population

That's all. Really. Just talk about it.

Click on image for film.

Report on the Federation Square (Victoria, Australia) Population Forum on 23 April 2010, where Mark O'Connor debated Marcus Spiller.

Report on the Federation Square (Victoria, Australia) Population Forum on 23 April 2010, where Mark O'Connor debated Marcus Spiller.

Put on by the City of Melbourne at the suggestion of Mary Drost of Planning Backlash to Councillor Peter Clarke, the Forum was a very well attended event.

The hall was almost full and, from the clapping, it was obvious where the majority stood. They heavily supported Mark O'Connor, co-author of the book, Overloading Australia, Enviro Press, 2009, who spoke very well against the rapid increase in population in Melbourne. He said there are actually 3 elephants in the room - population, climate change and economic growth.

He called the 'ageing population problem' a "proveable sham", noting that we all age exactly one year per annum.

There were five people on the panel.

O'Connor's main opponent was Marcus Spiller, formerly of the Planning Institute and now adviser to the Ministers of PLanning and Housing. He is still pushing Centralized Planning, just as he was back when Minister Hulls was in charge of Planning.

He may well have a lot of involvement in the current Review of the Planning Act, which promotes centralized planning. Spiller is totally optimistic about a bigger population.

Another panelist, Charles Berger, spoke sensibly. He said that we must do away with 'bigger is better' and go for quality not quanitity He said we must preserve threatened species. He described how our water usage would have to drop with higher and higher population numbers. He also said that there is very little evidence linking population numbers and successful economies.

Saul Eslake, seemed to have moderated his economic views. He said that Melbourne would be different in 2050 with 8 million - not marvellous, more expensive, and more crowded. He said business grows with population growth, but it does not mean people are better off. At present we are losing factories and exporting very little from Victoria and importing a lot.

Kelvin Thomson had been asked to be there but was overseas so could not accept.

Planning Backlash was officially recognized by Cr Peter Clarke in his welcome as being an instigator in them doing this forum.

Source: Planning Backlash

Republished here to give background to Sheila Newman's remarks in her debate with Steve Bracks on the Jon Faine show 19-4-2010. You can comment on Jon Faine's "Population Forum" about the debate here and you can listen to the podcast here. The sector in Australia that has the most costly dependency ratio must be the property sector, since it costs all Australians an enormous and unreasonable amount just to cover the cost of land for housing, business and agriculture. Most of the very high costs involved are completely unnecessary, except in the eyes of greedy developers and their hangers-on

Mr Salt, wrong again

Yesterday (4 Feb, 2010) the Australian had Bernard Salt raising the alarm about the dependency ratio (again). But the man is hopelessly misinformed. Elderly people are not the big problem. And children (who are more dependent and for longer and who outnumber elderly people) are not the problem either.

The sector in Australia that has the most costly dependency ratio must be the property sector, since it costs all Australians an enormous and unreasonable amount just to cover the cost of land for housing, business and agriculture. Most of the very high costs involved are completely unnecessary, except in the eyes of greedy developers and their hangers-on. The only reason that the costs are so high is that the industry wants it that way and our state and federal governments are in cahoots with it.

The housing industry is making life in Australia miserable

Australians pay these monstrous costs first and must deduct them from their disposable income. These unnecessary costs affect the amount of hours we must work and how hard we must work and whether we can afford to take holidays. They affect our health and happiness. The high prices affect the cost of doing business, of manufacturing, of storage, garaging etc. When these costs are inflated they take away from other economic and social obligations, which are to provide education, hospitals, child support and retirement funding in the form of pensions and superannuation. Yes, even for self-funded retirees, the cost of doing business is inflated by the cost of land and is deducted as a variety of costs from any profits which devolve to shareholders.

Australia's inflated land-costs

Australia's inflated land-costs mean that small business has had increasing difficulty surviving and that for an increasing number of Australians, survival itself - in terms of accessing shelter and having enough money left over for food and clothing - has become difficult and sometimes impossible. For more Australians each year, transport to get to work or education to train for employment, are luxuries. Yet all this could be changed if property development and housing were no longer considered as private profits but as public expenses and the factors that contribute to their inflation were adjusted accordingly. These factors are those which drive up demand. Demand is affected by births, deaths and immigration and, to a lesser extent, by household size, location and position, which may all be to some extent discretionary.

What drives the high cost of land in Australia?

The most noticeable adjustable drivers of demand are overseas and interstate immigration. Interstate immigration can be dealt with by adjusting building permits at local levels. Overseas immigration can be dealt with by State Governments ceasing advertising for new immigrants and by National Government revising immigration quotas downwards. For maximum reduction of costs, land and housing availability should be exactly equal to demand.

In a steady state society, houses would become available as people died, with some overlap, at very little cost.

It is Australia's housing industry which is responsible for elderly people being scapegoated instead of honoured and supported to enjoy the long and happy lives that we should all be able to look forward to.

ABS data

"For most Australians, whether buying or renting their home, the provision of adequate housing for themselves and their families involves substantial ongoing expenditure throughout much of their lives. Housing costs are often the largest regular expenses to be met from a household's current income.

The housing costs measure compiled from the Survey of Income and Housing is defined as the sum of:

* rent payments,
* rates payments (general and water), and
* mortgage or unsecured loan payments, if the initial purpose was primarily to buy, add or alter the dwelling."
Source: 1301.0 - Year Book Australia, 2008

It is always very difficult to get information from public sources on how the cost of land affects the cost of living in Australia because the Australian Bureau of Statistics refuses to treat land as a 'commodity' and our cost of living measure, the consumer price index, only factors in the cost of 'commodities' - other things you buy.

This kind of information is about the best we can get from the ABS (see below). It doesn't tell us very much. Most of the information is in the private sector and costs a lot to see.

It also doesn't tell us how much people who have businesses pay for rent and buildings on top of the money they pay for their own housing.

The ABS doesn't admit that land is like a commodity in Australia

Yet land is treated like a commodity in Australia, and we know for sure that for many of us it is our greatest burden:

“The development of stock mortgages and wool and crop liens in Australia represented legal ingenuity in that on traditional analysis, a property transfer was taking place with respect to something which would only come into existence in the future – the crop or wool to be grown.

In Australia land was not in itself a source of power but an asset capable of producing wealth. Improvements, particularly fencing, represented a high proportion of the value of real estate and borrowings on the land seem to have been greater than in England. It is thus argued that land in Australia was always viewed as a commodity, see Davidson and Wells, “The Land, the Law and The State: Colonial Australia 1788-1890” (1982) 2 Law in Context 89 AND Whalan, D., The Torrens System in Australia p.98.” Source: Adrian J Bradbrook, Susan V MacCallum, Anthony P Moore, Australian Property Law, LBC Information services, 1996, p.1.103:

Is the Property Development industry becoming an embarassment to its members?

Mr Salt recently argued that the property sector was being too timid. He implied that they had become somewhat embarrassed by bloggers highlighting the industry's reasons for promoting high immigration. He urged them to weigh into public debate and wondered why usually high profile growth lobbyists were acting like such wall-flowers.

"... I must say the “growth vs no growth” issue is ascendant and is likely to remain so during 2010. What disappointed me about this debate was the lack of supporting comment emanating from the property industry. No-one that I could see was out there putting the case for growth.

And I suspect the reason is that “big (property) business” doesn’t want to draw attention to itself on a contentious public issue. There seems to me to be almost a timidity in property individuals getting involved in public debate about growth. The logic seems to be don’t rock the boat."

Who would want to admit they are in this industry?

Well, maybe, the property industry is becoming a little more self-aware and less inclined to shoot from the mouth. Perhaps some of the younger people in the industry are becoming ashamed of the role the industry plays in creating and increasing poverty and inequality. Perhaps some of the young planners and builders aren't too keen on trashing the countryside. Maybe when young property developers, engineers, planners and developers you go to parties these days, their mouths go dry and they blush when some nice girl or bloke asks them what they do for a living.

I mean, what do you say? "I make my money out of unaffordable housing." "My boss is a land-speculator." "I serve the land-lords of the world." "We're in the business of overpopulation. It's good for our profits." "Oh, your mother protested on the steps of parliament last week?" "You hate people who bulldoze trees?" "Um, you think we cause most of the carbon gas increases in Australia?" "Well, I didn't choose to have small animals flee at my approach." "Gee, I might be responsible for people dying of thirst in a few decades, and I'm already responsible for animals dying of starvation, but hey, it's a job."

"The only way to offset the impact of the baby bust next decade is to grow the tax base through immigration. That’s why we need a big Australia, at least in the short term. And, make no mistake, this trajectory is good news for the property industry," writes Bernard Salt.

Well, no, Bernard. There is another way and it involves downsizing the property development industry so that we can afford what any normal functioning society can expect to provide for its children and elderly.

I look forward to some intelligent and responsible leadership from those young people who are currently embarrassed by their industry.

Anticipating the counter-argument

Basic economics requires profit to be made from land so that society can have publicly available infrastructure. Land commodifiers and speculators use the need for a profit margin to justify the buying and selling of land at unreasonable prices and for government and business conspiring to inflate those prices. But, when the costs of land are so high that they make business impossible, the time has come to say good-bye to the private housing and development industries.

NOTES

First published here 2/6/2010 but republished to give background to my remarks on Jon Faine Show - 19-4-2010

www.animaljusticeparty.org

The Animal Justice Party (AJP) is close to the target number of members to be able to register with the Australian Electoral Commission. This is an indication of the importance the community gives to animal welfare. The party is now calling for more members so that it can begin to make an impact. By the way, isn't that a beautiful logo!

Dear Animal Supporter

Much of the cruelty inflicted on animals in this country results from government policy decisions, ignorance, and inertia. The interests of animals have not been represented in the Australian electoral system and as a result governments have not given due regard to their plight.

Over recent months, a small but widely representative group of compassionate animal advocates has been working to establish a political party to represent the interests of animals in the Australian Parliamentary system. During this time, a Charter, Constitution and Party logo have been established and a wide range of policy papers is currently being prepared, covering such areas as: vivisection, intensive farming, live animal exports, animals used for sport and entertainment, wildlife, kangaroos, domestic animals, animals and the law, marine animals, population and settlement, and others.

These policy papers will be on the Animal Justice Party web site in a few weeks from now.

To be registered as a political party with the Australian Electoral Commission the AJP will need 500 members. Simply through word of mouth and our website we have almost reached this target, but we will need many more members if we are to be the significant force that all animals need.

We therefore invite you to visit the infant (but soon to be upgraded) AJP website www.animaljusticeparty.org, read the key documents and download and complete a Party membership form.

Yours faithfully Animal Justice Party Steering Committee

20 April 2010

Photo by Brett Clifton of a new wild male kangaroo come to the neighborhood

The article about SPPA in today's Australian (20 April 2010) is an indication of the profile public dissatisfaction is giving the population issue. The Australian is a self-admittedly big population advocate, and so it is interesting to see how the new party, Stable Population Party of Australia, has been reported.

Predictable but unacceptable slurring

The online version is quite acceptable, but a printed edition this morning uses the headline 'New party slams immigrants'. See, Stephen Lunn, "New Party slams immigrants," (April 20, 2010).

William Bourke says that this in no way represents either the article or his lengthy discussion with Stephen Lunn yesterday.

It looks like that Mr Murdoch's editors are trying to paint him in a certain way.

The Australian got the Party's name completely wrong

The Australian did not get the name of his party correct either. The name of the party is not the 'Sustainable Population Party', but the Stable Population Party of Australia. The newspaper apparently cleared this up later in the online edition, but all those people who only read print media will not be able to find the party which they may desperately wish to find. And a lot of people who otherwise might join may not because of the way the Australian has represented the party.

The article itself covers the basic facts about the party, notably the population stabilising policy of balancing emigration with immigration. It also quotes William's factual statement that "population growth might be a single issue, but it cuts across national policy agendas from health, housing and education to water, climate change..." but over-emphasises the fact that it also cuts across immigration.

Why can't the Australian be more positive about what the people want?

In fact the article could be saying so many positive things, such as how the Stable Population Party, by trying to stabilise our population at as low a level as possible, offers hope of an amnesty on starving out and breaking indigenous animal populations, of mortgage martyrdom, of anxiety about old age and rising costs, of a consolidation of community and democracy, and ultimately, as the baby boomers begin to die off in 20 or 30 years, of green space and freedom becoming available to Australia's growing population of cage-reared children, sedated and bloated with fast food.

The Australian is - unfortunately for Australians - interested in marketing Australian property to the world, through its property dot com, realestate.com.au, so positive reporting here would conflict with their business policy.

Dick Smith, FOKE, and Stable Population Party of Australia in Sydney last week

The Party leader encountered a very positive reception at a venue last week.

On the night of the 15th of April 2010, population campaigner Dick Smith spoke to the Friends of Ku-ring-gai Environment (FOKE) group where they had gathered at an environmental event on Sydney's North Shore.

FOKE's main concern is inappropriate development in their suburbs (high rise etc).

The event was packed with 170 seated attendees and a similar number standing.
Dick spoke well and introduced William Bourke of Stable Population Party of Australia to the crowd near the end.

Mainstream media were in attendance including 60 Minutes (who had been with Dick Smith all day), SBS TV, and North Shore Times (News Ltd).

William Bourke was interviewed by SBS TV and around 50 people came up to him after the event for a chat. Most of them departed after getting a SPPA membership form.

Looks like Dick Smith is leading the democratic population policy campaign and helping Australia find political alternatives to the growth lobby.

Makes a good counterpoint to Murdoch's mammoth Australia campaign.

The residents of the Brisbane suburb of Mitchelton are amongst the latest of communities at whose expense the houing development juggernaut plans to profit. The 5,000 current residents of Mitchelton now face the prospect of having as many as 20,000 more residents crammed into high rises in the area, but they are not taking this lying down and have formed the Mitchelton Action Group to fight these plans. Below, we include the 'about' page re-published from the web site of the Mitchelton Action Group.

About the Mitchelton Action Group

High rises in Chermside

The Mitchelton Action Group was set up to represent the Mitchelton Community in the consultation process with the Brisbane Housing Company (BHC) about a proposed affordable housing development in Blackwood Street Mitchelton. MAG is made up of residents and business owners who live and work in Mitchelton.

MAG has since reformed in response to the proposed Brisbane City Council plans to develop the Mitchelton area.  5 of the members of the Councils Planning team are members of MAG.

Governments are trying to overcome a chronic housing shortage caused by lack of foresight and planning by cramming high rise, high density housing into suburbs with train stations!

This will destroy Mitchelton.

Mitchelton should accept its share of new residents but Council's Plan is way over the top and the lifestyle of residents will be changed forever.

Calculations by community representatives on the Council's Planning Team indicate that the current population of the Mitchelton area is just over 5,000 and the added population could easily accommodate over of 20,000 people.

• Blackwood Street CBD 6 and 8 storeys on either side Osborne Road West
• 6 storeys from Northmore down to Sussex Street
• then higher to Samford Road Osborne Road East (Brookside)
• 6 to 10 storeys Ruby Road and Sussex Streets
• 3 to 8 storeys University Road
• 5 storeys on both sides

No plans to improve infrastructure

• No rail overpasses
• No improved intersections
• No more train station parking
• No new sporting facilities
• No public toilets for Blackwood St
• No widened main roads

It will be a congested nightmare for motorists and residents.

The Mitchelton Action Group is a not for profit organisation originally set up to consult with the Brisbane Housing Company on the plans to develop affordable housing in Blackwood Street Mitchelton. The Mitchelton Action Group is now representing the Mitchelton Community in negotiating with the Brisbane City Council and other interested parties in the development of the Mitchelton area.

See also: "Milton residents fight high-rise menace" of 25 Mar 10. #OtherGroups" id="OtherGroups">Other Brisbane Residents action groups: Auchenflower Residents Alliance, Jamboree Residents Association, Kalinga-Wooloowin Residents Association, Kedron and Gordon Park - Save Our Suburbs, Kenmore to Karalee - Save our Suburbs, Long Pocket Concerned Residents Group, Mandalay Progress Association (Fig Tree Pocket) Concerned Residents against Milton's Excessive Development, Oxley Creek Environmental Group, Save our Southbank Parkland, Sinnamon Park Residents Progress Association, Walter Taylor South Action Group Inc, West End Community Association, West Toowong Community Association.

This important statement from the Public Health Association of Australia came out in November last year but has been overlooked. It should be emphasised that the Public Health Association does not make press releases like this lightly. The entire document can be downloaded here.

Time for leadership on Australia’s population growth

The Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) is calling on Federal and State Governments to develop sustainable population policies to curb the associated population health and environmental risks.

“Australia’s population is projected to grow from the current 22 million to 35 million people by 2049 unless urgent action is taken now. Given the dramatic impacts that population growth has on health and environmental sustainability, it is hard to believe that Australia still has no population policy -- it is well past time to develop one,” according to Michael Moore the CEO of the PHAA.

More population will dramatically impact on food security, housing, mental health ...

PHAA spokesperson Dr Peter Howat of the PHAA said: “The projected 60% increase in the population in just 40 years will have a dramatic impact across many areas of service provision including hospitals and other health care services. The impact will extend to food security, nutrition, affordable housing, transport, education, stress and depression with the changing demography of Australia’s population”.

More population will negate any reduction of Australia's carbon footprint

Importantly, this rate of population growth would also effectively negate any achievements in reducing Australia’s carbon footprint. Yesterday the United Nations released its State of the World Population 2009 identifying population growth projections between 8 billion and 10.5 billion people by 2050. The report also identified ‘the key point is that women and men themselves, not Governments or any other institutions, make decisions on childbearing that contribute to an environmentally sustainable human population’.

PHAA spokesperson Dr Liz Hanna added:

“Population growth of this scale will magnify environmental impacts including climate change, drought, and soil degradation and will dilute all the health benefits of migration, including access to education, health care and employment. On the other hand, stabilising population growth would have many benefits for both health and environment.”

Policy to curb overpopulation risks now critical

Dr Howat noted that: “It is now critical that all our Federal and State Governments develop sustainable population policies to curb the risks associated with the social, economic and environmental instability that result from rapid and unsustainable population growth. Population policies must be developed to assure the equitable provision of services and infrastructure. With careful planning, there is a greater likelihood that the already vulnerable members of our communities -- including Indigenous people, recent migrants, non-English speaking people, single parents, unemployed, homeless and other low income people will not be further disadvantaged.”

Emphasis placed on need for OBJECTIVE inquiry

Mr Moore emphasised “The PHAA is calling for leadership from the Australian Government to commission an objective inquiry into Australia’s population policy options in order to develop a sensible population policy”.

For further information:

see PHAA Sustainable Population Policy http://www.phaa.net.au/documents/20091028SustainablePopulationforAustraliafinal.pdf

Source: PUBLIC HEALTH ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA MEDIA RELEASE www.phaa.net.au 18 November 2009

For further comment:
Michael Moore CEO PHAA
Dr Peter Howat, PHAA Spokesperson (Perth)
Dr Liz Hanna, Environmental Health Special Interest Group Spokesperson (ACT)

Rudd's penchant for a 'big Australia' is behind his absurd record immigration policy. Population growth and congestion is out of control and is the common denominator driving up Australian land prices, electricity, water, inflation, consumer demand, interest rates, and consequently the costs of living of ordinary Australians.

Our state and federal public infrastructure cannot cope - roads, public transport, health, education, housing, you name it!

Our state and federal public infrastructure cannot cope.
The cost of living for ordinary Australians is becoming desperate!

BIGGER ELECTRICITY BILLS

Today, Origin Energy chief executive, Grant King, warned the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia in Sydney that Electricity prices across Australia were likely to triple over the next 10 years.
He blamed the combination of the federal government's mandatory renewable-energy targets, energy policy uncertainty, higher electricity transmission and distribution costs, and higher fuel costs would drive the increase.

King attributed the rise in electricity demand to booming sales in energy-inefficient flat-screen televisions and air-conditioners. ['Energy prices to triple', The Australian April 14, 2010] This is clearly a consequence of new housing development driven by population growth laregley fueld by record immigration. And the growth lobby like the Urban Taskforce are lapping up the new cash!

Last month, that dodgy NSW Government euphemism 'The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART)' approved electricity price rises of up to 64% over the next three years, with "those living outside the main cities will bear the brunt of the increases."

'Country Energy, which provides all of rural NSW customers with their electricity, has been allowed to raise its prices by the steepest amount, with an increase of $918 if the scheme is introduced; otherwise, the rise will be $601.

'Overall, Energy Australia customers will see prices rise by a total of 46 per cent, for Integral Energy 60 per cent, and for Country Energy 64 per cent.

Welfare groups have warned that the price rises will force many low-income households into ''energy poverty'', and they will not be able to afford to pay their bills.'

[Brisbane Courier Mail, 'Households to feel pinch as price of power soars', 19th March 2010]

BIGGER WATER RATES

Across Australia, water rates are on the rise as each capital city spends big on desalination plants to cope with their swelling populations.

Last April (2009) it was reported by the Essential Services Commission that Melbourne households faced water price hikes of up to 84% over five years. The key drivers were claimed to be the global economy (standard excuse) as well as government not keeping water infrastructure up to demand and so deferring infrastructure works for years. [The Age (Melb), 21 Apr 2009]

Just two days ago, (12th April 2010), with Melbourne's extravagant new desal plant blowing out to cost a whopping $5.7 billion, Melbourne's water prices will further escalate to pay the bill and because of the extravagant dependency of desalination for electricity, which is also going up in price.

'Over the past five years the price of electricity has increased 13 per cent a year in Victoria - and in NSW prices have risen 28 per cent a year in each of the past two years.'

['Water plans drift behind a veil of secrecy', The Age April 12, 2010]

BIGGER HOUSING PRICES

In 2009 Australian capital city house prices rose by 12.1%. Meanwhile Australia's homeless stands at 16,000. Key drivers for house prices surging are the government’s first-home owners’ grant boost.
['Web alert - warning on 'crazy' house prices', Sydney Morning Herald, 16th February 2010]

Other drivers are the inflow of new immigrants seeking accommodation and foreign nationals permitted to invest in Australia's residential housing market.

BIGGER MORTAGE INTEREST RATES

Last December, interest rates were predicted to rise 1% during 2010. But the drivers were the surge of capital projects in the next few years and China growth.
['Business, brace for 1% rise in interest rates in 2010', Sydney Moring Herald, 24th December 2009]

This month, all the banks followed the Reserve Bank in raising their mortgage rates by 25 basis points, making this the 5th interest rate rise since October and has pushed up mortgage costs by a total of almost $250 a month.

Treasurer Swan said the rise was “a painful reminder” the economy was improving. How out of touch is Swan?

Economists warned there could be at least one more rate rise before the end of the year.

['CBA, ANZ, Westpac follow as Reserve Bank raises official cash rate to 4.25%', Herald Sun , 6th April 2010]

BIGGER GROCERIES BILLS

It was confirmed just last November that Australians "are paying the fastest-rising food prices of any major developed nation. The cost of feeding a family has shot up more than 40 per cent this decade, new OECD figures reveal.

Experts say the explanation for our pricey produce and soaring staples is not drought, currency movements or transport costs. University of NSW associate professor Frank Zumbo said comparing costs over 10 years eliminated such variables and exposed our "cosy" supermarket duopoly as the main reason.

[Daily Telegraph, 'Australia has fastest-rising food prices of any major developed nation', 9th November 2009]

BIGGER MEAT PRICES

Wholesale butcher Kevin Masterton says the days of expensive cuts at cheap prices are over for Australian meat lovers. He's predicted Australian meat prices will never be the same again.

"Everyone is predicting Lamb will be the first Australian meat that is unaffordable. Some of the predictions I've seen is that lamb racks and cutlets will be one hundred dollars a kilo by the middle of this decade," Kevin said.

And it's all because we've been spoiled for choice. The drought has forced farmers' hands - they've had to off-load cattle to stay afloat. "They see that they are going to make more money on the cattle so they hold onto them for longer. There is also quite a bit of export, the economy has started to turn so there is less cattle in the market," Kevin said.

And it's a similar story when it comes to lamb. There's been a nine per cent jump in retail sales and a 10 per cent rise in national expenditure on the meat.

And this year the nation's sheep flock is forecast to hit its lowest point since 1905. "And we have got massive exports to the middle east, so if you take those factors into account they've had a pretty detrimental impact on the stock," Kevin said.

"Lamb has probably had the most spectacular increase - we are probably talking four to five dollars a kilo for the lamb cuts."

['Meat prices on the rise', Today Tonight, 3rd March 2010]

So there is not enough capacity in our meat livestock industry to cope with demand, hence meat prices are going up.

BIGGER PETROL COSTS

"Crude oil prices have surged to 18-month highs on the weekend and have swept petrol prices higher.
Oil prices could go to $US95 a barrel, warns analysts. Domestically, a litre of unleaded petrol costs $1.29, up 0.3 cents.

'Oil, which has been trading at between $US75 and $US85 a barrel for months, now appears to be in a new range that could go up to $95, according to oil trader and analyst Stephen Schork.'

[Perth Sunday Times, 'Petrol prices set to rise, 6th April, 2010]

The trend suggests that Australian petrol prices could be nudging $2 a litre in two years time and this time it will stay there in line with international prices. Ain't globalisation and free trade great for locals!

BIGGER POORER AUSTRALIA

The compounding cost of living for ordinary Australians is becoming desperate!
What the economic data doesn't report is the social consequences - like the growing depression, family breakdowns, homelessness, substance abuse, suicides and domestic violence.
The long term impacts on children are devastating for not only the children but the future society they become adults in.

More people into less space driving up living costs, only delivers a poorer Australia.

The drivers of these costs must be addressed as a national priority.
The BIG elephant in the room is starkly Rudd's immigration out of control!
Rudd's red herring Population Minister is just that, an election red herring.

Rampant Rudd and his immigration wrath must be stopped!

The Medical Journal of Australia has published an article which looks at the devastating impact of population growth on public hospitals in Australia, as well as the more general impact of increased urbanisation, urban sprawl, and the reduced 'walkability' of neighbourhoods.

Here is an extract focusing on the problems public hospitals are already having coping with the demands of the current population.

"The Garling inquiry concluded in 2008 that the New South Wales health system is in a state of crisis.[13] This finding also applies to the rest of the states, with the possible exception of Victoria.[14]

An independent analysis by the Australian Medical Association has concluded that Australian public hospitals are dysfunctional, operating at full or above-full capacity, and urgently in need of increased capital funding. An important finding was that major metropolitan teaching hospitals operate on a bed occupancy rate of 95% or above. The report noted that hospital overcrowding was the most serious cause of reduced patient safety.[15]

It is clear that, even at Australia’s current population ...[*16A] the public health system is struggling to cope with demand. Changes will be required to deal with a vastly increased, yet still ageing, population and the attendant multiple comorbidities, many attributable to increased urbanisation.

Practical measures might include disinvestment (reallocating health resources from existing practices, procedures, technologies, and pharmaceuticals that do not deliver much health gain for their cost); investing in prevention; increasing the health workforce; and emphasising community health. Other measures might include increasing the role of practice nurses and expanding the role of pharmacists.

The increasing pressure on health services as a result of increased immigration might provide further motivation for a move to a single level of funding, with the federal government taking over responsibility for hospitals from the states. At the very least, this might end the “blame game” and cost-shifting that currently blights the system.

In his 2004 documentary Super size me, Morgan Spurlock suffered severe adverse health consequences after a 30-day period of eating super-sized meals at McDonald’s.16 Prime Minister Rudd’s vision of a super-sized Australia, while it might have some short-term economic benefits, will put further strain on the health system.

The plan to dramatically increase the population of Australia has to be debated and critically evaluated, and a population policy must be developed. In particular, health care professionals must engage with the federal government to ensure that it commits to and delivers on comprehensive national health and hospital reform, matching its appetite for unfettered, economically expedient migration to this country.

If this is not done, we — the citizens of a “big Australia” — will all, like Spurlock, suffer the damaging health consequences of super sizing."

NOTES

[13] Garling P. Final report of the Special Commission of Inquiry: acute care services in NSW public hospitals. Sydney: New South Wales Government, 2008. http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink/Special_Projects/ll_splprojects.nsf/pages/acsi_finalreport (accessed Aug 2009).
[14] Penington DG. Does the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission have a real answer for public hospitals? Med J Aust 2009; 191: 446-447.
[15] Australian Medical Association. AMA public hospital report card 2009: an AMA analysis of Australia’s public hospital system. http://www.ama.com.au/node/5030 (accessed Mar 2010).
[16] Gregory AT. A counterweight to fast-food advertising [film review]. Med J Aust 2004; 180: 590.
[*16A] The author, writing at the end of 2009, underestimates Australia's population by about 2 million people, so we have left this number out. Australia's population was estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to be 22,306,143 on 13 April 2010 at 05:45:22 AM (Canberra time). Refer to the ABS population clock here: hhttp://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs%40.nsf/94713ad445ff1425ca25682000192af2/1647509ef7e25faaca2568a900154b63?OpenDocument

Source

Deborah Pelser, "Super size me: is a big Australia good for our health?"

It's about time! In the decades since Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke decided to impose "elite as opposed to popular views on immigration", ordinary Australians have been given little access to the mass media in order to be express their opposition to population growth.

On the rare occasions when immigration has been discussed on Australia Talks, conspicuously lacking from the panel have been knowledgeable and articulate opponents of population growth. Tonight, for a change, Mark O'Connor, co-author of "Overloading Australia" will be a panel guest on Australia Talks.

So, please listen and be sure to phone in to express your opposition to the Rudd Government's anti-democratic imposition record high immigration.

When: Tonight (Monday 12 April) after the 6:00PM news Phone: 1300 22 55 76

The details from the Australia Talks web site are as follows:

There's growing unease about Australia's rapidly rising population, with a forecast of 36 million people by 2050. The prime minister's responded by appointing the nation's first Population Minister. It's shaping up as a hot election year issue, with the Coalition calling for immigration cuts. So what numbers can the country sustain? Should we be aiming for a big Australia? How much does our economic growth depend on migration?

Transcript:

Panel discussion on population, Radio National Breakfast program
Friday 9 April 2010, 8.10am – 8.23am
Interviewer: Fran Kelly
Panel Members: John Coulter (SPA), Bob Carr, Nick Minchin

Fran Kelly: This week has definitely been about the politics of population. With the appointment of Tony Burke as population minister on the weekend Labor has 12 months to come up with a national population policy. Australia’s never had a formal national population policy or target. So we thought we’d discuss this morning what that policy should look like and also explore why the politics of population is so fraught with danger. To help us answer those questions we’re joined by three guests who all support a contained population for Australia and have tried for many years to put the issue on the map. The call for a smaller Australia was backed up by a Lowy poll this week which showed that 69% of us think that 36 million Australians by 2050, which is the Treasury projections released earlier, is simply too large, too many people.

Dr John Coulter is Vice-President of Sustainable Population Australia and a former leader of the Australian Democrats. Nick Minchin is a former Finance and Industry Minister in the Howard Government and he’s set to retire from the Senate next year after 18 years in that chamber. They both join us in Adelaide this morning. Also on the panel today Bob Carr, Premier of NSW between 1995 and 2005, he’s in our Melbourne studio. Good morning to all of you.

I want to ask all of you what a federal population policy should look like. Nick Minchin, Senator Minchin, can I ask you that first, what should it include, a population policy for this country?

Nick Minchin: Well what I don’t think it would be would be to say we want a particular nominated numerical target in a particular year and when we reach it we’re just going to stop. I don’t think that is realistic but it should be a very deliberate and clear framework within which decisions affecting the population are made. And it should be responsive to both inevitable trends that are not responsive to levers, like the birth and death rates, and certain givens in the immigration rate, but it also should be proactive in trying to influence outcomes, and it should be about the sustainability of particular rates of population growth, and I think the problem we have at the moment is that in the absence of any formal population policy all we have is a responsive component which simply seeks to respond to whatever goes on with the natural increase and the immigration rate. So I think we need a much more proactive component in a formal population policy.

Fran Kelly: Proactive in trying to influence where our population policy heads?

Nick Minchin: Yes. Exactly.

Fran Kelly: OK we’ll come to that in a moment but first let me ask all our panelists this simple question, what should a population policy look like – John Coulter?

John Coulter: A population policy should begin with a recognition that Australians are not living sustainably now, environmentally sustainably now, either with respect to the Australian environment or with respect to the global environment. Moving on from that there needs to be a recognition from all governments that the drivers of this unsustainability are continual population growth and economic growth and both those levers need to be tackled. There is no magic number, I agree with Nick on this, there’s no magic number to which we should be aiming by a particular date because of that reciprocal relationship, so the shape of it should be a direction rather than a particular number.

Fran Kelly: OK, and Bob Carr to you now just on that particular number the Minister Tony Burke did make it clear yesterday that Labor will not be coming up with a target, no number. He says a population policy target is not central to that, he agrees with John Coulter that it should be more about direction than number.

Bob Carr: Yes that’s my position as well, I think though the population policy has got to detach us from the idea of endless growth because the only policy we allow for now has been more – M-O-R-E. I think it’s got to acknowledge that there’s some validity, some truth in the notion of the carrying capacity for a continent with Australia’s characteristics and I think there’s an opportunity to link population growth to a number of variables – I’ll give you three: energy efficiency, limited or cautious population growth until we cease to be such a major emitter of carbon. And that could await the arrival of nuclear fusion for example or another endless non-polluting supply of baseload power. Water – the efficiency with which we handle water, the advent of new technologies for desal, again, a cautious approach on population growth, or restrained approach on population growth, until we make progress on that front. And I think the third very quickly is urban consolidation until cities like Perth and Brisbane achieve the urban consolidation rates that Sydney’s got, i.e. the ratio of apartment dwelling to single detached cottage dwelling I think has got to be linked to population growth.

Fran Kelly: OK so all three of you think we don’t need a target, but all of these things are contingent on numbers, aren’t they? Bob Carr as you said there, a notion of a carrying capacity that is just a target by another name, isn’t it?

Bob Carr: I think we’ve got to discuss the context in which carrying capacity constraints cut in. We’ve got to say carrying capacity constraints are there until we’ve achieved the levels of water efficiency, energy efficiency and efficiency in land use that are desirable. I think that’s a way of dealing with that and of linking that to policy outcomes.

Fran Kelly: Nick Minchin the point you made in your initial answer there, we need to be proactive in trying to impact where our population is headed – what do you mean by proactive? That’s presumably pulling some levers and not others. What would you be proactive in?

Nick Minchin: Well obviously the rate of immigration is the most amenable lever available to governments. Despite Peter Costello’s colourful rhetoric I don’t think governments do have levers over the birthrate and they certainly don’t have and shouldn’t have levers over the death rate. So the natural increase I think is largely a given and not amenable to the government, but the immigration rate is definitely amenable and I’ve sat round our Cabinet table for 10 years where we had the annual discussion of the immigration program and that is entirely within the hands of the government. And I don’t want to be party political today but Mr Rudd just saying ‘Oh well 36 million it’s just going to happen and we just have to work out how to deal with it, that’s ridiculous because the rate of immigration is entirely a function of federal government policy and is a direct lever over which it has all the authority it needs.

Fran Kelly: In fact, let’s stay with that it is a direct lever, a lever that governments pull. It’s our only formal population policy we’ve had really from one year to the next is alterations and changes in the immigration policy. Earlier in the program we spoke to ANU demographer Peter McDonald, he’s given advice to the federal government that the immigration intake in this country should be around the annual intake of 180,000 people a year in order to be able to economically support our ageing population. Let’s have a listen:

Peter McDonald: Yes we have given that advice to the government. Obviously it’s not 180,000 every year, that can’t possibly work. But broadly in the range of 160,000 to just over 200,000 averaging out at about 180,000. This result produces the best impact upon ageing in the population and that then contributes to growth in GDP per capita for Australia.

Fran Kelly: Nick Minchin do you like that number, do you like that advice?

Nick Minchin: No I don’t I think that’s ridiculous. With great respect to Mr McDonald he is well-known as a high immigration guy and none of what he said has any foundation. We all know that the ageing of the population is not amenable to change by dint of the immigration policy because immigrants by and large come in at an age profile not dissimilar to the current profile of the Australian economy.

Fran Kelly: That’s not true for the large number of temporary entrants?

Nick Minchin: No but by and large, every study that’s ever been done on this shows that you’re not going to change the age profile of Australia in any realistic way by altering the immigration program in any realistic way, so that’s nonsense. And the productivity commission has made quite clear that … the real economic determinant for me is real GDP per head. That’s the economic variable in all this, and for Mr McDonald to say that will be maximized by 180,000 is also nonsense according to the Productivity Commission which shows that high rates of immigration will not enhance real GDP per head. That is 50% more, 180,000 is 50% higher immigration than the average under the Coalition government of around 125,000 so it is a massive increase in the immigration rate we’ve had for the last 10 or 15 years.

Fran Kelly: John Coulter, what’s your response to that advice that Peter McDonald has given the government. 180,000 immigrants per year.

John Coulter: Look I agree with you Fran and I’ve looked at the figures which came from the ABS just a couple of weeks ago on per capita growth of gross state product and in fact states that have performed worst were Queensland and Western Australia with a minus 2.3% and WA with a minus 2.1% growth and that was simply due to the very rapid rate of population increase. And if you look at that over a longer period of time you find exactly the same thing. Could I just pick up on what Bob Carr was saying – whilst it is highly desirable to use various technological techniques to try and improve our energy efficiency and find alternative means of energy and to improve the efficiency with which we use other resources, unfortunately humanity over the last couple of centuries has always taken those improvements as a way of increasing its population so the total impact on the environment was actually increased. So while we do those things it is absolutely vital that we recognise that we are not living sustainably now and consequently we need to do those things now which will reduce both the per capita impact and also the number of capits. And picking up on one of the things that Nick Minchin has said in relation to the birth rate, in fact the Howard government followed by the Rudd government has provided a very large baby bonus and that has certainly had some impact on the fertility rate. That should be removed, we should not be rewarding people in Australia for having babies, particularly when we have the highest emissions per capita of greenhouse gases in the world.

Fran Kelly: OK now these are real political hot button points, now John that you’re saying. Bob Carr do you think any politician would willingly suggest we need to cut our birth rate?

Bob Carr: I think it’s quite feasible for politicians to say that. I think Australian people are responsive to the argument that we are not serving the country’s environmental or economic interests by running such an ambitious policy of population growth. And look I agree completely with what’s been said about ageing of the population and immigration. Every study I have seen has made it absolutely clear that you’d have to run immigration at absolutely unsustainably high levels and for a very long time to have an impact on population ageing profiles.

John Coulter: You’re putting it off to the future

Bob Carr: Yes, you’re putting it off to the future. My challenge to the people who support a big Australia, a constantly growing population on both fronts, immigration and natural growth, is this: when are you satisfied? Are you satisfied when a population of 50 million or 60 million, all the east coast of Australia, every last inch of it, is urbanized? Because that’s what this debate is about. In land use patterns, in terms of planning, the idea of a bigger Australia, a population of 50 million, is a concept for the total, heavy, intensive urbanization of the east coast of Australia. That’s what this debate is about. The idea that we’ve got a population distribution that remotely resembles that of north America – we’ve got no Chicagos, we’ve got no Oklahoma cities or Kansas cities, we haven’t got sizeable population centres in inland Australia and given the water and other constraints, the aridity of the land we never will.

Fran Kelly: OK, we’ve only got a couple of minutes left. I’ll come to all of you one more time before we go but Bob Carr just a political question to you from all your experience is it possible to have an immigration debate in this country without it becoming overloaded with racist overtones. Already again this week it’s got muddled up with asylum seekers.

Bob Carr: Absolutely. The Australian public have got the highest political IQ of any electorate in the world and what we’ve seen in the last six months since this 36 million figure started to alarm people and render them anxious is a sophisticated debate where people haven’t opened up the issue of multiculturalism or where migrants come from. There’s been no Hansonite element whatsoever in this, it’s been a debate about population targets, about carrying capacity, about water and energy use, about planning the shape of our cities and these super ambitious immigration targets that governments have signed up to. This is a debate not about the value of immigration but about the costs of surging levels of immigration that Australians find very disturbing.

Fran Kelly: OK Nick Minchin a final question to you, I’m wondering what you make about the hints that our Population Minister Tony Burke is putting out there about our two speed economy and the answer to our population programs might be a greater spread of population? This has been tried before and has failed hasn’t it?

Nick Minchin: Well I was going to say, every immigration minister in living history has said oh what we need is a better distribution of the population. In a country that doesn’t have internal passports it is of course utterly ridiculous. You might give concessions to people to go to Kalgoorlie but they can hop on a bus to Sydney the very next day. That’s an absolute nonsense and we’ve heard it all before and it won’t work.

Fran Kelly: And John Coulter we’ve heard from you, you keep making the point that we’re not living sustainably. The fact is however we’re living here, the world is populating at a massive rate. Human population will increase from 2 billion to 9 billion in a single lifetime, with that sort of potential overload, it’s almost irrelevant what policy we opt for here and more people will ultimately come anyway won’t they?

John Coulter: No, I don’t think so, and I’ve held this view for the last 40 odd years that Australia should be deliberately setting itself on a course towards a sustainable future, not in isolation but being very very prepared to share its knowledge and its technology and its success and its failures with other countries. And just picking up on the issue of racism, the most racist policy we can possibly pursue is this one of high immigration. Because what we’re saying to the rest of the world is ‘You bugger off, we’re going to just continue to consume more and more and more, and we don’t care what happens to the rest of you’. So it’s the high immigration people who are in effect the most racist people.

Fran Kelly: That sounds like a great place to leave it. John Coulter, Bob Carr, and Nick Minchin, thank you very much for joining us on Breakfast.

May 5th 2010 - St Kilda and South Melbourne ALP Branches present POPULATE AND/OR PERISH: Are our migration numbers right or wrong?
A debate and discussion with Michael Danby MP, Federal Member for Melbourne Ports VERSUS Kelvin Thomson MP, Federal Member for Wills, Chair of the joint Standing Committee on Treaties (Non-ALP members may sign in as guests and attend.)

Wednesday May 5, 2010
7.30-9.30pm
Cora Graves Centre
38 Blessington Street ST. KILDA
VICTORIA

Description

Saint Kilda and South Melbourne ALP Branches present POPULATE AND/OR PERISH: Are our migration numbers right or wrong.

A debate and discussion with
Michael Danby MP
Federal Member for Melbourne Ports
versus
Kelvin Thomson MP
Federal Member for Wills
Chair of the joint Standing Committee on Treaties

Yes, its the event that had to happen: a debate on population between two senior Labor Figures
who have featured heavily in the media in recent years with opposing opinions on this important topic.

Come along and see DANBY and THOMSON slog it out, ask them questions, grapple with this enormous policy question

Non-ALP members may sign in as guests

The debate that has been organised is an ALP event, that will be taking place at one of the local branch meetings in Melbourne Ports. Standing orders for the meeting will be suspended to allow for the debate to proceed.

ALP members have been formally invited from the Melbourne Ports Electorate and surrounding electorates. Any non members who are interested in attending need to understand they will be signing in as guests at an ALP branch meeting.

Wayne Swann obfuscates

According to recent reports Wayne Swan ..."can't bring (him)self to agree with those who think we can solve all our problems by putting a freeze on national
population growth”. No Wayne, we certainly can't solve all our problems by reducing runaway population growth, but it sure would go a long way toward easing house prices, shortening hospital queues, preserving the environment and cutting our carbon footprints.

Who is this ‘We’?

A great many Australians these days would really like to know who exactly Mr Swan is referring to when he talks about "we" solving “our” problems. Is it the "working families" struggling in the outer suburbs to pay off hefty mortgages on second-rate housing stock on the fringes of our cities - or is it the vested corporate interests at the big end of town which possess an insatiable appetite for more growth, more markets and more people? Whose problems are you trying to solve Mr Swan?

Political addiction to population growth

The gap between the policies of the Liberal/Labor (Liboral?) party elites - that are politically addicted to massive population growth and mass-immigration - and the wishes of the electorate has never been greater. It’s a bipartisan problem. Tony Abbott has been whipping up mass hysteria about boat people lately, trying to make it an election issue. He's going to "close the borders" screamed the Herald Sun last week. But on the broader topic of mass-immigration, like the P.M. and Wayne Swan, Mr Abbot has also nailed his colours to the mast as a "big Australia" man whose "instinct" is to bring in "as many people as possible".

Who benefits and who loses by population growth?

Cheerleaders for the growthist lobby in the media have been doing their level best to scare the bejesus out of the public by raving on about retiring baby boomers and even raising the prospect of an armed invasion should we dare to consider putting the brakes on. The problem is no-one seems to have any real insight into where all this growth is heading for our country as well as the thorny question of who benefits and who loses from it? Who gets the profits and who gets to pay? How does the average citizen benefit when GDP per capita declines through massive population growth? Exactly what are the long-term implications for the environment and the famed liveability of our cities of this new "mega-trend"?

Rudd like a deer caught in headlights on population numbers

Despite the creation of a new population ministry, Labor has not had a great deal to say on these questions so far other than "growth is good". Mr Rudd hasn't even had an opinion this year. He appeared like a deer caught in the headlights recently when Kerry O’Brien confronted him on the 7:30 report - which is a bit strange considering that he "made no apology" last year for his support for “a big Australia”.

These questions are being ignored by our leaders other than a very vague undertaking to perhaps grow somewhat “differently" than before - presumably by stacking people 50 stories up in ugly high rises or transforming our urban areas into Los Angeles-style megalopolises with double-decker freeways and ghettoes of haves (those who bought houses before the great population explosion) and the less-fortunate have-nots that didn’t.

Some commentators in the media are suggesting that Rudd has "gone cold" on a big Australia this year. But what is far more likely is that he is simply being a very clever politician – like his predecessor John Howard - and is saying nothing publicly. Behind closed doors, however, he and his minions are champing at the bit to raise the volume as high as they can get way with without provoking too great a backlash from so-called working families whose marginal seats Labor took back from “Howard’s battlers” at the last election.

Expect Spin

To keep population growth ticking along at 2.1% per annum and maintaining a docile and electorate Rudd will try to do what politicians do best - bombard us with a mountain of meaningless words on things like the "programmatic specificity" of his new population ministry - but without of course actually doing anything.

One thing is certain, if the present growth trajectory is going to be maintained by Canberra indefinitely, the volume of complaints rising from the public is going to grow incredibly loud. When it takes the average person more than a lifetime to pay off a mortgage on an average house and when commuters have to spend half their lives stuck on clogged freeways or dysfunctional public transport systems, the politicians that continue to push growthist polices are going to eventually pay a heavy price at the ballot box.

Stable Population Party of Australia - a new alternative

Let's hope the newly formed Stable Population Party of Australia can capture many of the votes of the people that are most badly impacted by our government’s mad growth-at–all-costs agenda. We desperately need to lobby and apply pressure on our elected leaders to change their current policies. This is going to require constant media campaigns to get the public's attention as well as a small army of committed activists to get the message out.

Growth Lobby vs The People

The public needs to be made aware that there is an alternative to growth for growth's sake and that there is an alternative to the "Liboral Party” and their bipartisan and undemocratic policies which are failing to maintain a sustainable population. Make no mistake; the growth lobby is a formidable opponent with enormous financial resources on its side as well as the backing of both major parties and large sectors of the media. Only a very vigorous and determined grass-roots campaign the likes of which we haven’t seen before in Australia is going to have any chance at success at slowing down this juggernaut.

NOTES

7 April title was changed to better reflect newsworthy content

Illustration on teaser was reduced from original at http://www.gerasimon.com.au/australian_oil_painting_3.htm

What took the Prime Minister so long?

National environment group, Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) says that comments made by the Prime Minister in announcing the creation of a Population Ministry all but guarantee a skewed outcome for the government’s population policy inquiry.

“While welcoming the creation of the new portfolio, SPA wonders why it took the government so long to recognise that it was needed,” says Sandra Kanck, President of SPA.

“But as a consequence of other comments made at the time of the announcement SPA has concerns about the policy that will be developed.

Australians want to stop population growth

“Opinion polls show that a majority of Australians want to stop wanton population growth and believe we have neither the water or infrastructure to support Kevin Rudd’s ‘big Australia’.

“The Prime Minister has become a mite sensitive to this sort of feedback and is now attempting to show that he is listening, but who is he listening to?

“Kevin Rudd said on Saturday that the new Minister, Tony Burke, must be ‘acutely mindful’ of the positive implications of growth on the economy.

What about biodiversity, water, and infrastructure

“There are many other things Mr Burke could have been told to mind, such as the impact of increased population on biodiversity, or water, or shortage of infrastructure.

“The PM’s marching orders unfortunately tell Mr Burke to come out on the side of the development lobby, which has immediately skewed the whole debate.

Blinkered economic approach

“The new portfolio being based in Treasury, rather than, for instance, Environment, further shows that the PM’s views on the matter are blinkered.

“The new Minister was formerly a Shadow Immigration Minister and, given the Rudd Government’s shocking record of increasing immigration without telling the Australian public in the 2007 election that this was their intention, Mr Burke will be carrying a lot of baggage.

“The former Shadow Environment Minister, Kelvin Thomson, has shown himself to be the only Federal Labor MP who understands that without an environmentally sustainable future there is no future. That Kevin Rudd has picked Tony Burke over Kelvin Thomson says far more about the PM's politicking on this vital issue than about Kelvin Thomson's deep understanding and commitment to a sustainable Australia” said Ms Kanck.

Further comment: Sandra Kanck

State and Federal Government on the defensive

The Sydney Morning Herald article, "Cap, 'Not the answer to population growth'"(AAP 30 March 2010) quotes only those on the high-population side of the debate. Yet it depicts almost all of them as desperately trying to hose down the arguments for capping population.

Why they are so on the defensive is clear from the Essential Research political poll that was released back on March 1st. Among the usual questions on voting intentions etc was included one on attitudes to population, and the results were stunning:

Poll shows Australians against more population growth

* 75% agreed and only 19% disagreed that "We just don't have the infrastructure and services to manage more population growth."

* 64% agreed and only 29% disagreed that "Immigration should be slowed as it causes too much change to our society"

* 61% agreed and only 30% disagreed that "Australia has a fragile environment that cannot cope with a much larger population".

* 38% agreed but 52% disagreed that "Having a larger population will help our economy."

* 35% agreed but 58% disagreed that "Australia has the space and resources to cope with a much larger population."

* Coalition, not Labor, supporters were more likely to agree to the first two propositions.

See Source.

Obfuscation

Predictably the growth side tried to argue that it isn't the number of people you cram into the cities that counts, it's the superb way they plan to house them. Growth-promoter Bernard Salt once again got himself described as a "demographer". He also tried to run the aging population scare in reverse, as an optimistic claim that an immigration intake of 180,000 each year is Australia's "get out of jail free card to fund our retirement of the baby boomers".

Fuel crisis

However Salt admitted that "One thing that you can be confident about in the next 40 years is that, in real terms, petrol will be $5 a litre." It did not occur to him that high-priced fuel implies similarly high-priced fertiliser and food. (Food riots broke out last time oil reached $100 a barrel, because even the third world now grows its food with nitrate fertilisers derived from oil and gas.) One problem with the mega-cities that Anna Bligh and others would create is they will be totally unsustainable -- dependent on people elsewhere being willing to send them millions of tanker-loads of fuel and millions of trucks of food. It is far from clear what these cities can produce to offer in exchange.

Just at present the really valuable commodities, like oil and food, are dirt cheap whereas one pay through the nose for fashion accessories etc -- a situation which makes cities seem sustainable and provides millions of jobs for city dwellers. But it is unlikely this would be the case in an oil-starved world.

Wayne Swan swats problem away

Wayne Swan is still trying to swat away the population issue without descending to debate it: "I can't bring myself to agree with those who think we can solve all our problems by putting a freeze on national population growth." But the democratization of the internet makes it harder to get away with such tactics. One internet correspondent, Skooner, retorted:

"No Wayne, we certainly can't solve all our problems that way, but it sure would go a long way toward easing house prices, shortening hospital queues, saving the environment and cutting our carbon footprints. I, and a lot of other Australians would also like to know who exactly you are referring to when you talk about "we" Mr Swan? Just who are "we"? The "working families" which elected you - the Australian people - or just the vested corporate interests that possess an insatiable hunger for more growth and more people.

The ideological gap between the Liberal/Labor (Liboral?) party elites - that are addicted to huge population growth, baby bonuses and mass-immigration - and the electorate has never been greater."
("Skooner", on [email protected])

(Illustration: For more on Colonel Blimp see "Notes" [1])

Original title was: "Mr Salt and Mr Murdoch team up again to can Australians". See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09.

Into the Salty abyss

According to yet another article in Mr Murdoch's Australian newspaper by self-styled demographer, Bernard Salt,

Australia "quivered when a passing Japanese submarine lobbed shells into the eastern suburbs of Sydney in May 1942: property prices plummeted."

You can find the article, "Invasion victory ensured by complacency" in the business and property section in The Australian. A sort of where to buy and invade section, I guess. Here Salt advertises Australia as an easy target for any enemies. Pretending that he is writing for a mythical Peoples' Army in Bernardistan, he plots entry via the Kimberleys.

Why Salt's antics here are not seen as treacherous and inciting invasion would be a mystery to anyone seriously subscribing to the Axis of Evil myth. More sophisticated readers may wonder, however, if the property development industry is so worried by the Australian public's louder and louder calls for population stabilisation, that they must have decided to ask Mr Murdoch and Mr Salt to try provoke a full-on invasion.

Mr Salt probably realises that conducting a military invasion of Australia (rather than the economic immigration one) is not as easy as his imaginary character pretends. What may still be possible, however, is to misinform elderly Australians (members of the property lobby and readers of The Australian, for instance) via one of our only two national newspapers, and panic them into calling for a bigger population. Either strategy could work and, without an invasion - of immigrants or armed forces - the Colonel Blimps (and Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swann) of the Property and Development Lobby are doomed. A welcome extinction, in the view of many ecologists, which would prevent so many sad ones.

Australia Overloaded author, Mark O'Connor wrote recently in response to Bernard's attitude which seems to be that Australians are complacent cowards and the country needs more of them:

"If the Australians of our fathers' or grandfathers' generation had been as faint hearted as Mr Salt, back when our population was only a third of what it is today, Australia might now be a province of Japan."

(O'Connor was responding to an article, "Australia told to grow or risk invasion", in the Canberra Times, 31/3/2010, p. 6 which was reporting on what seem like Bernard Salt's attempts to commercialise fear and ignorance in yet another forum.)

James Sinnamon commented on the facts:

In fact, Australia achieved self-reliance in 1942 and stood a very good chance of being able to defeat a Japanese invasion. That is why the Japanese Army in March 1942 vetoed the Japanese Navy's plan to invade.

The reason why the Japanese Army vetoed the Navy's invasion plans is explained in detail by Andrew T Ross in Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945 Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, on pages 408-418:

By June 1942, the earliest date an invasion force could have been assembled, Australia would have 8 fully equipped divisions in the field as well as an air force capable of denying the Japanese total air supremacy. To win, they would have had to capture a deep water harbour in order to enforce a blockade to prevent Australia being able the resupply itself with some of the very few materials with which we were not self-sufficient (including petroleum). The northernmost deep water harbour was Newcastle.

Mr Sinnamon, who obviously has no serious investments in housing or infrastructure or bank shares, continued:

During the Second World War Australia was one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, a technological edge we have largely lost since then thanks to Australia having allowed its manufacturing sector to be destroyed as mandated by free market orthodoxy.

Of Australia's contribution to the Second World War, US President Truman said to the US Congress in a report on Lend Lease (including on Australia's reverse Lend Lease to the US during much of the Pacific War) on 27 December 1946:

"On balance, the contribution made by Australia, a country having 7 millions, approximately equalled that of United States." (Andrew T. Ross, Armed and Ready: the industrial development and defence of Australia, 1900-1945, Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, p 427)

Sinnamon asks,

Why would Bernard Salt wish to deny this, as well as this country's impressive military achievements, by focusing on only two episodes in the war?

In the case of the bombing of Darwin, the attacking Japanese force exceeded that which attacked Pearl Harbour, so I would think that the panicked response by some Australians was understandable.

(See also "The myth of the Howard Government's Defence Competence" of 21 November 2007 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6665)

Commercialising treachery

Well, I guess it doesn't matter to Mr Salt's objectives whether his statements are accurate or fair. The aim of the article seems to be to generate enough fear to overcome Australians' democratic desire for a small and stable population. This means we can expect many more articles like this one, sigh.

And the battle to invade and subdue Australia is half-won anyway. As Bernard Salt knows and Greg Woods writes, we are already well on the way to being a nation of disorganised captives to propaganda and consumerism.

So why would having a lot more of that kind of Australian serve to defend us against the tens of millions in some Bernardistan?

What The Australian wouldn't print

As Greg Wood writes:

Pray tell Mr. Salt, how would even tenfold more Australians, wedged into the alienating fringe of suburbia and the high-rise catacombs of your ambitions, and beguiled into apathy by myriad imported electronic eclectica, be of any practical assistance against this massed force from your imagination? As an audience to watch the news-feeds and up the ratings of the conflict perhaps?

Your narrow and convenient account of WW2 Australian response to Japanese attack is simply bad history. In fact the response was broadly self-sacrificing and heroic. That earlier time exhibited remarkable social identity and spirit, which acted as the glue that draws together the resistance your argument so disingenuously questions. That character is now largely lost as recent decades have seen genuine neighbourhoods sacrificed as commodities for trade in the game of property speculation and growth-for-profit that you advocate.

And the futility of your proposition sucks one’s breath out. Why bother to invade Australia when it is already for sale world-wide on the internet to the highest bidder with the strongest exchange rate? N.B. 80% of Australians (and growing) need not apply – insufficient funds!

Well, that's right, Greg. And the Property marketers of the Growth Lobby want more customers with ready cash. For some reason they think that the Peoples Army might have the ready. (After all, armies are where a lot of foreign aid ends up and big spending goes on.) So Bernard is getting the message to them, via Mr Murdoch's Australian that it would be a doddle to invade Australia. While they're perusing our topology on GoogleEarth, they can also have a look at property on Mr Murdoch's www.realestate.com.au

But Greg continues, referring to the treacherous conduct of The Australian as a 'community sell-out' in printing an article that purports to give fail-safe directions to invade your country:

Harking back to WW2 and what it truly does take to secure freedom, a community sell-out of this magnitude would have earned a bullet in the back of the head from the French Resistance. Or does your curious brand of history see them as an extremist terrorist group?

However, if you peruse the emailed responses to Salt's article, it really isn't so easy to invade Australia. Perhaps, in fact, Mr Salt was just using the Peoples' Army as a kind of code for the elderly tax-payer army that supplements the Growth Lobby's continued purchase of power in this country.

At any rate, here are some of the best of the responses in The Australian:

ID Langford Posted at 6:13 AM Today

Bernard, you are entirely out to lunch... Consider the SE Asian archipelago that you navigated down to get here...you don't think we will see you coming? Consider the vast interior of the Australian landmass that you will need to penetrate in order to project military force into our decisive areas...does it remind you of the German attempt to conquer the Soviet Union in WW2? Or Napoleon's attempt a century earlier?? Consider the logistics involved in forcing entry onto Australia and then sustaining it...consider the wet season which prohibits movement in northern Australia for much of the year...go read some the Defence of Australia foundational documents that are out there. Most of us are complacent about history; some of us however, are students of history and understand the efforts required to lodge and deny access to an area the size of the Kimberley would be a truly monumental task. It took over 205 German Divisions to invade the Soviet Union and even this massive war machine failed. Have a real think about it...who can even closely imitate this force structure today??

Jason Ransome of Basel, Switzerland Posted at 7:29 AM Today

Fantastic article! But did you take into account our anzus treaty with America. Let's not forget Australia is a huge country, you can start from the west and move east but our army will come from behind and cut your supply routes every time, so you better bring enough personal to protect those supply routes. If it was so simple to invade Australia then it would of been tried by more than just the Japanese Good luck with your invasion, your going to need it

I like this one - short and to the point:

Mr Squiggle of Melbourne Posted at 9:58 AM Today

What an odious little article this is. China's population is 1.3bn. Indonesia's is 231m. Even if we increased our population size four-fold tomorrow, we would still be strategically outnumbered. Just let it go Bernard, we'll never create national security by ramping up our population. The starting gap is too large.

neil of melb Posted at 11:05 AM Today

The problem with invading Australia is purely logistical, How may countries have the capability of transporting 150,000 soldiers, equipment and ongoing supplies over 1000's of km of ocean? The only countries that could conceivably do it are the USA because of their military power and Indonesia because of their proximity. But Indonesia does not have the capability to destroy our air force or stop it being reinforced from allies. They don't have the capacity to land 10's of thousands of paratroopers. We would have control of the skies and the resulting carnage inflicted on a marine invasion would catastrophic. Military strategists run simulations on these scenarios constantly, this is why we are spending billions on long distance radar, aircraft and submarines rather than a huge army. A war would be fought in the Pacific or Indian oceans or Timor sea, not on Australian soil.

Rhetorical Question to the Elites who make money out of the rest of us through war and housing games

Is The Australian in fact un-Australian? Didn't the diggers die to preserve free speech? How come only Mr Salt and his doyen get to say whatever they like?

NOTES

[1] Colonel Blimp was a cartoon character created by Sir David Low (1891-1963), a New Zealand political cartoonist and caricaturist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom for many years. Low was a self-taught cartoonist. Born in New Zealand, he worked in his native country before migrating to Sydney, Australia in 1911, and ultimately to London (1919), where he made his career and earned fame for his Colonel Blimp depictions and his merciless satirising the personalities and policies of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and other leaders of his times. Source, Wikipedia

See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09, "Madang landowners fight ecologically devastating Chinese mining invasion" of 1 Apr 10.

Article by Amanda Burchell

Aesthetics of a prosthetic and over-regulated world

One of the suggested topics for this discussion was: The aesthetics of a prosthetic and over-regulated world.

Though I had a problem in tweaking the word aesthetics to suit my purposes in relation to prosthetic, I learnt to use the latter word in a metaphorical sense and the rest found poetic license in its final expression by me.

And did I want to challenge the meaning of the word aesthetics in order to suggest precision, restraint, a certain punctilious and concrete approach?

Yes, I thought that I did.

So the translation for The Aesthetics of a prosthetic and over-regulated world would be:

The precise and concrete arrangement, to which a world propped up on plastic, is delivered in a rigid and untenable manner, devoid of joy and equity.

Welcome to Australia, folks!

Welcome to Australia, folks ~ this is the world we appear to be striving for.

… ‘A mundane metal cupboard in the bowels of the Australian Museum is a last resting place for lost mammals.’
… ‘In the past 200 years Australia has driven 27 of its mammal species to extinction.’

You may not give a damn that a Quoll or a Caladenia brachyscapa (Short Spider-orchid –Tasmania) – is rare or extinct but you might, however, spare a thought for your own survival, if it comes to that.

What's next? You perhaps?

Having ruined the habitat for other mammals and flora to boot, you might think – what’s next?

You, perhaps? Since it is always all about you, you may well consider that, if Australia keeps importing extra people – and you keep producing children yourself, you may just run out of room.

Perhaps each person who steps onto Australian soil, as well as the current residents, should be buying multiple blocks of land.
A man marries a woman and has two children: multiply that out by three generations - a house for the original couple, two more for each of their children and their families, and so forth.

Well, unless everyone stops procreating for a while, we are going to have serious problems in supplying sufficient housing, food, jobs and water, for everyone.

Water

Water… do you remember that, during Jeff Kennett’s regime, he made it illegal to buy and install water tanks?

That’s because during his time, water was privatized, and he, the politician – elected by the people - had a mandate to support the private enterprise that he and his government had further encouraged in the purchase of our public utility.

By the way if you’re wondering who would like to see Australia’s population expand infinitely, I would suggest that developers and real estate agents have a vested interest in population growth, wouldn’t you?

Immigration means more listings and sales – but, if you take a good look at where they’re building these house and land packages, they’re getting further away from real infrastructure and the CBD than ever before.

Now demographers are discussing self contained satellite cities where people are contained within, never needing to leave, really.

Is that what you want? Because that’s what they are talking about as a means to grow Australia, in a 'sustainable and manageable way'.

'They' includes those politicians I mentioned before; politicians like Jeff Kennett’s who just know what’s good for us and for Australia.

Well, I’d like the voting public to think about how tough things are at the moment – and how much tougher they are likely to get with a bigger squeeze on strained resources.

The Builders and Developers are Wrong

The builders and developers are wrong. More people does not equate to a cheaper, better standard of living.

I heard the case for increasing Australia’s population back in the 1980’s and I cannot see any proof to date, that an increase’ has served the interests of that population, in general terms.

And forgive me, my youngest son; I am not a racist pig, as you once accused me of being – I just want a country that will give you a job and home – and enough water to drink.

I want a sustainable population with equity for all – for a long, long, time to come.

Amanda Burchell

Online References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_flora_of_Australia
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3915&cn=394

One's first impression of Earth Hour is that it is a noble but token gesture to try to get the community to jointly recognise the need for global sustainability. The actual impact of turning power off for one hour on a weekend will do squat to reduce the world's greenhouse gas emissions. The physical effect is akin to turning off one light globe while China and the US burn millions of tonnes of CO2 - not even a speck in the universe.

But when one reads about Earth Hour further and realises it is inspired by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to raise global awareness about the impact of green house emissions on the natural environment, one starts to appreciate the significance of Earth Hour. The benefit of Earth Hour is communicating awareness of the problem across ordinary citizens around the world, which is a logical and sensible first step in making change. It also helps raise awareness and respect for what WWF itself is trying to achieve.

The WWF is "one of the world's largest and most respected independent conservation organizations". Its mission is "to stop the degradation of the Earth's natural environment and build a future where people live in harmony with nature." Earth Hour "is a call to stand up, to take responsibility, to get involved and lead the way towards a sustainable future." SOURCE: EARTH HOUR

So what is the scale of the emissions problem that the WWF is trying to draw attention to?

"In per capita terms, emissions from the U.S. power sector are the second highest in the world. Americans’ electricity usage produces about 9.5 tons of CO2 per person per year, compared to 2.4 tons per person per year in China, 0.6 in India, and 0.1 in Brazil. Average per capita emissions from electricity and heat production in the EU is 3.3 tons per year. Only Australia, at greater than 10 tons per year, emits more power-related emissions per person than the U.S. In many developing countries, per capita power consumption is extremely low, and millions of people lack access to electricity at all." SOURCE: Centre for Global Development

"Earth Hour has almost 5 million supporters and a global network in over 100 countries, it’s one of the world's largest and most respected independent conservation organizations. WWF’s mission is to stop the degradation of the Earth's natural environment and build a future where people live in harmony with nature.

In March 2009, hundreds of millions of people took part in the third Earth Hour. Over 4000 cities in 88 countries officially switched off to pledge their support for the planet, making Earth Hour 2009 the world’s largest global climate change initiative."

So in anyone's terms, Earth Hour, is a success in repeatedly raising global awareness about the emissions problem. The next step is those same supporters influencing political decision makers to make the changes each year to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions.

New economic modelling indicates the world has just five years to initiate a low carbon industrial revolution before runaway climate change becomes almost inevitable.

And what is the WWF trying to achieve?

"WWF-Australia believes that in order to stay below a 2 degree Celsius temperature rise, the Australian Government must implement a national plan to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

This plan must:

* Reduce carbon pollution by at least 25% by 2020 and 90% by 2050;

* Implement an emissions trading scheme operational by mid 2011 at the latest;

* Increase to 40% by 2030 the Renewable Energy Target (RET) and modify it or implement a feed-in-tariff to better support emerging technologies like geothermal, wave and solar thermal;

* Provide a fund to encourage landholders to preserve and grow trees to absorb carbon pollution and protect habitat;

* Implement world's best practice for energy efficiency and vehicle emission standards;

* Ensure two to three carbon capture and storage commercial projects are operational by 2015 and that no new coal-fired power stations are built unless they undertake carbon capture and storage; and

* Build on Copenhagen Accord to deliver a fair, ambitious and legally binding agreement in Mexico in 2010."SOURCE: WWF on Climate Change

Meanwhile, on the Friday before Earth Hour I gaze out of the window from a 17th floor Sydney office building and see today another clear blue sky. But at the horizon blanketing Sydney’s suburbs rests a brown murky haze that is pollution from road transport and industry. It happens every day in every city around the globe. Like smoking over a lifetime, the combined effect of those thousands and thousands of repeated days of brown murky haze in every city are taking their toll on the health of the planet.

If Queensland's current runaway population growth continues, furhter encroachments upon the habitat of our endangered iconic koala are inevitible, practically guaranteeing their extinction from South East Queensland. Yet Premier Anna Bligh, by having renamed the 'population summit' to the 'Growth Summit', has told Queenslanders she is no longer interested in considering the one chance we have to save our koala, that is, population stability.

We reprint below a letter from the Save Our Koalas rally organisers

Dear Koala Supporters,

We asked what you wanted to do in response to the Queensland Government's upcoming Growth Summit, and an overwhelming majority of you want to let Anna Bligh know that the Koala is more important than unlimited growth in Australia.

We need to send a message loud and clear to Anna Bligh and Kevin Rudd, that rushed development will have a catastrophic effect on Koala populations in SEQ, our lifestyles and our biodiversity, and that it could cause the extinction of the koala.

Rally outside the main entrance of Queensland State Library, Southbank, Brisbane at 11.00am Tuesday 30th March 2010.

Population growth a threat to biodiversity

The Australian Conservation Foundation has nominated human population growth as a “key threatening process” to Australia’s biodiversity under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (the EPBC Act).

“The bigger our population gets, the harder it is for us to reduce greenhouse pollution, protect natural habitats near urban and coastal areas and ensure a good quality of life for all Australians,” said ACF’s director of strategic ideas, Charles Berger.

“More people means more roads, more urban sprawl, more dams, more transmission lines, more energy and water use, more pollutants in our air and natural environment and more pressure on Australia’s animals, plants, rivers, reefs and bushland.

“We need to improve urban and coastal planning and management of environmental issues, but we can’t rely on better planning alone to protect our environment. Rapid population growth makes sustainable planning nearly impossible, so stabilising Australia’s population by mid-century should be a national policy goal.”

The EPBC Act nomination cites many government reports that acknowledge the direct link between population growth and environmental degradation.

The nomination looks at four specific areas where human population growth is directly affecting native species and ecological communities – the coastal wetlands of South East Queensland, Mornington Peninsula and Westernport Bay in Victoria, the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia and the Swan Coastal Plain in Western Australia.

ACF is calling on the Government to set a population policy that will:

* Stabilise Australia’s population by mid-century.
* Increase humanitarian migration and continue to support family reunions, but substantially reduce skilled migration.
* Return Australia’s overall migration to 1990s levels.
* Adequately fund strategies to minimise the environmental impact of population growth.

Source: Press Release Date: 23-Mar-2010

Message sent to growthsummit[at]premiers.qld.gov.au on Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 1:57 PM by Daniel Boon

Subject: Re Anna Blighs 'Foreword'

Queensland is unique and does have a diverse landscape; however, it doesn’t have a strong economy (otherwise income producing assets wouldn’t be for sale) as a failure to balance the budget indicates; our community identity is fragmented, given the influx of 2,100 people every week.

If, over the next 20 years, Queensland’s population does rise to 5 - 7 million people, then we are in for a harried life style similar to that of Sydney / NSW. The 'growth from record levels of overseas migration and to a lesser extent higher fertility rates' is something the State government does have some say over; an infrastructure fee should be levied on all new arrivals to lessen the environmental, financial and social impact of those incoming people.

Our population growth provides great financial benefits for corporations that fund the major political parties; short-sighted property sellers fail to realize that more land and nature surrounding their property will attract a premium in the not too distant future; however, continued growth will further over-burden our already stretched resources and infrastructures. Public works may create jobs in the short term, but in the long term, they just pose more financial burdens - as liabilities - on the populace.

The first challenge may be perceived providing places for people to live, work and play, but in reality, the Qld Labor Party - with unchecked growth - will see the eventual demise of the koala in Queensland as humans squeeze flora and fauna out. Building an additional one million dwellings will sorely test the forests and other resources and increase greenhouse gas emissions that the Labor government crows so much about introducing policies to decrease.

Population growth and preserving our environment, a classic oxymoron.

Queenslanders are among the highest consumers of energy and producers of waste in the world and our per capita consumption and waste is increasing each year and this is because despite claiming to have sustainable housing criteria, our houses consume more energy in construction and on-going running costs than homes in far colder / hotter climates; in other words, our houses are energy inefficient and that starts with a lack-lustre builder education process by organizations such as TAFE who employ staff with no real idea of what makes a house energy efficient; its far more than a batt of insulation and a mercury injected CFL light.

The 'global financial crisis' will continue regardless, mainly because governments spend more than they ‘earn’ to present a façade of successful management meanwhile spending our children’s future now.

The only option of the Bligh government is to stay within its earnings budget; however, past performance proves beyond all reasonable doubt that it neither has the ability or knowledge to manage in good times or the current situation, let alone plan for growth.

Every decision that involves spending more than one has will compromise everything we once loved about Queensland. Rather than a strong foundation, the Bligh / Labor government undermines our very future. The ‘grand plan’ - allegedly supported by 10 other regional plans across the state and covering about 90% of our population - was drawn up by what I call 'corporate government', corporations that direct the State government; and is not supported by thinking born and bred Queenslanders.

Bligh is right about one thing, it isn’t a one-way street, as our population increases our unique environment diminishes irreversibly. There is no such thing as sustainable growth because growth doesn’t understand the concept of balance.

The Queensland Government’s Growth Management Summit is a farce and the spin words ‘stronger, greener, smarter, healthier and fairer’ are the opposite of what will happen. Queenslanders wince noticeably when Laborites use the terminology 'smart state'.

See also: Queensland Government Growth Summit web-site at growthsummit.premiers.qld.gov.au.

Decades overdue, but, nevertheless, welcome, the Greens are to introduce into the Senate a motion calling for the establishment of an independent National Inquiry into Australia's Population to 2050.

Set population at infrastructure, environment capacity through national inquiry

Media release of 14 March 2010

On Monday the Greens will move a motion calling on the Government to establish an independent National Inquiry into Australia's Population to 2050.

“Australia’s population should be determined by the capacity of our environment and our infrastructure,” said Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown.

“Australia cannot support an increase in population to 35 million by 2050.

“Immigration should not be stopped.

"In fact Australia should increase its humanitarian immigration program, but we need to reduce our skilled migration program and balance that reduction by investing in skills training for Australians.

“National population policy is the responsibility of government; it should be responsive to national and global factors.

“Global population is expected to grow from 6.8 billion people now to 9.2 billion by 2050 and Australia should be taking a lead in finding global solutions.

“That should include increasing Australia's overseas aid budget to 0.7% GDP now with more funding for literacy and reproduction health programs for women and girls.”

Media contact: Erin Farley 0438 376 082

Erin Farley
Media Adviser
Senator Bob Brown | Leader of the Australian Greens
Suite SG-112 Parliament House, Canberra ACT
P: 02 6277 3577 | M: 0438 376 082| F: 02 6277 3185

Editorial comment: If this represents a final departure by the Greens from years of avoidance of this most critical of issues, occasionally interspersed with seemingly tokenistic short-lived pronouncements against population growth, then we welcome it, but we will believe it when we see it.

What you can do: contact your Senators (Qld, NSW, ACT, Vic, Tas, SA, WA, NT) and ask that they support this motion. Please let us know of any responses or lack of. Join, campaign and vote for, a party opposed to population growth (see below). Put pro-growth parties last on your ballot form.

See also: "Greens call for population inquiry" of 14 Mar 10 on ABC news Online, Greens' Senate media page, "Are the Greens a real alternative?" of 9 Mar 10, the Stable Population Party of Australia, the New Australia Party and the Animal Justice Party.

Google aerial photo of ADI Site giving an idea of size. Obviously it is surrounded by suburbs. Humans have not been denied species representation here, but, if this site is taken away, they will be denied their natural right to access natural ammenity and wild environment, which we should all be able to do, without compromising it. (Ed.)

Geoff Brown
President
Western Sydney Conservation Alliance Inc
PO Box 4134
WERRINGTON NSW 2747
Thursday, 4 March 2010
The Hon Peter Garrett
Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts
cc David Bradbury Member for Lindsay

RE: Urgent Ministerial intervention required to halt the clearing of Cumberland Plain Woodland at the former ADI Site – Penrith Local Government Area

Dear Minister,

We have been reliably informed that Delfin Lend Lease is about to commence
clearing Critically Endangered Cumberland Plain Woodland (CPW) within the Western Precinct of the former Commonwealth owned ADI Site. This first 6 hectare subdivision will be one of many out of the total 230 hectares within the Western Precinct. The Central Precinct, some 130 hectares is proposed to be developed in some 5 years time. This combined area of 360 hectares is predominately CPW
Aerial detail of water body at part of the site.
Your DEWHA recently listed CPW and Shale Gravel Transition Forest as Critically Endangered Ecological Communities. It is believed that the basis for the Critically Endangered Listing was that CPW had been reduced in area by some 400 hectares.
Minister here at ADI a developer is allowed to clear nearly the same amount of CPW that justified elevating CPW from Endangered to Critically Endangered and they don’t even have to refer their development applications to your DEWHA to have those assessed against the EPBC Act.

This is [...]

morally bankrupt and your DEWHA and the local member for Lindsay know that what Delfin Lend Lease is proposing is clearly a breach of the EPBC Act.

The justification for that statement is that DEWHA in 2008 received a delegation from Delfin, Penrith Council and David Bradbury to negotiate changing the National Estate boundaries of the ADI Regional Park. DEWHA told the delegation, and this
was paraphrased by your Adviser Peter Wright when we met him last month, that such an amendment would require Lend Leases 10 year old approval Certification – a dubious certification and assessment issued under the Howard Government – to be reassessed under the EPBC Act. Essentially DEWHA told the delegation that Delfin would not like the outcome of such assessment as it would result in the protection of CPW within proposed development areas and therefore a reduced housing lot yield and lower profits for the developer.

We know that Delfin Lend Lease has some shonky certification from the Howard Govt (see below)

Assessment and approval under Commonwealth environmental law was granted to the entire St Marys development under the former Environment Protection (Impact of Proposals) Act 1974 (EPIP Act) prior to the gazettal of the EPBC Act. Correspondence from the former Environment Australia (now DEWHA) was provided to the applicant in July 2002 advising
that despite the repeal of the EPIP Act and gazettal of the EPBC Act, no further Commonwealth approval would be required for the St Marys property. This certification was provided under the Environmental Reform (Consequential Provisions) Act 1999.

But for your DEWHA and the local ALP Member to hide behind this dubious certification and turn a blind eye to the bulldozing of Critically Endangered CPW is immoral and in reality, when assessed against the EPBC Act, as it should be, ILLEGAL.

Minister we now call on you to urgently intervene and to call in the ADI Site development proposal by Delfin Lend Lease so that Critically Endangered CPW is properly assessed under the EPBC Act. It is clear the current assessment Delfin Lend
Lease has - that gives them immunity from the EPBC Act - is scientifically flawed. The entire ADI Site assessment process under the Howard Govt was dubious and now as the bulldozers are about to roll those wrongs need to be corrected .

I recently emailed and phoned David Blumenthal – with no response - calling for him to act on this issue; we also said the same to Peter Wright last month in Sydney. A failure to protect these last great remnants of CPW at the ADI Site under the guise that legally we have no come back on the developer will not be accepted and viewed dimly by large numbers of voters in Western Sydney concerned with the protection of our Natural Heritage.

Yours truly,
Geoff Brown

Article by Mark O'Connor

Despite The Age's headline, "Populate or Stagnate," (March 10, 2010) most of Saul Eslake's[1] article is about admitting the costs of population growth. He makes some very useful admissions (see the phrases I have marked in bold, below).

Even at the end when he swings round predictably to backing growth, he warns his allies:

"But building public acceptance for ''a bigger Australia'' requires a greater willingness to acknowledge that it has costs, as well as benefits. It also needs more readiness to deal with those problems than has thus far been shown by those most enthusiastic about the benefits of faster population growth."

This is a tactic the growth lobby and our politicians are already following. At the Queensland Property Council's conference last Friday both Anna Bligh and Tania Plibersek repeatedly stated that they understood people's pain, and that they admitted and deeply understood the problems population growth was causing. Yet in the end their solution was to press on regardless and tell people to get used to it. Hence they talked vaguely about how "better planning" or "us in government trying harder" or "letting people see a few iconic examples of good high rise development as soon as possible" would solve the problem. I call this their "Yes, repeat No" approach.

"Yes, we hear your pain and we understand absolutely. No we don't intend to take any notice of your protests."

While this tactic is infuriating, it is also a sign that they know they are in a weak position. It will rapidly become untenable if we articulate (as I have above) what their ploy is, and demand that they stop doing it (or even that they apologise for having tried to hoodwink us with it).

In Saul's case, he hangs almost everything on his argument that if government was prepared to borrow more boldly to provide extra infrastructure in advance of the population needing it rather than, as at present, "in a discontinuous or ''lumpy' manner" ---then the problems of population growth would be solved.

Infrastructure for growth costs vastly exceed benefits of growth

He fails to understand the points made in Jane O'Sullivan's recent article "The downward spiral of hasty population growth"

As she points out, the reason governments can't catch up with infrastructure is that the costs of infrastructure for additional people so vastly exceed the extra benefits that extra people bring. The infrastructure costs can in some respects outweigh the economic gains by as much as 30 to 1.

"Does it make sense," asks Jane O'Sullivan, "that we’re incurring a 25 per cent of GDP cost to avoid less than 0.8 per cent of GDP cost?"

Saul's (and the Grattan Institute's) biases also show when he lists the "dampening" of wages in favor of business profits as a self-evident good.

Mr Eslake seems to have placed the same article in several papers and online forums. Google "saul Eslake" + "Populate or stagnate" for the list.

NOTES

[1]Saul Eslake was for 14 years chief economist at the ANZ Bank. In August 2009 he moved to the Melbourne-University-affiliated Grattan Institute as Program Director for its Productivity Growth Program. The Grattan Institute is part of the growth lobby, or in the more genteel language of the University’s media release “The Grattan Institute is a new think tank aiming to shape the direction of debate on many of the important challenges facing Australia. It was set up with substantial support from the University of Melbourne in conjunction with the Commonwealth and Victorian Governments, and BHP Billiton. Note by Mark O’Connor )

. . .

. . .

Environmentalists might expect Green MLC Greg Barber, to back another environmentalist, Kelvin Thomson, rather than supply quotes that could make him out unfairly to be racist. Wedge Politics we don't need from Mr Barber MLC who represents the Northern Metropolitan Region of Melbourne in the Legislative Council at State level, which Kelvin Thomson represents in the Lower House at the Federal level. What's going on? Are the Greens for real?

Population and Environment and the Greens

Over the years I have had conversations with people about the riddles in the Greens' strangely contradictory environmental policies and their mysterious priorities. Yet there is something of the hearty gym mistress and the scout master about them that inspires us, Charlie-Brown-like, to trust them again and again at the polls. We think, they must mean well, or that they are better than the rest, or ...

Lassie come home

Recently someone said to me that maybe they are just out there to confuse us. Are they, he suggested, really working with the Libs and Labs and Big Media, as a kind of border collie, to keep us sheep from straying too far from the farm? The dog looks friendly and competent. It's cute. We tend to trust it because it doesn't actually own the farm. But it works for the farmer.

During the past two weeks my uncertainty has been overtaken by a feeling of déjà vu.

Wedge Politics we don't need; Mr Barber plays the race-card

Firstly, I read an article in the [growthist] Melbourne Times (Fairfax media), "Welcome to Australia - Now that's enough," by Bianca Hall, (Wed.3 Feb, 2010, p.4.).

The logic of this article is amazingly contrived and reads like an excuse to cite Greg Barber of the Greens apparently slurring the motives of Kelvin Thomson's 'Population Reform' as racist in a most unfair way:

'Mr Thomson argues net overseas migration should be dramatically cut from 2007-08 rate of 213, 461 to 70,000 migrants. To slow down the birth rate, Mr Thomson would cut family tax benefits to new recipients who had more than two children and redirect the money to education and workplace training.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows fertility rates are higher for Australian women born in largely Muslim countries, including Turkey and northern African countries. Almost 30 per cent of people in Mr Thomson' electorate were born in non-English-speaking countries.

State Greens MP Greg Barber said the plan threatened to target Muslim families.

"Whether Kelvin understands it or not his policy selectively targets predominantly Muslim people and punishes them for having that third child," Mr Barber said. "We know what gets birth rates down - the empowerment of women, with contraception, access to education and participation in the workforce."'

Frankly I was gobsmacked and furious. You might expect the developers to try something like this, or the Libs, but a Green? You never know, however, when there is a logical explanation, so I decided to write to Mr Barber himself and ask for it. I sent the following on 24-2-2010:

"#LetterToGregBarber" id="LetterToGregBarber">Dear Greg,

I must congratulate you on your statements in parliament about water reproduced here about bulk water entitlements as well as on your stand against disempowering councils.

I have been a little shocked however to read you as quoted in the article I have reproduced below from the Melbourne Times.
It looks like the worst kind of wedge politics.

1. I would like to know whether you were correctly cited in this article.
2. [name withheld] tells me that you may have been cited out of context - if so, could you explain a little please?

3. This is what the article makes you look as if you are doing, in my opinion:

- trying to knock out ALP competition
- or doing the ALP a favour by playing the race card against someone who is leading the battle for the environment and democracy against overdevelopment, overpopulation, by tagging them with an unfair race-card where the (extremely corrupt and unfair) ALP may not dare to do so itself
- playing to a voting sector which is identifyable as muslim
- stimatising muslims specifically as overly productive of children, uneducated etc
- playing wedge politics
- maybe preparing a seat in the Labor party for yourself

I hope to hear that none of this is true and that you are instead cooperating as much as possible with Mr Thomson, who has shown great courage and leadership.
By the same token, if there is something unfair going on between the two of you and you were reacting, I am sympathetic to an explanation there.
I am trying not to make judgements without full inquiry.
I know how fraught politics and environmental movements are with this kind of thing.

Yours for reform in democracy, environment, population, land use planning and energy policy,

Sheila Newman"

Strange silence from Mr Barber

I never received a reply from Mr Barber, although I spoke to a person at his office several times and exchanged emails with that person, and was led to assume I would at any moment receive a reply. (See #comment-4310">below for a very brief response to another voter.) I made it very clear that I was dead serious in seeking an explanation and also that I was absolutely furious that someone was apparently trying to pull the racist card to shut up Australia's perhaps single most courageous, ethical, effective and environmentally literate politician - an ALP long-stayer who was standing up for democracy, despite his party. I said that I would write an article on the subject and so it was important for him to defend himself.

Save the Bush Rally on 24 February

The same morning I wrote to Mr Barber, I travelled to the Save the Bush Rally which took place on the steps of Melbourne Parliament. It was here that I finally lost patience with the Greens.

Speakers included Sue Pennicuick, Greens MLC, Rosemary West, of the Green Wedges, Colin Long, Greens Upper House Candidate, Damon Anderson, of Coomoora Reserve, and Gillian Collins, of the Pines Flora and Fauna Reserve. (Were all of them prospective candidates?) All made speeches about how development was being pushed through by Mr Brumby's government and how this was threatening bushland and how the Greens would provide more public transport.

Complicit Silence on how Overdevelopment has been politically contrived

No scheduled speaker mentioned why more roads or public transport are necessary. The silence on how their necessity had been politically contrived was absolutely deafening. The Greens' failure to expose how the Government is driving the overpopulation it is using as an excuse to force undemocratic development only protects this gigantic dystopic rort.

Sadly, not one Green said anything to the effect of, "We will expose this dishonesty and try to stop the overpopulation of Melbourne."

I know that Gillian Collins and Rosemary West are fully aware of the population growth corporate connection. Yet only one woman, Mara from Banyule, even mentioned that the bush is threatened by population growth. All the honour of the day for honesty and relevance goes to her. She was not even on the written Agenda. She should have been writing it.

The 'green' silence from the rest of them on the government elephant-in-the-room push for overpopulation seemed nothing short of shameful cowardice or cynical complicity. The population cat is well out of the bag, yet it seems that the Greens, of all parties, want to stuff it back in again - at the peril of our wildlife and democracy.

Why? What have they got to gain by protecting the bad guys?

I was furious that I had travelled from an outer suburb and ruined my day for more profitable pursuits only to hear a line-up of wanna-be-politicians using a captive audience to monger motherhood statements which would mostly sit happily on the billboards of new estates and the websites of corporate water-speculators. Many of those assembled in support of the speakers were battle-scarred environmental fighters who remained quiet while the glorified clichés were trotted out for the television cameras. Some dedicated naturalists and ecologists held banners and filmed the event, all of them waiting for some leadership.

They got nothing.

A trial of patience; an abuse of supporters' time

When Sue Pennicuick self-congratulatingly asked the crowd who they were going to vote for (meaning the Greens), an angry spectator called out, "Kelvin Thomson!" There was a murmur of approval from the long-suffering audience.

When Sue Pennicuick self-congratulatingly asked the crowd who they were going to vote for (meaning the Greens), an angry spectator called out, "Kelvin Thomson!"

Another spectator handed round stickers with "Say No to Melbourne at 5 Million" and someone else was distributing leaflets exposing the identities of organisations that push population growth, which included numerous developers and the Victorian Government with its site, "www.liveinmelbourne.com.au". The audience gratefully accepted the leaflets.

There was no-one else there, apart from the speakers, who wanted to keep the lid on the scandal of the population-growth lobby and the government's role in it. A brilliant opportunity was lost to educate the press on the steps and the pedestrians watching from the other side of Spring Street about why the government is corrupt and how the government pushes population in cahoots with the developers, then makes laws to force Victorians to accommodate the interests of this group. (See the Brumby government's links with the Property Council of Australia and the Live in Victoria Government website to attract immigrants at "Living in a Destruction Zone" and Minister Justin Madden's increasingly barefaced attempts to overturn any democratic restraint on the government's development despotism.)

Political corruption in Australia

I rode home on the same train as one of the wildlife activists. On that train there was also a man who had just published a dictionary of Australian political terms. He was a born and bred ALP member and I asked him if he had ever heard of Labor Resources or Labor Holdings. He hadn't. I told him about them. It seemed to me that a faint glint of horror animated his misty eyes for a moment, but he quickly suppressed it.

"They all do it", he replied, like a long-suffering adult on the antics of teenagers. I half expected him to add, "But they will grow out of it."

Yes, all the parties do it. "It" is the use of holding companies for donations which are then declared as coming from the holding companies rather than from their many corporate donors. This is a problem but it is the amount and the kind of assets that the ALP holds at state and Federal level plus their political power and their demonstrated abuse of it which is frightening even to the Liberal-National Party.

I tried to describe how the scale of the corrupt system was beyond any before and now grotesquely magnified by the ALP's dominance over every parliament in Australia. "They are nothing like the Labor Party is supposed to be anymore," I added.

"Oh, but they're better than the alternative," he intoned, reciting his true believer catechism, with a smug smile.

"It's like a religion," said the onlooking wildlife activist. "They are brainwashed from birth."

Politics as religion

She is right. For many people, politics is the same as a religion. You just don't question the church that you were born to: Labor or Liberal: each is better than the alternative.

Or, if you're a bit rebellious, there is the alternative alternative religion - The Greens.

But it seems to me now that they are all different brands selling the same thing. They are all selling overpopulation to the masses, but each of them is selling a different brand. The Labor Party is selling overpopulation as economic growth. The Liberals would be selling it this way but they cannot out-do the ALP at the moment. The Greens are selling overpopulation as Public Transport and the Socialist Alliance is selling it as bicycles. But they are all trying to sell it to us. Like Mr Madden and Mr Brumby and Mr Rudd, they aren't really interested in democracy and what we, the electorate think. They are all seeking niches within the territory defined by the corporate growth lobby.

Mainstream Media role in our loss of democracy

For many years now the extent of this collusion has been kept safely away from public knowledge by the commercial and the public media in Australia. Indeed it looks to me as if the commercial media - notably the Murdoch media, but including the Fairfax media - have been able to shape the policies and and promote the people who have come to form our useless political parties and the corrupt ideology of material progress.

The structure of print, television and radio media has permitted ownership in a few hands which have dominated public information and allowed the entrenchment of corporate interests over democratic rights. For me it is frankly impossible now to see the difference between the Government and the commercial Property, Banking and Media groups (all interchangeable themselves), especially with Stephen Mayne's uncovering of Labor Party investments cultivated with Wayne Swann and Kevin Rudd working for Wayne Goss whilst in opposition in Queensland. Yes, Mayne's investigations were published in the mainstream, but the mainstream doesn't connect the big dots and it won't effectively publicise any alternative parties or changes to the system which might combat the rot.

The situation is like the one in the 16th century, where the Holy Roman Empire had evolved from the Roman Empire and controlled kings, public ideology and institutions. The situation seemed utterly hopeless until the rise of a new technology - printing.

Who will fight the Evil Empire again?

In the 16th century Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the Church door at Wittenburg. Soon copies were printed and spread all over Germany.

Unfortunately, with the discovery of technologies for smelting iron directly with coal, new kinds of institutions arose - those of capitalist corporations. The corporations built towns and re-organised people as anonymous cogs, with loyalty to employers overwhelming loyalty to family and friends, isolated from any true community or personal independence. Gradually the corporations were able to dominate human institutions all over again, under the ideology of 'Progress', (See for instance, "Courier-Mail beats up on public for complaining about cost of 'progress'"), ironically taken from protestant values.

Things may be changing again, however. Today the 'common people' - as long as they can read and write and have access to computers - may be able to take back power from the Dark Towers (to use Tolkien's ever-useful terminology for the rise of corporate control) via a new technology - and that is the Internet.

It seems however that we should not rely on the Greens to challenge the dark commercial hegemony of the overpopulation and development lobby.

If Australians cannot place their faith in the Greens, recently some real dissidents have arrived and posted something new on the church doors of the Internet: Kelvin Thomson - a brave leader in waiting for the Labor Party or for a new party or a man who may lose ALP-preselection for his courage and hence could eventually run for the Senate on Mr Barber's turf; the Stable Population Party, the New Australia Party, and the Animal Justice Party.

I will be happy to be shown to be wrong and anyone who feels misrepresented by this article is very welcome to post an article in reply or to comment. I am happy to publish any response from Greg Barber. I will be more than happy to eat every word of criticism here of Greens and speakers at the rally if only I receive an explanation. Candobetter.org is a free press and we welcome true debate.

See also: Greens support Madden's Bad Law VC 71 in black week for Victoria, Australia of 11 Oct 10, "Tasmanian Greens and the terror of coalitions" of 24 Mar 10 on Online Opinion and related discussion forum.

Please attend public forums against population growth, featuring Kelvin Thomson, Mark O'Connor and others. Brisbane: 8:30AM - 12:30PM, Saturday 13 March, Sunshine Coast: 2:00PM-4:30PM, Sunday 14 March.(See article "Sunshine Coast environmentalists condemn sham population debate" for more details.)

Glen Elmes, LNP
member for Noosa

In the debate over the The South East Queensland Regional Plan in 2009-2031 on 11 February 2010 Liberal National Party MLA Glen Elmes_#main-fn1">1 warned how the vast discretionary powers, given to the Minister for Infrastructure and Planning, Stirling Hinchliffe, with his past history as a property development industry insider, would add to the consequences of SEQ's already shambolic urban planning and environmental management and runaway population growth.

The speech is effective. However, it has shortcomings. The speech appears to accept that continued population growth, even if at a lower rate, is actually necessary and desirable, just as long as it is properly planned and the necessary infrastructure provided beforehand. It also appears to avoid confronting those directly responsible for the current rate of population growth that it otherwise makes abundantly clear is excessive. Those directly responsible are, of course, the Rudd Government with its record high immigration program, that is given every encouragement by the Queensland Government. It is possible to draw the implication from the speech that the harm caused by rapid population growth could possibly be mitigated to an acceptable degree by the adoption of measures such as decentralisation._#main-fn2">2 and infilling._#main-fn3">3

I learned of this speech from the following comment (see also #appendix1">) made in response to the article, "It's time to fight Bligh's growth" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 6 Mar 10:

Vanga and happychappy1 may care to go to Hansard Thursday 11 Feb and read Glen Elmes' stirring speech to parliament condemning the government's population strategy for the Coast. At least Elmesy is doing his bit.

The speech, below, is from the Queensland State Parliamentary Hansard of Hansard of 12Feb 10, linked to from Hansard page. I have added subheadings. - JS

See also: "SEQ Regional Plan a travesty against the people of South East Queensland" of 9 May 09 by Dr Jane O'Sullivan, "The downward spiral of hasty population growth" of 8 Mar 10 on Online Opinion by Dr Jane O'Sullivan.

Mr ELMES (Noosa--LNP) (9.45 pm): ...

Queensland Government's habitual disregard of resident's wishes

I am privileged to rise to speak again on behalf of my electorate of Noosa in this critical debate about our future. My community always worries when Labor starts to plan on our behalf. The forced council amalgamation process of 2006 and 2007 was hallmarked by stripping Noosa and the Queensland constituency of the right to a binding vote on council amalgamations as enshrined in state law. Do you know why, Mr Deputy Speaker? It was because the Labor government knew that a vote would be defeated not by a small margin but overwhelmingly.

We know that all of the submissions in the world make no difference to this Labor government's approach to consultation.

We on this side of the House support the planning processes which would, in normal circumstances, lead to the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2009-2031, but these are not normal circumstances. We know that all of the submissions in the world make no difference to this Labor government's approach to consultation. We know that all the wisdom subscribed by the Sunshine Coast Regional Council; the highly respected Sunshine Coast Environment Council; the influential OSCAR, which stands for Organisation Sunshine Coast Associations of Residents; the forensic Development Watch; the EDV Residents Group; as well as the wise council from the Noosa Parks Association, the Noosa Residents and Ratepayers Association and of course the Friends of Noosa, to mention but a few, simply fail to be taken into account by this minister and this Labor government.

How could we expect anything to be different? With a Labor government now more dependent for its political survival on donations from the property development industry than from its traditional labour trade union base and with a minister captive to that same industry for whom he was a consultant and advocate before coming into this place, how could we expect other than what we have got? But the minister monsters any notion of impartiality through the concept of investigation areas and sleight of hand expansions of the urban footprint to appease his constituent urban development lobby.

Reckless disregard of established planning principles

The Sunshine Coast Regional Council opposed the 1,408-hectare Caloundra South extension investigation area on the basis of the loss of the interurban break and the nutrient and recreational use impacts on the Pumicestone Passage. Others opposed other inclusions into the urban footprint as well, but still on he ploughs. But everyone was unanimous in their chorus for the permanent protection of the interurban break between the Moreton Bay area and the Sunshine Coast, for it to be set in concrete, to become an article of faith. This interurban break is prone to flooding.

Stirling Hinchliffe, former development industry insider, now has sweeping powers to over-ride community and local government objections to grant developers all their wishes.

There simply must be a ban on the continued development of flood prone or flood plain land. The current practice of raising the level of flood plain land above the flood level for development purposes simply makes flooding elsewhere more likely and more severe. It is a 'beggar my neighbour' policy. On the Sunshine Coast we do not want to see the incremental stripping away of the interurban breaks, as has occurred between Brisbane and the Gold Coast which is an interurban break in name only. I strongly oppose this minister having the power to gazette new growth areas without public consultation and the process for declarations to occur.

There simply must be a ban on the continued development of flood prone or flood plain land. The current practice of raising the level of flood plain land above the flood level for development purposes simply makes flooding elsewhere more likely and more severe.

These regulations will permit a wide range of urban style tourist, recreation, sporting, hospitality and commercial developments to occur outside the urban footprint with limited code and impact assessment requirements and little guidance for local government. Further, I am also totally opposed to the proposed discretion for the minister to declare urban and future growth areas as a master plan area. Given the current minister's strong links to the property development industry, I am greatly alarmed by this proposed power, unfettered by any guidelines or ability to be challenged. This has been fostered by changing the definitions in the dictionary. Long-held definitions have turned turtle. What was forbidden is now at the bidding of the minister. Everyone has to go back to school and learn a new language.

My constituency and their advocacy groups requested the state support regional and local planning based on sustainable carrying capacity which also considers and accepts character and amenity. The Sunshine Coast Regional Council has a powerful electoral mandate for such planning and should be permitted to fulfil that mandate.

Queensland Government accomodates, rather than plans population growth

The South East Queensland Regional Plan proposes 156,000 extra dwellings by 2031, a 39 per cent increase over the 397,000 of 2006. The plan envisages 497,000 people crammed into a sardine city by 2031, 68 per cent more than the 295,000 of 2006. The place we call home and love so much will be loved to death by such an onslaught. The Sunshine Coast Regional Council sought assurance that dwelling allocations be qualified by assessment of development planning constraints--constraints extended by the Sunshine Coast Environment Council and others, all to no avail.

The growth is uneven. Although the South-East Queensland population growth is 1.57 million, Brisbane will grow by some 39 per cent, the Gold Coast will grow by 68 per cent and the heaviest impact will be borne by the Sunshine Coast, with a 76 per cent growth in population. Analysis of state and regional population progressions to 2031 and 2050 clearly shows that these are not sustainable in ecological, economic, financial or social terms. With the population doubling every 25 years and with two-thirds of the population in South-East Queensland, one-third in regional coastal areas and only one per cent west of the ranges, South-East Queensland will have a population equal to the present total state population by 2031 and 20 per cent of that population will be over the age of 65. The state already spends twice as much per capita on infrastructure as the other states and is facing mounting budget deficits and a state debt with a lowered credit rating. It just does not add up.

Here is a case for a state and regional population and settlement policy and strategy._#main-fn4">4 Analysis of the drivers of population growth, which is natural increase, net interstate migration and net international migration, shows that the state has a number of policy instruments at its disposal to deliver a population and growth rate which is determined to be sustainable for the region and for the state overall. Managing international migration to Queensland is obvious, given this has been double the rate of interstate migration in the most recent decade.

The South East Queensland Regional Plan simply accepts population growth as a fact to be accommodated rather than managed. Strategies and then policies need to be developed and implemented by which growth is limited to no more than the sustainable carrying capacity of the Sunshine Coast. A key factor of sustainability in my view is provision of acceptable infrastructure proceeding or in conjunction with appropriate development. I believe that the current government policy encourages this excessive population growth, and therefore policy change can reduce it.

For example, concessional stamp duty for first home buyers in Queensland is a significant incentive for Victorian and New South Wales property owners to relocate to Queensland, particularly in retirement, rather than to relocate within their own state. Limiting the concession to first home buyers generally rather than first home buyers in Queensland, as now, would be a good first step in limiting growth and would send a clear message of intent that population growth for Queensland is not limitless. It should be noted here that the Sunshine Coast Regional Council was elected almost two years ago with an overwhelming mandate from electors to preserve their quality of life, to nurture the area's unique communities, to manage population growth and development and to make the region the most sustainable in Australia. The electors who live on the Sunshine Coast have sent this very clear message which should be informing planning and planning instruments such as the South East Queensland Regional Plan that replicating the Gold Coast on the Sunshine Coast is not acceptable to us.

There is here potential for a clear identification of community areas in which modelling of desirable future living could be trialled. I envisage the greater Noosa area as one which could be home to communities capable of ready adaption to important change. Booking the ClimateSmart Home Service--which is a state government initiative and which I wholly approve of--managing our carbon footprint, insulating our homes, installing hot-water systems and solar power generation, composting and recycling more of our waste, installing greywater systems and harvesting rainwater et cetera are a few examples of some of the myriad ways in which a small engaged community might model solutions to climate change and sustainability. These solutions might then be rolled out across the state when it is clear which approaches work best and how they might be implemented.

We residents of the Sunshine Coast advocate a much less intensive residential development for our area than the currently accepted urban norm of large estate development which requires water and energy to be captured or generated remotely and delivered to these developments and from which waste water and waste is transported to a remote site for treatment or disposal. The current urban model is ultimately unsustainable and undesirable. Greater Noosa, with recognition from UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Program, is, I submit, ideally and best placed to model a sustainable future.

Queensland Government spends on infrastructure for population growth on maxed out bankcard

The truly monstrous failure of the Labor government has been in the provision of infrastructure. With our bankcard maxed out, the capacity for future generations to work through the economic catastrophe facing the state--home-grown by sheer economic incompetence--is hamstrung. Both the plan and the South-East Queensland infrastructure program fail to commit to the provision of the necessary infrastructure to support proposed increases in dwellings and sustainable development. The teaching hospital for the University of the Sunshine Coast--a truly fantastic win-win concept for health services in my region, for infrastructure provision and for education as a hub for economic development--has been put off and put back until it is almost out of sight and out of mind. Why? Because the Labor government has given up even the faintest hope of ever winning a seat on the Sunshine Coast so those electors do not matter anymore to Labor. The Queenslanders in this region of the south-east know who they cannot count on. Redress the wrong, address increases in public and active transport spending, and bring forward as a matter of urgency the coast section of CAMCOS and CoastConnect.

Effects of poor planning on Sunshine Coast

Many rural communities are home to those engaged in lower paid employment who are compelled to travel to work, often shiftwork, by private car. Alternative transport modes must be made available for these workers. It is not acceptable that bulk public transport solutions be provided only in the most heavily populated areas which are already advantaged by a wider range of services under competitive provision.

There are other infrastructure failures which I will only touch on. Education has failed. Schools are being built under a public-private partnership in my region. I am attending the opening of Peregian Springs tomorrow morning at 9.30, which in time will really max out the already maxed out bankcard. Health services fail every day. This is not the fault of the health professionals who struggle to meet the needs of those for whom they care; there are just too many of them to care for.

[Sunshine Coast residents] see paddock after paddock of enormous black pipes just waiting to be laid to suck the lifeblood from the region. Water will leave from where it was harvested via one-way pumps through the infamous water grid, off to Brisbane never to be seen again ...

Then there is water. What do Sunshine Coast residents see? They see paddock after paddock of enormous black pipes just waiting to be laid to suck the lifeblood from the region. Water will leave from where it was harvested via one-way pumps through the infamous water grid, off to Brisbane never to be seen again and for which the reward of recompense has been harvested by this broke Labor government also.

To most constituents, 'infill development' are dirty words but not everyone agrees. Displaying great courage and foresight, the Sunshine Coast Environment Council, for example, has proposed to focus on infill development to take advantage of existing infrastructure and services and the achievement of a more compact urban form incorporating sustainability principles. But this demands that location, scale and design must be sympathetic to the surrounding area and to community aspirations. In short, the local community needs to be engaged in the local solution._#main-fn5">5

The Labor government's approach to planning did not even start from an informed position. There was no review of the performance of the previous plan despite the fact that the 2008 State of the region report showed declining trends in almost all sustainability indicators, most noticeably biodiversity and livability indicators, and many of the plans and strategies that the plan requires for implementation are still incomplete and not integrated. While growth, transport and climate change are acknowledged, no robust solutions are offered. It is almost as if they have conceded that they will not be around long enough to address these problems of their own making, but they do not effectively address or provide solutions to these issues. Finalisation of this plan should await a fundamental review of the carrying capacity of the region. The dreadful lag in infrastructure and services has caught up with even the existing population, and effective performance monitoring, review, resourcing and accountability structures are incorporated.

The South East Queensland Regional Plan will be informed by, and is subservient to, the Integrated Planning Act 1997 and the Sustainable Planning Act 2009. Accordingly, it is of particular concern that the act does not include a prohibition on development applications which conflict with local planning schemes. This deficiency requires any local council to assess an application despite the conflict. Consideration of such applications makes it very clear to the local community that their faith in the local planning scheme, developed following prolonged community consultation, is misplaced. It also highlights for them the significant waste of local rate revenues applied by council to the assessment process and the dilemma which councils face in defending their decision in the Planning and Environment Court should a developer appeal against a refusal. It is essential that this wasteful, resource intensive and unnecessary activity is made redundant by appropriate amendment to the act.

Failure to protect wildlife, agricultural land

Iconic koalas,threatened with extinction in South East Queensland by
State Government, pandering to wishes of developer consituency

While we humans can speak for ourselves, it is also incumbent to protect those who cannot defend themselves, and I speak particularly of the koala--our native icon--threatened with extinction by development, by this Labor government and by this plan in particular. The koala is a key indicator for biodiversity. They will be a lost indicator at the present rate as community groups struggle to offset the failures of this Labor government. The mapping program is inadequate, incomplete and slow, while another aspect of growth is seen with this minister--that is, the growth in loopholes to aid and abet the developer constituency to find legal ways to destroy koala habitat with impunity.

... another aspect of growth is ... the growth in loopholes to aid and abet the developer constituency to find legal ways to destroy koala habitat with impunity.

Another aspect that has been largely overlooked is the impact on food production from development. Productive land agricultural pursuits, particularly those close to major urban centres, need to be preserved. This is another failure of the Traveston Crossing Dam--that less than optimum water storage location which sought to flood farm land and deprive Brisbane of a source of food. Let us hope that the remedial work to repair the damage done to the Mary Valley, primarily by the Premier in this case, will focus on developing this food bowl and repairing the other major consequence, which is social dislocation.

There is strong objection to the amendment proposed to the regional landscape and rural production areas, which has the effect of expanding the urban footprint and redefining activities which were previously urban. These areas should be afforded the highest level of protection possible so that food production for South-East Queensland's increasing population can be secured and, simultaneously, natural conservation areas protected.

Reject Queensland Government's "Sardine City" vision for Sunshine Coast

For the Sunshine Coast, we all hope for the sustenance of it being a community of communities. We do not want a sardine city. We want the places in which we live, work, play and grow our families to retain their uniqueness and their individuality. We want them to be the places in communities which attracted us to them in the first place. We do not want to morph into obscurity. We do not want to be harmonised. We want progress without oblivion.

The vision for the future of South-East Queensland and the principles that underpin the plan are generally consistent with those supported and endorsed by Sunshine Coast constituents. However, one notes with concern that the plan and its regulated regulatory provisions have significant flaws which remain to be addressed. The major concerns remain the weak basis in the plan for determining how growth can be managed and the potential inconsistencies that arise between desired outcomes, the lack of infrastructure planning to underpin development and the powers to the minister, who always seems ready to do a stirling job on behalf of his developer mates. It does not bode well for a sustainable future for the Sunshine Coast or anywhere in South-East Queensland.

#appendix1" id="#appendix1">Appendix: Divided opinions about Sunshine Coast Members of State Parliament

The following are comments in response to the article "It's time to fight Bligh's growth" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 6 Mar 10.

Posted by vanga from Caloundra, Queensland, 06 March 2010 7:17 a.m.

yet another story bemoaning the imposition of 100K more people on our life styles and still no word from the liberal nationals

Will the libnats ban any greenfield development in south Caloundra?

Will the libnats go with the council on the maximum number of people for sippy downs and maroochydore urban infil?

Hello? Is there anybody out there?

McCardle, Elmes, Wellington, Dickson, Simpson, Powell and the other one I couldnt find - whats your thoughts? A lot of coast residents want to know if you are going to dare to be different or are we stuck with what labour are pushing on us because you want the same or even worse - more people?

Some answers libants - you cant just sit back and whinge about everything the government does - let us know if you will be any different

Posted by happychappy1 from Maroochydore, Queensland, 06 March 2010 7:41 a.m.

No, no, no, no, no. This govt has to be kicked out before our lifestyles are totally ruined. Please LNP, give us your views?

Posted by vanga from Caloundra, Queensland, 06 March 2010 7:43 a.m.

the emails are flooding in

Glen Elmes- not his responsibility - sent my email to Dave Gibson of the Gympie

Powell - and Dickson not in their electorate so they arent interested - suggested I contact Marc McCardle

Peter Wellington - good onya - a politician with an opinoin - dead set against the proposals

Posted by vanga from Caloundra, Queensland 06 March 2010 9 a.m.

happychappy - lnp views as emailed to me

Elmes - not his responsibility - sent my query to the member for Gympie because that member is the shadow minister - so elmes has no opinon

Peter wellington - against the proposals - was on ABC talking about it

Power and Dickson - its not their electorate so of no interest, told me to talk to Marc McCardle
Mccardel and simpson - no response yet

can someone tell the 7 memebrs of the state parliament they are members for the Sunshine Coast as well as their own fiefdoms?

Maybe if they actually spoke with each other they could present a united from for the coast

Posted by carrot from Maroochydore, Queensland 06 March 2010 9:51 a.m.

Vanga and happychappy1 may care to go to Hansard Thursday 11 Feb and read Glen Elmes' stirring speech to parliament condemning the government's population strategy for the Coast. At least Elmesy is doing his bit.

The SCRC (Sunshine Coast Regional Council) has already shot themselves in the foot by caving in immediately to Caloundra South. That set a precedent that informs the state government exactly how spineless they are.

Posted by tonyryan from Maroochydore Bc, Queensland 06 March 2010 1:17 p.m.

This is still a discussion in a bubble.

The predetermining issues are: 'population' and 'rights of the people'.

First POPULATION. Increase is NOT inevitable.

In fact natural Australian population growth went into reverse two decades after we installed statutory livable age pensions in 1946.

The current increase is primarily caused by three million migrants and refugees. Do we have to take them in? No. Australia is a desert continent and we have already reached our optimum sustainable population.

No foreign power can tell us what to do.

The newcomers are straining our water catchments; our rural food-growing zones through enforced urban sprawl; our culture; our national sovereignty and our social integrity.

And to say we must give way to seachangers is nonsense. All human communities in history have reserved the right to repel invaders in order to protect their homes, their incomes and their way of life.

Ignoring official lies, unemployment on the Sunshine Coast is 23% and newcomers compete for the few jobs going. In a sense, they import poverty.

And RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE?

During the past three decades there has been a media-driven viewpoint that we elect representatives to rule over us. This is dictatorial nonsense.

Democracy was clearly defined by the greatest minds in history... Thucydides of ancient Greece, the Irish Monks, Thomas Paine of 'The Rights of Man' fame, Lord Acton... but most lyrically by Abraham Lincoln: "Government of the people, by the people and for the people".

Abe overstated the definition because already, enemies of democracy were subverting the meaning.

In a democracy, councillors, MLAs and MHRs are our elected servants, there for one single purpose, to install the product of electoral consensus.... or in Constitutional terms... the will of the people.

Wellington and Blumell excepted, the rest of our grubby politicians are exchanging election campaign funding for development favours.

This is obviously true of tyrant Bligh and Andrews, but us equally true of the LNP. This is why they are silent.

If you want to save the Sunshine Coast, you will have to do what people have done since time immemorial; confront the politicians en masse.

They will back down, believe me.

Posted by shellsay from Maroochydore, Queensland 06 March 2010 1:46 p.m.

What is so arrogant about the Bligh/Hinchcliff army is that they have totally and utterly disregarded the S/C community and SCRC rights to have an opinion. The whole process of altering the maximum population number of nearly 16,000 set by council, to now become the minimum is outrageous, how can this just happen? Of course you can't stop population growth, but you should be able to stipulate a lot lower figure. And how can all this be approved by these loonies when no effort towards sustainable planning has been taken into consideration, we are talking flood plain land here, has anyone seen the amount of water that is lying on there at the moment. Why arent we utilising further regional areas for development, why does it have to be here, the infrastructure that is in place now can't cope. It is up to the S/C communities to stop this decision now, instead of just blogging about it let's all do something. Developers like Stocklands are way to powerful and have destroyed enough of the coast, they are not ratepayers and don't have a right to an opinion. Send a submission into council, to take a stand on this through the reinstatement of their structure plan, which can be viewed on their web: www.sunshinecoast.qld.gov.au. Sunshine Coast residents have a right to be heard, Bligh/Hinchcliff dont live here we do.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ In spite of having made this speech, opinion about LNP member Glen Elmes is not unanimously favourable amongst Sunshine Coast residents opposed to population growth as can be seen #appendix1">below from comments in response to the article "It's time to fight Bligh's growth" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 6 Mar 10, where I learnt of this speech.

In the past the LNP has been correctly regarded as more the party of big business than the Labor Party. However, that reality appears to have been largely inverted in Queensland in recent years. An example which suggests this is the disturbing fact that on 2 June 2009, only two members of the Parliamentary Labor caucus were prepared to vote, even inside caucus, where they are all supposedly free to speak and vote as their consciences dicate, against privatisation. In contrast, the the LNP opposes privatisation and that opposition appears to be, in large part, genuine. They have repeatedly voted against privatisation and, on one occasion, LNP leader John-Paul Langbroek called on the State Governmet to put privatisation to the people in a referendum. Of course, the ultimate test for Parties such as the LNP is what they do upon winning government and not what some of their members are prepared to say whilst in opposition.

Glen Elmes' seat of Noosa was previously held by Cate Molloy, who was expelled from the Labor Party for her principled stand of opposition to the Bligh Government's environmentally and socially reckless plans to dam the Mary Valley at Traveston. Whilst we urged a vote for Cate Molloy in both the 2006 and 2009 state elections, this speech demonstrates that some considerable good has resulted from that loss.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑, #main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4. #main-fn4-txt">↑ This has raised decentralisation as a possible solution to overcrowding of the major urban areas. Noosa Shire Mayor Bob Abbot proposed decentralisation at the Debate at the Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane on Monday 22 February. His argument was that if our Governments had not allowed the infrastructure that serviced Inland Queensland in the firs half of the twentieth century to have been neglected in the second half of the 20th century then there would be plenty of desirable alternative locations for people to live outside the major urban regions. An argument put against this view is that, as a result of mechanisation, there was no longer as great a need for the larger rural workforces that existed back then. Also the lack of fertility and water have defeated past attempts to settle outback regions of the country, most famously the soldier settlers who were given plots of land in outback Victoria after the First World War.

Nevertheless, I believe that it is appropriate to carefully examine the capacity of some currently sparsely settled regions to support greater populations. Some factors which could bend the odds more in our favour are (1) The potential of Natural Sequence Farming as well as Permaculture techniques to restore fertility the land, (2) the capacity of the Internet to allow much intellectual work to be perfomed remotely, (3) Cheaper building techniques as described by US architect Michael Reynolds in his video Garbage Warrior.

If it were to be found that some of these regions may be able to sustainably support substantially larger human populations, then decentralisation should be adopted, but only as a solution to relieve the overcrowding of Australia's existing urban areas, rather than as an excuse to furhter increase Australia's population.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-fn3-txt">↑, #main-fn5" id="main-fn5">5. #main-fn5-txt">↑ In fact, we would tend to agree that 'infill development' is dirty. In theory infill development could relieve some of the demand for land, but it is not environmentally cost-free. The financial and energy costs of building and operating multi0story dwellings and obtaining food, water and other necssities from elsewhere needs to be taken into account. In practice, it is also very difficult to infull without sacrificing ever more of the remnants of vegetation in city areas. In a context of population stability, some 'infill' development may prove to be a means to relieve the demand for bushland clearing, but, in the current environment of runaway population growth it has just become another means for developers to profit by degrading the quality of life of existing community.

According to the Sunshine Coast Environment Council, the so called "Great Growth Debate" hosted by the Property Council of Australia in Brisbane on Friday 5 March 2010 was rigged in advanced to come out in favour the the continuation of "Business as Usual" rampant population growth that so suited its own members' interests at the expense of the broader community and our environment.

The earlier 'debates' hosted by the Courier-Mail in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast proved to be no less one sided. I intend to cover them in another article. Below, I include the media release from the Sunsine Coast Environment Council. The media release predated the Property Council forum. Please visit links for some media coverage of the discussion.

Sunshine Coast Environment Council Media Release, 4 March 2010 -

Property Council Population "debate" has a Predictable Outcome

The Property Council is holding their "The Great Growth Debate" on Friday 5th March. It is being billed as a symposium on new ideas and solutions to managing Queensland's burgeoning growth rate. This is a veiled attempt to disguise its continued lobbying of the State government to release more land, reduce infrastructure charges and minimise the requirements for valid environmental assessments and protections.

For the developers, there is no "debate" -- just their predictable mantra of encouraging population growth at any cost. Ensuring the greatest yield of their significant land holdings to reap the greatest profit with no consideration of the ecological or social impacts of their decisions and actions remains their agenda.
Narelle McCarthy, Manager of the Sunshine Coast Environment Council believes this is further demonstration of the Property Council's "business as usual" approach of enthusiastically embracing and encouraging the burgeoning population rate to drive up the profits for a small minority. "However," Ms McCarthy said "the communities are the ones who bear the detrimental effects of unfettered population growth. Loss of biodiversity, loss of open space, increased traffic congestion, increasing stress and social dysfunction are just some of the compounding and irreversible impacts. Population growth does not equate to economic prosperity or housing affordability. The SEQ Regional Plan has mandated another 98,000 dwellings be built on the Sunshine Coast thus ensuring a windfall for the developers but condemning the local community to a much degraded lifestyle".

From this orchestrated debate, the Property Council will provide a plan to the Premier's own growth management summit to be held at the end of March. This plan will predictably continue to echo their unjustified call for greater land releases and increased concessions to the development industry. So will the Premier accept the advice of the profit motivated vested interests of a few or the majority of her constituents calling on the government to limit the region's population growth?
To support the views and increased understanding of the community in how it can influence all levels of government in addressing the problems of SEQ's unsustainable population growth, the SEQ Conservation Groups are holding a free community forum on Sunday 14th March at the 2:00pm at the Lake Kawana Community Centre, Bokarina. The entire community is urged to participate in determining the future of the Sunshine Coast and SEQ at this critical juncture.

Originally published on 4 Mar 10 on scec.org.au. See also: Great growth debate slammed (based on this media release) by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 5 Mar 10, Aussie growing pains by Sue Lappman in the Gold Coast News of 6 Mar 10 (includes Federal Transport Minister Anthony Albanese's witty and imaginative quip: "I think Dick Smith should stay out of people's bedrooms."), Dick Smith Joins the Great Growth Debate on the Australian Property Council Web side, "The Great Growth Debate" program (pdf 2.8MB).

What you can do

Attend public forums against population Growth.

Brisbane: 8:30AM - 12:30PM, Saturday 13 March,
Queensland Museum Theatre, South Bank.
Cost $10. Phone Queensland Conservation Council on (07) 32297992.

Sunshine Coast: 2:00PM-4:30PM, Sunday 14 March,
Lake Kawana Community Centre, Bokarina.
Cost FREE. See brochure below.

Photo of big male by Brett Clifton

Preamble

The Animal Justice Party has been formed as a response to growing public concern about the neglect of animals and animal protection issues by political parties. It will give a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves. It will provide a focal point for voters frustrated by the lack of political action and who feel strongly that much more needs to be done through our parliamentary systems to assist the wellbeing of animals. There is a need for laws and processes which recognise animals' needs and capabilities and which protect their interests, whether they are domestic, farmed or wild. The Animal Justice Party will also ensure such laws and processes are properly enforced and implemented to achieve genuine justice for animals.

Our treatment of animals and the environments we share with them are often marred by a lack of understanding, leading to disrespect and cruelty. At a time when the planet’s environment is being challenged on so many fronts, we must urgently act to ensure that all animals that both contribute to and depend on it are respected and valued for their intrinsic and fundamental roles. We need to build a new relationship with the planet that is inclusive of all of its inhabitants. With a fresh approach towards animals and the ecological systems of Earth, humans can create more rewarding and ethical communities and relationships built on deeper understandings and firm principles of justice.

The Animal Justice Party seeks a restoration of the balance between the human, natural and animal worlds which acknowledges the interconnectedness and inter-dependence of these worlds, and respects the wellbeing of animals alongside that of humans, societies, economies and environments.

Vision

A planet on which animals are treated with respect, dignity, compassion and kindness, where they are able to flourish in their respective environments, and where their unique needs and capabilities are recognised and their interests are protected.

Mission

To promote and protect the interests and capabilities of animals by providing a dedicated voice for them in Australia’s political system.

Fundamental Factors

To implement its vision and give effect to its mission, the Animal Justice Party recognises the importance of the following:

• An education system which fosters in its values an awareness of the natural and animal worlds, and of human responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of the Earth and its inhabitants

• A political system in which participatory, deliberative democracy can be exercised so that citizens have the ability to express their true concerns about the treatment of animals

• An administrative system in which governments and institutions deal with animal and environmental issues in a transparent, honourable and accountable manner

• An economic system in which ethics, the protection of the natural world and its inhabitants, and the realisation of capability of all beings are highly valued for their intrinsic roles

• A societal system in which we acknowledge that it is our human duty and responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of all animals

• A robust legal system that recognises and protects the interests and capabilities of humans, animals and their environments

• A population settlement and land use system that is truly sustainable for all its inhabitants and ecosystems.

Principles

In all its actions, the Animal Justice Party will be guided by the following principles:

• Each animal is the experiencing subject of a life. Animals and the natural environment should be respected for their own sake, not merely for their instrumental values

• Animals have their own capabilities which they should be free to realise

• Human interactions with all animals should be based on respect and compassion

• Humans have the responsibility to avoid harm to animals and the environment through their lifestyles, diets and practices

• Policies of other political parties, both nationally and internationally, that advance Animal Justice Party principles will be supported.

Key Goals

The Animal Justice Party seeks the following:

• A legal framework and an administrative system in which animals' status is based on their sentience and capabilities, not their instrumental value

• Constitutional protection of animals and the environment

• A political decision-making process that is more responsive to the needs and interests of all animals

• An end to human practices that cause pain and distress to animals

• An end to the killing of animals for human benefit

• An end to the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment that is the habitat of so many unique Australian native animals

• Adoption by an increasing number of Australians of lifestyles and diets that are more respectful towards animals and the environment

• An acknowledgement that violence and cruelty are not the default settings for society and animals, nor are they solutions for planetary sustainability.

Key Strategies

The Animal Justice Party will:

For All animals

• Develop a new legal status for animals which acknowledges their rights to live protected from human harm

• Ensure consistency in the protection of all animals – companion, farmed and wild – regardless of their commercial or instrumental value, or their geographic location

• Support laws, policies and practices that enhance the quality of life of animals and reduce animal suffering

• Oppose laws, policies and practices which harm animals and their environments

• Support and promote lifestyles, practices and diets which maximise support for, and minimise harm to, animals and the environment

• Support the work of appropriately accredited volunteers who care for injured, orphaned and mistreated animals

• Support commercial and recreational ventures that provide opportunities for humans to spend time with animals on the animals' terms and in their worlds, and otherwise raise humans' awareness of animals, their needs, and their quality of life

• Promote values education that recognises the interests and dignity of animals as individual beings.

For Farm animals

• Support animal-friendly farming practices

• Oppose intensive farm animal production and processes that deprive animals of their basic needs and capabilities, expose them to confinement, painful procedures, temperature extremes and other inappropriate husbandry practices, and generally reduce them to the status of commodities

• Oppose transportation of live animals over long distances or otherwise in ways that cause suffering, or expose them to extreme cruelty at the end of the journey

• Oppose the importation of animal products derived from cruel animal production systems in other countries.

For Animals used in experimentation

• Support non-invasive research methods to improve human health as alternatives to the use of animals and animal products

• Oppose the use of animals in any scientific experimentation that inflicts pain, stress, distress and behavioural deprivation unless it is likely to result in a net benefit to the particular animal involved.

For Wild animals

• Enhance animal habitats and foster healthy ecosystems through dedicated terrestrial and marine parks and wildlife corridors, land revegetation and remediation, and animal-friendly land practices

• Oppose the institutional, commercial and recreational killing of wildlife

• Support the development and adoption of non-invasive and non-lethal methods to control native and introduced animal populations, including fertility control and more appropriate land management methods

• Support commercial and recreational ventures that seek to raise humans' awareness of the intrinsic worth of wildlife and natural environments.

For Companion animals

• Support measures to protect animals dependent on human guardians and to prevent their neglect, ill treatment or abandonment.

For Animals used in sport and entertainment

• Oppose the killing and mistreatment of animals in sport, recreation and entertainment.

To join the Animal Justice Party, click here.
© Animal Justice Party, Australia, 2010. For more information, contact: info[AT]animaljusticeparty.org

The New Australia Party is the second new party with a small population policy, we have covered in two days, but it is not single-issue. The population policy appears to be an important and central one. The party has a wide range of policies and which members can contribute to. They are also looking for members. The policies they have had which I have read quickly seem very good - better than the major parties at any rate. See in the notes section at the end of this article a comment about their views on the kangaroo meat industry, which at time of writing I note are currently subject to a yahoo poll.[1]

I would suggest that this party is a good one for people to get involved in if they have specific interests in policy formation.
Here is some information about the founder, Alan Ide.

On the party site, it says that "NewAustralia was founded following the collapse of the Democrats at the last election. Some NewAustralia members and in particular the founder had tried hard to steer The Democrats in the direction now adopted by this site. After the election we resolved to use the accumulated policy material to try and launch a new party."

Below are links to the New Australia Party site, the policies and the way to join.

Alan Ide, the founder of the New Australia Party writes:

"In the lead up to the election Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott are trying hard to convince us that there is some difference between the parties beyond the spelling of their names.

In reality though Lib/Labs present a united front on almost all aspects of policy.

Tony Abbott's climate package reminds us that the Lib/Labs will never do anything serious about the Greenhouse problem. The two packages on offer are just two different ways of continuing business as usual. Both avoid the polluter having to pay. The Libs are more honest - they don't charge the polluters at all. Labor's muddled ETS charges some of the polluters via the sale of emission permits, but then offsets this cost with even more fossil fuel subsidies. The result will be the same - Australia will remain dependent on coal and the world's worst greenhouse polluter.

The Lib/Lab position on population is the more the merrier. For them there are no limits to growth. Not enough water? Build another few coal-fired desal-plants. GDP will go up. GDP per head may even go up as people have to pay more for accommodation, food and water. Quality of life however will be going down.

On transport, the Lib/Labs will continue to heavily favour road-based transport as they do at the State level. Even when money is allocated to public transport it is often wasted. In Victoria billions have been poured into public transport - to fund a ticket system that doesn't work and a wavy roof for a station. Meanwhile road building continues apace.

Defence is another are of near-total agreement. The Lib/Labs will continue to pour money into expensive but obsolete 'assets' such as the Joint Strike Fighter, destroyers and assault ships. This is even as the chorus of criticism about the slow, short range JSF grows louder and its clear inferiority to competitors becomes more apparent. At the same time it becomes more and more evident that the era of the surface warship is well and truly over - yet still the Lib/Labs pour billions into these indefensible future war graves.

Right now the only other choice is the Greens and a few single-issue parties. Unfortunately though Green policy involves massive tax increases, open door migration and little if any national defence. No wonder they are stuck on about 10% of the vote!

NewAustralia offers a way forward. We are a multi-issue party. We do propose a major tax swap, not a major tax increase. We propose a more cost-effective defence strategy, not a no-defence strategy. We advocate a stable population for the world and Australia. We would preference the Greens and other like minded policies - adding to the net environmental vote, not splitting it.

But to do this we need members - 500 of them. If you like what you see at www.NewAustralia.net then click the Join button. Its free and you don't have to do anything else - until we get 500 members.

Alan Ide
Founder"

Candobetter Editor's Notes

Given the presence of animal activists and anti-kangaroo industry activists on this site, it is relevant to note that the New Australia Party is very strong on ecological values, but it is obvious that it has come from a different direction than many of the activists on this site. It comes from the same direction I initially came from, and supported the kangaroo industry for idealistic reasons, which some members will hotly defend. As a participant in their 'Supporters' Forum' I managed to have the statement at the end about statistics not being adequate to go ahead inserted to modify their policy (See below). There was even some discussion about getting rid of it since it is not core policy and I now see that there a poll on the issue has just been posted at yahoo - see below.

Below is the policy, and the paragraph in question in the poll with the statement that I wrote highlighted at the end.

"Kangaroo - Farming kangaroos to produce Kangaroo meat rather than beef and sheep meat may have environmental benefits. Kangaroos have much lower methane output and water inputs during meat production. Kangaroo is also healthier to eat then beef or sheep, and kangaroos have a lower impact on the land. For this to work kangaroos would have to be properly farmed as opposed to hunting roaming populations which would not be sustainable on a large scale. Climate Taxes on methane producing animals may assist kangaroo farming to become economically viable - although higher fencing and other costs may make kangaroo farming unviable.

Harvesting of roaming native populations should only be continued once the statistics on kangaroo and other indigenous fauna became reliable, which is currently not the case."

Poll to remove the kangaroo paragraph from the New Australia Party policies:

Enter your vote today! A new poll has been created for the
NewAustralia group:

Should NewAustralia remove the 'kangaroo paragraph' (http://www.newaustralia.net/rural.html#kangaroo) from its web site?

o Yes
o No

To vote, please visit the following web page:
the following web page.

Thanks!

Note also that the Justice for Animals Party may incorporate a small population policy; I know that one of the organisers is working on this.