Murdoch & Fairfax press spit dummy at Brumby's population 'limits'

On 28 July Premier John Brumby came out and said that he thought that Victoria had reached its population limit. A couple of days later he said that he didn't plan to increase immigration. He didn't say that he intended to decrease it though. Australia’s net rate of immigration is higher than it has ever been. Victoria has its own internet site which invites immigrants from all over the world, promising to facilitate entry and settlement. If Brumby doesn't decrease immigration, this means that the population will continue to grow at a very rapid rate in Victoria.

The sector which has goaded Victoria into overshoot typically shirks responsibility.

You might think that the people who run the country - the property developers, the mainstream press, and the banks - would be satisfied with this, but you would be suffering from the same kind of illusion that so many partners of addicts have lived under. Our unofficial rulers, the big end of town - are no more likely to accept limits than a heroine addict or a two year old child. It doesn't matter that their dose is still being constantly augmented; the very idea that it will not be continuously compounded, will send them into spasms. They will seek to place pressure on their supplier, the Victorian government.

Will other Premiers stand on their hind legs too?

Other state premiers, under the same orders, must be watching Victoria avidly, wondering why Brumby has stuck his head up over the parapet. This could put them on the spot too. After all, there isn't a State government in Australia that isn't pushing a very fragile envelope with population, resources, water, petroleum, shaky banks, and infrastructure. The whole lot of them must spend much of their time with their hands in their mouths, fingers stifling nervous screams. And what about the Federal government? No sooner did he hit the Lodge, the Prime Minister practically promised to increase Australia's population to 30 million by 2030.

Is Brumby very brave, or is he surrounded by such cowards that he simply seems brave? Has he recently actually tuned his ear to public discontent?

In our July 1, 2008, "Open letter to John Brumby on his admission that Victoria has an overpopulation problem," we predicted that

"(...) the corporate drivers of [the Victorian] government's program - such as the banks and the engineers in the Academy of Technological and Scientific Engineering (ATSE), and the developers and their allies in the Property Council of Australia, who have dug themselves very deeply into the housing and infrastructure economy, which is costing the rest of us so much - will continue to try to push the government into more unsustainable growth."

And we said that,

"We know that the mainstream press will not be your friend if you start to represent the public democratically in this matter."

We said that because we know that the mainstream press is the mouthpiece of the corporate world which, in Australia, is preponderantly interested in the expansion of mining, primary industry, housing and infrastructure, and that it attempts to manipulate the drivers of this kind of expansion by getting governments in Australia to increase Australia's population through immigration and pronatalism.

Right on cue, came The Herald Sun's really appalling editorial of July 29th 2008, "Premier goes off the message." This Murdoch-gem of pollie-heckling, needs to be acknowledged as an archetypal hysterical response, completely irrational, not even acknowledging the reality that Brumby is talking about, which is that Victoria is in overshoot and we should not be placing more pressure on the State's resources and capacity.

Let us examine the hyperbole:

Firstly, the Herald-Sun puts words in Victorians' mouths, saying that the Victorian people, "(...) expect the Premier to come up with answers, not run up a white flag of surrender."

"The message that Victoria is struggling to cope with the increasing numbers of people who want to live here is not the one John Brumby should be sending out."

Pardon? The writer seems to be saying that they know what lines the Premier was given to recite and that he has read from the wrong cue-board, or, zounds! he has ad-libbed.

Then the Herald-Sun editorialist seems almost to whine:

"If we take his words at face value Victoria is not "The Place To Be"."

This reminded us of a quip by Mr Thompson, the Liberal Member for Sandringham, "

"The topic is that the house congratulates the Brumby government on making Victoria a great place to live, work and raise a family for a million more migrants. Fundamentally," he said, "it should be retitled 'a great place to live, work, raise a family and speak in clichés'"

But, back to the Herald Sun editorial. The writer goes even further over the top, calling it, "an admission of failure" that "Twelve months after his elevation to the premiership, Mr Brumby has surprised us by saying in a Herald Sun interview: "I think we are probably at the limits (of growth)."

Hearteningly, the Herald-Sun also finds Mr Brumby's assessment of the situation, "curious".

"It is also curious, given Mr Brumby has been a vigorous and sometimes brave leader in his first year. "

One might almost hope that Brumby was actually sincere and that his remarks were independent.

Of course, in the end, we may find that Brumby was just holding out for more rewards from the infrastructure moguls.
We hope not.

Even though Brumby has taken his foot off the accelerator pedal, he hasn't put it on the brakes and the country is still running downhill.

Perhaps the most unreal part of this very unreal article was the insistence that the newspaper was representing what the people wanted. In fact, the Herald-Sun had just conducted a poll, "Is Melbourne's population growing too fast?" (In our opinion the poll should have asked, "Is Melbourne's population too big?" and the actual wording of the poll was yet another example of marketing a biased initial assumption, that growth was not in question; just the rate of growth. Nonetheless, the results of the Herald Sun poll at 5.30pm on 31st of July were:

Herald Sun Poll: Is Melbourne's population growing too fast?

Yes
82% (760 votes)
No
17% (163 votes)
Total votes
Total of 923 votes

Furthermore, the first Brumby article, "Premier John Brumby warns of dangers in growing too fast," elicited 62 comments of which approximately 60 were resoundingly negative about population growth. So it all adds to the unreality when the Herald Sun editorial presents the view that Victorians would be impatient at the idea that Mr Brumby might reneg on continuously racheted growth.

"Ultimately Mr Brumby must recognise that while Victorians will tolerate difficulties in fixing the state's problems, there is a limit to their patience. They expect the Premier to come up with answers, not run up a white flag of surrender."

What did The Age have to say about Brumby's views on limits to growth?

We were also interested to see which of half a dozen familiar ways the Fairfax press might choose to punish Mr Brumby.

It did seem a bit desperate of them to bring Ted Baillieu into the discussion right away, and have him apparently trot out the slur in "Brumby 'blaming' migrants," by David Rood, on August 2, 2008.

The slur was disappointingly predictable, and appears to have come from a deplorable press release from the Victorian Liberals the day before, "Brumby's panicked population backflip". In it Ted Baillieu correctly observed that the ALP Government had failed to cater for its population push for Melbourne. He then, however, took the low ground, referring to 'Fortress Victoria' and accusing Brumby of "slamming on the brakes and slamming the door on migrants, who contribute so much to our economy and society."

Although in Parliament the opposition have been continuously deploring the impact of high immigration in Victoria, their leader, Ted Baillieu, without actually saying how many Victorians he wants, came out and said, according to the Age, in ("Brumby 'blaming' migrants") that the Premier was making migrants into scapegoats in an "appalling" attempt to cover for his failure to deliver basic services such as public transport, hospitals and water."

Ted did not sink as low as he might have, however, since, "when asked [by the Age] if the Premier was "playing the race-card", Ted said he was not.

Why did the Age ask whether Brumby's comments could put Victoria's social cohesion at risk?

"Asked whether Mr Brumby's comments could put Victoria's social cohesion at risk, Mr Baillieu said some pretty ordinary messages were being sent overseas at the moment. He said some international students from India and Asia had been the victims of violent attacks," quoth The Age.

What has this got to do with the Premier's recognising that Victoria's population is in overshoot of its resources and infrastructure? Is Mr Brumby expected to continue to ramp up immigration until the city is completely overwhelmed, traffic at a standstill, with shanty towns in the parks and people sleeping in the subways and streets?

Why doesn't the Age admit that the social cohesion of Victoria has been damaged by the ramming through of intensification measures such as in Melbourne 2030. The Age could not have remained unaware of the plethora of negative submissions to the government on Channel Deepening, the Melbourne 2030 audit, and the Land and Biodiversity White Paper, to name a few issues arising from artificially stimulated population growth plans.

A case could be made that the Age is threatening Victoria's social cohesion by quoting Ted Baillieu's words in what seems like an irrelevantly racist beat-up. Why didn't the Age ask the Premier for the real reasons for his apparent epiphany of caution? What about some thoughtful interviewing for a change? Why pretend that this is anti-immigrant? What about pro-stability? It looks from their slant like The Age would like to shut the public up on the subject of population numbers by making it seem a dangerous and unsavoury topic, and to put Brumby off any independent thinking by dragging Ted Baillieu ostentiously across the path like a bait. In other words, it seems like The Age is using unfair tactics to influence or silence political debate.

"We have to send the right message. Scapegoating migrants for a failure to plan and a failure to deliver basic services is wrong, it's appalling, it's pretty low," Mr Baillieu said.

Why did Baillieu suggest that the Premier was 'scapegoating migrants'? What evidence did he give for that statement? Why did the Age print it without strong supporting evidence?

When asked if the Premier was playing "the race card", Mr Baillieu said "I'm not suggesting that.

It shows how over the top the attacks on Brumby are when even an immigration spokesperson, the Chairwoman of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia, Voula Messimeri, finds that there is nothing wrong in what he said, noting, unfortunately, that immigration is at a very high rate still.

""I don't think slowing the rate of growth is blaming immigration or ethnic communities," she said. "Victoria has absorbed a large number of migrants and done a pretty good job in making sure that cultural diversity and migrants are seen as valued," she is reported to have said, by The Age.

The Age article continued with their strange beat-up:

"Despite his attack on the Premier, Mr Baillieu would not nominate a figure for which he thought Victoria's population growth rate should be set. "You have growth rate you can accommodate," he said. "I'm not going to lay a figure on the table and say 'that's it and then you shut the door'."

Of course Mr Baillieu isn't going to nominate a figure; presumably he knows that whatever figure he cites it will not be enough for the Age or the Herald Sun, but it will be too much for the voters.

The journalist observed,

"Nor would the Opposition Leader say whether he thought national migration levels should increase."

And nor did the Age journalist apparently canvass the opposition leader's opinion as to whether he thought national migration levels should decrease. Why not?

National migration levels have increased above any previous levels already, and the Prime Minister is obviously under instructions to pump them up even further. It is well known that ATSE and the Multicultural Foundation of Australia and the Scanlon Foundation, would like our immigration rate to increase annually.

The Age subsequently ran a poll about Victorians' attitudes to Australia's population growth, with this result:

Is Victoria's population growing too fast?
Yes - 77%

No - 23%

Total Votes: 934 (on 2 August 2008 at 11.20pm)

Once again the public are only given a choice about 'rate' of growth, not 'growth' per se.
Their answer is pretty unequivocal though.

We can probably expect more articles soon which will suggest that Victorians are becoming racist because they think the population is growing too fast, and there will be some familiar faces from the growth lobby talking about how Victorians need to be educated [again] about the benefits of immigration.

Hopefully Mr Brumby will withstand the pressure. Let us dare to hope against hope that this is just a prelude to a much lower population growth rate in Victoria. Staying at the current very high growth rate is courting disaster. Wouldn't it be wonderful to STOP growing? And, wouldn't it be fabulous if Mr Brumby were to actually govern for the people instead of for the media and the rest of the big end of town? That would make him a truly unusual 21st century western politician.

See also: Open letter to John Brumby on his admission that Victoria has an overpopulation problem of 31 Jul 08.