overpopulation

Hi to you all, and particularly to those of you who I do not know. As you will have heard from Mary, I have agreed to take over as Convenor from Mary Drost OAM. In 2005 Mary established Planning Backlash as an umbrella organisation and coalition of community and resident action groups. For the past 16 years it  has worked to protect Melbourne’s liveability, and to give residents a say in the character of their street and their neighbourhood. Mary turned 90 this year, and is handing over the reins, to better focus on two key objectives; writing her memoirs, and living to be 100, so she can go to London and demand her letter from the Queen in person! She has done a mighty job, and we and all of Melbourne are in her debt. Big shoes to fill.

Mary has agreed to my suggestion that we adopt the name Planning Democracy. I think that the organisation is due for a makeover, and that Planning Democracy better reflects our aim of ensuring that residents have a genuine say in planning issues in Melbourne.

The video inside the article is a record of the third ARAG (Ashburton Residents Action Group) public rally over six years in the residential battle to protect Markham Estate and the surrounding streets and environment.

What was once a 56 apartment, two storey public housing community in Ashburton turned into a six year nightmare for residents when the State Government announced it would be replacing the 56 apartments with 240, of which only 60 would be for public housing; the rest to be sold privately for a fortune.

This outrageous proposal galvanised the community and they have been fighting for a fair go and consultation ever since.

Speakers at this rally included ARAG leaders Ian and Rita, David Davis (Shadow Planning Minister), Cr Garry Thompson (Mayor of Boroondara) and Clifford Hayes MP (Sustainable Australia Party).

In attendance was Will Fowles MP (Member for Burwood) who declined to speak.

Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) are partnering with filmmaker Maxine Trump on the Australian premiere of her award winning film To Kid or Not to Kid in Melbourne and Perth on the 26 and 27 February. The documentary is being screened as part of SPA’s ‘Stop at Two’ campaign. This will be the first time the film will be screened in theatres before being released on Amazon Prime on February 27th.

SPA National President, Sandra Kanck, says the aim of the campaign is to normalise the choice of having small or childfree families.

“The choice whether or not to have children is one of the biggest decisions any individual or couple will make in their lifetime,” says Ms Kanck.

“This decision is often swayed by family and social factors that have traditionally encouraged larger families. It is clear, however, that overpopulation is playing a very significant role in humans’ unsustainable impact on the planet, including climate change and these matters are now bearing on the decisions made by many to have smaller families or no family at all.

“As an environmental NGO, we advocate for smaller families as one solution towards reducing pressures on the Earth and support those who go down that path,” says Ms Kanck.

The 'densification' that planners push to accommodate overpopulation drives increasing water pollution risks, along with climate change. “Generally, we expect urbanisation to increase groundwater DOC (dissolved organic carbon) concentrations by up to 19 per cent, compared to agricultural or natural land use, likely as the result of contamination – for example, through leaking septic and sewer systems.” (Research paper.)

Climate change and urbanisation are set to threaten groundwater drinking water quality, new research from UNSW Sydney shows.
More than half of the world’s population faces a looming threat to the quality and availability of their drinking water because climate change and urbanisation are expected to cause an increase in groundwater organic carbon, a new UNSW study has found.

The research, published in Nature Communications overnight, examined the largest global dataset of 9404 published and unpublished groundwater dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations from aquifers in 32 countries across six continents.

People should know about the state government’s amendments to the Land Tax Act. An interesting article was written about it by Michael Flynn QC in The Age of February 17th 2020. regarding the amendment to the Land Tax Act to restrict land tax exemptions on contiguously rated properties only to regional Victoria. See: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/home-owners-could-be-slugged-with-an-unfair-tax-20200213-p540jq.html. These changes have resulted in charging land tax for anyone in metropolitan Melbourne with vacant land contiguous with their place of residence. Until now, land adjacent to your home was exempt from Land Tax if the property was rated by Council as contiguous (i.e. house and land rated as one parcel of land) The new amendment has changed this to now levy the tax on any properties in metropolitan Melbourne which have contiguous vacant land next to a place of residence. (For the purposes of this exercise, Mornington Peninsula also is considered to be metropolitan by the way). A paltry $43 million revenue is anticipated.

Why, once again, does the ABC avoid the issue of population growth, the primary cause of housing affordability. It is simply a fantasy to believe that adding another 400,000 people to Australia's population every year is not relevant

What follows is the text of a complaint lodged with the Australian ABC regarding the bias in its reporting on housing in a series of segments on the 7.30 report:-

“This week, the 7.30 Report included 4 segments on the above subject.

Once again, the ABC avoided the key issue like the plague.

It can be argued that housing affordability is Australia's greatest problem. Thousands of young couples in particular are having to save for years and years to accumulate a house deposit while prices skyrocket. This puts relationships under strain, and means that they often have to put off having families until they are well into their 30s, while often having to pay back a large HECS debt, and repay large mortgage instalments at the same time.

And it is not only young people who are affected. There are many older women who are caught in a rental trap.And don't get me started on the desperately bad housing conditions being experienced by our indigenous folk.

On the nights of February 11, 12 and 13, 2020, the ABC has shown three related 15 minute pieces in its 7.30 Reports, on the subject of housing. These segments have stressed the cost of housing and the gulf that exists between those who are able to afford or who own their house, comparing the situation of people who cannot afford a house, and who are thus obliged to rent. These programs have, however, completely failed to talk about Australia's extremely rapid population growth, which now requires the construction of the equivalent of a Canberra every year, [corrected 15.2.20] just to preserve the ratio of housing supply to housing demand. Most flagrant omission of all, the ABC says nothing at all about the fact that this is intentional government policy. We publish a letter of complaint which was sent to the ABC on this matter.

In the Beginning …
Earth’s atmosphere was unbreathable to humans. But that was okay, since there were no humans. Photosynthesising cyanobacteria used sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into food, incidentally producing oxygen. The many microbially-mediated rocks (stromatolites) the bacteria left behind from their halcyon days indicate a cyanobacteria population explosion so vast that it seems likely that simple metabolism accidentally transformed the atmosphere to the one we love and overuse today. This ‘oxygen holocaust’ probably also brought about the fossil status of our inadvertent benefactors around 2.5 billion years ago.

Planning Backlash writes: We have an urgent matter in Frankston as Cr Hampton is putting up a Notice of Motion (NOM) at next Tuesday's meeting on 28 January 2020 to reverse Council's decision on the Frankston Green Wedge Management Plan of 14 October 2019 to allow instead industrial expansion in the Green Wedge as well as subdivisions for residential use. See happy outcome here.

2020/NOM 8

It's a very lengthy NOM which includes allowing expansion of the industrial area into the Frankston's Green Wedge and allowing that ‘areas of land suitable only for grazing agricultural activities in Precinct 2 ... be better utilised for purposes other than agriculture – e.g. for employment or residential uses’.

The lengthy NOM 8 is in next Tuesday's Agenda for OM 1, 2020, Item 14.5, at:

Michael McLaren speaks with Clifford Hayes, Member of the Legislative Assembly – Sustainable Australia Party’s Southern Metropolitan region Victoria, about his private members bill which proposes significant changes to the Planning and Environment Act 1987 which will give local councils more control of local planning policy and maximum building heights in their municipal districts. Remember Clifford's important bill will be put to Parliament this Wednesday morning (13 November 2019) about 10 or so. Consider coming to show your support by sitting in the gallery for the vote.

Clifford Hayes, MP., of Sustainable Australia Party, asked Mr Jennings MP (Leader of the Government) to investigate selling public spaces to local governments at a nominal amount, given that population growth is driving ongoing decline in open space per capita in Melbourne. Mr Jennings' 'nothing to see here' response smacks disingenuously of avoiding the obvious context of the government's massive population growth-engineering and overdevelopment, which is driving an accelerated reduction in space and all kinds of ammenities, as well as democracy.

Question without notice - Public Land Use (Wednesday 17 October 2019)

“This is where we have got to with government-engineered breakneck population growth that also puts property developers and associated professions in charge of planning. 110 golf-courses, which occupy green, treed spaces, in all kinds of areas in Melbourne and its suburbs and another 374 in Victorian regions, now carry hugely increased potential resale value if speculators can get them rezoned for more intensive use. Predictably, golf-course owners and probably management committees are now complaining that they aren’t making enough money. Some of their complaints will be well-founded, because state-imposed population pressure has caused demand for land, water and power, hence their costs, to rise rapidly. If nothing is done, either to reduce population growth, or exempt golf-courses from paying these charges, they will skyrocket.” (Sheila Newman, Population, environment and land-tenure systems sociologist.)

Waleed Aly ("A Rhetorical State of Emergency," Sydney Morning Herald, 12 September 2019,) has dressed up banality as insight and has been very long-winded about it. His focus is climate change and he laments the fact that we have so "engineered a lack of [political] consensus" that Australia is never likely to successfully address it.

But there is a sense that Waleed believes his unique understanding sets him apart from the problems he describes ... I would like to help him find his feet of clay.

That we worry about climate change is because of the harm it is doing and will do to the natural environment; Waleed's focus, therefore, ought to be environmental decline from any cause, and not just climate change.

Melbourne lacks open green spaces. Unfinancial golf-courses should be returned to nature, to provide scarce habitat to our native animals and contact with nature for humans. These golf-courses often got by on the pretext that they would preserve open land, as a trade-off for more development. Melbourne is not just overdeveloped, it is overpopulated. Furthermore, our building industry is so incompetent that all its activities should be halted. Below you can read the nonsense being proposed by your government, as an excuse to give more land and free kicks to developers. It's a criminal economy that takes nature and destroys it just for more dollars for Australia's rich and greedy class. Submissions opened on 2 September 2019. Submissions can be made until 5.00pm on 30 September 2019. See example of a submission from Sheila Newman here: "Save 110 golf-courses for birds, not high-rises - Sociologist".

Lord Mayor Clover Moore has nothing to congratulate herself on with regard to homelessness in Sydney. The City of Sydney’s most recent street count has revealed that homelessness has risen and crisis shelters are at capacity. Although the City has been collecting levies from developers to create affordable housing since 2004, it has only created 835 new affordable housing dwellings in that time. Whilst the *official* number of homeless in Sydney reached 592 in August 2019 (with so many more couch-surfing and living on credit), Australia has continued to import approximately one million immigrants every two years, pushing up the price of housing and causing pressure on Sydney's very scarce land, to the extent that NSW State Premier, Gladys Berejiklian asked the Federal Government to halve the immigration numbers - to no avail. Lendlease private developments is forcing new suburbs into koala territory despite years of organised protests from nearby residents.

"Your program and so many on the ABC ignore the real prospect of widespread social, economic and environmental breakdown consequent on a human population having exceeded the long term carrying capacity of Nature. The ABC in its general coverage assumes a continuation of Business as Usual. Climate change, if present trends continue leads to a world 3 – 4 degrees warmer at century’s end. (David Attenborough in his recent TV program on climate change used the figures 3 - 6 degrees.) Together with declines in soil quality, water availability, food shortages and massive biodiversity loss these things have many scientists foreshadowing an imminent reduction in the global human population and a world in chaos."

Dear Geraldine,

Your program re infrastructure on [16 August 2019] yesterday's 'Breakfast' program did a great disservice to your audience. It perpetuated myths not supported by facts and failed to mention the real alternative context in which matters like this must be considered.

Tomorrow it will be exactly 10 years since Kelvin Thomson spoke to the Parliament describing increasing population as the underlying cause of the world’s problems. He listed each of them - global warming, food crisis, water shortages, housing affordability, overcrowded cities, traffic congestion, species extinctions, fisheries collapse, increasing prices, waste, terrorism and war - and described the role that population growth was playing in fuelling them.

Sadly in the ten years since he gave that speech population growth has continued unabated, and Kelvin says he can’t claim that the speech has had any effect on it.

But the speech has certainly stood the test of time. Every thing he pointed out ten years ago remains valid and has been vindicated by the growing problems and turmoil that we see around us.

Kelvin Thomson gives the example of water shortages, which are now even more acute than they were in 2009. He cites a New York Times report which appeared 10 days ago (“A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises”) which said that World Resources Institute researchers had found that among cities with more than 3 million people, 33 of them, with a combined population of over 255 million, face extremely high water stress, with repercussions for both public health and social unrest.

Script by Mark Allen of Population, Permaculture and Planning and Michael Bayliss of Sustainable Population Australia.

It has been great to re-live the Apollo 11 Moon Landing’s 50 th Anniversary. What a monumental achievement and tribute to human intellectual candlepower, endeavour and above all courage. I was a Year 9 student at the time; like other classes we downed tools to watch it unfold. Our teachers were just as astonished by the audacity and precision of the Landing as we were. I – and I think most of the people who I talked with or heard from at that time – had a very rosy view of the future. Yes we were involved in a stupid war in Vietnam, but I thought the Second World War and the Holocaust were so wicked and so evil that we’d learned from that, and that there was a very strong worldwide appetite for peace. I thought that war and conflict would become a thing of the past.

I also thought that we were learning from our environmental mistakes, and that the public interest and community action groups springing up to oppose air pollution, water pollution, toxic pesticides and habitat destruction would see us lift our environmental game. In short, I thought everything would improve.

But to reflect on the Apollo 11 Moon Landing raises the question for me – what has actually happened to the world in the last 50 years?

The Sydney Morning Herald of June 4th this year reported that Kristina Keneally, labor's Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, would advocate the economic importance of immigration - a sign the Opposition is willing to make the case for a bigger Australia as it considers its post-election policy platform. It would be a policy that was against the wishes of a majority of Australians and would be destructive economically, environmentally and socially.

The SMH of June 14th stated that the official ABS figure for unemployment had increased to 5.7% . Australia's unemployment rate is now among the worst in the developed world, according to the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development of the 36 rich nations which comprise the group, Australia is now ranked 20th in terms of unemployment. Two years ago, Australia was 14th and in 2013 it was among the top 10 which does suggest we are going downhill very rapidly, especially when you consider unemployment was around 2% from the 50's right up till the oil price shock in the 70's . What makes it worse is the official unemployment figure is a very conservative estimate with others like Roy Morgan research putting it at 10.3% and also stating ;

The marches yesterday were really impressive, but there is a way that school children could be many more times effective in carving out their future on these issues. Australian and State governments are pretty resistant against democratic protests, and anyhow, our governments at all levels don't have much of a clue about what to do about providing energy to our increasing populations. Schools and schoolchildren could exert much more pressure and constructive effort at a local level and we hope they will.

Teenage thoughts on marching

I am trying to imagine myself as a 15 year old back at school and trying to make my own decision regarding the Climate Change rally today, planned weeks in advance. How capable would I have been to assess the science on Climate Change? Actually, even now I don't think I can really independently assess the data. I understand that greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere and are associated with higher temperatures. I understand that the world production of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GGEs) is increasing and that they come from the burning of coal, oil, and wood or anything combustible and are mitigated by the process of photosynthesis performed by trees and in fact all plants including plankton in the sea. Thank you plants and trees!

In this 1973 video, the Club of Rome envision a world with far less need to work long hours and with a benign system of international cooperation. I think that they would be horrified if they could see what has actually happened, and the role that the IMF has taken. I think the Club of Rome got the material settings right, though.

This short Australian interview with men from the Club of Rome in 1973 is interesting in that the data seem right. It's 1973 and they are looking to 2040-ish. Population growth is coming right up against the time they expect it to be overwhelmed by deaths. The use of natural resources has happened as predicted as too the production of waste and the dwindling quality of life. Those interviewed advocate international cooperation to address global problems and cite the European Common Market as being a good start.

The Hon. Kelvin Thomson, former Federal Member for Wills, is joining the Sustainable Australia Party. Mr Thomson served as an Australian Labor Party Councillor for the City of Coburg from 1981 to 1988, Member of the Victorian Parliament for Pascoe Vale from 1988 to 1996, and Federal Labor Member for Wills for over 20 years from 1996 until the 2016 Election. Mr Thomson will be advising Sustainable Australia’s first elected Member of Parliament, Mr. Clifford Hayes, who was elected as a Legislative Councillor for the Southern Metropolitan Region at the recent Victorian election.

Mr Hayes said, “Kelvin Thomson’s knowledge of all three levels of government, his campaign experience - he stood for public office 12 times in his career and was successful on each occasion - and his policy development expertise, having been a Shadow Minister for the Environment amongst other Shadow Ministries, Parliamentary Secretary and member of many Parliamentary Committees during his parliamentary service, will make him an invaluable asset to me, my office and to the Sustainable Australia Party.

"Media resistance has always been one of the big problems," says Sandra Kanck, who came from a family where there were seven children and she learned early that one wage did not go as far for seven as it might for fewer. From 1994-2009 Sandra served as an Australian Democrats’ Member of the upper house of the South Australian Parliament. Her ‘maiden’ speech in parliament was – predictably for those who know her – about population. For more than nine years Sandra Kanck has been either President or Vice-President of SPA, mostly the former, including reluctantly juggling the role of Acting Treasurer for three months during one of her stints as President.

Dear 7.30.
The statements being made by politicians and commentators re the size and growth of the population/immigration intake are (deliberately) ignorant, seriously uninformed or deliberately politically biased. And the coverage of this issue by your program and ABC journalists more generally also lack quality research, lack of 'joining the dots', failure to question unfounded claims by the above and, in some cases, unquestioned acceptance and repeat of demonstrably untrue statements.
Please consider the following demonstrable facts and follow the inevitable conclusion.

Infrastructure, including, schools, hospitals, police stations, utilities for water and electricity, roads etc. do not last forever. It's estimated that across the broad sweep of all infrastructure, infrastructure has a life of ~50 years. Thus 2% of the total capital value of all infrastructure must be spent every year just to maintain but not to improve infrastructure for the existing population.

Recently, largely due to high immigration intakes, our population has been growing at 1.6% pa. Not long ago the rate was as high as 2%. But at 1.6% this means that 3.6% of the total capital value of all infrastructure must be spent each and every year just to maintain the level of service; that is an 80% increase in the cost of infrastructure just to maintain the same level of service.

Ex Labor leader, Mark Latham, recently joined Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party and will be running for the NSW legislative council at the next state election. Here is his 8-Point Plan to "save Sydney “suffocating” from overpopulation and overdevelopment."

Latham's 8-Point Plan

1. Our immigration program must be framed in the interest of the people who live here now. This is especially true of policies impacting on an over-crowded, increasingly dysfunctional city like Sydney.

2. Permanent immigration numbers should be slashed, bringing them closer to their 20th Century average of 70,000 per annum (down from 190,000 currently). Temporary visas must also be cut back.

3. NSW should not take any more special refugee intakes, given the mismanagement of Syrian refugee settlement by the Baird Government.

4. Sydney’s planning laws must be overhauled to make the city more efficient and sustainable. An urban containment strategy is needed. For existing suburbs, One Nation supports development and density restrictions in under-serviced, over-crowded LGAs. The Government should publish a comprehensive report identifying these suburbs (most likely, most of the city).

BRAG has always tried to remain unaligned politically but the plans the Andrews’ Government has for centralizing planning, if re-elected, require us to take a stand. The plans are being developed in secret by Labor to ensure that massive changes can be rammed through, if re-elected, to push at least 70% of new medium to high density housing into the middle suburbs of Melbourne. What this means is that you can expect multi-storey blocks of flats in your local street and neither you nor your council will be able to do a thing about it. You will have no right to be advised, object or appeal and the first indication will be when construction commences.

And these flats won’t be just two or three story, they could be up to seven or eight storeys or even more. No more mandatory heights, no real restriction on how many dwellings per block, as Planning Minister, Richard Wynne, has told the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee that, under the changes, 10 or more dwellings could be built on a single block. Previously the maximum per block was only two dwellings per block. No more backyards or gardens and lots of concrete.

There have been many news headlines about an article in the Lancet, "Population and fertility by age and sex for 195 countries and territories, 1950–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017."

The news reports on this paper are hyperbolic - quite unwarranted. Why have they picked up on this article, which contributes less than others to the Lancet's special issue on "global burden of disease"? Just an excuse to trot out the 'birth dearth' scaremongering stories, I guess.

The paper itself presents no more than a methodological tweek on how global population data are collated. It's relation to "global burden of disease" is just to ask "how do we calculate the denominator?"
The only real news (which I gleaned from a table, not commented on in the paper) is that Global Population in 2017 was probably even bigger than UN's last estimate, by maybe 90 million! [1] Yet all that gets reported is concern about too few births!

So why not a headline like "There are 90 million more people on Earth than previously thought"?