We’ve got a problem in Australia. For many decades our way of life has been under attack from within. A persistent voice via the mainstream media has ruled our dinner party conversations.
Let’s start with the way we live in suburbs of large cities - largely in detached bungalows surrounded by gardens.
Well, NO, according to what comes through the megaphone of the media. Living like this is a waste of space and terribly unsophisticated. We should take a leaf from the book of Europe, its cities built centuries before our own and catering for different needs and differing modes of transport. First, back in the 1980s some were persuaded to live in "units" with tiny courtyards, but now it's full-on, all the way, apartments for the present and future population !
Furthermore, we have been divided into multiple different groups, according to when we were born, and we all have a generation label. The other day I read a reference to “Gen Z.” I can’t remember them all, so I must look that one up!! The various age groupings have not all been set against each other but rather they have all been set against a group called the "Baby Boomers," born post the Second World War. This managed antipathy would not be necessary, but for the fact that Australia’s living standards are falling to the extent that the younger generations are not going to have as much of life’s material necessities as their forebears. So the story goes that the Baby Boomers took everything due to their extreme greed and selfishness, and all at the expense of subsequent generations.
If you imagine the engineered divisions as cutting an apple tart, the larger slices are the generations, apart from the obvious first bisection into male and female, with a minority who fit into neither category. Then we have the religious and ethnic/cultural groups. Add to this we have neurodiversity and gender identities, with which the national broadcaster occupies itself One very real division, which was not nearly as marked 50 years ago, is the wealth divide with the erosion of the middle class. Not enough attention is paid to this as Australians move down the economic ladder towards homelessness and poverty.
These processes are inextricably tied up with greatly increased immigration levels over the past two decades. Immigration accounts for about 80% of Australia’s population growth. It is because of these numbers and the anticipated numbers that Australian society and way of life is being displaced. Immigration now rules all aspects of our lives. Planning systems must be changed to accommodate the influx, and these changes mean serial demolitions of established houses, new major roads, infrastructure upgrades, and more trucks in our streets, as well as cranes and bulldozers, creating noise and necessitating detours.
The skilled trade work forces has been diverted into a massive building exercise, so that it is now nearly impossible to hire anyone to maintain existing buildings. The standard of workmanship has nosedived according to tradespeople I know.
There has been a transformation of the economy, such that the main game in town is property development, buying, and selling. Whilst the very achievable dream of young people 50 years ago was to buy a house with land for the anticipated family, that dream has now all but evaporated into a life of apartment renting or purchasing, both necessitating two salaries.
Current generations have indeed lost out, but Australians are being persuaded to blame one generation for this, rather than the real forces behind it - those who, with their sure-fire recipe of eternal and ever faster population growth led the charge against that relatively benign society.
Some have been able to foresee where this is headed. Logically, Australians will be stripped of their land and therefore their autonomy.
The main ingredient of the recipe - population growth - is a choice successive governments have made, even though it is harming the people already in Australia. It is causing our arable land to be covered in all the ingredients of our ever-spreading suburbs. This is taking over farm land and riding roughshod over nature and wildlife. Some have been concerned about this on the grounds of sustainability, questioning the objective of a large ever-growing population on a mostly arid and infertile continent. They know the process of accelerating and infinite population growth will end in disaster. They desperately want to stop this trajectory towards environmental catastrophe. They try to convince others, sometimes with success, but they cannot stop the wheels of government, which seem to do nothing other than facilitate the process at the expense of their electorates. The environmentalists concerned about population growth are, on the whole careful and practiced at plying their arguments, because they must avoid the pitfall of being labelled "racists." Of course, it’s just about impossible to avoid this, as the label “racist” is often the only weapon that can be levelled - however unfairly - against their logical, eminently sensible position.
Another group, perhaps more directly and immediately affected by turbo population growth feels usurped and culturally affronted. They lack the nuance of the environmental side and scream out their raw objection to being treated in this way.
To the environmentalists, these people are wrong and so they are paralysed in joining forces. The disapprobation of association is too uncomfortable to bear.
All the massaging of public opinion by the media over at least four decades has paid off. In effect it has silenced us as a society and rendered us politically impotent. The divisions sown between the generations by big-business and government have created wedges of distrust, preventing us from communicating. The continuous displacement through infilling, infrastructure insertion, and flight in search of affordability and peace, have structurally disorganised us. The monopoly on mass media by a few powerful elites means that we only see what they want reflected there; we do not see any faithful representation of what we are actually experiencing.
A sociology of immigration politics in Australia
I had a conversation about this with sociologist and candobetter dot net editor, Sheila Newman. She has an interesting explanation of why self-censorship is so effective in preventing people from speaking up.
In her view, the contemporary takeover of state and commercial media by big-business interests stigmatises criticism of massive immigration numbers. Such criticism is deemed racist, as most of us realise. This situation is very similar to old theocracies where monarchy and church promoted shame, guilt, and paralysis over sexuality. It was a medieval masterstroke to make for example masturbation wrong since nearly every human experiences thoughts about masturbation, often leading to actions. Likewise, today in Australia, criticism of what amounts to a bureaucratically-organised invasion by numbers, is proscribed by the government, and most political voices since it gets labelled as 'racism.' If you grew up believing that immigration is a right that supercedes the rights of the host population, then to express or even think against this, makes you a 'racist.' To experience doubts about your motivations makes you deeply flawed. So you don’t do it now unless you are in the company of highly trusted people. See more in an article here.
If you would like to know more about the way the Church and State acted to disempower people and how the French, but not the British, managed to have a democratic revolution, overthrowing this duopoly, see, Sheila Newman, Land Tenure and the Revolution in Democracy and Birth Control in France, Countershock Press, 2024.
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