be paying an exorbitant amount as they commute from their local suburb. The matter of public importance (MPI) today really should be under the heading of a grievance motion. The topic is that the house congratulates the Brumby government on making Victoria a great place to live, work and raise a family for a million more migrants. Fundamentally it should be retitled 'a great place to live, work, raise a family and speak in clichés', because that is what the Labor Party regularly does and treats this house with disdain.

He gave many examples:

"We have seen other jurisdictions around the world where people speak in clichés. They speak in mottos - be it China, be it the Soviet Union or other regimes around the world. It makes a mockery of this Parliament to parrot these clichés on a regular basis. If one googles the phrase, one will find how many other countries around the world use the cliché, the phrase 'a great place to live, work and raise a family'. I could refer to the United States of America and the town of Annapolis, where the residents regard it as the 'greatest place to live, work and raise a family'. One could go to the area of Cary in the United States, where the locals promote their town and region as the 'greatest place to live, work and raise a family'. One could go to the township of Saskatchewan in Canada, where the state is promoted as the 'greatest place to live, work and raise a family'.

He went on to name more examples, finishing up with Amityville:

"(...) One could go to Amityville - I understand there is a film called the Amityville Horror - where again people find it to be the 'greatest place to live, work and a raise a family'. It may be from this very township that the spruikers for the Bracks and Brumby governments found the phrase in a Hollywood film script. (...)

"(...) The Labor Party is speaking in clichés. It makes an absolute mockery of this chamber. In terms of the matter of public importance before the house, we as Australians should value the opportunity to live in a wonderful country which allows us freedoms and advantages not experienced in many other parts of the world.

"(...)The member for Bentleigh was speaking about public transport, and it will not be long before the commuters going on the Frankston line through his electorate will not have room on board the train with the seats removed, and they will not have room anywhere else. They will have to climb on the roof and follow the New Delhi trains there by way of a precedent in looking at good public transport examples."

(...)

Thompson: "Do I believe this state has the capacity to absorb a million new migrants in the short term?"

"Do I believe this state has the capacity to absorb a million new migrants in the short term? I do not believe so. Why is that? I will outline why. We are still waiting on the delivery of better water infrastructure, better roads and better public transport, real tax reform, and a vision for manufacturing which will provide a fundamental employment base for Victoria, drawing on our energy reserves."

(...)

"(...)We have water shortages that have not been envisaged by the current government. It has been in office for 19 out of the last 26 years in this state. There was provision for better water infrastructure 25 years ago, but the Labor Party has failed to deliver."

(...)

"We need a plan for our electricity supplies and to make clean use of our coal resources, but we have seen recently a decline in the service reliability of power companies. A number of senior citizens in my electorate experienced power blackouts for 48 to 72 hours. We need affordable housing." (...) The Brumby government refuses to recognise the effect of the huge stamp duty windfalls as part of this process. We have the highest stamp duty in the nation. The government continues to collect the money and impose that burden affecting the fertility rate of the next generation and the ability of working families to maintain an affordable quality of life in addition to meeting their housing repayments.

"Looped into their mortgage repayments is the money borrowed to meet the stamp duty commitment.

"Public housing lists are blowing out, with no addition to the public housing stock. There is a disability housing crisis. We confront as a community increases in the cost of petrol, water, power and food, and these are adding to the household budgets of Victorians. The housing boom on the fringes of Melbourne requires hundreds of extra doctors and hospital beds and dozens of new schools as well as billions of dollars in infrastructure spending to supply new roads, public transport, schools, hospitals, shops and child-care centres, but there has been a lack of planning on the part of the Bracks and Brumby governments to provide appropriately for these needs." (...)

And so on.

Look, just before all the members of government give up their homes, and go out into the wilderness to make room for the guests at the big barbecue, could I suggest that someone responsible should consider putting a message up here, on the Government's immigration site, saying, "Immigration program cancelled indefinitely due to overshoot of oil, water, shelter, and soil?"

Source of parliamentary dialogue:
www.parliament.vic.gov.au/downloadhansard/assembly.htm, MATTER OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE, ASSEMBLY Wednesday, 16 April 2008, beginning at p.1274

“To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, and the destruction of our most cherished values—there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally—and breed.” (Isaac Asimov)

Environmentalists have been often accused of being prophets of doom. Now there is a new species of Catastrophists: they are political and economic commentators with a pervasive lament that the world faces exponential population decline, with a “Global Aging Crisis” that threatens to “stunt” economic growth.

Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation writes that current population trends also threaten to make military actions increasingly difficult for most nations. Pensions and health care will require increased funding. As the labour force stops growing, it will become more difficult for Washington to sustain current levels of military spending or the number of men and women in uniform.

Many commentators are concerned, more or less openly, with national or international prestige, not just economic, but military. It is not just about pensions; at stake is the decline of national prestige and of capitalism, which as rule have always flourished with population growth.

Governments, media, industries and business in general have switched from their previous 1970s preoccupation with uncontrolled population growth, to focus on the consequences of unplanned Western population decline. They fear the asymmetrical proportions of an ageing population in the developed world against the youthful force of Asian nations of the new coming world. The decline of the West is seen as tantamount to decay and loss of relevance on the international stage. It is the tragedy of Western extinction. Competition about power has got a new name: Fertility.

The Canadian political analyst Mark Steyn asserts that the West is in danger of extinction. “We’re pretty much awash in resources, but we’re running out of people, the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter.” In the face of his preoccupation with the ‘demise of Western civilization’, Steyn ignores questions about the abundance of every other resource.

Since the United Nations downgraded its assumption of global population projections, from 10 billion to slightly under 9 billion by 2050, the press have reacted as if Earth were on a fatal collision course with a giant asteroid. They have created panic among the Old Cornucopians and anyone else who believes that population growth is ‘No Problem’.

However, they shouldn’t worry, because, according to these predictions, population growth is still on course to add, by 2050, a new population nearly the current size of India, or almost five times the size of sub-Saharan Africa. The trouble is, the growth will be mostly in developing countries, in places where women average six or more children (Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Somalia) and those where they average five or more (Congo, Ivory Coast, Eritrea, Guinea, Nigeria, the Palestinian territories, Sudan and Togo). India is projected to overtake China’s population by 55%, while Indonesia is expected to increase its population by 30% and Vietnam by 40%. And if Turkey joins the EU, with a projected increase of 30 million, it will count as the Union’s most populous member.

Different projection models, seen by some as pessimistic, and by others as optimistic - conclude that there is an 85 per cent chance that the world’s population will stop growing before the end of the century. There is a 60 per cent probability that it will not exceed 10 billion people before 2100, and around a 15% probability that, at the end of the century, Earth’s population will be lower than it is today. For different regions, the date and size of peak population will vary considerably. At the global level, old age will prevail: the proportion above age 60 is likely to increase from its current level of 10 per cent to around 22 per cent in 2050.

If trends were to be borne out, by 2050 the cohort aged 65 to 84 years old would reach 1.3 billion, while those aged 88 and over would number 175 million.

These projected numbers are feared likely to impose a destructive burden on society. Hence, for some, the prospect of an end to world population growth is welcome news for sustainable development. (Lutz,Sanderson,Scherbov)

The pessimistic view of a population decline depends on absolute faith in the benefits of population growth. The new breed of pessimists is the antithesis of the Old Cornucopians and a new mutation. Their literature is studded with references to the perils of ageing.

“Economists in the West have declared that it will be impossible to sustain the present system of old age pensions.” (Mullan). “The United Nations duly convened in October 2000, a group of experts to examine issues of population aging and decline, the twin most dreaded consequences of humanity’s biological success.”

Such fear is not new. As early as 1937, John Maynard Keynes assured us that the problem of overpopulation is old hat and in its place we have a different threat: lack of demand caused by a declining population. The nationalistic content of such preoccupations was reflected in the thinking of many and endorsed by the Royal Commission which reported in 1949 the danger of a steady fall in birth-rates from 1870 (Mullan).

The European Union (EU) has an ambivalent attitude: while promoting population control policies in the developing world, it would look stupid, not to say racist, in denouncing the danger of falling birth rates in the West.

For some commentators this worry is part of a more generalised alarmism, which touches every aspect of modern society: food scares, water depletion, climate changes, family crisis, terrorism, social fragmentation, immigration, AIDS, bird flu, civil and uncivil wars, football violence, unruly teenagers, destruction of forests, and so on, some of which are suspected to have been promoted by environmentalists in search of a visible platform.

The lack of growth produces a stationary society especially if older people are excluded from the labour market. The trend has become a cause for angst, paradoxically transforming the old image of the demographic “bomb” out of recognition. No more explosions, but implosion. “An older industrial world will inevitably be a slower growing one.” (Hamish McRae)

It’s the economy, stupid

The author offers an interpretation for the existence of the New Catastrophists. Their insistence on gloom mongering is manipulative and follows deliberate ideological ends, the ideology of eternal Growth: The Golden Calf.

The ideology underlying the population growth model is inspired by Adam Smith, mercantilist/imperialist economics, and modern demand and supply theories. (A. David Coleman)

As life expectancy has increased in the entire Western world, it has been associated with longer and healthier life spans in the older population. A 60 year old today is not the same 60 years old of twenty years ago. As a result, people can either work longer or consume less.

Ah! Consuming less! This concept is anathema for the disciples of the New Dogma—the Growth Factor. No society today, rich or poor, of left or right government, will oppose this dogma, which has become a quasi-religious belief system. It follows that economic growth cannot do without population growth.

Among supporters of population growth, the late Julian Simon is the most extreme case. He advocated continued population growth long into the future, deserving Professor Albert Bartlett’s award of membership in “The New Flat Earth Society” because a flat earth is the only earth that has the potential to allow the human population to grow forever.

“We have in our hands now - actually in our libraries - the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years… Even if no new knowledge were ever gained...we would be able to go on increasing our population forever.” (Julian Simon)

How has this self-confidence in progress and everlasting human improvement, founded on growth, given way to gloomy predictions about the future?

Again, the word on which we should concentrate is “growth”. No population growth = no economic growth. It is simple. The faith of the Cornucopians in a radiant future is based on growing growth. To anticipate lower economic expectations, resulting from less people to feed, clothe, house, educate, mobilize, and serve in the army - even if this includes unemployment, crowding, pollution, cementification, and social conflict - goes against the conventional assumption that human inventiveness doesn’t accept biological limits and is the motor of progress.

The over-optimistic view that purports humanity’s capacity to overcome every difficulty, with time, technology and lots of human beings, has turned on its head, when confronted with the awful perspective of a diminishing population.

If humans are so deft in inventing new solutions to ever increasing problems, what then stands in the way of creating new solutions to the economic affliction of demographic decline, publicised by the press and governments as the ultimate tragic event?

Surely, the same race that has sent man to the Moon - an incredibly difficult task previously thought to belong to the realm of science fiction - can manage changes arising from the so-called demographic transition?

We are being instructed to believe that the problem is economic. Ecological concerns are not a priority, nor are related issues of resource depletion, energy availability, loss of biodiversity, plunder of our natural capital. The fact that many species are in danger of extinction is not a major concern, nor that natural beauty is disappearing under tons of concrete. Though it is undeniable that the density of human populations is responsible for environmental devastation, it is also evident that not everybody is concerned. Our governments obey the economist exhortations and rightly recognise that people are mostly interested in what is called “purchasing power”.

If people were better informed about the threat to their lifestyles they would take into consideration other factors: Peak Oil is already upon us and its scarcity is already affecting their purchasing power. And if they were to reflect further, they should recognise that a less populated world would have everything to gain in security, democracy, liberty, employment, resources availability, and so on.

Solutions to the crisis

A report released on Sunday, February 19th by the English Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) the leading New Labour think-tank, claimed that Britain was at a “demographic fork in the road” and needed to increase its fertility to prevent future tax rises.

The answer ? “The IPPR report says, in effect, that we need more babies to pay for our pensioners but this ignores the fact that those babies will eventually become pensioners themselves,” said David Nicholson-Lord, research associate for the Optimum Population Trust. “When that happens, we will need - on the IPPR’s logic, at least - even more babies to support the even greater number of pensioners. Population would thus have to go on increasing ad infinitum - something the planet clearly cannot support.” (David Nicholson Lord)

Behold an Editorial from The Economist of January 7th 2006, the smartest most influential magazine in the world,” according to The Sunday Telegraph

“The new demographics that are causing populations to age and to shrink are something to celebrate. Humanity was once caught in the trap of high fertility and high mortality. Now it has escaped into the freedom of low fertility and low mortality. Women’s control over the number of children they have is an unqualified good, as is the average person’s enjoyment, in rich countries, of ten more years of life than they had in 1960. Politicians may fear the decline of their nations’ economic prowess, but people should celebrate the new demographics as heralding a golden age.”

Notwithstanding the congratulating tone of this article, about the happy consequences of the lengthening of life, due to a limitation of births, the general reaction is of dismay and hand wringing. Some reactions are obsessively concentrating on a narrow issue. It is called: pension funds, or the preoccupation of providing funding to a growing number of older people.

Nobody seems to be able to find a solution, in spite of the proclaimed inventiveness of the human race.

According to certain UN figures “The ‘population bomb’ is now, officially, a dud…. The Population Division of the UN has now published a report titled ‘Replacement Migration: Is it a Solution to Declining and Aging Populations?’ that claims to address a problem population doomsayers did not predict: that within 50 years many countries around the world will be suffering from underpopulation. The report explicitly states, ‘Among the demographic trends revealed by those figures [generated], two are particularly salient: population decline and population aging.’ The report predicts that by 2050, Japan’s population will have dropped by 18 percent, Italy’s by 28 percent, and Europe as a whole by 13 percent,” according to Joseph Klesney a policy analyst at the Acton Institute.

The UN Population Division continues to worry: if the United States hopes to maintain the current ratio of workers to retirees over time, it will have to absorb an average of 10.8 million immigrants annually through 2050. At that point, however, the U.S. population would total 1.1 billion, 73 percent of whom would be immigrants who had arrived in this country since 1995 or their descendants.

Just housing such a massive influx would require the equivalent of building another New York City every 10 months. (Longman)

Europe is also deemed to need mass immigration to fix the support ratio between workers and pensioners. Britain, for example, is recommended to take a million immigrants a year to 2050, just to maintain the balance, which would bring the population to 120 millions…

Some European countries try to ignite more pro-natalist propaganda.

In extremis, some demographers recommend more immigration, in order to pay for our pensions.

But this is a theme for another, more ad hoc article.

Feeding reciprocally these up-down fears of economic decline = population decline, one of the most active and fundamentalist proponents of population growth is Ben J. Wattenberg, Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative institution supported by Big Business. And it is not strange that Big Business should support a rise in population, even through immigration, as businesses depend on a growth of their customer base. Just think how depopulation would play in favour of the construction industry.

Wattenberg “believes in the dire economic and emotional repercussions consequent to the “birth dearth”: shrinking markets, wrenching economic dislocation and great personal costs for millions of young people who decide not to raise families. (Wattenberg)

He then puts his foot in it, by bringing in scenarios of the Black Death, to support his theories. While recommending not investing in Europe, he compares our situation to “that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050 ”.

Back in 1348, Europe suffered the Black Death or Plague, the second worst catastrophe in recorded history, which reduced the estimated European population by about a third.

It also brought stability, progress and freedom from want to the people who escaped death. As the distinguished scholar David Herlihy pointed out, the great reduction in population created opportunities for the survivors and those who came after them; there were fewer people, more jobs and a higher standard of living. (David Herlihy and Samuel K., Jr. Cohn)

Another historian agrees that, before the Black Death the continent “was caught in a Malthusian deadlock” in which “the balance between people and resources had become very tight.” After the plague, Europe “emerged from the charnel house of pestilence and epidemic cleansed and renewed, like the sun after rain.”(John Kelly)

Moreover: “Serfdom declined more rapidly. The status of women rose. Wages rose for common people. Talented young people were able to advance faster. The power of the kings declined more rapidly.” (Norman Cantor ) It is an indisputable fact that the sudden population decline stimulated labour-saving technologies that transformed the economy.

It would be nice if future population decline were not the result of tragic circumstances, but rather the consequence of many factors, all signs of progress in medicine, economic progress and cultural deliverance from old customs.

Where are the Optimists?

The writer John Seager, currently writing a book on the effects of population trends around the world, asks: “Is this so-called ‘birth dearth,’ as Wattenberg puts it, really a problem? It is not. In fact, smaller families represent a great potential opportunity. The world is beset with social, political, and environmental challenges and crises;many caused by rampant population growth.” (John Seager)

Most invectives against population growth come not from straight environmentalists but from scientists:

“If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery restored.” says the biologist Richard Dawkins,

and:

“It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.” Richard Dawkins

Most environmentalists appear less concerned with overpopulation. They concentrate on poverty, global warming, human rights, and many other ecological and sociological fears, but they shy away from overpopulation, which is the underlying reason for these problems. They may fear to lose many of their supporters, who believe that the real problem lies elsewhere, mostly in overconsumption by the rich.

Dr Madsen Pirie, President, Adam Smith Institute, said it: Do not worry: you said it all. We will get over this hump of population decline, go through the difficulties and come out the other side, happier and with better living conditions. The benefits of any given situation depend on good policies. (News night’s David Grossman Aug 2003 BBC)

Exponential growth cannot go on eternally and more so population growth plus economic growth.

As noted by The Economist, higher life expectancy goes hand in hand with better health, and better health may improve worker productivity and savings, and puts pressure to introduce new technologies to boost workers’ efficiency.

Policymakers should focus on the advantages of the median income on a per capita basis, which would make more individuals better off, rather than on the gross national product or national income.

If Governments hate a shrinking population is because it restricts their power status, but what matters is GDP per person.

A slowly shrinking population will bring a more egalitarian society, lower unemployment, elimination of costly and obsolete infrastructures, a stimulus to economic modernization, like the use of robots as substitute for menial labour, and improved living standards.

Although, realistically speaking, we recognize that every economic regime has its problems, population growth seems to have accumulated more than enough: they include increased import dependency for food and raw materials, increases in housing costs, congestion and crowding, marginal population ignored and exploited, balance of payments problems, inhibition of productivity growth and real income, an abundance of young people of working age, which can result in unemployment or underemployment, accompanied by political instability, elevated rates of crime, and the deterioration of social capital as a possible further consequence.

The “greying” of developed nations will provide opportunities as well as challenges. The real crux of the population question is the quality of people’s lives; the ability of people to participate in what it means to be really human; to work, play and die with dignity; to have some sense that one’s life has meaning and is connected with other people’s lives.” (Cohen, J.)

Let’s be optimistic for a change and look forward to our old age, when we will all be wiser, reasonably healthy and still active in contributing to society.

What better challenge for Cornucopians? So why not apply the famously sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg’s cheerfulness as medicine: emphasise the possibilities of technology and human creativity! (“The fact is human ingenuity has conquered every problem so far.”). I didn’t include him in my review because he is an unreconstructed optimist, the True Original Cornucopian. Because he thinks that everything is just a management problem, we shall call on him to fix things whenever they get a bit too difficult.

Dear Cornucopians who have lost their sense of reliance on technological fixes and market forces, consider that even Wattenberg and Co will come up with some extraordinary solution to our new predicament, new technological advances, and man’s creativity will rush to the rescue in a world of sprightly octogenarians, with the added benefit of living in a cleaner, peaceful and greener environment. And with a New Cornucopian suit fitted to their leaner new frame, we can celebrate together the Age of Increasing Opportunities.

References:

1. Phillip Longman, May/June 2004,The Global Baby Bust”, Foreign Affairs. In “The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World prosperity and What to do About it” New York Basic Books, 2004, he urges that policies in the USA and other rich countries encourage more children.

2. Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson &amo; Sergei Scherbov, 2 August 2001” The end of world population growth”, NATURE vol. 412www.nature.com 543 27. Sunderland, Massachusetts.

3. Phil Mullan,2002 “The Imaginary Time Bomb” I.B. Taurus Publishers, theorises that Ageism is a form of discrimination

4. Hamish McRae 1995, OECD Economic Outlook.

5. A.David Coleman 2006, The prospect of population decline, University of Oxford, Round table discussion on the economic financial and environmental implications of over-population, OPT London 15 Feb

6. (Julian Simon L.) 1995, “The State of Humanity” Cato Institute and Blackwell Publishers.

7. David Nicholson Lord, 2006, Optimum Population Trust, News Release: Baby Shortage A Myth

8. Ben J. Wattenberg “The Birth Dearth” New York: Pharos Books.

9. Ben J. Wattenberg, 1997 “The Population Explosion Is Over”

10. The New York Times Magazine

11. David Herlihy and Samuel K., Jr. Cohn , 1997,” The Black Death and the Transformation of the West” (European History Series), Kirkus Associates,Harvard University Press , Cambridge Massachusetts)

12. John Kelly 1002, “The Great Mortality : An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time “ Harper Collins Publishers,10 East 53rd Street , NewYork )

13. Norman Cantor 2001,”In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made “, New York Free Press.

14. John Seager 2004, Why Anxiety Over Low Fertility? Population Connection, (Fact Sheet From The Reporter)

15. Cohen J. ,1998,” How many people can the earth support? “New York Review of Books.

Original article from Macedon Ranges Residents' Association (www.mrra.asn.au)

(16/7/08 - SG) How do we know if our politicians, councillors or decisions have been bought? The short answer is, we don't.

We need look no further than New South Wales and the Wollongong scandal for confirmation that money can buy governments and decisions, particularly planning decisions. Yet NSW has an Independent Commission Against Corruption [ICAC], something we don't have in Victoria.

So how bad is it in Victoria, where accountability in any form no longer seems to kick up as one of the State's strong points?

In the past week, 3 articles have appeared in the Age newspaper - shocking and revealing stuff. Written by veteran journos Royce Millar and Kenneth Davidson, the articles snap the spotlight onto Victoria's lack of an ICAC, lack of accountability, and shifting views on and stubborn political denial that there's a problem when it comes to who is paying who in politics. From these articles, it seems Victoria's Premier sees political donations not as potentially corrupting influences but just part of a healthy democracy. Like kissing babies, perhaps?

You can access the Age articles by clicking the following links:

• In a healthy democracy, influence cannot be bought, Royce Millar, The Age, 7/7/08 at
  http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/in-a-healthy-democracy-influence-cannot-be-bought-20080710-3d4i.html
• Money is the root of all Political evil, Kenneth Davidson, The Age, 10/7/08 at
  http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/money-is-the-root-of-all-political-evil-20080709-3cji.html
• A Little Bit of Give and Take, Royce Millar, The Age 16/7/08 at
  http://www.theage.com.au/national/a-little-bit-of-give-and-take-20080710-3d51.html

MRRA Says:

In the first article, Millar takes the discussion to the next logical step, and raises the issue of political donations and sponsorship in local government. And what a good discussion it is.

Anyone who thinks buying influence doesn't happen in local government should think again. It's bad enough if it's happening at Federal and State levels, but in those arenas there is more scrutiny and access so potentially more public pressure, and more chance of being caught.

In comparison, it can go almost unseen and undetected at local government level. A nod, a wink, a quiet word; rarely anything as crude as a brown paper bag or a pair of white shoes. Delivering 'favours for mates' can be something as subtle as promising to vote for what another Councillor wants if they'll vote for you this time, overlooking a conflict of interest, or orchestrating noisy albeit minority support for pet projects. These are just some of the ways private agendas can be delivered.

Millar raises an interesting point: while Councillors have to declare donations received during an election campaign, they don't have to declare them until well after the election. Their sponsors remain anonymous when you go to vote. It's all a secret, until they start to vote.

MRRA finds it a very relevant subject, given the recent invention of Macedon Ranges Residents' Secretariat Limited, a company representing development interests, possibly even political party interests, that seems intent on trying to confuse the Macedon Ranges' community into thinking it's us, MRRA Inc - i.e. a 'good guy' acting in the interests of the wider community - to the point of even pinching most of our name! Flattering, but...

MRRA estimates that to date, MRRS Ltd may have spent something in the order of well over $10,000 launching itself and its agenda (the latest effort being a survey sent to all households in the Shire, replete with reply paid envelopes - who could afford that!!!). Not to mention the individual numbering on each "ballot paper" (survey form) which must have cost a fortune to print. But wait, there's more! No, not a free set of knives, but MRRS Ltd is even giving away an expensive free meal - and free transport to and from home - to tempt residents into playing its game. And the feeling in our water is that neither the 'spend' nor the 'big sell' is over yet...

What could be worth that type of investment by business, development and real estate interests? And who exactly are all those interests? What do they want? Will all be revealed anytime soon?

Which leads us to the next question. Is the long-term objective of MRRS Ltd to get people elected onto council who will do what MRRS Ltd wants? Is that why MRRS Ltd says on its survey form, "MRRS offers assistance to potential candidates prior to elections and post elections, when elected..."? [our emphasis]

And how does MRRS Ltd's invitation to residents to become members work? MRRS Ltd has already publicly stated its recruitment will be through hand-picked secondment of like-minded people by its directors. In any event, don't you usually have to buy shares to be a 'member' of a company? MRRS Ltd is a public company, so do residents need a stock broker to become a 'member'?

Crickey, it's all too convoluted and complicated for us, but then MRRA is just a grass-roots community group used to its members joining up normally - they make a written application and pay an annual fee.

The grubby world of buying political influence is one where decisions are consistently made to serve self- and vested interests. Merit and 'public good' doesn't come into it. Is there really that much at stake? You betcha. There's big, big money in buying governments and influence (look no further than Wollongong, for example), and in stacking Councils with 'like-minded' mates to ensure favourable outcomes. Under the right conditions, it can spread like an aggressive cancer. Does Macedon Ranges have the disease?

Our state's population grew by a record 82,430 last year, the boost in numbers caused mostly by people coming from overseas. A policy of zero population growth may "hurt" the economy, and cause some short-term inconveniences, but an "ageing population" should not be a rationale for continually replacing our retirees without ecological suicide! Our economy supports the supply of goods and services, but our ecology supports all life and our very existence on the planet! Thirty percent of Victoria's animals are either extinct or threatened with extinction. Our state has been losing its endangered grasslands at a rate equivalent to more than three football fields a day. So-called "sustainable" industries such as intensive farming, irrigation, native forest woodchipping, and overgrazing are pushing the endurance of Nature to new and dangerous limits. Our climate change figures are predicting the worst-case-scenario! Our biodiversity is not a "service" but part of a system that supports all life and can't be quantified monetarily. This is our government's short-coming! Our Brumby government is intent on economic and population growth for Victoria, on making more freeways, growth corridors, and industries while leaving the mammoth task of repairing the damage for the next generation! We can't have continual growth on finite resources. The above article was originally published on 25 June 2008. It is front-paged here in view of Cardinal Pell's comments among other pertinant events.

The man I’ve heard jokingly called ‘Pel Pot’ has come out saying that ruthless commercial forces are against procreation.

“Cardinal George Pell, speaking after the Pope's arrival in Sydney for World Youth Day (WYD), said Western nations were producing too few children as the institutions of marriage and procreation came under attack.” July 14, 2008, AAP (Murdoch press)

Since my own research has revealed to me that ruthless commercial forces are pouring billions of dollars into boosting Australia’s population, via births and immigration, I was amazed to read this.

Further reading of the article made me think that Cardinal Pell is actually worried about the marriage rate and thinks a decline in this will bring down the birth rate. I don’t know what he uses as a norm for the birth rate; Australia’s is pretty high for a first world country.

I would like to know if Cardinal Pell actually has any evidence for his fears that ruthless commercial forces are out to slow down the birthrate. Because, if such ruthless commercial forces exist, I would like to know what on earth they see in promoting small populations when every major commercial force I know of will do anything to push up the number of consumers of land, resources, mortgages and disposable products, no matter what miseries result.

If I knew what was in it for big business to depress the birth rate and the rate of immigration, you can bet I would be grateful for the information.

In the mean time, I can only assume that the press are publishing Pell’s unmitigated nonsense because they are among the forces which want to keep on driving population growth upwards. And Pell’s strange pronouncements will help to keep the public confused about what is really happening and who the real community enemies are.

I cannot help wondering if Cardinal Pell is performing for friends in the big end of town as a way of cooperating in order to reduce coverage of his own embarrassing attitude to the prosecution of pedophiles within the church.

The Catholic Church has for a long time been in the business of land-speculation and encouraging high immigration and birth rates. It must have made plenty of powerful friends through these habits.

If Pell is truly worried about fewer marriages and consequent reduction in very large families, he should consider the stress placed on family life by the corporate forces which profit from international property speculation and ensure that families are mortgaged to the hilt. (Banks, developers etc.) Who, with a working brain, would consider marriage and a family in such a situation?

If Pell is actually worried about drug taking and promiscuity, then perhaps he might consider that those habits accompany social precarity and that social precarity is an outcome of the policies which drive continuous diasporas within this country. In fact, the corporations which push up population growth very successfully in this country also manufacture the the commercialised culture that vehicles binge-drinking, recreational drug-taking, and predatory sex.

I can barely resist telling Dr Pell that if he is so concerned he should not be encouraging celibacy among priests. I can only be thankful that he does.

by Sheila Newman and Richard Laverack

Why build more roads now?

Why on earth, with petroleum supplies not meeting demand and oil prices through the roof, are we still engaging in public-private partnerships with road builders???

Australia is currently set to be criss-crossed by new roads, tunnels and tollways. A case in point, which we have studied is the SEITA Eastlink tollway, which is being built by ConnectEast in a private-public partnership with the Victorian Government.

So, why is Victoria engaged in massive road construction just now? And, why are we persisting with Eastlink, all the way down the Mornington Peninsular when we could simply stop it now?

We found some strange answers to our question towards the end of a SEITA document called, "Frankston Bypass Environment Effects Statement, Strategic Transport Modelling Technical, dated 3rd March 2008, in "Clause 5.7 - Impacts of Fuel Price Changes."

"The MITM adopts current estimates of vehicle operating costs (fuel maintenance etc) on a per kilometre basis in order to assist in determining route choice behaviour. However, these estimates remain constant for forecast years (2011, 2021 and 2031) since vehicle operating costs are unknown. However, it is worth investigating the elasticity of traffic demand with respect to fuel price in order to gain insight into the effects on traffic demand if fuel prices were to change in the future.

"Table 17 shows both short and long run elasticities of demand for fuel consumption and Vehicle Kilometres Travelled (VKT) with respect to fuel price. In the long term, and elasticity value of - 0.29 for VKT with respect to fuel price would mean that a 10% increase in fuel price would result in a 2.9% decrease in VKT. However, in reality motorists adjust much more to fuel price rises in relation to fuel consumption, either through more fuel efficient vehicles or better driving techniques to conserve fuel. This situation is likely to be even more relevant for the Frankston Mornington region where limited alternative transport options exist.”

SEITA then lists its source as Goodwin Dargay and Hanley (2003), referring to "Elasticities of Road Traffic and Fuel Consumption with respect to Price and Income: a review," ESRC Transport Studies Unit, University College London.

Let's analyse those statements.

Note that, In 2002, when the 'research' into trends for that review would have been done, oil was $22 a barrel. 10% of $22 is $2.20.

If all we had to cope with now was a $2.20 increase on $22, a freeway might still make some kind of sense. Now, however, only 6 years later, oil is over $140 a barrel. This is about 6 times the 2002 price of oil and represents a rise of 536% !

What has happened here? Well, we cannot say for sure, but what usually happens is that projections are based on past trends, and, since from 1987 to 2002 prices did vary more or less only by about 10%, to assume they would go on doing so would be to base one’s projections on past trends.

But those were not the only trends in the past.

Between 1973 and 1987 prices rocketed, but SEITA and the Victorian Government are proceeding as if the 1987 to 2002 trends will last for at least another half century.

The reality is that, since 2003, prices have increased continually, and have gone well beyond any previous levels in 2008, with little sign of ever coming down to the kind of trends relied upon by the Victorian government and ConnectEast to make the tollway a profitable, worthwhile or sensible transport option.

Have a look at trends in oil prices in the graph below:

(Source is "Oil Price History and Analysis," WTRG Economics' Energy Economist Newsletter, http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm. Prices are in 2006 dollars.)

Now why would an engineering company like ConnectEast, in the business of making roads, be unaware of the rising oil prices? Oil prices severely impact on the cost of the construction materials and the fuel used by roadmaking vehicles. Building Eastlink must be costing more every day. "Well in excess of 90% of the total construction budget has been spent," already in February 2008, according to The Age, in Simon Mann, "Long and winding road nearly ready to roll", February 16, 2008.

It would be strange if all ConnectEast's engineers and other staff, and SEITA's government advisors, were not aware of oil production curves and theory.

What of the Victorian Government - ConnectEast's partner - in tollroad ventures?

The government has received submissions and press releases from various groups about petroleum depletion projections and oil prices and there has been a Senate enquiry into oil depletion.

The Australian CSIRO study by Barney Foran and Franci Poldan, Future Dilemmas: Options to 2050 for Australia's population, technology, resources and environment, published in 2002, was already flagging problematic trends. See Chapter 4, "Natural Resources and the Environment".

The VAMPIRE study from Griffith University, Queensland, drew attention to Melbourne for its oil-reliant transport vulnerability.

Apart from that, explosive oil prices and depletion fears are constantly in the news. One would therefore be entitled to expect the Victorian government by now to be aware that business as usual has gone completely off the radar.

One has only to go to Amazon com to find a hundred or so books written in the last ten years about the coming energy and fuel crisis, most restating and reaffirming projections made for peak oil production and then decline to start around about now.

If that were not enough, in the past few days, on July 11, 2008, the CSIRO came out again and warned that the cost of petrol could rise to $8 a litre in the next 10 years.

Yet SEITA and the Government still seem to be basing their traffic projections for the next 30 years on a series of totally obsolete oil price trends. On this achronistic basis they openly state that they forecast 30,000 additional vehicles to be travelling along Moorooduc Road in five years time.

What sort of reasoning is this? How can spending $700,000,000 dollars be justified in these circumstances? And how can all the suffering by people and animals who live in the path of this freeway be justified?

After allowing for a 10% increase on $22 a litre fuel price of 2002, which they think might reduce the number of kilometers motorists might travel by 2.9%, SEITA diminish this feeble concession to reality with the rationale that motorists will deal with higher prices by using more fuel efficient vehicles or better driving techniques:

“However, in reality motorists adjust much more to fuel price rises in relation to fuel consumption, either through more fuel efficient vehicles or better driving techniques to conserve fuel.”

But, over the last six months motorists have flocked to public transport. So much so that Connex has ripped the seats out of trains to make standing room only! The metropolitan public transport network is at breaking point. There is no argument about this. The state has asked the Federal government to put funds into public transport.

What will happen if the Frankston and Mornington Peninsular region doesn’t get better public transport?
Is the poor public transport situation from Frankston down through the Peninsular one that ConnectEast, with its shareholders in mind, hopes the government will preserve? This would partly protect ConnectEast's investment. SEITA write, for a project meant to serve the Peninsular for more than thirty years into the future:

“This situation is likely to be even more relevant for the Frankston Mornington region where limited alternative transport options exist.”

This notion is problematic on a few grounds – to say the least. It would mean leaving the public to wear high petrol costs with no reliable public transport option, so that, if people could not pay for petrol, they would not be able to travel to work, shops, doctors, schools, hospitals. Presumably people would, as SEITA hopes, prioritise petrol costs in order to continue to travel for vital and income earning reasons.

SEITA does not canvas, and neither has the government, openly, the logical corollary to continuing very high petroleum prices. It is this: high petrol prices will bankrupt many businesses and leave many people unemployed or underemployed. In the short term businesses will cut whatever costs they can and pass costs on to consumers. The first cost-cut will be wages. Higher costs for products, higher costs for private transport, and lower wages and more unemployment, is a recipe for a sustained, possibly permanent economic depression. Some might describe such a situation as an economic and social collapse.

Colin Hampton,Frankston Councillor/SEITA advisor pushes for tollway through Pines Flora and Fauna

It looks like this tollway project, which SEITA says was on the Melways maps 40 years ago, has just gone out of date and should be abandoned. We could save ourselves the trouble of the last 50km or so. Yet, only a week or two ago, Colin Hampton, Frankston councilor and member of SEITA advisory council, at meeting with low attendance, pushed through support for SEITA’s Option 1, which is the one that goes through ecologically sensitive territory and divides the Mornington Peninsular in two, severely curtailing the few remaining chances for viable wildlife corridors.

What's what:

SEITA stands for the Victorian Southern and Eastern Integrated Transport Authority which was formed by the Victorian Government to manage private public tollway-construction ‘partnerships’. SEITA managed the selection of the private sector bids and now oversees the State's ongoing commitment to this project. In October 2004, ConnectEast was awarded the contract to fund, design, build, own and operate EastLink for a period of 39 years. ConnectEast was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in November 2004.

Who's responsible

The members of the advisory council to SEITA was set up with John Nicol, as 'Independent Chair'; Janet Holmes à Court, Deputy Chairman; and Frank Corr, Northern Community Representative; Norman Galbraith, Central Community Representative; Geoff Griffiths, Southern Community Representative; Cr Mick Morland, Casey City Council; Mr Tim Tamlin, City of Greater Dandenong; Cr Colin Hampton, Frankston City Council; Mr Ian Bell, Knox City Council; Ms Lydia Wilson, Manningham City Council; * Cr Tony Dib, Maroondah City Council; Cr Craig Shiell, Monash City Council; Cr Tim Rogers, Mornington Peninsula Shire Council; Cr Chris Aubrey, Whitehorse City Council.

The responsible minister is John Pallas, Minister for Roads and Ports.
Your Victorian leader is John Brumby.

(See also: “What Can YOU Do To Stop Road Tunnels Destroying Royal Park and Democracy?”
“Roads to wildlife extinction,”
“Wildlife Campaigner: "SEITA preferred Frankston bypass route will severely impact wildife"”)

Aerial View of Royal Park Showing proposed Road Tunnels in white, drawn by Dr Jan Scheurer.

The extension of the Eastern Freeway in tolled road tunnels through Royal Park was announced in Sir Rod Eddington’s report on “Investing in Transport - East West Link Needs Assessment” released on 2 April 2008. The State Government then called for public submissions on the Report.

The closing date is next Tuesday 5 July 2008. If you have not already done so, could you make a submission? To assist, there is a proforma letter for you to send urgently, published at the base of this article.

Click here to see a map of Royal Park before Australand, Commonwealth Games and proposed Road Tunnels.

Construction of Road Tunnels through Royal Park, as proposed in the Eddington Report, will devastate the Park and badly affect residential West Parkville.

The Road Tunnel starts at Hoddle Street; goes under the Melbourne General Cemetery; and proceeds underground until it comes to the surface to form a T junction in Royal Park, adjacent to the State Netball and Hockey Centre (SNHC). This huge junction area will be a quarry for 5 to 10 years and, although said to be constructed by "cut and cover" methods may never be "covered" due to security concerns.

The southern spur of the Tunnel heads south under Flemington Road, emerges in Holland Park in Kensington and exits at the Port of Melbourne. The northern spur carves its way through Royal Park sports grounds, wetlands and underground water storage areas and exits in the middle of CityLink.

In the last ten years we have seen massive land grabs for the SNHC, the Games Village and, recently, the Royal Children’s Hospital.

To the left is the Candobetter artist's rough interpretation of what is happening and the recent past. The white lines are the new tunnel. Highlighted in red is the approximate area of 20ha given to Australand by the State government a couple of years ago.
More accurate drawings are welcome.

Road Tunnels are the final nail in the Park’s coffin. And you might as well bury democracy in that coffin, along with a lot of other nice things.

See in the top illustration, the aerial photo with graphics drawn by Dr Jan Scheurer of RMIT. This is the only graphic representation to show exactly where the Road Tunnels with 4 lanes of traffic will go in Royal Park. (The Eddington Report’s little line drawings fail to graphically present the reality and the enormity of this project.)

The dotted lines represent tunnels with open cut-and-cover construction and the filled-in lines the underground tunnels. The fine lines represent walls or fences around exit and entry points and the one line to the south of the SNHC is a roadway needed to drive around the perimeter of the Road Tunnels junction.

Roads Minister Tim Pallas is reported to have said at a meeting with the Kensington Association on 25 June 2008 that it was “not possible to construct major infrastructure without impacts, and that some had to be tolerated for the wider good”. Are you willing to sacrifice Royal Park for Road Tunnels?

What’s Been Happening?

The Royal Park Protection Group Inc. (RPPG) has been involved in the campaign to oppose Road Tunnels together with a number of other community organisations and political groups. These are (in alphabetical order): The Coalition of Residents and Business Associations – Melbourne (CORBA); Carlton Residents’ Association; Flemington Association, Great Public Transport not a Tollway Tunnel and Freeway (a Western suburbs group); Greens (particularly MP’s Greg Barber and Colleen Hartland); Kensington Association, Mount Alexander Road Campaign Group (MARCG); and Yarra Campaign Against Tunnels (YCAT).

Significant Recent Events in the Campaign Opposing Road Tunnels:

25 May: “No Tunnels” Rally at Debney’s Park organised by RPPG and MARCG.
3 June: “No Tunnels” Rally outside Melbourne Town Hall prior to Planning Committee meeting.
18 June: Meeting of Western Suburbs groups in Footscray organised by Greens.
21 June: “Hands off Holland Park” Kensington Association Rally in JJ Holland Park, Kensington.
24 June: “No Tunnels” Rally outside the Melbourne Town Hall prior to the Council meeting.
4 July: Eastern Transport Alliance Forum at Manningham Council on Public Transport esp. rail.
5 July: “Climate Emergency Rally” City Square then march to Alexandra Gardens.

Coming Events:

Friday 11 July: The Premier is going “Live on Line” re Eddington Report. www.premier.vic.gov.au
Tuesday 15 July: D Day - Closing Date for Submissions to Eddington Review.
Tuesday 15 July: “No Tunnels” Rally outside Yarra Council Meeting 6:45 pm Fitzroy Town Hall.
Monday 4 August: Meeting Public Transport not Tunnels 7 pm 10 Hyde St. Footscray.

OTHER NEWS:

Dispute over Commuter Cycle Path through Royal Park

The long saga of the cycle path proposed for the Park next to Macarthur Road ended at the Planning Committee meeting of 8 April 2008. The Committee decided as follows: "that the Planning Committee resolve to … grant a Planning Permit for the construction of the shared path subject to conditions… to this report keeping the pathway as close as possible to Macarthur Road with a minimum of three metres separation from the road without widening the path or decreasing the number of trees." Sounded clear enough to us. But we discovered that, over the long weekend in June, a path was being carved through the Park up to 17 metres away from Macarthur Road and that 23 trees were being felled. Correspondence ensued with the CEO, Councillors and Council officers and we were told that it was all a matter of “interpretation.” Could have fooled us! It appears to us that Council staff call the shots at the Town Hall.

Dispute over Dogs-off-Leash in Royal Park

At a meeting of 8 July 2008 the Environment Committee of the City of Melbourne considered the proposed new areas for Dogs off Leash in Royal Park. Unfortunately Councillors appear to have been swayed by arguments put up by Minister Bronwyn Pike, Member for Melbourne and Patron of the Royal Park Dogs Group, and Minister Dick Wynne whose wife is a member of the Dogs Group. Thus means that an extensive area of parkland of high habitat value populated with ground nesting birds has been confirmed as a Dogs off Leash area. This threatens many species of birds documented recently in a professional birds’ survey.

Minister Bronwyn Pike is reported to have said at a meeting with the Kensington Association on 25 June 2008 that she was: “working assiduously with her Government colleagues to alert them to possible impacts of such a proposal (i.e. road tunnels) on Kensington and other parts of her constituency. It was not possible or practicable for her, as a Government Minister, to rule out any specific aspects of the Eddington proposals … Rather, she believed that she was best able to serve her constituents by working 'from within', rather than by excluding herself from the process by prematurely condemning the proposal.” (We have heard the self same words over the Games Village and the Royal Children’s Hospital)

Editor's comment: Apart from the tactics, obviously overpopulation in Melbourne is forcing indigenous animals to compete with dogs, and dogs to compete with local people, and locals to compete for parkland with developers and the new populations of consumers which they have imported, and which are the cause of these new roads.

We can all only lose.

Minister Bronwyn Pike should be protesting to stop the freeway because it will take away from dogs and humans as well as from trees and indigenous animals. It is tragic that this park, which goes back to the time of early settlement, is being sacrificed for very transient benefits to a few people. These tunnels and roads will become monuments to folly and vested interest in the face of oil depletion.

The Royal Park Protection Group is an incorporated organization and its objectives are as follows:

1. To protect, regenerate and conserve the Royal Park as a unique, indigenous, central city park for present and future generations, consistent with principles of the 1987 Royal Park Master Plan; and
2. To oppose alienation of parkland by government, commercial, sporting and other bodies to ensure public access consistent with the terms of the establishment of the Royal Park.

The group has learned close up of the erosion of democracy over the past few years. Their experience seeded the formation of the peak body, Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc (PPLV).

SUBMISSION PROFORMA

The Chief of Staff
East-West Transport Options Review
Department of Transport
GPO Box 2797
Melbourne 3001
Email address: eastwestyoursay[AT]doi.vic.gov.au

Dear Sir

I wish to make a submission to the East - West Road Transport Review.

I am totally opposed to the construction of road tunnels as proposed in the Eddington Report. Here are the points I wish to make to support my argument:

1. This proposed project involves construction of 4 lane freeway/tollway concrete road tunnels for 18 km., which will blow out Victoria’s green house emissions at the very time a “climate emergency” has been declared by the Federal Government.

2. Major parks - Royal Park and Holland Park - will be destroyed as they will be turned into major tunnel construction “staging” sites for 5 to 10 years. Open parkland and sports fields will be ripped up and community facilities removed. The Royal Park wetlands, developed with a $5 million grant from the State Government plus its water storage facility under the adjacent Ross Straw Field, will be obliterated as they are in the path of the Road Tunnel. The north of the Road Tunnel will exit on CityLink, which will be widened by two lanes over the Moonee Ponds Creek and Travancore Park.

3. Residential amenity of inner city neighbourhoods along the Road Tunnels route will be seriously compromised and heritage streetscapes threatened. Compulsory acquisition of residential properties along the route of the tunnels is inevitable.

4. The Road Tunnels are, in reality, a city by pass for trucks from the Port of Melbourne. There will be massive traffic congestion on surface roads as most traffic off the Eastern Freeway is headed for the city yet there are no outlets for commuters.

5. Vent stacks 12 storeys high will be built at the entry/exits (“portals”) of the Road Tunnels and every 3 kms. on their route. An example of these obtrusive polluting chimneys - the Burnley Tunnel vent stack – can be seen outside the Malthouse Theatre in Sturt Street, South Melbourne.

6. The $10 billion of funds designated for the Road Tunnels should be diverted into public transport, in particular rail extensions to Rowville and Doncaster and upgrading the Belgrave-Lilydale rail line.

I trust you will take account of my concerns over the proposed Road Tunnels. I would be pleased if you can acknowledge receipt of my submission.

Yours sincerely

Name:
Address:
Phone:
Email Address:
Date:

For his political courage in speaking out against undemocratic, but mainstream media and government endorsed, growth, actor, Geoffrey Rush deserves particular historic recognition from Australians. He launched a new website: Marvellous Melbourne at https://marvellousmelbourne.org. Candobetter.net editor 12 January 2017: Unfortunately, eight years later it is no longer maintained, so we have removed the link. Candobetter.net remains one of its memorials. However the problem those optimistic protesters set out to solve has grown every year into a behemoth that threatens many of our institutions and certainly our way of life, all over Australia.

On Sunday July 6, 2008, Planning Backlash held an impressive public meeting in Mooney Valley.
Speakers included Blue Wedges activist, Jenny Warfe, and Actor Geoffrey Rush.
The meeting focused on the imminent threat of two key changes to government powers:

- New residential zones that remove residents’ rights to object to or even know about planning applications, and
- Removal of Councils’ planning powers by the Victorian government.

Jill Quirk, of Sustainable Population Australia, Victorian Branch, described the meeting as "Amazing".

Jenny Warfe evoked the ultimate pointlessness and crudeness of dredging operations in OUR Port Phillip Bay.
Geoffrey Rush launched a new website for Planning Backlash, called Marvellous Melbourne at marvellousmelbourne.org.
He spoke movingly of how utterly Melbourne will be transformed over the coming years. He also intelligently and courageously questioned the necessity for the population growth currently being imposed on Victorians, and raised the question of the optimum size for Melbourne.

For his courage, Geoffrey Rush deserves particular historic recognition from Australians. Although it is common for people at candobetter.org to challenge the grotesque premises and impacts of endless growth, a professional actor depends upon the mainstream media to a great degree. He therefore takes enormous risks in speaking out against politics which profit the mainstream media and which it heavily endorses. Indeed, it is largely because the mainstream media endorses undemocratic growth and the governments which provide it, that we have had this growth and its frightening and demoralising effects imposed upon us.

The Marvellous Melbourne site, marvellousmelbourne.org, asks:

"Is development the same as progress ? What makes the difference ? Is growth sustainable ? Is there any such thing as 'big enough'? What do we want to sustain ?"
And,
"Are elected governments just dictatorships between elections ?"
It states that,
"Planning is off the rails in Melbourne", and asks, "What is happening in the country and on the coast ?"
It concludes, "This site is for you. It is an attempt to celebrate the best of Melbourne - and to encourage you to explore what was, what is, and what could be."

Details to hand are sketchy, but other speakers were a Leongatha area resident who told of how the imposition by the Victorian government of a desalination plant has forced hitherto non-political residents to come out in organised protest to protect their environment and way of life. A woman from Kilmore, where high density living is being imposed, described how antithetical this was to the community's wishes, since Kilmore is a town which people deliberately chose to live in for a relaxed lifestyle and open space. A Stonnington councillor spoke about the massive and unwelcome changes which are looming for that area.

I believe that that other indefatigable campaigner against bad treatment of native wildlife, horrible planning decisions, and undemocratic population growth, actor Rod Quantok, was also there, but I have no actual report.

SPA(Vic) President, Jill Quirk, said, after the meeting, "The over all feeling I got from the afternoon and all the speakers was expressed pain and anxiety over losses continually suffered because of "development" and the consequent erosion of our environment as well as the loss of democracy entailed in the pace and magnitude of what is happening now in Victoria."

Let's hope that Marvellous Melbourne will extend to represent the rest of Victoria, and that similar sites will rise to represent every state in the country, since almost every settlement on this continent is at the mercy of corporatised growth and related forms of exploitation, which our corporatised governments have completely failed to protect us from. Candobetter will try to promote all such democratic initiatives.

We will try to include details of other speakers and speeches as they come in. Please post comments on this article, supplying details of speakers and speeches, if you are able.

One of the biggest dilemmas for environmental realists is striking the right balance between the potential infringement of human rights required to power down to a more sustainable society on one hand, and the inevitable threat to human rights if we don't take action now. Let's call this the human rights dilemma. One solution is simply to deny the relevance of the coming environmental collapse by idealising a variant form of cornucopia, believing everything would be okay if we just wrested power from the corporate-military elite and brought about a new world order founded on the principles of liberty, fraternity and egalitarianism, extending the ideals of the French revolution to all 6.5 billion citizens alive today and making room for the 9 billion plus expected to grace our humble planet by 2050. Wouldn't it be wonderful if billions more could enjoy the North American way of life with sprawling verdant suburbs, neat bungalows with double garages and private swimming pools populated by shiny happy citizens. Sadly such a reality is just a fantasy promoted by soap operas, incessant but often subtle advertising and peer pressure, but it's the ideal to which billions of our fellow world citizens aspire. The endless, but usually fruitless, pursuit of consumertopia is, as amply documented in Oliver James' excellent book Affluenza, the cause of much distress. Many teenagers in affluent countries acquire a deep sense of inferiority because they lack the kind of consumer gadgets as their peers have or because they fail to emulate the cooldom and aesthetic perfection of media role models. Worse still the exponential rise in aggregate consumption by our species is ultimately suicidal, not just for indviduals but the vast majority of our fellow human beings. When nature begins to take its course, with its periodic natural distasters affecting ever greater numbers of people, you can bet the poorest and most vulnerable will always be the first to go.

The trendy left has long believed we can metaphorically have our cake and eat it. We can somehow let newcomers to our land join our consumer frenzy and cut carbon emissions. We can miraculously guarantee everyone affordable transport, cheap food, free healthcare and an extensive welfare state and reduce collective consumption. We can incredibly subsidise single parents and unwanted babies and simultaneously guarantee every child love, good education and a bright future. Such idealists live, pardon my French, in cloud cuckoo land. We can obviously only welcome newcomers to our land if our environment and economy can sustain their presence. Likewise we can only provide transport, food, healthcare and social benefits if we can sustainably maintain the material means required. We can only subsidise unwanted children by spending billions on social workers, childcare professionals and state benefits, diverting resources from other needy categories, e.g. a child in council care can cost a UK council as much as £90,000 a year and in all likelihood will continue to be a burden on public finances later in life. A prevailing culture of hedonism and entitlements has created a situation in the UK where over 2 million adults live on incapacity benefit not because they suffer from a severe sensory or physical impairment, but because of essentially psychological problems brought on by social marginalisation and self-destroying indulgence in drugs and booze, whether legal or illegal.

As a result the country has recently attracted over a million newcomers from Eastern Europe to do jobs in the catering, building, transport and agricultural sectors that home-grown Britons used to do. The Polish plumber phenomenon has affected not just the bustling overcrowded metropolis of London, but has spread far and wide to areas with high indigenous unemployment. Some businesses like Subway and Starbucks have actively recruited new migrants and then sent them to their outlets the length and breadth of the land. In just 4 years we have learned to expect to be served by recent economic migrants and hardly blink an eyelid when outside we see another home-bred homeless islander selling the Big Issue or another alcoholic beggar pestering us for loose change. So why does the Big Issue seller not take up plumbing and why does the beggar not get a job in Starbucks, Caffè Nero or Costa Coffee? The sad truth is that too much hard work is required to learn the tricks of the trade required by competent plumbers and most native Brits on benefits would not be much better off on the minimum wage. Worse still most customers would rather be served by polite, attractive and smiling Eastern European staff in their early twenties than emotionally insecure and often incompetent members of Britain's underclass of non-productive long-term benefit claimants. The corporate-state behemoth has effectively dumbed down the former working class, while importing a steady flow of smarter and keener migrant workers from countries where young people are still motivated to learn the hard skills any viable society needs. To cap it all, I've even witnessed migrant care workers looking after mentally ill indigenous citizens. Such is the shortage of competent maths teachers willing to endure the stress of British secondary schools that increasingly education authorities resort to importing human resources from countries where an interest in the abstract science of numbers is still cool. Meanwhile indigenous teachers are deserting the profession in their droves, intimidated not only by children unruly behaviour but by a culture of fear, litigation, lack of respect and celebrity worship. The government talks tough on combatting the perceived threats of terrorism, street crime and illegal immigration, softening public opposition to draconian surveillance state legislation, but has actually created a hypercompetitive labour market with a large reservoir of disgruntled and alienated workers, desperately seeking a piece of the action. The net result is a brain drain in countries of net emigration and growing dependence on the tentacles of corporate grandeur and an enslaving welfare state. Yet for every newcomer to the wealthy world boosting their per capita consumption, there remain billions in the poor world unable to scrape together the funds for a one-way ticket to the citadels of consumerdom, but increasingly reliant on trickle-down subsidies sent home by distant relatives.

Opium of the People

It's hard to get closer to the heart of the corporate elite manipulating and conditioning the governing classes of the world's highest consumption economies than Rupert Murdoch. His media empire has in large part been responsible for winning popular support for neo-liberal or neo-conservative governments in the UK, Australia, the US and elsewhere. In the UK the switch from Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party to Tony's Blair's New Labour Party represented no shift in Rupert Murdoch's long term agenda. Both were tools that facilitated the implementation of globalist policies and transferred power away from local centres of power to unaccountable transnational corps and spurious supranational entities. Yet Murdoch has always known how to tailor his incessent propaganda to the target audience. In London, UK, you can pick up the Sun often bundled with free chocolate bars, bingo tickets or fuel discount vouchers, then enter Starbucks only to pick up a copy of the Times with your coffee. On the way home, you have to dodge distributors of the freebie LondonPaper, also owned by News International, and replete with celebrity gossip and other news deemed to be of a greater interest to trendy twenty-somethings who work in the city's thriving new media and advertising companies. This joins other freebies like the Metro, City A.M. and London Lite all aggressively handed out gratis by low-paid and usually migrant workers. Such papers end up littering the rapid transport system. The London Times still sets a semi-serious tone, requiring a reading age over ten, and a keen interest in world affairs. Its regular columnists include former Marxists and unlimited growth enthusiasts, Brendan O'Neill and Mick Hume, forever attacking green fascists as naive apologists for eugenics and simply writing their perceived enemies off as against progress. To this print media empire, we should of course, add Sky TV and Fox News.

It comes as little surprise alongside semi-intellectual apologists for our high-consumption lifestyle, the Murdoch press hires the services of populist automobile evangelist and TV celebrity of Top Gear fame, Jeremy Clarkson, responsbile for driving a landrover up a Scottish mountain, another 4x4 all the way to the North Pole and hiring a personal double-decker bus to take advantage of apparently empty bus-only lanes, which he thinks should be available to cars. At the Borders book store Top Gear now boasts its own section, replete with glossy picture books of shiny motors for aspriring Formula 1 champs to drool over.

It takes quite a huge leap of the imagination to conclude that the liberal media is largely responsible for environmental scare stories, but alas a growing number of left-leaning pundits such as William Engdahl and Greg Palast have gone down this route. A cult has arisen around climate change denial movies. Anthropogenic climate change is, of course, only a small piece in a much larger puzzle and, I dare say, often serves to dodge the key issue of the long-term sustainability of our growth-addicted model of development. We need merely raise the spectre of pseudo-environmentalist aristocrats such as Al Gore, Ted Turner or Prince Philip to whip up a mass frenzy of indignation against a secret plot to forcibly reduce the world's population and thus deny billions of the world's poor of the same luxuries we take for granted in the prosperous world.

It's hard to deny that environmental concerns tend to appeal much more to the better-educated professional classes than the wider working and welfare-dependent classes, including most recent economic migrants. Billions are invested annually in the never-ending promotion of consumption, entertainment and pure unadulterated mind control. The other day I asked a lady why she was reaching so eagerly for her copy of the Sun. Apparently unaware of who owned and controlled the newspaper, her reason for buying it was simple, to find out what's on the telly and read more celebrity gossip. No doubt she wrote me off as pompous twat with no affinity for the working class. Out in the provinces away from cosmopolitan metropolises, the UK has become a maize of Tesco Towns, with the masses meeting only for their weekly shopping sprees or to engage in entertainment events organised by large corporate operations. When not at work or at school, most are glued to gigantic plasma screens watching action-packed movies, surfing the commercialised Internet, engaging in violence-themed videogames or seeking new partners in dumbed-down chatrooms.

Green Tokenism

The real debates on the future of our species and sustainability of our civilisation we should be holding have been significantly dumbed down on two fronts. First, the masses from Aberdeen to Zagreb or Sydney to Shanghai are lured by the never-ending promotion of the North American way of life, quite obviously unattainable for most. In this context eco-friendliness is just another desirable commodity. Second, the chattering classes are presented with simplified moral arguments about our duty to tackle a whole host of evils, ranging from climatic catastrophes, racism, despotic regimes, famine, energy security, homophobia, women's rights, child abuse, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. Whatever the purported problem, the solutions on offer assume the moral and cultural superiority of the enlightened global elite. Take the UK's Independent Newspaper, renowned for its championing of environmental causes. It's also one of the most unashamed proponents of immigration to an already overcrowded island. Yet for the simple minds of many sandal-wearing leftists, there is no conflict. Welcoming newcomers to our shores and buying energy-saving lightbulbs or cycling to work to reduce our environmental footprint are both part of our duty to help build a better world. Sadly in the grand scheme of things such efforts are futile. I can cycle to work or choose to tolerate overcrowded trains to reduce my carbon footprint, but the brainwashed masses, especially those who have just moved to a high consumption region, want to indulge as long they can afford it.

Some former Marxists and a handful of those who still adhere to this religion are acutely aware of the environmental paradox. Mike Davis, a Los Angeles-based activist, formerly associated with the International Socialists and author of Planet of Slums. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster and City of Quart, has finally realised that decades of unsustainable development and reliance on a globalised network of multinationals and governmental organisations, has all but destroyed the last vestiges of worker solidarity. In a recent article published in www.informationclearinghouse.info, he concludes:

In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards. (full article)

Nonetheless to alleviate the human consequences of catastrophes caused by climate change in the poor world, Mike Davis still asks us to welcome more immigrants aboard our lifeboat. It's like inviting passengers from the lower decks of the Titanic, about to drown in a purportedly unsinkable ship, to board a luxury yacht just a few hundred metres away. Some would brave the icy waters, but while the yacht may accommodate a handful of desperate Titanic passengers, it too would sink if they all reached temporary safety. One way or another our failure to act now by powering down both consumption and reproduction will see an escalation of internecine warfare and famine, while the new corporate aristocracy run for the hills, building themselves havens of tranquillity with the resources they plundered in times of plenty.

This article was originally published with the title "Breeding Hatred"

See also: Devastating demolition of the case for mass immigration by Sir Andrew Green in the Daily Mail of 31 Mar 08, The Collusion of the Left in the Neo-Liberal Agenda of Sep 06, Open Britain by 'open border' extremist Phillipe Legrain and introduction and comments on his own web site. A local copy of a posted comment is to be found here.

Neil's site: (www.outsider-insight.org.uk)

Title was The edge of the abyss and green denial.

Earlier this year Lindsey Grant, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Environment warned that we face a tumultuous century, as competition grows for diminishing resources. The human race will not get through it without fundamental changes of our population size, our living arrangements, our consumption patterns, and our expectations – and probably not without mounting hunger and violence. He calls for a new mindset to deal with it.

“The name of the abyss is energy. People tend to worry about one crisis at a time,” he says. “We do so at our peril. Right now, the crisis of the moment is climate warming, but the decline of fossil energy will affect more people more seriously than climate change for most of this century. Both will generate a coming crisis in food production.

“The forces now coming together – the astonishing growth of fossil fuel use in the 20th Century, – the growth of human population, quadrupling in the same period, – climate warming and rising sea levels generated by that growth, the imminent decline of those fossil fuels, the growing shortage of fresh water to meet human needs - and as a consequence, the prospect that agriculture will be unable to produce enough food to feed us, are the most important immediate challenges to humankind. They threaten the fabric of modern societies. The threat – still largely unrecognised – transcends all the other problems that transfix our policy makers: terrorism, economic recession or the transitory issues of international politics.”

A month earlier Professor Betsy Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program and associate professor at Hampshire College USA made a claim typical of growth and development orientated non-governmental organisations.

“The United Nations projects that world population will eventually stabilise, falling to 8.3 billion in 2175,” she says. “In developing countries, attention should focus on reducing poor people's vulnerability to environmental changes related to global warming, such as sea-level rise in Bangladesh or increased rainfall variation in Africa. A focus on population diverts us from the need to take action on these critical concerns.”

Well intended as such ideas are, we are unlikely to still have the resources and habitable living space to survive in any such numbers on the planet by 2175. People like Hartmann have obviously not heard of the growing number of countries, in the 2005 UN Population Division survey, now more concerned about the over-inflated and distorted case of supporting growing numbers of older people than too many people, encouraging immigration and higher birth rates with more tax incentives. Or the crazy population explosion in Africa and Haiti – desperately poor, wrecking what's left of the environment and exporting surplus people to USA, Canada and Europe.

Nor, it seems, has she looked at the population explosion in countries like Saudi Arabia, where wealth and urbanisation has seen no reduction in birth rates. And in the USA, where massive Mexican immigration to a more prosperous consumer life-style has seen average birth rates increase in the Mexican immigrant community over birth rates in Mexico.

It is so depressing that these well-meaning people just don't see the connection between higher population and all the problems they want to solve, even when the evidence is presented to them. It is a mind block. All they think about is trying to reduce everyone's consumption, to accommodate more people into an ever more stressed quality of life competing for diminishing resources – in the vain hope that populations will stabilise at a level that is already beyond the Earth's capacity to sustain. Growing populations just wipe out any gain from reducing consumption.

They selectively ignore hard evidence in the belief that the magic bullet of technology will somehow make all the problems conveniently go away, so everyone can have their cake and eat it. Trouble is, the cake is crumbling fast and their dream that all the world's growing numbers can be accommodated, using their other magic bullet of conscience-absolving ‘sustainable’ growth, is a delusion.

For many decades there has been a wilful blindness to recognise that overpopulation is at the root of so many of the critical problems we face today. Both the UK and US governments have completely ignored a Royal Commission and a Presidential Commission respectively, both of which warned that existing population levels were already high enough.

Many environmental organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are in denial or are too timid to confront reality lest they offend fundamentalist visions to go forth and multiply. They run scared of confronting the continuing high birth rates in many third world countries in case they are accused of racism. Instead, they call for our support to polish the furniture and re-arrange the deckchairs while planet earth's rapidly shrinking resources are consumed by relentless human population increase.

Living in denial suits the leaders in many poor nations. Limiting family size challenges engrained cultural habits and religious dogma. Better to hope that humanitarian aid prevents further hardship.

Geologist, author and population activist, William Stanton wrote: “Our planet, marvellous in its diversity of plant and animal life, naturally evolved over 1,000 million years, is being converted in a geological instant to a factory farm geared to feeding a single species, Homo-sapiens.”

The idea that the human goal should seek a high quality life rather than a high quantity and low quality one, to sustain the doctrine of short-term corporate greed, seems lost on our political leaders. Do we really want the maximum number of people with the minimum standard of living - or a smaller number at a comfortable standard of living?

Misplaced confidence in the ‘demographic transition’ to population stability?

Population activists need to do more than parrot the UN prediction that population is conveniently set to stabilise at around 9.2 billion by 2050. Whatever realities we face trying to support a much larger global population in the lifetime of many people alive today, we also need to project the hard number-crunching consequences of continuing on our current track, which predicts a much larger population to absorb.

Stanton observes: “It's a grand recipe for complacency to be told that as nations achieve a prosperous western-style standard of living their population growth automatically falls to near zero. On this basis there is no population problem, only a need for masses of western aid. Unfortunately, this comforting theory has been found wanting time and again.” The United States is one of the most affluent nations in the world, but on its current demographic growth rate may well see its population expand from over 300 million now to 750 million by 2075.”

From 1950 to 2000 the mean population exponential growth rate was 1.77% - a doubling time of 40 years. Over 800 million go hungry every year and 2 billion suffer from malnutrition. Today, 1.8% is the average population growth rate for 4 billion people in the less developed world, excluding China. If this rate continues the population will rise from 6.7 billion to an impossible 21 billion by 2070. (Optimum Population Trust).

Rethinking the procreative right

For most people the right to procreate is central to their belief. The world's religions, in particular, provided ample endorsement for the “go forth and multiply” message at a time when the world's population was a fraction of the resource-gobbling numbers it has now reached.

In April 2007 the Vatican Church concluded in a two-day Conference on Global-Warming-Paganism and Population Reduction that there is no evidence of man-induced climate change and that urgent priority for humanity is the development of the third world.

The 1994 Cairo conference on Population and Development concluded that “Reproductive rights embrace certain human rights that are already recognised in national laws …. These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. “The promotion of the responsible exercise of these rights for all people should be the fundamental basis for government and community supported policies and programs in the area of reproductive health, including family planning.”

The word “responsible” is not defined. However, Carter Dillard, writing in Yale Human Rights and Development Legal Journal 2007, argues that defining some limits on procreation is not inconsistent with human rights.

“What is perceived as a justified legal and moral interest to procreate freely without regard to others, including the rights of prospective children and society as a whole, has consequences for others, and such acts are subject to law, if only in its role as a guide. If each person is endowed with rights that compete with and limit others' rights, the creation of new persons in a finite space eventually results in either limiting the rights of some in favour of the rights of others, or a general limiting of each person's overall rights, as the spheres of rights begin to overlap.”

In Reproductive Liberty and Overpopulation*, Carol Yates, Professor of Philosophy at Ithaca College in the United States argues that sustainability will require population reduction as well as changes in consumption. Reproductive liberty should not be considered a fundamental human right, she argues and a global agreement to address the risk of ecological meltdown and consequently the collapse of the human species, should include the option of coercive measures to reduce population to a sustainable level.

John Feeney, an environmental writer in Boulder, Colorado, says “A purposeful drop on the part of industrialised countries to consumption levels comparable to those of the poorest areas in the world is not only wholly unrealistic but, at today's population size, would not end our environmental woes. Our sheer numbers prevent it. We have no alternative but to return our attention to population. Already in overshoot, we must aim for population stabilisation followed by a decline in human numbers worldwide.

“We have to provide easy access to family planning options while educating parents and children through the media in the benefits of smaller families. And we should end the web of government incentives for larger families, to make population stabilisation more not less likely.” The money saved could be targeted at supporting older people.

Yet using the tax system as an incentive for reducing, not increasing birth rates is still regarded as a ‘no go area,’ an invasion of human rights, where the historic mindset of national power is boosted by growing numbers. Even now, with commodity prices soaring, ‘think tanks’ supposedly at the cutting edge of ideas, see a growing birth rate as a sign of economic well-being.

But what right is more important than trying to preserve an equitable quality of life for people instead of descending into more repressive and dangerous times, driven by the relentless pressures of ever increasing numbers? Many governments, the UK more than most, think nothing of introducing highly prescriptive and invasive regulations to control demand and behaviour – speed cameras, tax penalties and more. Why should we fear tax incentives to help save the planet and stem the decent into growing stress and chaos for our children?

The civilised choice seems obvious, yet the “growth is good” mindset of our political and business leaders, underpinned by (no longer) cheap energy, rules all.

In Estonia large baby bonuses have been offered to raise the birth rate, and have been quite widely taken up. Portugal has introduced tax incentives tied to pensions to encourage mothers to have more children and in Singapore (one of the most densely populated countries in the world) where birth rates have fallen significantly, the government has appointed a 'population czar' to encourage population growth.

In a 'scare campaign' about ageing, the Australian Government has been offering inducements of AU$5,000 for every new child born, in a country where government reports reveal constantly worsening environmental conditions. Yet the Government is encouraging more immigration each year than the natural birth rate, cheered on by the growth lobbyists. In 2005/6 the population grew by 265,800 (a natural increase of 131,200 plus net immigration of 134,600).

James Sinnamon (candobetter.org/james) Australian writer and environmental analyst describes this as “concentrated benefit" – where a minority in our community, i.e. land speculators, property developers, financiers and others collectively known as the "growth lobby", gain from population growth. "Diffuse injury" is what the rest of us pay in congestion, higher council rates, higher electricity charges, higher housing and environmental costs, hospital and education pressures for population growth. “For decades, the wider community was not fully aware of the costs they were paying because they were spread out so diffusely,” he says.” That is why the growth lobby was able to get away with it for so long.”

The UK's present population is around 60.5 million. It is more vulnerable to food imports than any other country in Europe and is increasingly dependent on energy imports. Family size and immigration levels will result in the UK population rising to 65 million over the next 10 years, 70 million in 2028, 77 million by 2051 and over 85 million by 2081 - at least 70% of this increase due to immigration. (OPT, Migration Watch UK)

All of us, politicians, business and public opinion, need to wake up fast or our children will inherit a grim future. Will they thank us for not acting in the face of such challenges?

(2,227 words)

Word is that Melbourne is getting its 1 million more ten years early and that the Vic Government is in a panic because it has no idea how many permanent new guests have taken up its foolhardy invitations to come and stay. Who the hell is responsible?

Melbourne 2008: Living in a destruction zone

Once Melbourne number plates bore the motto, "The Garden State."
Then we got Kennett's formula, "Victoria on the Move." It sounded like some kind of unnecessary laxative, prescribed by a mad surgeon. Kennett tried to beat population up and, unfortunately for us, stopped the Victorian diaspora to Queensland. I guess he prepared the way for what Bracks did to Melbourne. Him and the editors and senior writers of the Fairfax and Murdoch press, who nagged shamelessly for population growth.

Since the Bracks Population Summit (2002) the Victorian government have ranted continuously and illogically about how we 'have' to have 1 million more Victorians. For local councils, population Projections exist in two forms:

Council data only go to 2011
ABS "Victoria in the Future" (VIF) series go to 2031.
But ...
The ABS has just discontinued VIF figures in circumstances which could mean that Victoria's actual growth has overshot both target and projections and has shot into the stratosphere. The word is that we are getting our 1 million more ten years early and that the Victorian government is in a panic because it has no idea how many permanent new guests have taken up its foolhardy invitations to come and live here.

This is almost certainly the reason for the hasty attempts to introduce draconian new "no-go", "slow-go" and "go-go" residential areas (now described as "areas of 'limited change', 'incremental change' and 'substantial change'.

“What I tell you three times is true.”
(Lewis Carrol, The Hunting of the Snark)

One of my most difficult tasks in writing about these matters is to overcome the propaganda which says that we must have economic growth and that for economic growth we must have population growth.

The Federal and State governments and the news-media repeat this all the time, despite much contrary evidence, and most people believe it because they have no other source of information.

On the one hand the State Government actively seeks to attract more and more immigrants to Melbourne.

On the other, it pretends that population growth is some irresistible force over which it has no control and for which we must all make way no matter what the demands.

Verify this by going to the Victorian Government’s immigration pages at http://www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au
Here's a sample of www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au:

and there is a special page to assist private immigration agents.

Yes, your government is really working overtime to overpopulate this country.

Alice in Victoria

Asking the public to accept massive intensification of infrastructure, huge cost increases, and loss of rights and space, and nature, on the grounds of a responsibility to reduce greenhouse emissions whilst bearing government imposed, unnecessary population growth is an Alice in Wonderland task.

Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." (Alice in Wonderland.)

But the Government is asking of the public to believe impossible things through the Melbourne 2030 program. Even the so-called independent auditors of Melbourne 2030 keep up the ridiculous charade:

Whilst recognising that almost everyone except developers hates Melbourne 2030, the ‘auditors’ of it write in their ‘independent report’:

“At the same time, local communities must be prepared to take a broad metropolitan view that recognises the necessity of urban consolidation,” they write, giving the reason as:

“(…)the urgent housing need resulting from unprecedented population increase and the need to reduce travel and greenhouse emissions to meet our responsibilities towards climate change.”

But even the Auditing Committee shows some unease, although not enough to save Melbourne or to question all the growth. They wrote:

“The recently released report of the Ministerial Working Group Making Local Policy Stronger (June 2007) and the subsequent State Government Five Point Priority Action Plan recognised community concerns in relation to existing residential zones. It proposed a way forward by enabling the identification of ‘no-go’, ‘slow-go’ and ‘go-go’ residential areas (now described as areas of ‘limited change’, ‘incremental change’ and ‘substantial change’) (...)”

“We would caution strongly, however, that the implementation of the five point action plan will not ease community tension unless local communities play a significant role in the application of new zones.”

Is conning the public going to make up for oil depletion and water scarcity?

Analyse the problem:

• Growing the population and expanding infrastructure will increase the number of car trips and the distance travelled.
• Modern high-rises are power-hungry.
• Building upwards increases the electrical power requirements for air conditioning, heating, drying clothing, moving things and people up and down in lifts and pumping water upwards.
• It is harder to cool and heat high-rises and it is harder to cool large, dense cities.
• Reducing vegetation reduces rainfall and cooling.
• Reducing access to land deprives people of access to vital resources when governments fail (as they invariably do.)
• Our Victorian government has already failed us by overshooting our water supply. It has attempted to supplement that supply by costly, power-hungry technologies, notably desalination. It has undertaken in ignorance an impossible promise to deliver these with alternative technologies.

Analyse the propaganda

We are running out of water, fuel, and affordable food; native flora and fauna are threatened, and democracy has been sacrificed to growth.

Driving these problems is Melbourne 2030 in its role as a vehicle for imposing massive population growth.

But what is driving Melbourne 2030?

Population growth via immigration is not, as we are led to believe, a kind response to the starving millions of the world.

And it is not to create a better world for the rest of us.

• Apart from a small number of refugees, the immigration program is actually all profit-driven by big business in Australia. The profit goes to a corporate and investor caste well out of the reach of the middle and the working classes.

• The number one profiteers in population growth in Australia are international property developers, which include Finance, construction, real-estate, engineering.

The 2002 Bracks Population Summit …

…was largely auspiced by Property Developers, in APop (The Australian Population Institute) and mortgage financiers. As well as Australia’s mainstream Press – Fairfax and Murdoch - which own www.realestate.com and www.domain.com.au, Mr Richard Pratt and Mr Steve Vizard, both involved in criminal activities for financial gain, were very prominent in this event.

Perhaps the two biggest peak bodies currently coordinating government lobbying on population growth to advantage the industries they represent are:
• The Property Council of Australia
• The Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (working with the Scanlon Foundation and the Australian Multicultural Foundation.

Here are the main aims of the Property Council of Australia, from their own document, "Powerhouse 2010 Update" downloadable as a powerpoint file here

Don't you love it! Melbourne - and the rest of Australia - under permanent construction.
Ah, the excitement of choking traffic in the mornings; the challenge of breathing in that dust.
The joy of watching your favourite piece of nature paved over.
The engagement of foregoing sleep to write useless submissions to your local member and state government.

Gee, our taxes at work! 33% of my wages. And then, on top of that, there are those rising council rates, that burgeoning homelessness, those skyrocketing rents, those outrageous property prices, that choking traffic...

And, here is their latest 'branch' member - the Victorian Government.

The Problem: Organising against population growth, dispossession and life-threatening hardship as oil and water deplete.

The mainstream media and government are corporatised and represent the interests of the corporate world. We cannot rely on them for information, guidance or to organise. We need to communicate outside of them: Internet, word of mouth, books, films, meetings and markets.

Organising requires comunication between neighbours and kin and power at a local level.

Default human social structure is along kinship lines of family and clan.

• Local Communities with a history together and especially with intact or strong kinship structures have the best chance of organising to survive well.

• Current land-use planning and population programs structurally split- up communities and prevent them from organising.

We need to challenge local laws that stop us having livestock and water for growing food.

• We need to re-design our communities so that we can grow food and keep domestic animals.

• It is vital to get back and conserve full use of suburban land and water. So look out for ways to do this.

The government is public-private corporatising rural land and giving more and cheaper water to their agribusiness program. Agribusiness does not care about you and me; agribusiness quotidienly watches people starve. That is why we have to fight government attempts to retain our water for other uses. We need it.

Laws should be primarily for benefit of local communities, then integrated into region and continent

Inheritance and Land-tenure systems need reform along Roman-law lines, like Western Continental Europe.

Roman-style laws
• Preserve land within families
• Share land equally between men and women
• Minimise land fragmentation and speculation

Basically this means that our inheritance system and land-use allocation and planning system need reform towards:

• male and female equal inheritance,

• prohibition against disinheritance of children (legitmate or illegitimate), and

• leasing to substitute for land-sales

Remember:

Cheap goods are the baubles to seduce and distract today’s indigenous populations.
Today’s indigenous populations are us.
We who were born here.
Let us not be distracted by beads and baubles.

• Land with water and a stable population and society are what counts.
• Land speculation is a mug’s and a con-man’s game.
• High profits in any field are not sustainable in the long term.
• No society that encourages one class to profit at the expense of all the other citizens is sustainable.

Dear Ben West, Chairperson of The Green Party of Vancouver,

A friend, Tim Murray, has alerted me to a quote you have made in a letter you wrote to the Mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan:

"Densification is of course environmentally positive in so far as it prevents the devastation of agricultural lands or wilderness areas but this initiative if not part of an overarching smart growth land use plan would not accomplish this goal."

I have some questions for you.

How is it "environmentally positive" to concentrate people into highrise apartment complexes where it takes massive energy inputs to treat their drinking water and sewage, run their elevators, maintain their multi-story parking garages, power their artificial indoor fitness club environments, and bring them food and resources from distances that grow in proportion to their population size, giving them no hope of growing their own food to survive the new end-of-cheap-energy era?

Isn't it more environmentally friendly for people to live in the country where their water needs no chlorine or UV treatment and their sewage requires no chemical treatments and their septic tank uses less energy per person in its lifecycle than urban waste treatment facilities? Just because people own no land doesn't mean they don't require resources from land in order to survive. Wouldn't it make more sense for people to live on the same land where their food comes from, work this land with their own muscle instead of with machines, and find wood for heating and building materials from their own land instead of importing it from far-away industrial clearcuts? Of course, for this ultra low footprint lifestyle (rural, not urban) to work really well, there would have to be few enough people that each person could have enough quality and quantity of land that they could be self-sufficient without breaking their back.

In the upcoming era of depleted fossil fuels whereby the only oil, coal, wood, and natural gas remaining will take more energy to extract than what you get out of it, we simply will not have a use for so many urban bureaucrats living densely in highrise apartments. The earth's carrying capacity will be drastically reduced due to lack of energy resources. Finding a new unprecedentedly abundant source of energy with zero impact on the environment is not only impossible, but it is also undesirable as it would enable humans to further grow their population, which would displace even more other species, destroy biodiversity services, and therefore lower quality of life on earth for humans.

Would you agree that it is not just the average consumer's consumption level that is relevant, but also the number of consumers?

Whether population growth occurs in the city, in the suburbs, or in the country, is there such a thing as "Smart Growth" when it still involves population growth, which guarantees that environmental damage will increase no matter what conservation measures are imposed? (HINT: Each person must consume finite resources and produce waste just in order to survive. If the number of people keeps growing, it is only a matter of time before the total environmental damage increases even if the theoretical minimum for average per capita consumption is achieved.)

Are you one of those people who uses cliches like "You can't stop progress" or "Growth is inevitable" as a cop-out excuse for letting our environment get worse, while lying at the same time by telling people that our environment can get better alongside continued population growth so long as this growth is "managed/contained/smart/densification/steered/deflected"?

How long will Canada's protected areas be protected if our 1% annual population growth trend continues (doubling our numbers every 70 years); how many National and Provincial Parks will relax legislation to allow agriculture, roads, power corridor easements, mining, native hunting, increased camp sites and recreational development, etc to meet this growing demand? How many Parks will incidentally fall victim to air and groundwater pollution as well as poaching and alien species infestations caused by Canada's population growth?

Would it not be prudent for the Green Party of Canada to advocate lower immigration to Canada so that Canada can set a good example in an overpopulated world by reducing its population to a sustainable level to avoid mass species extinctions and human deaths due to the downside of Peak Food caused by fossil fuel depletion?

Thanks and I look forward to your reply,

Brishen Hoff
President of Biodiversity First biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com

Victorian State Member of Parliament, Neale Burgess, has alerted the public to the fact that Minister Gavin Jennings has introduced, through Peter Batchelor, a BILL in Parliament to ensure the lowest possible Classification of Devilbend as a Natural Features Reserve.

This will ensure priority for recreational fishing, horseriding, and other recreational activities inimical to wildlife, in an area which has protected indigenous fauna to date.

Devilbend is precious keystone wildlife habitat essential to Frankston and Peninsula Wildlife Corridors. (See www.awpc.org.au for the corridor plans). The Wildlife corridors are needed to save Peninsula wildlife from extinction via development. Toll-way developers and other friends of Mr Brumby’s can make the idea of turning Devilbend into a glorified sportsground sound environmentally and community-friendly, completely failing to mention that they will thereby destroy a lynchpin in a proposed wildlife corridor for Melbourne’s Southern region.

Extinction of native fauna throughout the Peninsula will permit greedy developers and cold-hearted, exploitative politicians to simply fill the Peninsula with housing and industrial developments like the 400 ha one planned for Port of Hastings. This is an outrage! Soon Victoria will have no more wildlife than Singapore - which has one single mudskipper species listed.

It is so essential that Devilbend be RE-Classified as a NATURE CONSERVATION RESERVE to save rapidly disappearing, remaining native animals on the Mornington Peninsula.

Brendan Sydes, of the Environment Defenders Office, (EDO), has suggested that if we act before tomorrow, there is a way to turn this around by making an Amendment to the present BILL in Parliament.

The Amendment needs to make Devilbend a Nature Conservation Reserve, instead of a 'natural features reserve'.

So if anyone has an MP sympathetic to wildlife, please write seeking the Amendment in the Lower House BEFORE the vote which is tomorrow. Thursday.

The Land and Biodiversity is a waste of time. Minister Jennings hypocritically fails to protect wildlife by ensuring their decimation on the one hand in the BILL and then on the other with his pathetic Green Paper for Biodiversity in a time of Climate Change, which only serves to waste Wildlife defenders’ time and energy and drive them to despair.

What you Can Do

AWPC was alerted by Neale Burgess, local MP and Brendan Sydes Chief Solicitor EDO, to the suggestion of such an ammendment.

Yesterday AWPC called Neale Burgess office requesting that Burgess MOVE the AMENDMENT through Barry in his office.

AWPC has also been in touch with GREEN MP Sue Pennicuik ( office in Brighton), and sent a lot of material to Cameron Pidgeon.

AWPC will call Edward O'Donahue, Upper House MP in Pakenham, who lives on the Mornington Peninsula

Labor Upper house man for the region is johan.scheffer[at]parliament.vic.gov.au
Please let him know how you feel he should vote.

It is essential to move on this today to prevent the Bill from passing without an amendment in the Lower House and proceeding to the Upper House.

Posted by Sheila Newman on behalf of Mark O'Connor.

Tonight’s Insight program on SBS (June 17, 2008) –“Is Australia running out of workers” was very interesting about how we are now digging up and shipping out our minerals so fast, and so profitably, that other employers can’t compete with the wages paid by the mining companies. Employers are desperate for staff, but with unemployment currently low they can’t get workers at the wages, or the wages and conditions, they are able or willing to pay. (The most genuine case seemed to be the orchardist who had to leave several thousand dollars worth of mandarins unpicked because she couldn’t find pickers anywhere. Other employers seemed to be on the usual lurk of wanting the government to give them cheap workers.)

We are now so greedy that we want to ship abroad our mineral patrimony even faster than our existing workforce, with all the mechanical aids and vast machines now available, ­can manage. So the solution proposed by short-sighted business councils and some economists is to bring in ever more people to make up the shortfall in labor.

The result is of course that the extra workers will rapidly swell the population of Australia, so that the average Australian will own a steadily decreasing share of our mineral riches, which are themselves steadily decreasing. The future will be one of an unsustainable population in an impoverished continent –in a world beset by fuel shortages, climate change, and famines. And all for the short-term benefit of mining companies and those whose fortunes depend on a rising stock market.

Of course Jenny Brockie and her staff didn’t manage to see it in those terms. They took the reckless sell-off of our once-only mineral assets as a datum. Hence they also took as a given that there would not be enough workers in the country to service both the mining industry and the other more localized industries on which we depend for all sorts of supplies and services. And they also took as given that the mining industry would be able to pay rates other employers could not.

Granted all those unquestioned assumptions, they proceeded to examine quite rationally whether 457 visas (which it seems allow employers to pay about $10,000 on average less than they would have to pay Australian workers) were the best solution, or whether we should take in even more people as permanent migrants, or on the contrary run a guest worker system for Pacific migrants, or whether we needed to better train and motivate our own youth. The dishonesties and special pleading of employer organistions were fairly well exposed, and the CFMEU’s argument about it being no kindness to poor countries to take their skilled workers and doctors and nurses was respectfully examined.

But the underlying cause of the labor shortage, and the wisdom of selling off all your mineral assets as fast as possible, was not discussed.

Mark O'Connor

See also : Transcript of Insight program of 17 Jun 08 Labour Pains

This is is a call for help.
The University of Western Australia wants to bulldoze rare bushland in the middle of our city for future property development. The Minister for the Environment David Templeman is soon to make his decision on whether 60% of this pristine 36 hectare bushland will be destroyed to make way for offices and housing.

David Templeman's contact details are:
The Hon. David Templeman MLA
Minister for the Environment,
Climate Change, Peel
29th Floor
St. George's Terrace
PERTH 6000

email: david-templeman[at]dpc.wa.gov.au

Please open the website www.blackcockatoorescue.com.

Once in there have a look at the site and click on UWA link.
Watch the videos and then click on the link to protest, on each vision or just one.
Make your comments known to the ministers and send it off.
Remember the ministers have not made their decisions yet so be nice.
We need all your help.
click for video
WE NEED TO ACT NOW AS THE DECISION IS NEAR, VERY NEAR.

Glen Dewhurst of Black Cockatoo Conservation team

These are lovely, intelligent, sociable and long-lived animals. To lose them would be tragic - and the situation already is tragic. (Ed.)

Poet pens a plea to stop population push

By Mark Uhlmann Assembly Reporter

As the federal and ACT governments preach the virtues of high population growth a few individuals are prepared to put an alternative view.

One of those is Canberra poet Mark O’Connor, co-author of a book soon to be published by Enviro Books called Overloading Australia.

The Stanhope Government boasted this week of increases to interstate and international migration to Canberra, but O’Connor said, “Canberra’s going downhill rapidly."

“We have this mad pro-development Government that tries to push more and more people into it.”

He said most people wanted Canberra “kept more or less the way it is”, but could not get representation for this view in the ACT Legislative Assembly.

Canberra’s present population was more than enough and Government programs encouraging more people to come were irresponsible.

At the very least there should not be an open-ended commitment to ever more suburbs, which was the case at present, he said.
The economy was dependent on more suburbs being built. The result was a declining quality of life for those faced with higher population densities.

O’Connor said “citizen disobedience” was now appropriate. For example, that we should not conserve water.
This would “only be encouraging (Chief Minister) Jon Stanhope to push us further into a position where come the next drought we’ll have an even larger population”.

Until the Government had a plan to cap the population, it was counterproductive to conserve water.

Across the country, population growth was being demanded as a necessary part of economic growth, putting an increasing strain on the infrastructure of cities.

Australia’s annual population growth was 1.5 per cent.

“The UN Population Fund regards 1.1 per cent as too high in Asia.” O’Connor said.

The growth was about half natural increase and half immigration. Immigration was at record highs and all the pressure from government and industry was to be even more irresponsible.

There was recognition by governments that greenhouse gases had to be cut, but by some trick that had to be divorced from economic growth, and the economy just had to keep on growing. “That’s an unsustainable position, that will come unstuck before long,” O’Connor said.

There was a “selective deafness in the media” on the population issue.

The president of the Australian conservation Foundation, Ian Lowe, had tried to raise the population issue at the 2020 Summit, but had been up against a belief that population growth and economic growth were good.

O’Connor said, “Unless you win this (population) battle, in the long-run every environmental battle will be lost.”

(Reprinted with the author's permission from From The Canberra Times Saturday May 24 2008 page 15 News)

On Radio National's Breakfast Show of 16 June 2008, Canadian Maude Barlow author of "Blue Covenant - The Global Water Crisis And The Coming Battle For The Right To Water" (RRP AU$29.95), broke yet more alarming news of yet another aspect of humankind's combined problem of resources scarcity and overpopulation, that is, the rapid ongoing depletion of non-renewable underground water supplies on top of our large-scale interference with the earth's natural water cycles.

In the interview (the audio file not yet available, will be soon made available here for about 4 weeks) Barlow gave a sobering catalogue of unsustainable water practices across the globe. These included:

• Much of the US is literally running out of water, and that the Colorado
  River/Hoover Dam system is failing;
• Water tables underneath southern India are rapidly falling as bore water pumps are running literally 24x7 to supply water for agricultural, domestic and industrial use;
• The ground beneath Mexico City is sinking as water beneath it is pumped out to supply the needs of its population;
• China is diverting massive amounts of water at enormous ecological and social cost in order to supply the world with cheap plastic artifacts such as shower curtains;
• The biggest killer of children in the world today is not AIDS, war or traffic accidents, but, rather, water-borne diseases.

She strongly opposed water privatisation as a solution to the problem. Whilst being in favour of placing an appropriate monetary value on water, she said that giving control of water assets to private corporations would only lead to those corporations being able to charge exorbitant rates to the rest of us and would most likely lead to the poor missing out.

As a general rule, Maude Barlow opposes measures to divert natural flows of water such as the Victorian Government's planned North South Pipeline to diver water from the Goulburn River valley to supply Melbourne's project population growth by 1 million (see www.plugthepipe.com).

In regard to desalination which is being more widely adopted around Australia, Maude Barlow suggested that instead of relying on such energy-intensive and ecologically questionable technologies that Australia, instead urgently consider ceasing the growth of its population. Without sustainable water supplies it is folly for a country such as Australia to continue to erect ever more high-rise buildings without sustainable supplies of water to meet the needs of their occupants.

See also
Against the flow of 7 Jun 08 in the Melbourne Age;
Mother Jones interview about Maude Barlow's previous book, Blue Gold;
Maude Barlow on the Global Movement of 27 Feb 08;
About Maude Barlow in www.canadians.org;
Reviews of Blue Covenant by Readings and The New Press

How do the politicians and the CBC define prosperity?

It is time we ask ourselves: Has this ”progress“ called ”Economic Growth“ (of which population growth is the main factor) really made our lives better? Politicians say it improves our lives. The CBC's host of ”The Sunday Edition“ Michael Enright said on his June 7, 2008 radio show that we need immigration-driven population growth in order to ”prosper“.

I would like to know what his definition of ”prosper“ is. Does Enright think that prospering means converting hundreds of thousands of hectares of Canadian land from biodiverse ecosystems into new roads, subdivisions, clearcuts, malls, parking lots, and open-pit mines to accommodate about 250,000 additional immigrants every year? Does that make life better for the average Canadian? Has real wealth per Canadian increased?

When I was born in 1980 there were only 24 million people in Canada. 28 years later, would a middle class person be able to afford more quality and quantity of real resources now than in 1980? I don't think so. In 1980, a middle class person could easily afford a 40 hectare hobby farm where the climate is mild such as Southern Ontario. Today, you'd have to be upper class to have that.

In 1980 a middle class person could afford more seafood with more varieties to choose from, thicker fillets and less chemical contamination in those fillets. In 1980 the furniture that the average person bought was made from solid wood, not particle board with a glued-on veneer that peels off when wet. In 1980 grocery stores in Canada gave patrons paper bags that could be used as tinder in your woodstove, used as mulch in your garden, or composted. Now we get non-biodegradable plastic bags, which are overflowing landfills, littering the countryside, and we are made to feel guilty for using them.

The lesson: ”Economic Growth“, or increasing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) does so by increasing the population, which explains why it results in less real wealth per person. More people means less space and resources per person. No wonder ”progress“ has made life worse for the average Canadian

.

Brishen Hoff, President of Biodiversity First
(biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/index.htm)

See also: Living standards and our material prosperity 6 Sep 08 concerning the quality of life in Australia

(illustration by Sheila Newman)
In “Population grows at record rate", an article by Tim Colebatch, The Age, June 6, 2008, an Australian journalist has once again been given license by the Fairfax Press to frame Australia’s overpopulation problem as some kind of triumph.

In an article akin to the spin used to sell large bags of potato crisps and sugar, caffeine and phenelalanine-laden soft drinks to adolescents, Tim Colebatch sells overpopulation to Age readers.

Whilst relating the latest ABS statistics, the journalist chooses resoundingly positive terms for this undemocratic and frightening complex phenomenon:

Australia “turned the corner” into 2007 by having ‘almost 21.2 million people'.
In Victoria, the state’s population grew by a “record” 82,430 people. Tasmania “reached a milestone” and is ‘now “on track” to reach 500,000 residents’

Portraying this bizarre engineered growth as some kind of race for supremacy, Colbatch comments that Victoria “lost slightly” ‘in net migration flows to other states.’ ‘Queensland (+25,647) was the “big winner” from interstate migration, as usual, while NSW (-24,028) was again the “big loser”.’

The article concludes with some of the costs of population growth in Australia, but without portraying them as costs. In contrast to the hyped up descriptors for the growing numbers, journalist Colbatch leaves right for the end a peculiarly unemotional account of some of the suffering involved:

“The rapid population growth is driven by business recruiting ready-trained skilled workers from poorer countries rather than training Australians. In the six months to April, almost 100,000 temporary workers arrived, while the Government has just increased the quota for permanent skilled migration from 102,500 to 133,500. Critics point out that there has been no increase in housing supply, so the arrivals are intensifying the housing shortage and helping to drive up rents.”

There is no warning of how the extra people will affect the chances of Australians to weather oil, soil and water depletion.

The statistical news is actually unrelievedly awful, especially as related with ghastly flourishes like these for Victoria:

‘VICTORIA's population has “soared” to more than 5.2 million, with the Brumby Government "claiming the biggest growth in 35 years”' and ‘Treasurer John Lenders said the figures were "an endorsement of our Government's record investment in making Victoria the best place to live, work and raise a family"’.

No mention at all of the growth in groups all over Victoria and the rest of the country protesting at the loss of democracy and control over their environments. This is not reporting. This is propaganda, pure and simple.

Please circulate this article to help to counteract mainstream-media propaganda for population growth.

India: Oil prices to increase by 11%
Diezel goes up by 9%
Cooking gas goes up by 17%

The Indian Government is reported to fear that the price of oil may cost it the next election₁.

Such are the politics of petroleum. There is nothing it does not touch.

The 'rich countries' appear to have much more of a buffer than most of India, but their road transport and agriculture industries are already in trouble. It is well-known that starvation is never far away for many people in the tropical Asian countries, but less well-known is the large class of people living in precarity elsewhere, especially in the Anglophone countries.

In London around 10,000 finance workers have lost their jobs this year and it is anticipated that perhaps up to 40,000 will lose their jobs in the current months. (France2 8pm News, 21 May).

In "Job loss a sure road to skid row"₂ in the Herald Sun of Tuesday May 27, 2008, it was reported that a Citibank survey showed that, in Australia, "one in two workers would face financial ruin within four weeks of losing their jobs;… almost 20 per cent of workers would not last a week. Only one in four workers would be able to survive more than three months."

Some 'rich countries' don't know when to stop and part of their population is sliding ever so quickly into third world status. For instance, the Australian government has become a 'banana republic' massively endebted and engaged in energy-intensive infrastructure expansion programs everywhere. Under the behest of the Australian academy of Technology and Engineering Sciences, the Property Council of Australia, The Australian Population Institute, and its own state governments, all heavily peopled by big development lobbyists, Australia is trying to double its population as soon as possible, planning new megacities. For these 'programs' of infrastructure building and population increase, worker, business and family reunion immigration have been stepped up, and families receive baby bonuses for having children, just as though the days of cheap oil were just beginning, instead of in their twilight. Yet, as in the USA, evictions and personal debt are sky rocketing.

And really, what is three months security in a century of oil depletion? Who is safe? We all need more solidarity. France, so far, shows the best example.

Sheila Newman

Footnotes

1. ↑ Rhys Blakely, "India concedes in battle to keep oil price down", The Times, 6 Jun 08

2. ↑ Craig Binnie, "Job loss a sure road to skid row" in the Victorian Herald Sun(Australia) of 27 May 08

I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Canada’s social democrats have not experienced an ideological epiphany in the past seven months. One might recall that New Democratic party (NDP) premier Lorne Calvert in calling an election for November 7th declared that growth was a good thing so long as its “benefits” were shared.

This revolutionary statement was made to distinguish social democrats from the growthists on the right who simply promised that growth’s benefits would “trickle down” to the less fortunate without state intervention. But between them was complete unanimity that growth should proceed. The boreal forest would continue to be clear cut no matter how timber royalties were spent, potential farmland would be sold for housing, wetlands would be cleared for development and uranium mined.

In a speech given 22 May 08 to the Shepherds of Good Hope, NDP leader Jack Layton revealed that his party had not changed its attitude to growth:

“As a country, we have a responsibility to ensure that no member of our society is denied the essentials of life. But today, we are seeing a very disturbing trend in Canada: the growing gap between the rich and everyone else. More wealth (sic) is being generated than ever before—but that does not mean that everyone is better off. In fact, the opposite is true. The reason is pretty clear―the benefits of economic growth (sic) are not being shared equally among all Canadians.”

Oh Jack. So that’s what’s wrong with economic growth? Just that its benefits are not being shared equally among all Canadians. Well they certainly weren’t shared equally in NDP British Columbia, NDP Saskatchewan and NDP Manitoba. All three provinces recorded the worst child poverty rates in the country. And homeless people were out on the street in force in the latter half of the nineties in BC too, during the NDP reign. The growing gap between top and bottom income levels also rose during their tenure. Analysts even on the left also report that the gap between social classes or at least regionally between north and south actually grew under Tony Blair’s centre-left government. Clearly there is a gap between the rhetoric of social equality and its delivery. And just as clearly, economic growth is not the mechanism of that delivery.

But I thought what was wrong with economic growth was what it did while it was “growing”. Eating into natural capital and destroying real wealth in creating the “wealth” that Mr. Layton defines as such. For what is “wealth”? Is it the toys we accumulate with all this economic activity? The consumer goods, the cars, the furniture, the sparkling new housing units? What is it? Seldom factored in as wealth are the 33 trillion dollars worth of biodiversity services that the planet provides free of charge to support human life. Services which are daily being destroyed by relentless economic growth. Clean water, unpolluted air, healthy vibrant fish stocks in our lakes and streams, viable microorganisms―these constitute the real wealth of the nation that are not to be “shared” and parceled out like tax rebates to Jack Layton’s low income constituency or offered to the developers’ greed. When are we going to a measuring stick that reflects this fact and replaces GDP and the statistics politicians are using to test reality?

To seal the deal Layton was asked by veteran parliamentary reporter Mike Duffy if his plan to tax the worst corporate polluters might impede economic growth. Layton quickly reassured him, “Oh, no, look at Germany. Thegovernment forced penalties on the car manufacturers and revenue went to the development of wind turbines. There is more economic growth now than before.” Layton’s plan is in opposition to the Liberal-Green plan to introduce carbon taxes. He apparently has not heard the news that the Royal Academy of Sciences concluded that ALL economic growth must end if we are to stop short of raising global temperatures by that critical 2 degree tipping point.

Tim Murray, 1 Jun 08

See also: Growth is OK if it is shared? of 12 Oct 07.

The Australian government will do anything to save this little fellow except stopping developers from building over his habitat.

You would think that the Federal and ACT government really cared that his species is nearly extinct to read how far they are prepared to go to make other species pay for what some leaders of our species are responsible for doing.

In the wake of the Belconnen kangaroo massacre, some of us thought that the government was drawing a very long bow to expect the public to take seriously the implication that 400 odd Belconnen kangaroos were mercilessly purged from nature in order to protect the earless dragon, charming though he is. Just between friends, we still aren't convinced.

Yet, in Peter Robertson & Murray Evanshttp, "Draft National Recovery Plan for the Grassland Earless Dragon Tympanocryptis pinguicoll, "native grazers" as well as "introduced grazers" have been newly included as threats to Tympanocryptis pinquicoll. "Native grazers" is zoo-speak for kangaroos and any other indigenous wildlife that eats grasses.

In fact, the draft paper reveals an absurd situation and we need someone like Alice to tell the government it is nothing but a pack of cards. How wildlife officers and zoologists can stand working in these arcane conditions is beyond me. According to the government's own sources, in the paper,

"The main factors involved in the decline of the Grassland Earless Dragon are thought to be loss and fragmentation of habitat due to urban, industrial or agricultural development, and these processes still threaten extant populations."
"... development at the Canberra Airport does not require the approval of the Minister for the Environment (under Section 160 of the EPBC Act) and proposals both underway and in planning at that site have resulted in the loss of known habitat and threaten further areas of occupied habitat."

Yet kangaroos have to wear all the blame! We also know that the Belconnen site is to be surrounded by new developments and there are rumours that the site itself is to be developed. So, between the airport and the developments at Belconnen, what hope is there for the earless dragon? What hope is there for kangaroos?

The problem is clearly not kangaroos, but the government's obdurate, undemocratic and unsafe insistence on growing Australia's population at the behest of developers. (See "Scanlon report underpins threat to Australian democracy"). This in the face of an expected indefinite world wide depression associated with oil decline. And they are building a new airport when the future of cheap air-travel is doomed by the lack of replacements for petroleum-based jet-fuel. It's not just kangaroos and dragons who should fear our government; it's us!

Actually, this situation where humans are blaming kangaroos for their own actions reminds me of the case that biologist, Farley Mowatt made for wolves in his 1963 book, Never Cry Wolf. He went to work as a government biologist in the Arctic on a project to find out why caribou herds were diminishing. The government thought they were probably being eaten by wolves (although both species had co-existed for millenia). After living adjacent to the wolves for months, Mowat reported that the wolves lived on a diet of field mice supplemented by the occasional elderly or sick caribou. The local trappers in the area were killing all the caribou to eat and to feed to their dogs. Mowatt's book, Never Cry Wolf, is a classic and it is said that it led to the Soviet Union banning the killing of wolves.