overpopulation

“When discussing population, let your starting point be about finding the issues that you have in common. It could be about congestion, climate change, loss of heritage, the list goes on. It is not about us pushing our view of the world onto people. Instead it is about helping them to see population in a new light by showing how it connects to the issues that are important to them.” This article is based on Mark Allen's speech to the Victorian Branch of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) Seminar: Attitudes and communication in population and the environment on 23 April 2016. Videos of the event will be available soon. Mark Allen started Population Permaculture and Planning. He has a background in town planning.

It is nice to be reminded about how well the past year has gone and what a great journey it has been and it wouldn't have happened without a lot of support. I would like to give special mention to Sheila Newman, Jill Quirk, the candobetter.net website and all the folk at the permaculture village at Confest (which is where I held my first workshop during Easter last year). I would also like to thank Michael Bayliss for his unwavering support.

Connecting with these people and others has been invaluable in terms of helping to build the Population Permaculture and Planning movement that began with that first workshop. One of the reasons why I have managed to engage with so many people since then is because I have tried to take a more collaborative approach with no fixed outcome and with no expectations other than a passion to make real change....so far it seems to be working and I will discuss more about that as we go on.

Working in collaboration with people can take you to places where you never expect to go and I mean this in a good way. It can be very constructive if you get it right. You can help to bring the best out in people and they can help to bring the best out in you but if you get it wrong it can have the opposite effect.

I have been involved in activism to a greater or lesser degree for quite a number of years and I have seen a lot of activists come and go along the way. Many have burnt out, many became disillusioned and overall, despite our best efforts and some great wins along the way, the trajectory in terms of making the world a more ecologically and socially sustainable place has generally been downwards......which is quite depressing.

Part of the reason for this is because people have a tendency to bring their agendas and egos into movements. After a while it becomes all about protecting identities and valuable energy that should have been used to create systemic change is wasted in internal fighting. I am sure that you can all relate to this to a greater or lesser degree. For example I have seen animosity between vegans and non-vegans in the animal welfare movement to the point where I sometimes wonder whether the animals would have been better off had we all just gone home and watched TV.

So over time I have learnt that creating real proper decent long-term change requires more than going out and fighting the good fight so to speak. There is also a need to create underlying whole-scale cultural change from within. A great philosopher once said that you cannot overcome an addiction with the same mindset that allowed that addiction to manifest in the first place.

If we want to lift ourselves out of the very real climate emergency that we are currently facing and achieve so much more, we have to change the record; we have to re-examine our approach so that we can achieve real progress with our activism as well as ensuring that what we achieve is effective and durable.

This was my intent when I started Population Permaculture and Planning or PPP as I shall refer to it from now on. For a start...... the fact that I was taking on the issue of population knowing very well how divisive and emotionally fraught this topic can be, I realised that I had to approach it in a way that could make it as accessible to as many people as possible.

I started PPP in part because I could no longer ignore the population issue, especially knowing the impact that it has in terms of how we plan our cities (or not plan as the case may be). I had entered into the town planning profession because I thought that was the best that I could do in terms of contributing towards making the world a better place. Basically I thought that I could change things from within.

Obviously I was a bit naïve but it was worth studying planning because while my education didn't turn out to be of much use to me in a professional context, it did teach me to think critically and to understand that many issues are often more complex than they first appear. Ignoring this complexity can lead us into all kinds of problems.

For example so many planners are caught up in the high density is the solution to suburban sprawl dichotomy that they ignore the fact that high density can actually help to increase sprawl by pricing people out of the inner suburbs. One distinguished professor in WA even went on to say that the answer to this problem is to lower the quality of high density development in order to make it more affordable to people on lower incomes. I think that if we lowered the standard anymore here in Melbourne many new developments would actually start to become uninhabitable but that’s another story........

So because my drive as a planner was to try and create sustainable communities, it became increasingly apparent that we cannot ignore the topic of population growth. With Melbourne increasing in size by more than a thousand people every week, it is becomes impossible to engage in the slower more considered planning that is needed to create long term viable neighbourhoods.

The vicious circle of planning for engineered population growth

It is a case of more hastily built prefab concrete apartments and continuous sprawl beyond the urban fringe. This rapid rate of population growth of course is used to justify this type of development and this type of development is in turn perpetuated by politically engineered population growth. It is a vicious circle spinning perpetually downwards as our potential to create socially and ecologically sustainable communities continues to decrease.

What makes this fact all the more poignant is that there is an urgent need to rapidly reduce our carbon emissions and it is imperative that this starts with town planning. If we get this wrong everything is so much harder, no amount of divestment from fossil fuels will be of help if we continue to build on our food bowls and green spaces and increasingly have to rely upon sourcing our food from further and further away... and that is just the start.

Creating resilient communities is about being flexible and adaptable to changes in society that we cannot even perceive at this point in time and we are living in extremely uncertain times.

It may just be that we will come to value the larger middle suburbs that are currently targeted for subdivision and that we will look towards retrofitting them as permaculture communities. There is good soil out there that has been lovingly enriched over the decades by generations of Greek and Italian migrants and we have the infrastructure already in place to produce a good proportion of our fresh fruit and vegetables from this under-tapped resource. The cofounder of Permaculture, David Holmgren, has a new book coming out later this year that is about all of that....... but I am digressing.

So I came to realise the important interconnection of permaculture and town planning and population in terms of creating long term viable sustainable communities and that by discussing the three in context I could make the issue of population so much more approachable to so many more people.

This inspired me to start running workshops and by doing so I began to draw people in who otherwise may not have been interested in discussing population as a subject in its own right. Importantly this had to be a collaborative effort. When we engage with people about population or indeed any other subject for that matter we must try to connect with their world view, to see it from the prism of their perspective and use that as a starting point.

I always begin by brainstorming ideas with the participants at the beginning of each workshop and that way they are better able to feel as though they are part of the creative process and to share some of the ownership of the outcome. It is not a case of me lecturing to people how they should view a particular topic. Instead it is a step by step process and this always leads to an understanding that our current rate of population growth is something that has to be questioned. I am not saying that everyone comes out of the workshop agreeing that there is an urgent need to reduce population growth but almost all come out knowing that population is an important consideration and that it is ok to discuss it, especially when looking at its importance in a wider context. This means that the next time they hear the population issue brought up in discussion, they will be more open minded.

This is why I believe it is important that we help people to think about population without challenging their values or their political identity. Some people come into a workshop believing in the principle of open borders for example and they come out continuing to believe in that principle. However they also come out agreeing that in the mean time we need to slow our rate of non-refugee migration so that the communities we do create are socially and environmentally viable over the longer term.

They no longer see population as a fixed black and white issue, that it is in fact fluid depending upon the circumstances. A belief in the free movement of people is strong among many young people on the left and if we want to connect with them we must acknowledge these ideals and by doing so they will more likely acknowledge that there are many steps that need to be undertaken before that kind of thinking can be put into practice.

There may come a day when the world is so balanced politically, socially and environmentally that we could have open borders across the world without it leading to sudden influxes of population from one country to another. It doesn't look very feasible at the moment but who is to say that we shouldn't work towards that ideal. It is an ideal that I would like to work towards no matter how out of reach it may feel. We don't have to smash people's dreams in order to persuade them to consider reversing a migration policy that was put in place by John Howard in order to boost gross domestic product.

We need to slow the rate of population growth as it is right now and, for want of a better word, start an intelligent and ongoing national conversation about the rate in which our population should grow (or shrink) and how we should plan for that to happen. Right now that is all we need to be trying to achieve. As population activists, we ourselves need to acknowledge that we all have differing values and that we should be comfortable with the fact that we do not all need to share the same values in order to bring about change.

The important aim of the workshops that I hold is that they do not run to a particular agenda other than to help people connect to the three issues of population, permaculture and planning. This attitude I think needs to form a wider approach in terms of how we work with other activists, that we work towards finding those areas where we can connect and that in turn allows us to feel comfortable with different values and perspectives.

We need to see our work as being part of an ongoing conversation that will always be greater than the sum of one person's perspective. That way we don't get bogged down in internal politics and because our agenda is fluid, our values do not become threatened. In turn, by taking this approach we can have a profound influence on the people with whom we interact. They pick up on this sentiment and they themselves become more open-minded and become more open to challenging assumptions as well as seeing things from other perspectives.

We need to work together to find areas where we can connect rather than focussing on the games of ego that occur through issues that divide us. That is what got us into this mess. We need a different kind of thinking to let us get out of the mess and to stay out of it.

So when discussing population, let your starting point be about finding the issues that you have in common. It could be about congestion, climate change, loss of heritage, the list goes on. It is not about us pushing our view of the world onto people. Instead it is about helping them to see population in a new light by showing how it connects to the issues that are important to them.

This is the kind of thinking we need in order to create a truly sustainable and resilient world. We need to think outside the matrix and to help others do the same.

Entirely predictably, the Murray Darling river system is toxic with effluent again, host to masses of poisonous cyanobacteria. As the Weekly Times reports, "WATER will be switched off to hundreds of farmers and town residents in the Mallee this week as the Murray River blue-green algae emergency worsens. The toxic outbreak now involves almost 500km of the Murray River and has claimed reservoirs, rivers, wetlands and parts of Victoria’s two biggest irrigation districts. Taps were turned off to towns and farms in parts of the southern Mallee late Friday when the algal bloom reached key Wimmera Mallee pipeline pumps near Swan Hill, catching most residents unaware. Experts said a record autumn heatwave, with temperatures soaring above 40C in northwest Victoria this week, was expected to grow the algal bloom until it choked almost all of the Murray River along the NSW-­Victoria border within weeks."[1] But these problems have been known for so long now, it seems foolish to believe that we can hope for any resolution that would keep the vast Australian desert from claiming on our only major inland river system. Certainly we should not meddle with the northern river systems, but unfortunately our psychopathic leaders have already started.

People have asked me to republish a letter written in 1937 about this very problem. I have done so below, but if you really want to understand the horror of this phenomenon, get hold of a copy of Rodney Barker's tale of a scientist trying to blow the whistle on the pfisteria infestation on the Mississipi in the mid 1990s and probably still today. There and here it is the product of too much fertiliser and effluent going into too little water. This is among the best pieces of science writing I have ever read. The life-forms that toxic algae take and their ability to affect the nervous systems of animals large and small - notably humans and baby humans - outdoes the monster from the Black Lagoon and is very very real and very little recognised.

Russell Grimwade urges National Awakening in 1937 - but we are sleeping even more deeply today

Letter to the editor of the Argus Newspaper, 6 February 1937: Sir. - Your leading article "Nature Takes Revenge" in the Issue of Saturday is a valuable history of man's expansion to the outer continents from Europe. It states the basic laws under which man is allowed by Nature to add to his wealth and comfort. It also states the inevitable disaster that follows the contravention of these laws. The final sentence leaves the way open for constructive action in a manner which impels me to contribute a suggestion for the urgent consideration of my fellow Australians.

This isolated continent is the most recent of the earth's land masses to suffer the occupancy of civilised man. It is undeniable that in the century and a half that we and our antecedents have been here we have made a success of it - if success be measured by material and social progress. It is also undeniable that we have a duty to leave our
successors as good or a better land than we have enjoyed. If we do not learn by the mistakes that time is now revealing in other countries we are falling in our trust. The repeated stories of floods and disaster that come to us from .America are clear evidence of the errors of the systems of occupation of a few centuries ago. Are we yet taking action
to avoid those mistakes?

There is ample evidence that we are not.

Erosion, flood, and soil drift are three terrors alone that we are beginning to experience in the same way as other countries of comparatively recent settlement. To avoid these disasters, are we taking all the action possible that trained men recommend?

It is a sad fact that we are not.

There has been a remarkable growth this century in the universal education of our people in regard to the value and functions of trees and forests. But it is incomplete, and has not yet led to the necessary political action to safeguard the future.

Do Australians realise what uncontrolled settlement has done to their great river, the Murray?

Ninety years ago 51 per cent of its annual flow came down in winter months and 49 per cent in summer. Today 76 per cent is winter flow and 24 per cent, summer.

This is a unique illustration of the regulating value of forest-clad watersheds. Do Australians know that, since the Burrinjuck dam was finished, 12,000,000 cubic feet of silt has accumulated in it? Do the taxpayers who have built the Hume weir realise that only half its watershed is under control, and that the other half, in private ownership, may be cleared and burnt as cleanly as its owners wish, and that such operations must inevitably hasten the silting up of the huge lake, so that perhaps in 100 years it will not exist and cannot be remade? Do Australians realise that settlement in all States has taken place, and is still taking place, under Lands departments which dominate the trained officers of the Forests departments?

Do Australians realise that the chief product of their forests is not the lovely timber that they yield, but water and its regulation, which is the factor limiting the immediate population and future prosperity of their continent? ? Is it known that each year trained forest officers make an analysis of the causes of the fires that occur in our forests, and
that each year they report that more than half of them are caused deliberately? It is known by every interested party that for a few thousand pounds collected each year by Lands departments, holders of grazing licences or their agents, or their delayed-action candles, cause fires that burn out mountain sides of perfect watershed in return for precarious grazing for a few head of cattle.

Do Australians mind? Do they wish to save these appalling yearly losses and attain a balance that will prolong the future indefinitely in progress, prosperity, and peace from flood, fire, and denudation? If they do wish these things, much can be done to that end, but it must be done in the next few years. In a few more years it will be too late.

The first thing to be done is political. Let each State that wishes to ensure its future place all its Crown lands under the absolute control of its Forests Department. Let the forest officers of the State-men who are trained in the great fundamental science of forestry be the only authority who shall say what is to go on in those areas, and who shall enter them.

If tourists, graziers, settlers, or even Lands Department officers want access to those areas, let it be only with the approval of the Minister for Forests on the recommendation of
his experts.

This is the obvious first step to avoid the appalling mistakes that other countries have made and this country is still making. Such a step is above the factions of party politics, and far above the feelings and jealousies of departmental officers. It is no censure on Lands departments that the administration of Crown lands should be removed from their control. It is an archaism that they should so remain.

When Lands departments were given control of Crown lands the great science of forestry had not formulated the laws that govern the fundamental requirements of modern national life. For example, the urban consumption of water has Increased tenfold a head in the last 100 years, and cities are larger, and likely to become larger and even more extravagant. It is only by the application of the principles of sound forestry that supplies of the necessary volume will be available to the population this country may be called upon to sustain. It is no shame upon Lands Department officers that they have not the expert knowledge to provide these requirements. It is not their job.

It is shame upon us that we allow, by an inverted system of administration, the experts to be subservient to the layman. Should this change be wrought by public clamour or far-seeing governmental action, I believe that within 10 years the fire-loss alone would be so reduced that the people of our country would be encouraged to feel that the awful damage of the past was being reclaimed, and that Australia was doing something to reclaim the unrelenting desert creep that threatens us today.

Russell Grimwade, 6 February 1937.

NOTES

The introduction to this article cited from Chris McLennan, "Water crisis worsens as Murray River blue-green algae spreads," Weekly Times
March 8, 2016

The globally unique and lovable Carnaby's Cockatoo exists only in the South West of WA. They are a totem for Noongar people and a part of our shared cultural and natural heritage. But the cockatoos are endangered and we are at risk of losing them forever.

Instead of helping the cockatoos to recover, the State Governments own analysis shows the Government's Green Growth Plan would further drastically reduce the population of these beautiful birds, intelligent, social and long-lived birds.. By locking in the clearing of thousands of hectares of bushland that the birds rely on, numbers of these already rare birds would be reduced by half and the long-term survival of the population would be placed in question.

While the State Government has hailed this Plan as a great environmental initiative, the grim reality is that it will result in the deaths of thousands of cockatoos through starvation as their vital food sources are bulldozed to make way for more unsustainable urban sprawl.

The public submission period for this plan is open now. Tell them to send it back to the drawing board.
See also an ABC report on the problems associated with this WA land-grab by a developer-government. "Carnaby's Black Cockatoos at risk if Perth-Peel land-use plan goes ahead, says leaked report." Note, however, that the ABC is part of this problem because it promotes the idea that mass immigration and population growth in Australia is inevitable.

Mention in your submision that we don't need the massive human population growth, or urban sprawl, and there's nothing "green" about it.
Please visit: https://ccwa.good.do/cockatoos/stopcockatoodisasterplan/"& and see candobetter.net's other pages on the Carnaby's cockatoo and previous efforts to save it in Perth - which these plans will wreck.

The Curse of the British invasion lives on?

"The Noongar people saw the arrival of Europeans as the returning of deceased people. As they approached from the west, they called the newcomers Djanga (or djanak), meaning "white spirits".^{#cite_note-5">[5]#cite_note-6">[6]} There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly their white complexion reminded the Noongar of corpses; their unclean odour of early 19th century Europeans was said to resemble the dead; the fact that the ships arrived from the west, the direction of Kuranup, the setting sun location of the soul in traditional beliefs;^{#cite_note-7">[7]} the fact that Europeans seemed to have no memory of kinship relations; and that Noongars who associated closely with Europeans were apt to die from European diseases over which Aboriginal people had little resistance, supported this claim."

And the devastation continues at an ever greater pace. We must stop this industrial savagery and civilise ourselves.

Population is a big issue happening in the world today, with our numbers having increased massively from around 1 billion in 1850 to what now looks like 11 billion at the end of the century. Right now, the numbers of the world’s poor increase by 80 million each year and the number of unwanted pregnancies are 210 million per annum. Considering that human population predicts 88% of impact to other animal and plant species (according to the International Union for the Conversation of Nature) human population remains a huge, yet very controversial concern. (This article was written by Michael Bayliss as part of an information booklet with Mark Allen (founder, Population Permaculture and Planning) entitled: 'Why We Need To Talk About Population.' This booklet is designed to engage with a younger, left leaning generation including environmentalists and activists. It will be available at the Sustainable Living Festival Big Weekend at Federation where Mark Allen will also present on town planning and population issues. To find out more, click here.

Australia's population numbers

It almost seems absurd to extend these world population concerns to Australia. Australia's a population of just under 24 million (at time of writing) and a density of around 3 people per square kilometre seems minuscule when compared to the demographics of other (mostly densely overpopulated) countries. Surely with miles and miles of free uncharted space, Australia could take its fair share of the world’s load? Isn’t Australia one of the highest per capita fossil fuel guzzling and carbon emitting countries in a society awash with consumerism and materialism? Couldn’t we all consume less, replace those coal industries with renewables, and open up our borders to take in our fair share?

Ecological and logistical considerations

The problem is that when you look at our continent more closely, our vast land of plenty starts to look a bit wanting. Only around 6% of our soil is arable by world standards, with 80% of the land-mass arid or semi-arid. This means that we have an incredibly fragile ecosystem with a very low carrying capacity that has struggled with white occupation for the last 200 years and it is about to get another wallop through climate change. There is every good reason why the south-east coast of Australia is populated and the central and north-west are nearly vacant, and that having large numbers of people live in the interior of Australia makes almost as much sense as populating the Sahara.

Academy of Science opinion on our population

The Australian Academy Of Science has suggested that our capacity to sustain ourselves will be maximised by not exceeding 23 million (whoops, we’ve just done that!) with Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery, painting a bleaker picture - that Australia can only support around 8 million people in the long term for our society’s current level of per capita footprint. This means that to be sustainable, we need to find ways of reducing our per capita and overall consumption by 1/3 at our current population to be sustainable, according to these predictions. However, our population is also growing at a rate of an Adelaide every 3 years, and at this rate our population will double in 35 years time. This will mean reducing our per capita output by 1/6 of current levels in a very short amount of time. What happens after then?...

Breaking taboos

The topic of population has become a taboo in Australia over the past 20 years, partly due to the ongoing perception of us living on an empty continent, and partly due to the mass media promoting the social-demographic arguments of Pauline Hanson, One Nation and others to drown out rational ecologically-based discussion. While there are educated people with no xenophobic agenda currently championing for a sustainable population such as Kelvin Thomson and Dick Smith, there is still confusion in many people's minds between population numbers concerns and racial prejudice. When I ask my friends in the environment movement why they don’t think more about population, the typical reply is: ‘Every time we discuss it, it always ends up with a white guy in his 60s ranting about immigrants.’

Rational discussion

I would like a rational discussion about population to return to the conversations of progressive and socially minded people. Population numbers are intrinsically linked to our economy, and manipulated by our government to fast-track GDP growth (as I shall explain soon) so it is really difficult to talk about the end of neo-liberal capitalism without talking about population numbers at some point. It is hard to talk about cooperative self-resilient communities and eco-villages as the way of the future whilst our town planning system is trying to keep up with an Adelaide’s worth of growth in our major cities every few years. It is hard to share our environment with our native plants and animals for much longer if an end point to our population growth is never debated and if our only option to reduce our per capita footprint infinitely lower is unrealistic. Finally, higher population growth does not automatically mean greater diversity and better outcomes for refugees and asylum seekers. Under our currently societal structure, it can even be the other way around!

Three models and three ideologies

Below are three models of possible population growth in Australia, representing three ideologies, where I want to table the pros and cons with each model. The first is the ‘business as usual’ approach of our current system. The second is an open borders policy, and the third is a sustainable population model.

Model 1: Business as usual:

Business as usual with ~1.5% growth per annum, majority of growth policy regulated to raise GDP, and with a current tax system that allows people to pay less tax from owning property (negative gearing).

As can be seen from the chart, our current model of population growth is beneficial for government to raise money through more people paying tax. It is also very beneficial for employers, as it allows an environment for more applicants for jobs, placing downward pressure on wages and conditions. It is most certainly of benefit for those in the property and construction industries, especially for those who invest in property, where a growing customer base ever drives up the demand for the price of properties in established suburbs (for now).

Unfortunately, things become pretty much worse for everyone else. Whilst it is easy enough to deduce the negative effect of this kind of population growth policy has on young job seekers (for example) and in raising general costs of living, it may be surprising to note that refugees, both past and present, are adversely affected by this type of population growth. For example, past generations of migrant market gardeners have been priced out of their area as the urban boundaries of Melbourne and Sydney expand. Likewise, refugee immigrants are being pushed out due to the increased gentrification that comes with high density living in inner city Melbourne suburbs such as Footscray, Carlton, and Richmond that have traditionally been very viable hubs of strong migrant communities. In recent years, new arrivals through the humanitarian program have tended to settle in areas around Broadmeadows, Deer Park, Heidelberg Heights and Dandenong. A far cry from (say) Victoria Street in Richmond, current generations of refugees face social isolation and difficulties in accessing essential services, which makes establishing community or assimilation more difficult. The Multicultural Development Association has reported that refugees in current times are lacking access to essential information, such as what the swimming flags mean on Australian beaches! The fact that Broadmeadows has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country is telling.

Most people are surprised to find out that our humanitarian intake has gone DOWN since the Howard Era, as proportion of our intake, from 25% prior to 1996 down to current levels of around 5-10%. As Howard himself said on 2014 on live radio:

“One of the reasons why it’s so important to maintain that policy is that the more people think our borders are being controlled the more supportive they are in the long term of high levels of immigration. Australia needs a high level of immigration. I’m a high immigration man. I practiced that in government. And one of the ways that you maintain public support for that is to communicate to the Australian people a capacity to control our borders and to decide who and what people and when come to this country.”

In other words, the asylum seeker fiasco during the Howard Government era, Tampa crisis et al, was politically engineered so that people would be complacent to another kind of population growth that the government (and big business) prefers!

Imagine if we traveled to another planet and witnessed and alien society where the government, swayed by big business, had an immigration policy that was based almost entirely on making money for small sectors of society. Imagine this was at the expense of refugees, or people in desperate need from other countries. Imagine the government engineered a border crisis so that refugees were seen as a huge problem so that, once a tough stand seen to be taken towards them, the government used that ruse to bring in population growth policies from other avenues. Imagine, in this society, the the former leader could basically state this word for word and pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. Imagine, in the society where the left were disinclined to call the government out on these policies, for fear of sounding anti-refugee and xenophobic, even when the population policies themselves are discriminatory towards asylum seekers. Imagine if keeping silent perpetuated this growth as a component of the neo-liberalist growth-at-all-costs agenda and if keeping silent on this was a liability on environmental objectives. From an outsider point of view, I’m sure the whole situation would seem more than a little illogical and farcical.

Population has been a very prickly issue for us on the left, particularly in recent decades, with the shadow of Pauline Hanson and One Nation/Reclaim Australia, and particularly when population growth is generally equated in our minds to refugees and open borders policies. However, if we choose to not debate population at all, then our current social and politically engineered population growth policy will continue, the same one that unfairly disfavours refugees and asylum seekers in favour of migration programs that generate short term increases in GDP. This is, to my mind, a very cynical neo-liberalist ideology. We, on the left, have the obligation at the very least to be educated on population policy as it currently stands, and at very least, lobby for a change in policy in favour of the humanitarian program again, even for those of us who are pro-growth. There is also a strong argument that it is very important to support the anti-war movement to prevent the formation of refugees in the first place and that refugee crises are generated by arms manufacture, neo-colonialism and global conflict.

Even if one were recipient to the short-term benefits of this kind of population growth, it must be recognised that the positives are just that - short lived. Eventually, property becomes so expensive that it is not worth investing in anymore. This is called a housing bubble, and has happened to Japan in the late 80s early 90s and currently China and the USA. Coupled with an infrastructure deficit and environmental overshoot, this can only affect everyone in the long term.

So if the current model sounds unfair to most, one might consider a more egalitarian open borders approach. Let’s explore that below, with its associated pros and cons.

Model 2: Open Borders policy:

Open borders policy, no cap on humanitarian intake, no policy to mitigate natural birth rate or GDP fuelled migration (This is in spirit the policy of the Greens Party). This model assumes growth of 600 000 per annum (250 000 humanitarian, 250 000 GDP, 100 000 natural growth).

This model is conducive to the ideal for many who identify with the social left, as an open border policy provides an unbiased avenue of entry into Australia regardless of race, religion, socio-economic status etc. An opens border policy means that industralised countries such as Australia can play a more definite role in accommodating displaced people from abroad and the idea that everyone is free to move wherever they wish to worldwide. The idea of border restriction or control can be uncomfortable for many as this implies an exclusion from those living in the majority world from the relatively privileged position of Australia. From the political field, many Labor-Left and Greens politicians support this ideology, with perhaps Sarah Hanson-Young of The Greens being the most vocal and well-known advocate of this position.

However, in trying to write the above table objectively, I tried to come up with tangible Pros that were practical rather than ideological. This proved to be more difficult than I was anticipating, and had to put in a few question marks in the pros column as the practical benefits are either tenuous or are a double edged sword with associated cons.

Speaking of the Greens, I’ve observed that many Greens policies cry out for more and more infrastructure (trains, trams, social services, public housing etc). At the same time they generally do not support environmentally destructive mining practices, not least unconventional mining such as fracking. But then, where will all our infrastructure come from? Trains lines, schools, public housing, plumbing - these all require raw materials that need to be dug up from the ground, and processed into tram lines by use of fossil fuels. There really is no way around this unless we learn a way of making train lines out of renewable resources, which isn’t likely. So much of Australia’s per capita consumption is embedded within the town planning system - suburbia and high density apartment living are both inherently resource hungry. Separation of homes and workplaces, and our physical and economic separation from our food sources result in a reliance of our earth’s resources that no amount of wilful reduction of our per capita consumption will mitigate, unless our town planning system changes substantially. If it doesn’t, there is no way we can really put much of a brake on our dependency on resources, and with model 2’s annual growth rate at 600 000 per annum, this could only escalate within our current town planning system. Instead of being able to plan to change the town planning system to accommodate more people in a sustainable way, any government would probably be doomed to play an endless cycle of infrastructure catch up under our current system - at the environment’s expense, even more-so than under our currently system.

I doubt an open borders policy would be practical for any government in the long term. Without an opportunity to transition large scale to a better town planning system, the housing, services and infrastructure costs would be huge. This means either a steep decline in quality of life for residents, or huge taxes or government debt (most likely a combination of all the above). Voters tend to not like those things. Voters on the left would also feel alienated and lied to by a government that would be forced to continue to mine for resources to build the infrastructure with, even if the economy was completely powered by renewable energy. Finally, the huge population growth would have a massive and unavoidable impact to the environment, particularly habitats and water supplies near to the large urban conurbation, even if our per capita footprint were to go down. Any government being elected on an environmental platform would soon let down many of their voters. This is probably a realistic prediction of the Greens if they won government on an open borders platform - they’d soon be shot down. This is also a conundrum that I’m sure many of the left deep down struggle with. That environmental, as well as anti-capitalist objectives, are at odds, at some point, with a human population growth that is not sustainable. Government would survive better, in the long term, if there was some compromise and balance between open borders ideology and the realities of environmental objectives.

Open borders policy only works in the long term if we can work with the world to address the root causes of conflict and displacement that generate high numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. Without this, an open borders policy is great at helping individuals in immediate need for asylum, but can only serve to diffuse the larger problem into the long term. One example is the island of Tuvalu, which made a strong case for evacuating many of its people to Australia and New Zealand in 2003, due to land loss as sea levels rose. New Zealand now has a relocation policy which is very reasonable in those circumstances, however their population is expected to more than double from 12 000 to 28 000 in by 2050. This will mean an endless cycle of relocating people, unless there is a way for Tuvalu to be sustainable in its population growth. Fortunately, according to the UN, non-coercive population sustainability strategies work if women are empowered and educated, and when there is access to family planning and contraceptive strategies (often at odds with the predominating patriarchal religions in host countries). No need for one-child policies or for coercion by the west to the majority world! Mostly grass-roots foreign aid and proactive international cooperation is key.

One final concern with an open borders policy is consideration of the original custodians of our land. My instinct is that any policy to promote population growth without consultation of aboriginal people can be easily argued as more unsolicited colonization of Australia. This belief was certainly shared by some my Noongar identifying friends and community back when I lived in WA, many of whom would be very welcoming to a generous refugee intake, if only their people were consulted on policy. If aboriginal perspective on population issues is hard to find, I imagine this can be attributable to the many other uphill battles that their communities are fighting daily, and poor representation of both aboriginal perspective and the population issue in Australian society. For those willing to search however, there are references in the literature, perhaps most poignantly expressed in the Deaths In Custody Watch Report (1994):

‘Since 1788 the non-Aboriginal powers within our lands have taken upon themselves to increase the population by many millions, meanwhile our population became near to extinction...Australia’s population is bearable at this point in time but further ecocide of this country will leave nothing for no one...Ecologically our land is on its knees: with help it can survive and resuscitate itself, but with any major increase in population this land will die, and we will die with it.’

Model 3: Sustainable Population policy:

A medium term sustainable population numbers policy that promotes (1) fiscal policies that do not encourage large family sizes and (2) promotes policies where immigration = emigration (e.g. Between 70 - 80 thousand per annum), with priority given to the humanitarian program (intake of at least 20 000 per annum, with flexibility in times of crisis). An emphasis on foreign aid funding would go to empowering women to make their own life choices, including career decisions, earning capacity and family size.

No model is perfect, and although it is probably self-evident that I advocate for this third model, it would not be objective of me if I did not acknowledge the cons associated with the model. However I would like to highlight that most of the negatives are either risks arising from poor management of the model, or from short term changes as our society goes through adjustments. On balance, this model of population sustainability strikes me as one that allows for the best balance of long term economic objectiveness, environmental and pollution goals, town planning goals, whilst allowing for a defined but generous humanitarian intake. Keep in mind that refugees and asylum seekers would be better off adjusting to a country that had the capacity to provide them with the services that they required to participate fully in their new home. They would not need so much the additional burdens of suburban sprawl, un-affordable housing, and an unforgiving job market that many refugees, along with other disadvantaged groups, face in today’s growth-at-all-cost system. That’s not to say that these problems will disappear, but they will be less and so much easier to address and manage. Currently, many migrants who come to Australia in recent times report feeling very socially isolated in the outer suburbs and miss the greater sense of community that they had back home.

Not that immigration is the only way to a sustainable population - far from it. I envision a future where families with no children are seen as societal norms just as much as families with children, and where adoption is seen as a viable and accessible alternative to couple of all sexual and gender identities. The key, as always is through education, empowerment, and allowing people to make their own choices. High schools, for example, should educate young people into the pros and cons of having children, and with consideration of the environmental impacts of having children, and the implications for future generations with worsening environmental conditions. I do not advocate fiscal policies that reward large family size, instead this money should be spent on children’s services, such as schools and and medical subsidies.

With a sustainable population, more money and energy could go into grass-roots foreign aid instead of more and more infrastructure and more investment could go into transitioning our society and economy into one that less focused on growth and more focused on social and environmental resilience. If our town planning system were to reflect the ideals of eco-villages, intentional communities, and permaculture principles, we would be in a better position to accommodate our current population longer term. We may also be in a better position to assist people in need of asylum or refuge into the future.

Final Words:

I hope this article has helped to disentangle some of the confusion and assumptions that have been barriers for further discussion on population issues for Australia and abroad. Although my own views are currently for population sustainability at this stage, I acknowledge that there will be many differing views and ideas on this topic and I hope my ideas may help to stimulate further thoughtful discussion and debate. I have not yet heard a successful argument for long term high rates of population growth that can also account for positive outcomes for our cities, towns, environment and asylum seekers, however that does not mean that one doesn’t exist! Please let me know if you have any ideas =).

The term 'diversity' is being used as a euphemism for chaos and social disenfranchisement in mass people movements which are politically packaged as both positive and inevitable, much as slavery was in the 18th and 19th century. UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson has said that 'the refugee crisis in Europe has created fear and hatred among local residents, which should be combated by bringing to light the positive contributions of migrants to creating a diverse society'.[1]

See also: The phoney « refugee crisis » (7/9/15) by Thierry Meyssan | VoltaireNet and other articles about the European refugee crisis.

The Numbers

"The number of international migrants reached 244 million in 2015, an increase of 41 per cent compared with 2000, the United Nations says in a report. The report published on Tuesday, the latest biennial revision of migration trends, found that the number of people who had moved to another country - voluntarily for economic reasons or because of conflicts - had risen by 71 million since 2000."[1]

The influx into Germany and which is overflowing to the rest of Europe amounts to an invasion because permission was not sought from the ordinary people who bear the impact on jobs, housing, social and natural environment of these colossal numbers of people. At the same time the immigration flows are the result of wars that European leaders and global commerce are inflicting on the sending countries.

Imposed mass immigration compromises self-determination and democracy

Talk of 'diversity' as if different ethnicity/religion is the only feature of the problem of mass immigration to Europe is to ignore the sheer numbers of people seeking work and housing. Such huge changes in demand form the greater part of economic and social impact and the resultant hardship and inconvenience is an affront to citizens who were not consulted.

Talk of 'diversity' in the face of this huge and largely irrevocable change to numbers and composition of society has the effect of further reducing the scope of citizen input into self-government (which is a kind of cooperative population management). Self-government involves cooperative apportioning of work and housing as well as supporting infrastructure within a society defined by its membership (citizens). It is usually managed through long established civil legal and institutional processes only available to citizens or visaed immigrants.

How a population evolves is a traditional and anthropological prerogative of its members, not commercial 'stakeholders' or global political players. A sudden redefinition of membership without consultation is a fundamental problem.

War and mass migration: Criminal role of the press and governments

When external forces produce massive population changes, this is usually referred to as war. Whilst we do know that US-NATO members have a long history of and a current responsibility for the wars in the Middle East that are producing much of these mass migrations, it is difficult to pinpoint what organisations and people are really behind the manipulation of numbers in Europe through open-door policy. This is because they hide behind rhetoricians like the UN Deputy Secretary, national leaders such as Merkel, and a pro 'diversity' corporatised and syndicated global media that obviously has interests in labour market, weapons manufacture, international trade and the transmission of power through chaos. In fact, apart perhaps from Putin's Russia, most of us do not know who is in charge of nations anymore; policies seem to be influenced from many transient global hats.

The mainstream press have had a criminal role along with EU and European governments in suppressing discussion of the numbers involved and manufacturing an apparent consent to them against real citizen feelings. In tandem these actors have consistently talked up US-NATO roles in wars that have caused these population disruptions in the Middle East. These arrogant attitudes and manipulations of perception have caused chaos, suffering and death.

Diversity doesn't nail it

'Diversity' is a non-sequiteur in the face of western warmongering overseas and manipulation of European population numbers and institutions to reduce wages, inflate housing prices, and generally place pressure on established social gains and citizens rights.

Unfortunately many commercial ventures use the UN as a respectable umbrella for advancing their own selfish interests. Any organisation may register as a UN member on a variety of bases and the UN attracts government, property and banking lawyers, ideological entities with strong links to business and government, such as the Australian Multicultural Foundation, and a variety of businesses in various guises looking for opportunities. (See http://www.unaavictoria.org.au/our-partners/. Associated projects are often described as 'development' initiatives but they are about taking over land and resources, changing local laws, exploiting and disorganising workforces in the sending and receiving countries.

The people behind some of these trends are so craven that they do not seem to think twice about provoking and stoking protracted wars and genocides, except to justify them with flimsy excuses.

Left-right conflicts growing

Another aspect of these problems is a growing division between 'left' and 'right' in population politics as reported, endorsed and incited by the mass media. In a strange way it is reminiscent of the setting for the rise of fascism in Germany. In those days the right (the Nazis and the Italian fascists) were encouraged by big business and the mass media as a means of combating the 'left' or the rise of communism. The communists were for the uniting of workers against exploitation and war but the fascists were for exploitation and pro-war. Today we have a situation where groups identified by the mainstream press as 'left' and 'anti-fascist' are coming into conflict with groups identified as 'right-wing'. Counter-intuitively the left-wing, as presented by the mainstream press, seems to think it is okay to have disorganised mass immigration and has almost nothing to say against the wars producing these population movements. The right-wing seems to be the only voice criticising US-NATO involvement in wars in the Middle East, and they are definitely against uncontrolled mass immigration. At the same time, the center left and center right that control most governments and are aligned with the mass media encourage mass migration and encourage war. That leaves unrepresented people of a center left or center right disposition who are neither in favour of war or mass migration. This is a glaring omission and one senses that it is deliberate on the part of the mass media that claims to represent public opinion globally.

NOTES

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/nthamerica/2016/01/13/244-million-international-migrants-in-2015.html#sthash.xwREuHUA.dpuf

#otherArticles" id="otherArticles">Appendix: Other Articles about the European Refugee crisis

Why Illegal Migrants are Good for Turkish Business? (21/12/15) | New Eastern Outlook, Refugees as "Weapons" in a Propaganda War (21/11/15) by Eric Draitser | Global Research, The Flood of Refugees into Europe: "The New Slave Trade" (8/11/15) by Peter Koenig | Global Research, Merkel Overwhelmed: Chancellor Plunges Germany Into Chaos (4/11/15) | sputnik News, The phoney « refugee crisis » (7/9/15) by Thierry Meyssan | VoltaireNet, Refugees as Weapon – and Germany shifting Alliances? (17/7/15) | Global Research.

"Harper gutted environmental regulations!" my NDP neighbour shouted. That was his parting shot in what turned out to be an acrimonious exchange.

So what? NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, like NDP Premier Rachel Notley, says that he favours the expansion and development of the oil sands project, and is "committed to getting it (the oil) to market". So what then is the benefit of restoring environmental regulations?

Lets assume that thanks to the NDP or the Liberals, tar sands oil will somehow be 'responsibly' extracted and 'delivered to market'. What then? What do buyers eventually do with the oil once they have bought it? Duh. No one will buy this oil unless they intend to burn it. It's the burning of the stuff that is most critical, isn't it? Isn't burning oil the major problem? I am sorry for ‘Harper-ing ‘on this point but no one seems to call out Mulcair (or Trudeau) for their ridiculous position on this issue. Mulcair and Trudeau are like the aspiring manager of a cigarette company who promises that, under his management, the company's cigarettes will be manufactured and delivered to cigarette smokers according to the toughest environmental standards.

"Harper muzzled scientists!". But would it make a difference to Mulcair or Trudeau if they were "un-muzzled"? The very fact that they are both prepared to 'develop and expand' the oil sands project is proof that they are not really listening to scientists anyway. What would un-muzzled scientists say that the global scientific community has not already said? Oh, but Trudeau promises to go to the next climate conference and make Canada "a leader in fighting climate change". So he is going to expand and develop the oil sands and assert Canada's leadership in fighting climate change at the same time? Now that is the very definition of a Liberal, isn't it? Someone whose feet are firmly planted on both sides of every issue.

Both Mulcair and Trudeau argue that they can better "grow the economy" than Harper. That's a selling point? Forgive me, but isn't economic growth killing biodiversity and rapidly depleting non-renewables? Oh, I forgot. "We can have economic growth and protect the environment too."

That, my friends, is THE BIG LIE that all of these parties peddle. Continuing conomic growth is neither desirable, necessary, nor physically possible going forward. "Sustainable growth" is the ultimate oxymoron. Infinite growth on a finite planet is IMPOSSIBLE.

It has never apparently occurred to the Harper-haters that making Harper the lightening rod for all is that is wrong with this country is chasing a decoy. When he is shown the door on Monday night, or soon after the new Parliament convenes, the fundamental policies that form the basis of our ruination will remain in place. Oils sands development and continuing economic growth----fuelled of course by unending population growth. The rest is all window dressing.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Tim Murray
October 17, 2015

PS My nominee for the most absurd speech of this campaign? Thomas Mulcair bragging about the fact that he came from a family of 10 children. That is like someone bragging that he came from a family that owned 10 Hummers. Many of us in retrospect feel morally culpable for having too many children. We love them but the planet doesn't. None of us are perfect. We all have environmental skeletons in the closet. But we don't have to trot them out and brag about them, do we? Especially if we are in a leadership position. If it is important to ring the alarm bells about climate change, it is also important to ring the alarm bells about the increasing number of climate-changers.

Does Mulcair know that there are over 7.3 billion people living on this planet right now? Hello? Has he ever taken a look at the World Population Clock? Does he care what time it is? Has he, or any of his "researchers", read the Murtagh/Schlax study out of the University of Oregon? Conclusion: Just in terms of carbon footprints, by having two children, a couple wipes out the environmental benefits of six major "green lifestyle changes" like driving a Prius, recycling your garbage, replacing light bulbs with CFLs, not taking a plane flight etc. BY A FACTOR OF FORTY! The authors pointed out that this could apply to other environmental impacts as well.

Population matters. Even Canada is, contrary to myth, OVERPOPULATED (cf. Science Council of Canada report number 25 and "Big, Cold and Full" by Dr. David Schindler and Dr. Madeline Weld). It is sad commentary on the pathetic state of environmental awareness that Green Party leader Elizabeth May is the ONLY politician in this election who has at least raised the subject. She didn't say much, but she said something.

A Social Democratic Party that Lost Its Way: Once-upon-a-time Canada’s New Democrats knew that there were Limits to Growth. They knew about the Club of Rome, about Silent Spring and about the Population Bomb. They knew that resources were finite and that their unrestricted extraction would cause irreparable damage. They knew that “growth” was the ideology of the cancer cell. Yes, in the 1970’s the environment was very much on the agenda. Party academic and scholar Charles Taylor spoke of “the politics of the steady-state” and John Harney ran his federal leadership campaign on those kinds of issues.

Here’s what the British Columbia NDP stated in 1972:
a. “An NDP government will undertake a study of the effects of continued exponential growth in the Province of B. C.
b. “Such a study of the exponential growth in B. C. would investigate the possibility of taking all steps deemed necessary to deal adequately with the situation.
c. “The Environmental Control Committee of the provincial NDP will study the adoption of a steady-state economic policy, the concept of progress and limited growth, and the party’s stand on this matter.”
d. “It is recommended that a federally-sponsored permanent research group be established to investigate all aspects of growth and to submit recommendations for action. Such a research group would be required to submit reports within two years of its establishment, and at subsequent two year intervals.”
e. “An NDP government will give top priority to environmental problems with particular emphasis on population control.”
f. “An NDP government will encourage all means which will bring about voluntary limitation of population.”
g. “Immediate steps will be taken to educate the public in the urgent necessity of halting population growth.”
(From Policies for People, Policies of the B.C. NDP 1961-78, p.30)

So what happened to all of this? Somehow the NDP lost its vision. Its prescient grasp of the impending ecological crisis slipped away into the hands of those who would have us believe that we can “have our cake and grow it too”. That we can have Economic Growth—“development”—and environmental integrity at the same time. They reconcile these contradictory goals with self-delusional, trendy oxymorons like “sustainable development” and---my personal favourite—“smart growth”. The NDP has become a party not just about dividing up the economic pie more equitably—but about “growing” the pie too. “Grow the pie to grow the revenues, and increased revenues will allow us to fund and maintain an endless laundry list of social services. Growth is not the problem you see. The problem is that the poorer among us are not in on the action. Apparently the NDP has not heard the terrible news: We’re living on a finite planet.

As I wrote in 2008, when the NDP was led by Jack Layton and the federal Liberals by Stephane Dion,

“In this they are not to be distinguished from any other party. Even the Greens, beneath their rhetoric, are committed to Economic Growth, because their leader Elizabeth May shares Layton, Harper and Dion’s goal of boosting Canada’s population to 40 million plus via immigration (http://www.greenparty.ca/index.php?module=article&view=85). That's right folks. Greens and so-called 'environmentalists' somehow believe that you can add another Metro Toronto to Canada's population every decade without negative ecological impacts! Yeah, and you can eat a liter of ice cream every day and lose weight too. Immigration accounts for two-thirds of the country’s population growth, and it is that, coupled with per capita consumption rates, which drives economic growth. And economic growth is eclipsing wildlife habitat and spurring greenhouse emissions.

No Jack, it’s not about driving Green cars, or building windmills, or retro-fitting houses. It’s about stabilizing our population level, limiting economic growth, and finally establishing what we talked about 35 years ago—a steady-state economy.”

Well that was then and this is now, September of 2015, when the country is in the midst of a federal election campaign. A campaign where, once again, contending leaders employ histrionics and fake outrage to give the impression that each offers the voters a radically different choice than their rivals. And once again, many voters are buying it. Harper is the devil incarnate or he is the one man who can be trusted to guide us through tough economic times. The fate of the world hinges on stopping Stephen Harper or re-electing him. That is what rhetoric can do to peoples’ brains.

But if there is indeed a difference, it is, as Freud would have put it, “the narcissism of small differences”. The differences are so petty that each leader feels obliged to inflate them to stake out a distinctive position. All parties support continued hyper-immigration-driven rapid population and economic growth, but some are careful to couch it those aforementioned oxymoronic euphemisms like "sustainable growth", "sustainable development", and drumbeats, "smart growth" (smart extinctions? smart clear cuts? smart carbon emissions?).
The only difference between the Opposition Parties and Harper's Conservatives is that the former are more adept at Greenwash. Nothing better illustrates this point than the absurd contention of NDP leader Thomas Mulcair that he is committed to getting the oil sands oil to market, but will ensure that it will be extracted and delivered safely and responsibly in accordance with tougher environmental regulations. What Mulcair doesn’t get is that it is not how the oil is procured and shipped to market that is of crucial importance, but the fact that once “marketed” and received, customers are going to actually BURN it. How is Mulcair and his party going to “green” that? And this is the party that accused Stephen Harper of not being serious about tackling climate change.

No doubt Mr. Mulcair took his cue from the newly elected NDP Premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, who shortly after assuming office this summer, declared that the oil sands project was a “tremendous asset” and an “international showpiece”. That’s quite an abrupt transition for a party that once regarded it as the planet’s most conspicuous environmental blight, and insisted that the oil sands was in reality the “tar” sands. Funny how that works.

Funny, except that Mother Nature is not laughing.

Tim Murray
September 8, 2015

"Home ownership is a means to an end. It is not necessary for all people in all places. What all people want is housing affordability, security, and autonomy. A place they know they can come to, where they are in control of their own lives, which can be arranged to best serve their interests, tastes and lifestyle, and which will not enslave them financially. It is these values which have been so steadily undermined in Australia over the past decade in particular.

In some European countries like Germany, only about half of all households own their home. Many people have cited them, in an effort to wean Australians off their preference for ownership. However, the situation here is very different to that in Germany. There, tenants have substantial rights protecting their tenure and enabling them to decorate and to a certain extent modify their abode. Most importantly, the housing market is not inflating, so there is no expectation that rents will outstrip inflation into the future." (Dr Jane O'Sullivan) [1]

Submission to the Home Ownership Inquiry
House of Representatives Economics Committee
By Dr Jane O’Sullivan, June 2015

I am grateful to the Committee for its consideration of Home Ownership, which is an issue of increasing concern for Australians.

Home ownership is a means to an end. It is not necessary for all people in all places. What all people want is housing affordability, security, and autonomy. A place they know they can come to, where they are in control of their own lives, which can be arranged to best serve their interests, tastes and lifestyle, and which will not enslave them financially. It is these values which have been so steadily undermined in Australia over the past decade in particular.

In some European countries like Germany, only about half of all households own their home. Many people have cited them, in an effort to wean Australians off their preference for ownership. However, the situation here is very different to that in Germany. There, tenants have substantial rights protecting their tenure and enabling them to decorate and to a certain extent modify their abode. Most importantly, the housing market is not inflating, so there is no expectation that rents will outstrip inflation into the future. [1] This Submission was made in the name of Dr Jane O'Sullivan.

In Australia, renters are faced with ever-tightening budgets as rents are ratcheted up, and the prospect of termination of lease forcing them to move, with great uncertainty about where they might be able to afford to move to. They generally have little if any control over the fittings and finishes in their home, the energy mix and efficiency, or the level of security afforded. The only insurance against ever-increasing insecurity is home ownership.

I hope that this inquiry will consider policy options both to improve the accessibility of home ownership, and to improve the security and rights of tenants.

Current rates of home ownership

Home ownership is still relatively high in Australia, but most current households bought their first home before the escalation in property values, that began in the late 1990s. The rate of decline in home ownership among younger cohorts between the 2006 and 2011 census is disturbing. The following chart is reproduced from Leith van Onselen [2]

Behind this relatively small change in overall home ownership is a vast increase in household debt levels. The ratio of mortgage debt-to-disposable income exceeded 140% in December 2014. [3] This is up from an average debt of 27 per cent of average income in 1985.[4] The Economist reported that, since the 1970s, virtually the entire increase in the ratio of private-sector debt to GDP around the world has been caused by rising levels of mortgage lending.[5]

LF Economics documents that housing in Sydney and Melbourne requires more years of median income to pay down the capital value than in any other city except Vancouver.[6] Vancouver is another city beset by very high rates of immigration-fuelled population growth. When one factors in that mortgage interest rates are higher in Australia than elsewhere, even at our current relatively low rates, affordability in Australia is extremely low on world standards. If setting aside 30% of a median income for the purpose, Sydney or Melbourne households would spend 6 years saving for a 20% deposit, and 23 years paying down the principle on a loan for 80% of median home price, plus a further 20 or more years to cover the interest, according to the LF Economics report. Spending 30% or more of disposable income on housing is considered to indicate housing stress. Thus the median household entering the market faces official housing stress for their entire working life. Let us remember that households entering the market as first-home-buyers initially average incomes well below median.

The ratings agency Filch found Australia had the highest growth in dwelling prices since 1997. This is unsurprising, since we had the highest population growth also.

Source [of Nominal House Prices diagram]: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-15/fitch-graph-of-housing-price-growth-since-1997/6018762

Thus Australians have shown very low elasticity of demand for housing, absorbing huge cost increases with relatively little change in purchasing behaviour – accommodated by a massive change in debt, impacting on consumption behaviour and work-life balance. A declining proportion of income spent on every-day consumption means a smaller multiplier-effect of each person’s productivity in the whole economy: fewer jobs are needed to service this consumption, while more people try to increase their hours of work to pay their mortgage. Workforce participation can only fall as the least competitive in the labour market are forced out.

There are two main reasons for this low elasticity:
a) Conditions in the rental market have worsened also, making long-term renting ever less attractive. Median rent statistics hide the fact that new additions to the rental stock offer less and less amenity. Like-for-like, rents have risen faster.
b) Expected further inflation of housing makes those without property nervous that they will be permanently locked out if they do not buy in as soon as possible.

It is often argued in the media that rising house prices have been driven by Australians demanding bigger and fancier houses. This is patently untrue. If it were true, the standard post-war three-bedroom bungalow in inner ring suburbs would be decreasing in value. The average ‘house’ may have increased in size, but not the average abode, when apartments are included. It is land which is inflating, not the cost of construction nor the scale of homes.[7]

The truth is that the average standard of accommodation in Australia has been steadily declining, with the average young couple settling for a smaller apartment, in a noiser and less green neighbourhood, with less contact with neighbours, and/or a greater distance from work and community amenities. Most will have spent more of their adult life either in their parental home or in share-houses, than their parents’ generation. Most will spend a far greater proportion of their life-time earnings just keeping a roof over their head. All these factors contribute to considerable loss of quality of life in Australia.

An increasing number of reports document the social stresses of housing unaffordability. The Age reported on multiple families living together because they can't afford the rent.[8] Minimum wage workers are being pushed to the fringes of Sydney, with UWS urban studies researcher Dallas Rogers affirming that geographical separation of rich and poor creates a cycle of disadvantage.[9]

The inflation of house prices does not benefit home owners, as the inflation will equally affect the home they buy to replace one sold. This was well explained in a recent letter in the Canberra Times:

“If you bought a house in 1995 for $200,000 and sold it in 2007 for $600,000, how much profit did you make?
“A) Nil. B) About $200,000. C) $400,000. D) None of the above. The correct answer for most people would be D. If it was your only house, you would have needed to buy another house in 2007 to replace the one you sold. An equivalent replacement would cost $600,000. Add to that the costs of selling (say $20,000) and the costs of buying and moving (around $40,000), then you would have spent an extra $60,000 to be in the same position you were in 1995.
“Many people think that they are better off when the price of their house goes up. They aren't. It is still the same asset. What does go up is their capacity to borrow.
One of the most outstanding achievements of the last Liberal/National government was to double household debt. The profit of Australia's major banks was closely aligned with this increase in debt.”[10]

The Reserve Bank of Australia suggested that consumption growth in Australia will depend on further housing inflation, with the ‘wealth effect’ (the illusion of greater wealth) encouraging households to spend.[11] Thus they are relying on households exercising their greater capacity to borrow, using debt to pump up GDP. Given the effect of housing unaffordability on the ability of households to save for retirement, others stress importance of housing equity to fund retirement, advocating the use of reverse mortgages. Yet, if households are coerced into spending their growing home equity instead of paying down their mortgage, they will not have equity to draw on in retirement. This attitude appears to be merely kicking the can down the road – to land in a very rocky place, when the current young and over-leveraged cohort reach retirement. Private debt cannot sustainably grow GDP any more than fiscal debt, and it’s about time our macroeconomists admitted it.

In an article in The Conversation, Keith Jacobs argues that the majority of people would benefit from falling real estate prices, but the media and political discourse spruiks housing inflation as enrichment:

“Why has this crisis of affordability not been addressed by government? A major reason is that powerful industry groupings such as the financial sectors, property developers and real estate lobby groups have been spectacularly successful in maintaining pressure on the policymakers to privilege wealthy homeowners at the expense of less well-off households.”[12]

Demand and supply drivers in the housing market

The main factor driving these stressors is population growth.[13] Population did not initiate the past 15 years’ hyper-inflation – that was primarily the capital gains tax discount. But population growth was used since the mid-2000s to prop up the bubble caused by that rash and inequitable gift to the rich.

Was it the faltering of housing inflation in 2011 that caused the Gillard government to backflip on its election promise of reducing immigration, and further escalate population growth despite worsening unemployment?

In countries with stable populations, like Germany, property values are near stable, and housing is not a magnet for speculative investment. It is free instead to serve its occupants. Japan’s property bubble ended as its population growth tailed off. Australia’s population growth remains far higher than almost all other OECD countries. This is not only at the expense of affordable housing, but of fiscal balance, with the increased infrastructure costs amounting to over $100,000 per person added[14] , and already accounting for State government debts.[15]

Yet, because it forces up aggregate levels of debt, population growth is great for the banks. Unfortunately, policy-makers tend to turn to banks for macroeconomic advice, apparently oblivious to the conflict of interest between the banks and the populace they leverage. CommSec’s quarterly State of the States reports, which Premiers spruik as a measure of their personal success, invariably places population growth as a dominant determinant of economic performance. Yet the same reports show incomes more consistently outstripping cost-of-living in the states with least population growth. Only by ignoring per capita metrics are the faster-growing states portrayed as more successful. If headline economic indicators were routinely reported per capita, and change in public and private debt were subtracted from them, we would have a much more realistic view of wealth trends. This is the story the banks do not want to tell.

It is frequently claimed that house price rises are due to inadequate supply of housing. This excuse is wearing thin with the public, who see that government policy has taken every opportunity to increase demand. In addition to the expanded immigration program has been added increasing access of foreign investors to Australian real estate. The capital gains tax discount remains sacred, even as welfare and community services are sacrificed as ‘fiscally irresponsible’. Intermittently, first-home-buyer grants further fuel demand and ratchet up prices.

Foreign investment in real estate does not increase supply, it merely fuels the demand, and further displaces prospective home-owners. Without foreign capital inflows, the supply of housing outstripped demand growth continuously from 1950 to 2007.[16] There is an acknowledged tendency for foreign owners, particularly Chinese, to leave properties empty,[17] with the effect that their purchase decreases, rather than increases, housing supply. If developers claim that they can no longer find up-front funding for new ventures on-shore, it is only because, at the current value of land, their proposed development is not commercially viable. A liberal government should not be interfering in the market-place to prop up such unviable ventures.

By introducing investors who have much lower costs of capital than Australians, as well as providing a haven for those who may be laundering corrupt earnings,[18] the prices can be ratcheted even further beyond what is economically rational for Australians. This can only progressively lock Australians out of home ownership, and leave them increasingly beholden to foreign landlords.

Such fuelling of demand plays into the hands of those with control over supply. A recent University of Queensland study[19] found that speculation in peri-urban land was highly lucrative for those with political connections, who have more than a knack for picking the next area to be rezoned. Likewise, approvals for height relaxations on inner urban developments are equally lucrative. It serves developers to present supply as the problem for housing affordability, and themselves as the heroic saviours. Their claims that foreign investors are needed to get projects up are purely self-serving. Their investment in numerous lobbyists and think tanks spruiking population growth ensures that supply is never met, and ever more concessions from government can be requested to help them ease the pressure that they themselves have bought and paid for.

The proportion of investment housing relative to owner-occupied housing

The main impact of the capital gains tax discount was to attract investors into the property market, massively intensifying demand. It goes without saying that housing investment decreases home ownership. Investors need tenants, and those households competed out of home ownership by cashed-up investors are forced to remain tenants. Population growth ensures rental vacancy rates are kept very low, forcing up rents and motivating renters to stretch their credit limit to purchase property. Once heavily mortgaged, both home owners and investors depend on further price increases to recover their investment. But this can only happen at the expense of younger people entering the housing market, each cohort facing higher indebtedness than the last. Each year housing inflation continues, more investors are attracted, further decreasing the proportion of housing that is owner-occupied. It is a vicious cycle.

The Prime Minister was clearly declaring himself on the side of investors against home-owners, when he recently said “I do hope that our housing prices are increasing.” Anyone who thinks that property owners can continue enjoying investment growth well above CPI, without housing affordability deteriorating inexorably, is deluding themselves. Yet, as the old adage goes,

“It's hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.”

The impact of current tax policy at all levels

Tax policy currently preferences investors over home owners, particularly through the following elements:
• Capital Gains Tax discounting;
• Tax deductibility of interest rates;
• Depreciation of buildings;
• Negative gearing.

Together, these measures mean that financing an investment property is much cheaper than financing a home. This is inequitable. Changes should aim to level the playing field, removing systemic advantages of investors over owner-occupiers.

No interest payments on real estate should be tax deductible. These are not productive investments, they merely serve to flood demand and inflate housing prices. Those with money to invest should be free to invest in property, but those who have to borrow to do so should not get special treatment from government, as if they are doing the economy a favour, because they are not.

The ability to depreciate buildings, rather than merely deduct the costs incurred in maintaining them, is also an inequitable means for investors to minimise their costs. In a rising market, where the building has probably increased in value in spite of wear and tear, this is a dishonest device which further disadvantages owner-occupiers.

The capital gains tax discount is a gift from the tax-payers to the richest members of society. Saul Eslake documented the extent to which the introduction of this discount in 1999 stimulated an enormous increase in the use of the negative gearing facility to shift taxable income to lightly-taxed capital gain.[20] Borrowing for property investment and the proportion of loss-making landlords increased dramatically.

Before the capital gains discount, negative gearing was mostly only a means of deferring tax from current income to future capital gain. However, the ability to deduct interest and depreciation contributed to the amount of income offset. It is the capital gains discount that has turned negative gearing into a major tax rort. Saul Eslake (op. cit.) estimated the tax avoided to be in the order of $5 billion in 2011. He concluded, “This is a pretty large subsidy from people who are working and saving to people who are borrowing and speculating.”

The claim that abolition of negative gearing would force rents up has been debunked by a number of commentators, who have demonstrated that its abolition between 1985 and 1987 did not result in any consistent rent response across Australian cities – in Sydney and Perth, where vacancy rates were unusually low, rents rose, but in other cities they were unchanged or fell.[21]

Other measures have been implemented to advantage first-home buyers in the marketplace. These include first-home buyers’ grants and stamp duty waivers. These measures invariably serve merely to push the price of real estate further upward. Prices are limited by buyers’ capacity to pay, and if this is supplemented by government, the first-home buyers simply pay more. The impact on prices affects all buyers, and has the impact of increasing total mortgage debt carried by the community.

What is needed is to remove the advantages enjoyed by speculative investors, not to fuel an arms war between investors and home buyers.

Opportunities for reform

It is not difficult to identify a range of measures which would stem housing inflation and shift speculative investors to more productive investments. What is lacking is the political will.

The following measures are roughly in order of impact, from the greatest and most certain to the least or less probable.
1. Drop immigration quotas significantly and tighten conditions on most forms of temporary work immigration, allowing population growth to taper off.
2. Remove the capital gains tax discount (across all forms of investment income), allowing only a CPI adjustment. Capital gains tax should not apply to the family home, or at least should be net of all expenses in buying the next home.
3. Disallow foreign investment in property. This is purely inflationary, and allows foreigners privileges in Australia which are not reciprocated.
4. Disallow mortgage interest payments and building depreciation as tax deductions.
5. End negative gearing, allowing tax deductions to be claimed only against the income from the activity that incurs them (but permitting costs to be carried forward against future rents or capital gains).

Land tax has been proposed as an additional measure, but is problematic in an inflating housing market. It means that people can no longer even count on home ownership to insulate them from rising costs of housing. As their home rises in market value, through no fault of their own and conferring no advantage on them, they nevertheless face rising tax. Rates are already a land tax that many long-term residents find hard to endure. A land tax can only force more of them out and accelerate the geographical separation of rich and poor.

However, tax on vacant property may be worthwhile, to deter speculative behaviour and prevent investors withholding stock from the market. Any property vacant for more than three months, without being under contract or development application, may be subject to the tax.

The nation’s elected representatives need to decide whether they support:

- on the one hand, ongoing profiteering by developers and real estate speculators, who are increasingly not even Australian, knowing that this can only mean increasing levels of household debt, housing stress, homelessness, inequality of wealth and geographic separation of rich and poor generating slums, crime and civil unrest,
- or on the other, stabilisation of land values and the diversion of speculative investment to productive uses in enterprise and infrastructure, knowing that this means an overall drop in investment returns (including their own) compared with recent expectations, but may avert a bigger drop that an over-inflated bubble must ultimately cause.

To use Tony Abbott’s parlance, “Whose side are you on?”

A rational and sincere public servant should know that the current situation is unsustainable and highly damaging to the fabric of society. Unfortunately I have seen little evidence of such a combination of wisdom and sincerity.

“Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.”
Derrick Jensen – “Endgame: The Problem with Civilization”

Jane O’Sullivan
June 2015

FOOTNOTES

[1] Forbes 02/02/2014. In World's Best-Run Economy, House Prices Keep Falling -- Because That's What House Prices Are Supposed To Do. http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/02/02/in-worlds-best-run-economy-home-prices-just-keep-falling-because-thats-what-home-prices-are-supposed-to-do/
[2] van Onselen, L. 2015 Winners and losers in negative gearing reform. Macrobusiness 31/05/2015. http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/03/will-hurt-negative-gearing-reform/
[3] Leith van Onselen 2015. Australian household debt ratios hit record. Macrobusiness 31/05/2015 http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/03/australian-household-debt-ratios-hit-record/
[4] Kenneth Davidson 2015. Left out in the cold by a state reluctant to invest. The Age, 25/01/2015.
[5] The Economist 31/01/2015. Safe as Houses. http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21641206-banks-have-been-boosting-mortgage-lending-decades-expense-corporate
[6] LF Economics 2015. Housing affordability in Australia. https://gumroad.com/l/UXjubSee summary at http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/04/oz-housing-affordability-measured/
[7] Van Onselen 2015. Australia’s idiotic land bubble. Macrobusiness 10/04/2015. http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/04/australias-idiotic-land-bubble/
[8] The Age, 20/01/2015. Multiple families living together because they can't afford the rent.
[9] Inga Ting 2015. The Sydney suburbs where minimum wage workers can afford to rent, SMH, 9/6/2015 http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/the-sydney-suburbs-where-minimum-wage-workers-can-afford-to-rent-20150608-ghjc6v.html
[10] Keith Calvert, Phantom Profit, The Canberra Times 4/6/2015.
[11] Michael Pascoe 2015. RBA remains dovish, but that's no surprise. Sydney Morning Herald 8/05/2015. http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/rba-remains-dovish-but-thats-no-surprise-20150508-ggx4s9.html
[12] Jacobs K. 2011. Why falling house prices aren’t the calamity the media would have you believe. The Conversation, 13/12/2011. http://theconversation.edu.au/why-falling-house-prices-arent-the-calamity-the-media-would-have-you-believe-4547
[13] Ridiculous immigration fires housing spike – Bob Carr. The Australian http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/immigration/ridiculous-immigration-fires-housing-spike-bob-carr/story-fn9hm1gu-1227393713757
[14] O’Sullivan J. 2014. Submission to the Productivity Commission Inquiry into Infrastructure provision and funding in Australia. http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/135517/subdr156-infrastructure.pdf
[15] Daly, J. 2014. Budget pressures on Australian governments 2014. Grattan Institute. http://grattan.edu.au/report/budget-pressures-on-australian-governments-2014/
[16] Soos P. 2011. Debunking the myths peddled by Australia’s property bubble ‘deniers’. The Conversation 14/12/2011. https://theconversation.com/debunking-the-myths-peddled-by-australias-property-bubble-deniers-4488
[17] Callick, R. 2015. Why the Chinese are willing to pay over the odds for local property. The Australian, 11/06/2015. http://m.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/why-the-chinese-are-willing-to-pay-over-the-odds-for-local-property/story-e6frg9fo-1227392052366
[18] Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, John Garnaut 2015.Corrupt overseas buyers ramp up property price, burn locals. The Age, 23/06/2015. http://www.theage.com.au/national/corrupt-overseas-buyers-ramp-up-property-price-burn-locals-20150622-ghu5pn.html
[19] Murray C. and Frijters P. 2015. Clean Money in a Dirty System: Relationship Networks and Land Rezoning in Queensland. IZA Discussion Paper No. 9028, April 2015. http://ftp.iza.org/dp9028.pdf
[20] Saul Eslake 2013. Fifty years of housing failure. Address to the 122nd Annual Henry George Commemorative Dinner The Royal Society of Victoria, Melbourne 2nd, September 2013. https://www.prosper.org.au/2013/09/03/saul-eslake-50-years-of-housing-failure/
[21] Greg Jericho 2015. Negative gearing: a legal tax rort for rich investors that reduces housing affordability. The Guardian 19/03/2015. http://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2015/mar/19/negative-gearing-a-legal-tax-rort-for-rich-investors-that-reduces-housing-affordability

It occurred to me recently that there are four central tectonic splits within the worldwide political left. Like the tectonic plates that shift beneath the surface of the earth, these represent fundamental cleavages between different tendencies, parties and groups under the broad umbrella of the worldwide left. And, like tectonic plates, these positions clash.

The first split is over approaches to globalization. This refers to the major political and economic developments that have taken place over the last 40 years. Economically, it involved the internationalization of the capitalist market economy, following the gradual opening and liberalization of markets (capital, commodity, and to a lesser extent labour) primarily for the benefit of Transnational Corporations (TNCs), which now dominate the global economy.[1] Politically, it involved the gradual erosion of national sovereignty, as increasing power has become vested in transnational political, economic, and cultural institutions, leading some left theorists to argue that globalization has seen the emergence of either a Transnational Capitalist Class (Marxists) or a Transnational Elite (libertarian).

Today, the overwhelming majority of the left, either explicitly or implicitly, endorses globalization. A much smaller number oppose it. The ‘globalisers’ aim to reform or even radically transform the global economy, but not to wind it back. To do so, they argue, would be regressive, suggesting that long-held Marxist ideas about the progressive role of capitalism are still deeply influential. The anti-globalisers, by contrast, argue that effective social struggle today, must also include a national component in order to restore national/economic sovereignty, in the face of growing transnational power, which has emerged via the globalizing process of the market economy.

A key debate between the globalisers and anti-globalisers relates to the interpretation of neo-liberalism. For the globalisers, neo-liberalism is typically viewed either as the result of misguided/irrational economic ideology (reformists), or as a class-project, designed to restore profitability for the capitalist class (anti-systematic). But either way, neo-liberalism is seen as reversible within the framework of the global economy. For reformists, it simply requires the revival of electable social democratic parties, whereas for (globalist) revolutionaries hope is placed in a, seemingly very distant, global working class revolt. The important point, however, is that neither approach, sees globalization itself, as the core problem to be countered.

For many anti-globalisers, such as political theorist Takis Fotopoulos of the Inclusive Democracy project, neoliberalism is inevitably bound up with the globalization process. As he puts it, “globalisation, in the framework of a capitalist market economy, can only be neoliberal.” According to this view, neo-liberalism in fact represents the required policy framework for states that have opened up and liberalized their markets, as most have done over the last 40 years. Once states have done this, whatever their formal ideology, whether social-democratic or conservative etc, they are required to offer competitive conditions – that is, neo-liberal policies – in order to attract investment from TNCs and/or to ensure exports are competitive on the global market. Anti-globalisers therefore argue that the only way neoliberalism could be overcome is if rebel states/nations – in coalition with each other – remove themselves from globalist (neo-liberal) institutions (i.e WTO, WB, IMF, EU, NAFTA etc), and reinstate social (i.e. capital/commodity) controls on markets, as a first step towards greater (if not complete) economic and political self-reliance. This, it is thought, would allow for the effective restoration of relatively egalitarian welfare states.

The second major contemporary split within the worldwide left revolves around ecological limits to growth. Those who accept limits argue that a combination of mounting resource scarcities and environmental degradation will soon put an end to future global economic growth and development. Leftists within this school are likely to adopt particularly radical positions. For, unlike many other environmental thinkers, they strive for an egalitarian world order based on fair shares for all. But today the earth is groaning under the weight of human impact and yet only about one sixth of the world’s people enjoy levels of high-affluence taken for granted in OECD countries. In this context, an egalitarian world of affluence for all seems like an immoral pipedream. Theorists in this school, such as Saral Sarkar and Richard Smith, argue for a massive retreat, not just from global capitalism, but also from high industrialism and affluence. This would involve (among other things) an egalitarian planned contraction and reorganization of industrialized economies.

But on the left, those who accept limits are in a small minority. Most remain firmly wedded to the productivist/growth theories and ideas embraced by both the liberal and socialist movements in the 19th century. Most on the left acknowledge that environmental issues, particularly global warming, represent major problems, which are unlikely to be resolved adequately within a growth/capitalist framework. But the alternative society they variously envisage typically does not also call into question various sacred cows such as globalization, high industrialism, affluence, centralization, and population growth. These are all typically dismissed as the irrelevant preoccupations of neo-Malthusian doomsayers. When pushed on these issues, (most) socialists reveal their faith in the dominant idea that technological progress, perhaps combined with a more rational socialist/planned economy, can overcome any foreseeable environmental constraints.

The last two of the four tectonic splits are far older. There is the long split between reformists and revolutionaries. The reformists seek to change or improve society, by working within and/or modifying the dual institutions of modernity: the capitalist market economy and representative democracy. Revolutionaries seek to overthrow or dismantle these institutions and replace them with alternative ones, such as socialized/planned economies and more participatory/direct forms of democracy. There is also the split between statists and non-statists. Statists, seek to use the power of the state, even if only for a revolutionary transitional phase, to achieve a socialist society. Non-statists reject the state, whether for transitional strategic purposes or not, and instead propose building up alternative institutions/cultures, that could eventually replace the state and capital.

Each of the above four splits are theoretically separate. Thus, people on opposing sides of one split may come down on the same side of another split. For example, anti-systemic leftists, while agreeing on the need to overhaul capitalism, may well hold opposing views on globalization. On the other hand, adoption of one position is often closely related to another. For example, almost all leftists who accept ecological limits, usually also oppose globalization, for reasons mentioned above.

As it turns out, I find myself adhering to the least popular ‘plate’ in each split. I oppose globalization. I believe humanity confronts severe and imminent ecological limits to growth, and I remain a stubbornly convinced revolutionary anarchist. This leads me to a minority position on the left, advocating for what has been called by eco-anarchist theorist Ted Trainer, ‘the simpler way’ (TSW), which calls for a new society beyond consumer-capitalism, based on individual and collective self-sufficiency, to be gradually built up from the grassroots.

Jonathan Rutherford
Coordinator of New International Bookshop and ‘Simpler Way’ Activist.
Website: https://politicsofsimplicity.wordpress.com/

A panel in Japan has proposed the government take measures to halt the country's population slide so it goes no lower than 100 million people. At present Japan's population is likely to fall to about 87 million by 2060. This new proposal probably reflects outside interference by globalists, who are pushing for cheap imported labour. We should take into account that Japan's population numbers were stable until international trade and 'development' pushed them up by reorganising the population away from largely rural and small cities to massive land-less labour sources in huge cities. The Japanese are a very big tribe and have managed to regain control over their numbers. This push for immigration will once again destabilise them. Japan can only feed itself by importing food and energy. Already the national atomic power production system has shown itself to be hugely unstable and dangerous. This should be taken as a signal that Japan needs to go with its natural trends to return to a smaller, stable population. Reference: Anthony Boys, How will Japan feed itself without fossil energy? in Sheila Newman, (Ed) The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto Press, 2008.

The panel which the mainstream western press has unsurprisingly given such prominence, reportedly advised, using typical pro-growth terms 'greying population' , 'vibrancy', 'shrinking workforce', 'larger group of pensioners':

"Japan should stabilise its population about 100 million people, stemming an expected dramatic fall in the next 50 years in the rapidly greying country. If the plan is adopted by the government, it would be the first numerical population target in the country.

The population of 127 million is projected to fall to about 87 million in 2060 because of a far-below replacement fertility rate and the almost complete absence of immigration.

That would have potentially huge knock-on effects on the size and vibrancy of the economy, and will heap ever-increasing pressure on a shrinking workforce to provide care for a larger group of pensioners.

In its interim report, released on Tuesday, a government panel proposed Japan should take measures to halt the population slide so it goes no lower than 100 million people.

The panel estimated that if Japan's total fertility rate - the average number of children born to a woman - recovers to 2.07 in 2030 from the 1.41 in 2012 and stays at that level, the country's population will be about 100 million in 2060.

In its report, the panel called on the government to double its support for parents to make childcare easier, while encouraging senior citizens to work longer to help offset the cost of their old age.

The panel also suggested Japan accept more foreign skilled workers to boost the labour force. Previous such suggestions have fallen on deaf ears in a country that views immigration with suspicion.

Economic and fiscal policy minister Akira Amari said the government planned to reflect the proposals in its guidelines on economic and fiscal policies to be released in June.

"We hope the government will share our sense of crisis," Akio Mimura, the panel's head and chairman of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said at a panel meeting, a cabinet Office official said. Source: AAP 13 May 2014 - 6:02 PM UPDATED 13 May 2014 - 9:40 PM"

The Japanese are a national group of tribes of Pacific Islanders who occupied and organised land-tenure in this region for millenia without advice from globalist entrepreneurs.

Diet change in Japan in the 20th century

During the Edo Period, when Japan’s population numbered around 33 million, total cereal dependency was probably around 90 percent, with 6 percent provided by soybeans and azuki beans, and a further 6 percent by potatoes and sweet potatoes, plus fresh vegetables, fruit, fish, and meat, when available and/or in season.

Remarkable changes took place in the Japanese diet from the 1930s to the 1990s. The increases and decreases are symbolic of the changes that have taken place in Japan over the last 70 years (the mid-thirties was the period when buses, trains, and telephones were beginning to change patterns of life in rural Japan) and over the last 40 years, since the inception of the drive to industrialization and economic growth.

With the exception of wheat consumption, which rose 4-fold, direct cereal consumption decreased generally. Intake halved of the traditional soybean-foods, miso and soy sauce. Consumption of milk and other dairy produce increased 28-fold (4-fold since 1960), along with oil and fat, which rose 15-fold (over 3-fold since 1960), meat, which increased 14-fold (6-fold since 1960), eggs, which rose over 7-fold, and fish, which increased nearly 4-fold. More than twice as much fruit was eaten. Since 1990 domestic production of cheese has increased nearly 120 percent , all part of the ongoing change (Westernization) of the Japanese diet that has been taking place over the last half-century.

Today’s westernized Japanese diet represents a move away from cereals into animal protein foods. In fact, the total consumption of cereals has not decreased, the cereals are simply "processed" through livestock to provide food in the form of animal protein.

What food does Japan still produce for herself?

Japan could easily have been self-sufficient in food in 1960, but is now grossly dependent on the international market for food supplies. Since the late 1990s, 60 percent of food calories consumed in Japan are imported. Japan ranks about 130 in the world, far below Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Brazil in grain self-sufficiency.

Production of the food staples – rice and soybeans as well as other cereals – has predictably diminished along with farmland and levels of consumption. Rice is one crop for which Japan can easily be self-sufficient. At the end of the 19th century, Japan planted about 2.6 million ha of wet rice per year, but yields were about two tonnes per ha. From 1920 to 1969, planted area hovered around the 3 million ha mark, but yields rose from about 3 tonnes/ha to about 4.5 tonnes/ha. Planted area in 2004 was around 1.7 million ha, yield being around 5.2 tonnes/ha.

Planted area for soybeans was a high of over 400,000 ha in the 1870s and peaked in 1910 at 470,000 ha, but by 1995 it was under 69,000 ha. A complicating factor for adducing food needs is that soybeans are now imported as livestock feed.
Self-sufficiency in soybeans has fallen steadily since 1930 and is now around 20 percent, with annual imports since the early 1980s in the 4.5 million to 5 million tonne region.

In areas of Japan with fairly mild winters, and where the land was not snowbound in the winter months, winter wheat and barley were often grown on paddy land as a winter crops. Total production of wheat and barley, 3 million tonnes in 1913 and 3.8 million tonnes in the late 1950s, has plummeted to around a million tonnes or less since 1970.

Japan still produces about 80 percent of vegetables, 39 per cent of the fruit , 44 per cent of beef, 51 per cent of pork, and 67 per cent of the dairy products she consumes.

Self-sufficient in fish (though at lower levels of per capita consumption) up to around 1980, since then Japan has had to maintain, and even raise, per capita fish consumption by subsidizing her ever-declining fish catches with imports.
Japan has gone from potential or near self-sufficiency in livestock feed in 1960 to about 50 percent overseas dependency in just under 40 years. Source: Anthony Boys, How will Japan feed itself without fossil energy? in Sheila Newman, (Ed) The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto Press, 2008, pp 354-357.

Item: Statscan reports that Vancouver and Toronto residents are the least happy of Canadians
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2015046-eng.htm

Interesting. According to a recent Statscan report, people in Vancouver and Toronto are less happy than folks in any other Canadian city. How can that be?

Don't they like the massive and relentless influx of "New Canadians"? Don't they like "diversity"? Don't they like higher density, unaffordable housing, traffic congestion, ethnic gangs, crime and job competition from a growing pool of cheap imported labour? Don't they like being told they must fork out more and more money for improved transit and infrastructure because Vancouver will add another million to its numbers? Don’t they like being told to move over and squeeze tighter to make room for more and more people? Don't they like listening to city politicians who want to "welcome" migrants and grow the population while promising to make the city the "greenest" in the world at the same time?

The unfortunate truth is that while many Vancouver and Toronto residents are unhappy, they can't tell you exactly why. Yes, they don't like unaffordable housing, traffic congestion etc. But apparently they can’t connect it to the federal policy of mass immigration. And anyone who tries to connect the dots for them is buried by media outrage and driven off the stage. Just ask Ontario's former Environment Commissioner, Gordon Miller.

Meanwhile, after reporting Statscan’s findings, the CBC featured a story about a Harvard academic whose research has demonstrated that with enough effort, we can all “choose” to be happy. All it takes is practice. We can train our brains to be optimistic and positive. Translation: don't try to change your circumstances, change your attitude! If you work in a sweatshop or a fast food restaurant or at Walmart for the minimum wage, don't worry---be happy. Be happy with mass immigration. Be happy with your displacement. Be happy with 'diversity'. Be happy with Euro-Canadian cultural suicide. Don’t worry.

You see, it is all about how you look at it. Instead of being unhappy about the surrender and betrayal of your country or how your community and your neighbourhood has been rendered unrecognizable thanks to policies that were enacted by governments that never had a mandate to do so, you can focus on the positive. As Bing Crosby said, you've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative and don’t mess with Mister-in-Between!
Each day you should endeavour to count your blessings, meditate and be kind to strangers and friends. If you keep doing that, one day you will suddenly wake up and realize that you are happy.

So give it a try, won't you? Say, "Despite the fact that Chinese millionaires have demolished heritage homes on the West side of town, inflated local real estate beyond the reach of ordinary Canadians and replaced English signs with Chinese-only signs, I'm happy!" Or, "Despite the fact massive numbers of Muslim immigrants are unwilling to accept our cultural norms or respect our traditions and impose a net fiscal burden on Canadian taxpayers, I'm happy! Then meditate and think about it.

Voila! Suddenly you understand what Vancouver City Council and Mayor Gregor Robertson meant by “Reconciliation”. You are happily reconciled to your own displacement! You are born again! You are at one with the Multicultural universe! You are “welcoming”. You are ready to run to the airport and like a Walmart greeter shout, “Welcome to Canada, Home-to-the-World!” Or, “Welcome to Vancouver, The World-in-a-City”!

You are ready to be kind to strangers, strangers like the ones who came from China to rip down good housing stock, price you out of the local market, and drive your wages down as not-so-temporary foreign workers. Or ready to be kind to vitriolic imams who preach anti-Western hate from the safety of their mosques while their agents and front men wage law-fare against critics or threaten them with a human rights complaint. It is amazing what a little kindness will do.

If people in Vancouver and Toronto are so unhappy, then why don't they take that advice? Decide to be happy. Decide to change their attitude. As that Harvard academic said, the world is what you perceive it to be. Change your perception and you change the world. Your world.

So tomorrow morning, I am going to do just that. I am going to perceive the world differently . And I am going to start by perceiving my VISA bill and my mortgage debt as being paid off. Poof! Gone! See!

I wonder if the Royal Bank will accept my perception of reality?

Tim Murray,
April 22, 2015

And now a word from our Minister of Immigration, Chris Alexander (with apologies to Bob Marley):

"You say mass immigration has robbed you of a job so you ain't got no place to lay your head? Somebody came and took your bed? Don't worry, be happy. The landlord say your rent is late and he may have to litigate, don't worry, be happy. Look at me I am happy!

Here I give you my phone number. When you worry call me. I make you happy—or I’ll call the police and shut down my constituency office until you go away!

The function of Australian mass media seems to be to inveigle listeners into complicity in the terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to 'choose' between distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B.

I am fed up.

I am fed up with the fact that nearly all the air time on local ABC radio is filled with discussion of the symptoms of rapid population growth and human overpopulation with scarcely a passing reference to the actual cause. For example, today I caught a discussion of wind farms on the Basalt Plains in Western Victoria. A woman called Jon Faine’s program with a concern that there are only 500 brolgas left in the area and that wind farms impinge on the birds’ territory by around an 8kms margin from each wind farm. Host, Jon Faine as devil's advocate pointed out that the brolgas could go somewhere else as the wind farms were not really taking up a lot of space. The next caller ridiculed the brolga advocate with the opposite argument that if coal continued to be used to generate electricity then there would be no environment for brolgas or anything else. Neither caller mentioned that with increasing population, more and more electricity needs to be generated either by coal or by wind farms or whatever will do the trick. The human environmental footprint in Victoria is growing from a size 10 to a size 14 with no end in sight.

I’m also fed up that the Leader newspaper was delivered to my letter box this week with the front page headline “Please ease squeeze” plastered over a photo of South Yarra railway station exit/entrance presumably at peak hour in the afternoon as the crowds are walking away from the station. According to the article the station is a daily bun fight with too many passengers for the capability of the station. Prahran State Greens MP, Sam Hibbens “has lodged a Freedom of Information request with the department of transport to find out what improvements are being considered for the bustling hub.” This same MP in 2010 as a Federal candidate was invited to reply (both in writing and by phone) to a questionnaire on population for Sustainable Population Australia but no reply was received. In a nutshell, Hibbens is calling for improvements in the station to accommodate an “extra 5000 people expected to move into the Forest Hill precinct adjacent to the station in the next 15 years.” I feel exasperated to know that it is already overcrowded, so the improvement would have to provide an enormous increase in capacity if it were to accommodate the continuous increase in population which is expected. This increase in population ensures continued discomfort and stress for passengers. This is a big deal as it is an essential part of their daily lives and we only get one life each, as far as I know. Governments don’t seem to be about improving lives at all, only talking about it, staving off complaints, and controlling what should be uproar about the completely avoidable destruction of the reasonable lives we used to lead and could have continued to have led.

I am equally fed up with the articles in the daily media such as The Age in Melbourne (several this week) about booming population growth as though it is news. To me it is just a constant feed of reminders to the readership of a decreasing quality of life due to socially engineered population hyper-growth.

Turning to the radio, the function of chat shows especially on the ABC seem to be to inveigle the audience into complicity in this terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to feel they are being heard by calling in with suggestions and their views on whether they’d like distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B. Alternatively, the programs feature trivial topics as a brief distractions from the reality of where we are heading. (As I write this, the program I can hear is dedicated to personal coincidences.)

I’d love to know what instructions the columnists of the daily newspapers are given to guide them in their articles on population growth. It must be something like “Make sure that you don’t let anyone know that high population growth is a government choice. Make it sound like a trend you are following and reporting on that has no rhyme or reason."

On Friday the 13th of February I attended the “Great Debate: To Collapse or Not to Collapse,” hosted by the Sustainable Living Festival at the Deakin Auditorium. The following Wednesday I attended a screening on the movie Cowspiracy, hosted by Animal Liberation Victoria, which explored the impact of industrial animal agriculture on the environment and the resistance from environmental groups to address the issue in a meaningful way.

Both events painted a grim picture of the environment and society if we don’t make considerable changes, however as in most events that prescribe change, they did a good job of focusing on particular issues whilst ignoring others. I have reflected considerably over the past week, and after summarising the two events I will share three points that I feel get overlooked by the environmental and social change movements. I believe these points must be acknowledged if we are to sustain the planet for successive generations.

The Great Debate: To Collapse or not to Collapse

The Great Debate identified climate change as an immediate crisis and six key speakers argued as to whether change should happen as a result of ‘collapse’ (e.g. a breakdown of our current complex and fuel dependent society) into a simpler, more grassroots society, or whether to work within the existing paradigm to a society run on clean renewable energy. The audience had the opportunity to vote at the end of which option they most agreed with or to suggest an alternative solution. With Bendigo Bank and Future Super sponsoring the event and encouraging attendees to divest, it was clear that the clean energy option had more support, however if the MC was hoping for a clear cut debate from the speakers she may have left a little disappointed.

Speakers David Holmgren and Nicole Foss gave the clearest arguments promoting collapse as the best option. Holmgren, who has spearheaded the permaculture movements in Victoria and abroad, suggested that a move from the middle class from grid-dependency towards self-reliance based on permaculture principles will allow a change of culture permitting a smoother transition away from capitalist growth economies that greatly impact the planet. Nicole Foss (see www.theautomaticearth.com) argued that economic collapse is inevitable as we are currently living in a financial bubble. As the bubble bursts, it will not be possible to fund the investment costs required for a large scale transition to renewable energy sources. To the contrary, people will only become inspired to take grass roots action when there is resource and fiscal depletion, she argued.

Phillip Sutton (author of ‘Climate Code Red’); Jess More (Stop CSG Illawarra) and George Marshall (author) were more inclined to argue that economic or physical collapse isn’t necessary. Sutton stated that collapse would not take CO2 away from the atmosphere. Therefore we need green tech technology to reclaim these emissions. These three speakers seemed to believe that there is a failure to talk about climate change on across the political spectrum. So a bottom-up change needs to take place through a conversation with wider society. Hopefully this would eventuate in a critical mass motivated to change society away from fossil fuels and endless economic growth.

George Monbiot (Prominent UK climate change author) had reservations for both sides of the argument and counselled attendees to abstain from voting. He suggested on the one hand how the planet will struggle to sustain our societies with current growth even with a switch to renewable energies. Further, that it is impossible to grow on a finite planet, especially now that limits have been reached. On the other hand, he had reservations about the manner in which basic demands (such as health) might be met in a post-collapse society. He believed that history has shown that post-collapse societies are not a peaceful alternative as and that feudal societies or tribal pockets run by psychopaths tend to be the norm.

Once the votes were counted, it was found that a distinct majority of 123 voted for non-collapse, and 59 voted for a third option (whatever that might be).

Why collapse might be better

I was in the minority who voted for collapse (23 votes) because I believe that the planet and other species that still live in it have a better chance of recovery if we’re in less of a position to systematically exploit it.

I learnt much from this debate and all speakers raised clear and valid points. As I anticipated however, the largest two contributors to climate change and ecological destruction, human population and animal agriculture were never discussed. This is all too common in environmental discussions. Nicole Foss mentioned the ‘P’ (for population numbers) word in passing, and George Monbiot brought up limits to growth on a finite planet, however this was couched as an economic argument rather than in terms of human numbers.

Cowspiracy:

The frustration that I have with environmentalists ignoring animal agriculture as the primary cause of climate change was shared a few days later when I attended ‘Cowspiracy’, in which this was the main premise. Despite the conspiracy theory nature of the title, the movie was much better thought out than that. The documentary referred to the fact that UN reports had been repeatedly reporting animal agriculture as the leading cause of Greenhoouse Gases (GHG), with the World Institute equating this proportion to 51% of GHGs, or 32 000 million tonnes [1] This takes into account Methane (with a global warming power at least 23 times that of Co2) and land clearance. The Standard American Diet is much less efficient in terms of land area use compared to entirely or mostly plant based diet, with many studies suggesting the difference is quite dramatic [2], [3]. livestock agriculture now covers 45% of the earth’s surface [4]. Consider that transportation, the next highest emitter of GHG emission, contributes a much lesser proportion at 13%.

See http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/ for many links to some of these sobering statistics.

The documentary makers were curious as to why many environmentalist groups, such as Greenpeace, were not campaigning on the issue or even providing this information. In investigating, their conclusions were that many environmental groups were either ignorant of the issue, wilfully or otherwise, or had deliberate motives for withholding this information.

Reasons included perceived possibility of alienation of membership and fund base, due to environmental group awareness that people tend to be disinclined to change their own behaviour. Relatedly, campaigns that have a clearer ‘us’ and ‘them’ delineation (such as fossil fuel emissions from corporate giants) are easier to pursue. There was also some leads to suggest that some of the larger environmental organisations may also receive funding from the animal agriculture lobby.

Many of us in the population movement would sympathise with the frustration that the documentary makers felt at this disjointedness of priority. However, I became frustrated at the film of my own accord, because as although the filmmakers acknowledged human population growth, they took the approach of trivalising it in comparison to animal growth. As the two are so intertwined, I was once again left feeling that many loose ends were not tied. This is a sentiment that is now all too familiar to me. Although I understand that everyone needs to pick their battles and focus on particular campaigns, failure to acknowledge important and fundamental issues undermines the whole environmental movement in the long run. I have listed 3 important issues that I believe must be acknowledged if we have any chance on either a clean emission free society OR a soft collapse:

(1) We need to stop eating industrialised animal products

This won’t be a popular suggestion for many due to the fact it suggests such a profound change to our diet and a fundamental change that is difficult for most of us. But inaction now means even more uncomfortable change down the track. Unless the UN changes its statistics more favourably anytime soon, the best single change we can do individually in regards to emission and biodiversity loss is to transition to a mainly plant-based diet.

If there is any benefit to living in a global society, it is that we have an access to a variety of plant foods that allow us to have a complete diet easily. The earth unfortunately cannot sustain 7 billion humans eating at the top of the food chain. The option to change, however, is possible within our current paradigm.

If this line of reasoning sounds logical, it is mainly the animal rights movement that is relaying the message to the wider public at present. It is easy to acknowledge that a fair proportion of people would be wary of the messages conveyed by animal rights activists due to suspicions that their morality may be skewing the validity of an environmental based argument. If a recognised environmental movement were to champion this cause, especially where animal agriculture was not the only focus, than I believe more people would be convinced.

I also acknowledge that most environmental organizations do amazing and tireless work within their areas of focus, and it is impossible to fight all battles at once.

Given the proportion of GHG attributable to animal agriculture, one might have hoped that more attention would be directed towards this industry by all the environmental groups out there. Currently however, there are precious few environmental organisations advocating for this, which probably comes down to a perceived unpopularity of the issue to the membership base, where a fundamental change to the way an individual member lives would need to be advocated for.

As mentioned before, ‘Us vs them’ debates, where the emphasis is on fossil fuel usage by corporate giants resonate better with most people. This may be because it externalises the issue and the individual campaigner is less compelled to change their own lifestyle choices. I completely empathise why environmental groups choose to take this path, but anyone who successfully campaigns against animal agriculture will be much more effective in the long run for the well-being of the planet, if this is the ultimate goal.

(2) Our population growth needs to slow down or not grow at all

Many readers of Can Do Better would rightly suggest that industrial agriculture is an unfortunate consequence of feeding a large world population and would not be a phenomenon if the world’s population were less than it is today. This is theoretically true but the current reality is actually unavoidable. If global populations were to double however, than the savings we’d made on GHG by switching to a plant-based diet would be nullified. Essentially we’d be back to square one again and need to look towards another seismic change in lifestyle.

The major problem is that the demographic transition, or the plateau in global human population that we were hedging our bets on just isn’t happening. We were predicting human population to reach 9 billion and level for around 20 years, and only most recently has this been upped to 11 billion, or a 40% increase from 7 billion. Currently charts show human population growth rate as an almost exponentially rising curve since the 1990s whilst the growth curve of all other vertebrate species on the planet (with the exception of ‘livestock’ of course) going inversely the other direction by almost the same amount.
I personally believe that human population will continue to grow at this rate until we (a) do something decisiveabout it or (b) we overshoot and our environmental rug is swept from under us. Of course, we are at this stage heading for option b.

Population numbers is a difficult subject for many of those people fighting to save the environment. This is probably because most identify with the left side of the political system. They thus struggle to differentiate population stabilization from reproductive coercion of the majority world (on an international scale) and protectionism or xenophobia on the national scale.

There is also a persistent belief that the problem is one of per capita footprint (particularly in the West) rather the total number of footprints. Most serious research has suggested that both need to come down, with population, unfortunately, being the most powerful variable.

Canadian environmentalist Tim Murray suggests that: ‘One new citizen via British maternity ward or airport wipes out 80 lifetimes of responsible recycling’ and ‘The energy produced by a 900 machine wind farm in BC will be erased by the energy demands of just 22 days of population growth’. This certainly paints a dour picture of the effectiveness of a clean economy with today’s rapid population growth.

Another example is that found from the Union for the Conservation of Nature, whose study across the globe in 2004 found that human population density predicted for 88% of biodiversity loss, regardless of nation wealth or per capita consumption.

This latter finding complements my own anecdotal experience volunteering in Western Kenya where the Karkemega forest was being decimated literally before my eyes from a hilltop viewpoint to meet the survival needs of local people, living on a sustenance level on less than $40 per month, whose population numbers had been disturbed and boosted by the political and religious landscape. This suggests that a population living in a lower consumption, non-global or post-collapse society would cause a significant reduction in environmental impact, but as Phillip Sutton and George Monbiot suggested at the Great Debate, environmental destruction just becomes more localized in such societies and more dispersed in industrialised ones. Note that traditional societies, human and of other species, have lived for many generations in local ecologies at numbers that did not overwhelm their environment. We can deduce this from the fact that they obviously co-existed with a full complement of species in Africa, India, America and Australia before colonization. [5]

The good news is that population growth can be a relatively straightforward thing to manage, if the political and social will is there. The United Nations Family Planning association has found that high levels of education and access to NON COERCIVE family planning services result is lower birth rates AND lower infant mortality – essentially when women are empowered and enfranchised away from patriarchal political and religious institutions. This may be a relief to those on the left haunted by China’s one child policy and population control in the majority world as manifestation of Western imperialism. Targeted grassroots foreign aid is the key.

Population is therefore an international concern (total carbon output) and a national and community concern (effect on local eco-systems) with varying implications according to carrying capacity depending on location.

Australia has reached its 23 million carrying capacity [6] according to the Australian Academy for Science calculations in 1994. We are now expected to double our population in 35 years, which means to halve our national carbon output, each individual will need to consume at one quarter of what they consume now. Ironically, in the long run, human psychology would probably predict that most Australians would opt for less people than the dramatic cultural shift that would result in a short-term reduction in the very way they live.

This is, of course, antithetical to the open border ideology to many in the left. I would love to share this ideology, but one must take into account the carrying capacity of Australia in addition to the population growth rate of the world’s poor which, at last estimate, was growing at the rate of 80 million per year. Even if Australia had completely permeable borders, it could never accommodate the total annual population of the world’s poor (at almost 4 times Australia’s current carrying capacity per year).

Unless the ultimate aim is complete diffusion of the problem without addressing the root cause (which benefits no-one in the long term) than an international movement to address population and reduce poverty is the only real solution.

Totally open borders, without addressing the root issue, also don’t address the well-being of all other species and the first custodians of the continent. It may also be argued that unless aboriginal Australians have final say in our immigration policies, that this can be interpreted as further unsolicited colonization.

As it stands most of Australia’s population growth rate (388 000 per annum, or at 1.7% per annum, the highest in the OECD) derives from the ‘skilled’ or employment-related immigration channels (55%) followed by natural birth rate (40%) with humanitarian intake a distant third at 5%.

The job market has been slowing down, and it is evident that the continued push for skilled immigration is social engineering by the right of the political spectrum to raise GDP by increasing the customer base via the housing and asset markets.

This push for high housing prices and low wages is at the expense of the working and living prospects of people with disabilities, the young, the old, the first inhabitants and even our asylum seekers.

This stark local reality puts environmentalists and the left at a seeming crossroads: open borders vs diminished social rights, vested interests and worse conditions for asylum seekers.

Whilst environmentalists and the left remain silent on the subject, or continue to confuse all debate on population with refugees, ironically big business benefits at the expense of most of the social rights that the left are campaigning for in addition to the environmental goals which are diluted by impacts of rapid population growth.

If the left are concerned by Australia’s population growth and the political ideologies that fuel the wrong kind of growth, the good news is that any concerted campaign that succeeds in toppling the property developers, financial institutions and media moguls from power would mitigate the pressure on politicians to promote socially engineered growth without ever having to mention the dreaded ‘p’ word. Currently the cause is championed by single issue advocacy group such as Sustainable Population Australia and a major hurdle for such groups is in enrolling the wider public, many of whom are skeptical that such groups are using environmental green wash to promote a culturally protectionist agenda. Whilst this assumption is false in the most part, multi-campaign environmental groups who also campaign for population sustainability would probably present the message easier, as their true agendas are more trusted by the wider community.

A final consideration would address our national birth rate. Whilst it is already slightly under ‘replacement level’ (1.9%) further cultural change would allow for a more generous humanitarian intake without affecting the population growth rate.

A cultural change would be possible where people did not feel that raising children was the societal norm and that having less or no children was considered an equally valid life choice from the perspective of mainstream society. A community focused upbringing, where a wider network of trusted adults assisted in the raising of fewer children, could be a better alternative to the nuclear family arrangement that is the current norm [7]. Furthermore, the education system could assist, where students could be facilitated in opening considering the many positives in raising a family, alongside the many costs, including financial pressures, changes to lifestyle, and the environmental impact of additional people on the planet. If we are considering that enormous change will happen in most of our lifetimes, including the possibility of economic and environmental collapse, this is something that people will need to carefully consider before deciding on having children.

Summary: we are not going to save our society from collapse if we are catering for a population heading towards a long term goal of infinity people, even with all the green tech in the world.

3. We have to keep our Ego under check

This last point comes more from my own philosophical outlook than through factual research that has resulted in my views on animal agriculture and population. However I do strongly believe that human ego has been at the core of all our problems and issues throughout history and fundamental to our ability to see through transition, whether through a clean capitalist economy or a soft collapse.

If we approach our problems from a place of empathy and compassion for each other and other species on the planet, we are in a better position to accept the facts of our predicament and make the necessary changes, regardless of how difficult the changes may appear to us personally. We’d also be able to work proactively with others and accept different opinions and factual evidence even if it initially conflicts with our own pre-existing beliefs.

I also believe there is some reason for optimism when it comes to addressing ego in what appear to be strong recent western trends to pursuing Taoism, Bhuddhism, mindfulness, and other spirituality which aim to mitigate ego and reconnect the individual to the planet. Not that this pursuit is reserved for spiritualists at the expense of atheists; most modern science, whether it be iquantum physics or biological science, is shifting from a Spencerian (false-Darwinistic) model of competition and reductionism towards one of mutual interdependence, symbiosis and balance.

If we come from a place of ego, we are ultimately coming from a place of insecurity and fear and tend to seek validation of ourselves and our beliefs at the expense of others. It makes us dogmatic and stuck in our beliefs, fearful of letting go and embracing change and the unknown.

These rigid characteristics are associated with big business, seeking short term profits at the expense of a future planet. The challenges for the environmental movement are to engage the wider public, of whom many are culturally conditioned, stuck in their ways and brittle in shifting their schemas.

Yet it would be delusional for those of us active in social change not to see the finger when it points back at ourselves.

Amazing though the work may be that we all do in our respective fields, if we are not addressing fundamental questions required to save ourselves, due to ego and fear, our efforts in other areas to save our planet can only be thwarted.

Ego is an issue everywhere, even in the animal rights and population movements. The animal rights and vegan movements are plagued by internal debate over many issues that can get personal, where this energy would be better diverted towards the animal agriculture industry. Some involved in population sustainability may be motivated to do so from a fear of losing their culture and lifestyle, however we all need to embrace that culture is a constantly changing phenomena, on those who currently live in Australia must also acknowledge that massive cultural shifts that we imposed and continue to impose on Australia’s original custodians. It was interesting at the Great Debate where there was much discussion from many of the speakers of the ongoing issues of promoting a dialogue to the wider public that is empathetic to their current beliefs and life circumstance.

Ego is most certainly an issue for myself. It was frustration which motivated me towards writing this article, itself a manifestation of ego, which means the finished article may be affected by judgment and fixed thinking. I still have a long way to go before I am a paragon of environmental sustainability - although I think I’ve addressed the two ‘biggies’ in regards my diet and my choice not to reproduce, I’m still sure that if everyone lived my carbon footprint that the earth would have been underwater decade ago, and there is still much, much more I can be personally doing. My aim is an ambitious one, to tread lightly on the planet and be as free from hypocrisy as I can. I would invite those inspired to join me in weaving all pieces of the puzzle together, and for those unconvinced, I would invite constructive debate on the thoughts I have raised, so long as it invites further constructive discussion towards a common goal of saving the planet.

Concluding Observations:

In order to authentically save the planet and ourselves, either through green tech, zero growth or through soft collapse, we need a holistic view of change, of which elements such as fossil fuels are more of an accepted given whereas animal agriculture, population, and ego are not given the platform I believe they deserve. These are very difficult issues to address, and history has not given much confidence in our capacity to live rationally and harmoniously with ourselves and our environment, but they are necessary to avoid a hard collapse, as predicted by Nicole Foss and George Monbiot at the Great Debate. If we are unsuccessful, that is perfectly fine in the longer term for the future of the planet itself, as I’m cautiously optimistic it will repair itself in an event where we are no more. It would just be a dreadful pity for the human race if we didn’t face facts and worked together to be authentic about giving it a good shot.

It is ultimately those issues that we find most difficult to confront that are the most essential issues for us to open up to.

Michael Bayliss is Vice-President of Victoria First, an NGO decicated towards better stewardship of Victoria through highlighting population concerns to the wider community. He is a former committee member of Sustainable Population Australia (VicTas Branch) and member of the Sustainable Population Party. He is also actively involved in many animal rights campaigns such as Coalition Against Duck Shooting and grass roots post-growth movements such as Doing it Ourselves.

NOTES

[1] Reference: “Livestock and Climate Change” World Watch Magazine, 2009. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294.

[2] Reference: Robbins, John. Diet for a New America,StillPoint Publishing, 1987, p. 352

[3] Reference: “Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2003, vol.78 no.3, 6605- 6635. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full

[4] Reference: “Livestock and Climate Change.” International Livestock Research Institute, Issue Brief, 2011. (https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/handle/10568/10601/IssueBrief3.pdf

[5] Reference: Sheila Newman, Demography, Territory, Law: The Rules of animal and human populations, Countershock Press, 2013.

[6] In 1994, Australian Academy of Sciences held the Symposium, "Population 2040: Australia's choice". They issued a joint statement http://www.sciencearchive.org.au/events/sats/sats1994/Population2040-section8.pdf said: “The quality of all aspects of our children's lives will be maximised if the population of Australia by the mid-21st Century is kept to the low, stable end of the achievable range, i.e. to approximately 23 million. If fertility remains at its current level ‘a little below replacement’ and immigration is set at the low end of the postwar range (50,000 net per year) Australia’s population in 2040 will be 23 million and almost stationary. Australia can thus achieve a near-stationary population free of disruptive bulges of population groups (which require a sudden expansion of education facilities when young and sudden expansion of care facilities when aged) by a managed mixture of fertility and immigration.” Entire book source is: Population 2040 : Australia's choice / proceedings of the Symposium of the 1994 Annual General Meeting of the Australian Academy of Science by Australian Academy of Science. General Meeting Symposium, (1994: Canberra, A.C.T.)
Canberra : The Academy, 1995

Sheila Newman tells me that Jonathan Stone and others publicly stated that Australia’s population at the time of the event, which was 17 million, was probably already at carrying capacity. According to her memory, Dr Stone prevailed on those present to suggest they needed to appear generous to refugees and therefore should allow some leeway for immigration which, he felt, would take Australia to 23 million.

[7] In other species and in many traditional human communities, including Australia between the two wars, there is a long tradition of extended families helping one breeding couple. This is known to anthropologists as ‘cooperative breeding’. (See http://candobetter.net/taxonomy/term/6927) Aunts and uncles not directly involved in reproduction are able to engage actively with their local communities and wider politics. Status, position and identity need not depend on reproduction.

The internet provides the general public, almost anywhere, with access to contraceptive information which your local GP and well-trod academic paths have failed to provide. Here is a male contraceptive that provides months of temporary sterilisation to men. It only requires bathing the testes in hot water (46C or 116F) for 45 minutes a day for three weeks for six months infertility. Bathing in water of water at 43.3C or 110? produces at least four months of infertility. Longterm practice can apparently permanently reduce fertility. Voegeli's method was recommended and used in India in the 1940s by a Swiss doctor who ran her own hospital in India and advocated for the poor. Why have educated people lost this information? My reading leads me to surmise that this was (a) because it was recommended by a female doctor; (b) because you could not make money out of it (c) because it undercut commercial methods [1] (d) due to overvaluation of possible long-term effects in certain cases. All these concerns fail to take into consideration the dire situation of people in countries of high birth rates who do not have access to 'modern' and costly contraception. Note: This article has been retitled from "Simple Male Contraceptive - hot water" to "Revolutionary male contraceptive" because some readers thought it was a joke and, although the concept and practice is simple, this kind of simplicity is revolutionary today.

Of the reasons I have surmised for the failure of this method to be popularised, it seems to me that its very cost-free nature may be why the method has not been promoted widely. In our commercialised global culture, money-making opportunities receive the widest promotion of all ideas. This also explains why population growth is widely promoted but population restraint is not. The first makes money for focused beneficiaries; the second simply removes diffuse costs. Dr Voegeli's method apparently gained local popularity in India during a famine, but who knows what subsequently disorganised the societies and their cultural knowledge in the areas where Dr Voegeli practised?

Below I have copied and pasted a letter to the Lancet written by the woman who introduced this practice to India in the 1940s. [2] This Swiss woman doctor's battle to have the method taken seriously is alluded to in this article, http://www.newmalecontraception.org/heat-methods/:

"In 1949, Voegeli began a 20-year campaign to publicize the heat method so that, if the results of further studies were favorable, the method could be widely used (Corea, 1985; Robinson, Rock, & Menkin, 1968). Voegeli’s impassioned pleas for the method make fascinating reading and show how in some ways, the plight of the poor has changed very little in the intervening 50 years. Her attempts to publicize this free contraceptive were generally unsuccessful, although in 1954 the Japanese government requested the information and conducted several successful experiments (Corea, 1985 ch. 9)."

The same article also warns that "It is now clear that fertility may not return completely after long-term use of heat methods. After keeping meticulous records during more than 12 years of use of the special underwear method, one long-term user has found that his sperm count after quitting is only a fraction of what it was before. Keep in mind, if trying heat methods, that they may gradually impact fertility over time. Except for short-term use, heat methods should not be used as a reversible method– they should only be used by men who are okay with potentially being less fertile, or not fertile, in the future." The same article also provides theory on why heat methods work based on the location of the testes outside the body.

M. Voegeli, M.D.
"Marlefried"
Goldiwil-ob-Thun
Switzerland

January 4, 1956

The Editor
"The Lancet"
7 Adam Street
Adelphi Terrace
London W.C.2
England

Sir:

I am sending you the enclosed article in the hope that you may find it of value for publication in "The Lancet".

For your information I may say that I hold the Master's degree from Columbia University of New York City, and my Doctor's in medicine from the University of Berlin and the University of Paris. In India I practiced in my own private hospital, specializing in surgery. In 1950 I retired and am now living in my native Switzerland.

Yours very sincerely,

M. Voegeli, M.D.

CONTRACEPTION THROUGH TEMPORARY MALE STERILIZATION

by Dr. Martha Voegeli

In view of the fact that the problem of over-population, instead of being solved, looms ever more largely in the minds of thoughtful, conscientious people, it might be of interest to those trying to solve the problem to know how I met it during my thirty years of life and practice in India.

Working in an environment where the need for a practically useful contraceptive was of the utmost urgency, a type was aimed at which would meet five basic requirements, namely, effectiveness, reliability, safety, cheapness and simplicity. Such was the method finally evolved in my own laboratory. I called it the method for temporary male sterilization. The name indicates that it is for men. It requires the application of heat which reduces male fertility to the extent of producing in its stead sterility for a period long enough to be of value practically, without however sterilizing a man permanently.

The treatment consists in a sitting bath of 45 minutes, at a temperature of 116 F, daily, for a period of 3 weeks. This treatment results in sterility which lasts for at least 6 months. After that time, normal fertility returns. Where sterility of longer duration is desired, the treatment must be repeated every 6 months.

This formula was arrived at after ten years of experimentation, with the free and intelligent cooperation of nine male patients. While results differed at a temperature lower than 116 F, at 116 F they were uniform in all cases and remained stable. Race, nationality, age, climate made no difference. Among the volunteers were two English, two Americans, two Scots, two Indians, and one Austrian of Semitic origin. They lived in climates where average temperatures ranged from 60 - 100 F; ages varied from 25 - 45 years.

In all cases it was found that at a temperature as low as 107 F, motility in the specimens observed was visibly reduced. Timely treatment with a stimulant solution would promptly restore it to normal. This suggests that sterility resulting from exposure to heat is due to impaired motility of the spermatozoa rather than to their destruction. At 116 F, movement of any kind ceased altogether and could not be restored. Here it was impossible to determine whether this was due to simple paralysis or to complete destruction of the spermatozoa. Were they doped or were they dead? That was the question. In neither case could it be ascertained whether the matrix they produced them had not also been affected. It must be borne in mind that in every case under observation normal fertility returned when the term of temporary sterility had expired. This would indicate that the matrix, if affected at all, had not been affected to an appreciable degree. The heat applied may have led to a reduced output of spermatozoa or to impairment of their motility, or both. Certain it seems, that the temperature necessary to the suspension of fertility does not affect the matrix permanently. Conclusive answers to this and other questions will probably be forthcoming shortly through further research.

In the meantime, the method evolved in my laboratory was found to be effective, reliable, safe, cheap and simple. Its effectiveness and reliability were established beyond doubt. Daily baths of 45 minutes' duration at 116 F, over a period of 3 weeks, resulted invariably in sterility lasting for a minimum of 6 months. Successive applications of this formula yielded the same result. This was established by a test period of ten years.

In the field of practice, control was possible to a very limited extent. Only a fraction of those treated would report regularly and for any extended time. To establish reliable statistics was therefore next to impossible. Nevertheless, the results were obvious. In families who could not feed even the children they already had, babies ceased to be born, or their arrival was spaced. Moreover, gratitude, expressed by gifts of flowers and fruit, by a happy smile or a gracious bow, or where it was very deeply felt, by bodily prostration before the doctor, left no doubt of the practical help which the method had given. It often happened too, that parents would pay a courtesy call, all smiles, just to exhibit the new baby decided upon after hard times were over.

The safety of the method was likewise evident. Whether its systematic use for a period longer than twenty years would have had any undesirable side effects is not known, but within that period no such effects, local or general, physical or psychic, could be observed. To ascertain this was easy in laboratory cases all of which had been followed up and checked periodically for that span of time. In these it was found that temperatures below 116 F would produce sterility for a time of varying length. At 107 F, for instance, the ensuing sterility would last for two to five months; at 110 F, four to seven months, and at 116 F for a minimum of six months and a maximum of eight months. But where the sperm count is abnormally high, sterility lasts for only four months. This was pointed out by a research scientist in a university where the method is currently being put to the test. In such a case, the bath temperature would have to be raised, or the number of baths increased, or both, in order to insure sterility for six months. This could indeed be done without risk of any kind. In the laboratory as well as in practice, temperatures of 125 F were comfortably supported. In no instance were there undesirable after effects; heightened temperature merely lengthened the period of sterility. In no case did it produce permanent sterility because no degree of heat within the range of physical tolerance is high enough to sterilize a man permanently. For this purpose, other more drastic methods, operative or chemical, would have to be resorted to.

As to the effect of the method on physical health, in not a single instance where it had been used systematically and for years did it affect the body adversely. Except for the period of treatment, marital relation was normal. From the psychological point of view, far from being detrimental, the method proved to be beneficial to both husband and wife. It did away with a number of psychic disorders arising from inhibitions and forced restraint which manifested themselves in perverse habits and moral aberrations of various kinds. Again and again, couples would express in their humble way their relief from the mental strain due to the fear of the coming of another baby they could not feed. Now they could mean more to each other and to their family than ever before. Children subsequently born to such parents were normal in every respect.

The cheapness of the method was guaranteed by the fact that the only cost to the individual was that of a bucket of hot water. To a government adopting it the chief expense would obviously be that attached to the dissemination of information. This could be accomplished through existing clinics, centers of public health education and other channels suited to the purpose.

The simplicity of the method is obvious. There is hardly a method now in use as simple as the method for temporary male sterilization. Apart from the mentally deficient, the most backward individual can grasp and apply it. Its technique is suited admirably to people in countries like India, where the poorest avail themselves of every opportunity for bathing, where time is as yet no factor, and "squatting" a favorite mode of relaxation. In actual practice, containers used in the household or in everyday work were adequate for the bath. Naturally, thermometers were not generally available. To give men an idea of the correct temperature, they were offered a sample "feel" by dipping the hand into water heated to the required degree. Where a timepiece was lacking the men had more than one way of knowing when the forty-five minutes were up. One was the position of the sun, another their own uncanny sense of time, not easily comprehended by the foreigner.

For western man, or those living in the more highly industrialized places, the sitting bath might prove to be too cumbersome and time-robbing to be practical. For them an electrically heated gadget, such as a cushion, pad, chair, or suspensory would perhaps be more acceptable. Here a fresh series of experiments would be needed* to determine the factors of temperature, and the number of baths. It is possible, even probable that by use of such gadgets the duration of the treatment could be considerably shortened. Where the procedure is now being tested the sitting bath is used.

I wish to point out that between the years 1930 and 1950, the method was used in practice on a constantly expanding scale in places where famine had broken out. At that time there was no other method in sight that was cheap, simple and effective. The poor took to it readily and with gratitude. Advice, instruction and treatment were given without charge. No propaganda was needed. Fear of being censured or penalized by those representing special interests - priest, employer, family, headman and party boss - would deter some from seeking help. When they were assured that they could come under cover of night and that no name and address would be asked, many would seek the help offered. Those who did so were, among non-Christians, about equally proportioned between Mohammedans and Hindus. Among Christians, Catholics were in the majority. Opposition, sometimes violent, came only from among the well-fed, motivated as a rule by prejudice - religious, cultural, economic, political. A good deal of encouragement and understanding was given to the movement by the intellectual members of the community.

In closing may I say that from the practical results which were obtained, there can be no doubt as to the value of the method. From a more theoretical point of view, some questions are justified. For example, it might be said that the method rests at present largely on empirical grounds; that the purely scientific basis I was able to provide was not substantial enough to justify its application on a large scale in practice. But confronted as I was on the one hand with the appalling misery caused by overpopulation, and on the other hand aware of the utter harmlessness of the sitting bath as a means of implementing the treatment, I had no compunction about putting it to use without further temporization. Here I must emphasize that those who volunteered for experiments were motivated by truly humanitarian considerations. They were all willing to help to the point of sacrifice. Their distress at the sight of the misery around them was as great as my own.

Again, from the moral point of view, it might be asked if dissemination of the knowledge of the method could not lead to its misuse. To this question the answer is yes. But what plan or invention for man's good has not been misused? Such misuse would hardly result in increased licentiousness, for men so constituted will follow their inclination with or without knowledge of the method. Conversely, wide-spread information about it would certainly reduce the number of unfortunate children born out of wedlock. Faced with the case of a man who by reputation was a libertine, I decided, after much thought, that he too should be given the information. My reasons were, first, it might protect an unsuspecting, gullible or even morally defective woman; second, prevent the coming of a child unjustly doomed to suffer the liability of offspring of his type. Considerations such as these convince me that misuse of the method, in itself to be deplored, is an inconsequential factor, as against the benefits which will accrue to family and to society where it is used with conscience and with discrimination.

M. Voegeli, M. D., M. A., B. D.
Chalet "Marlefried".
Goldiwil-ob-Thun.
Switzerland.
March 31, 1956.

* This would also apply to other substitutes for the sitting bath such as sunbaked rocks, sand, or the direct exposure to the tropical sun itself in places where hot water is not easily available. Factors like these may have caused some of the sporadic cases of temporary sterility reported after the second world war.

NOTES

[1] For instance, a 2007 study (Transient Scrotal Hyperthermia and Levonorgestrel Enhance Testosterone-Induced Spermatogenesis Suppression in Men through Increased Germ Cell Apoptosis) reports that soaking the scrotum in 43C water for 30 minutes for only six days 'was found to accelerate oligo-spermia (reduced sperm count) when combined with TU (testosterone undecanoate) injections every 6 weeks but not to the extent of TU combined with oral levonorgestrel and never to contraceptive levels of less than 1 million sperm/mL. Now, why would you lower the temperature and lower the number of days employed and add powerful and potentially dangerous hormonal injections to a time-proven simple workable method that does not require any prescription?

[2] Originally from http://www.puzzlepiece.org/bcontrol/voegeli1956.txt

Australian treasurer, Joe Hockey, stated in April 2014 that the age of entitlement had come to a close. [1] He was of course referring to entitlements that the faux-elite Liberal Party believe that people receive which they don't deserve. Medical health, education, financial assistance during unemployment and so forth. He wasn't referring to Negative Gearing or cash payouts for "Women of Calibre" to stay at home with their child.

Authors Note: The title was changed from "The End of the Age of Entitlement". Editor: Originally published on 2015-01-28 19:13:10 +1000, it has been republished today to bring it up to top of front page again, with the new title.

The Paid Parental Leave goes to people who deserve it, you see, that is, the people who don't need it. The Liberal Party retain a Calvinist mindset, where wealth is an indicator that one has been gifted and blessed by God. The poor, well, they must deserve to be poor. To say that the Liberal Party want to take Australia back to the 50's, implying the period of the 1950's, is overly generous. We're looking at some "50's", but something more like the 1550's

Poor Joe, to touch fleetingly on what modern Western society needs to do, but rather than grabbing on and pulling himself into the 21st century, he turns back to a past no one wants to revisit.

The Age of Entitlement IS over, but for a completely different reason. The latter half of the 20th century, and in particular the last two or three decades, have been built on the unsustainable foundation of neo-liberal economics and hair brained social theory. Built on ideas which promise so much but cost even more. It is fair to say that our society and our economy is slowly regressing back to a quasi-theocratic, stagnant and un-free state, but with neo-liberalism and Political Correctness replacing Christianity as the ruling religion, and technocratic economists and Politically Correct intellectuals filling the role of priests. These priests, who we don't call priests, but who act as if they were, exist only to manipulate the masses into accepting that their rulers are fair, right and eternal. Just as it has always been.

Our economy is built on debt, or more specifically, funny money, printed to bail out lenders who put people into debts they can't pay back. We have more or less been living a life of high consumption with ostensibly low cost. We have been led to believe there was no cost. That the cheap imported goods from China as opposed to locally made goods was a free kick. (It is hard to believe today that Australia used to produce electronic goods like radios and TV's. Anyone remember Amalgamated Wireless Australia?). We were told, again and again that despite the loss of manufacturing jobs, all was OK because we'd do "service jobs", and we'd all be able to buy seven hundred thousand dollar brick veneer homes preparing coffees for each other and acting as middle men. We convinced ourselves that rampant waste of resources tearing down houses and building them up again to sell them immediately afterwards for profit, or just to speculate on capital gains, was efficient use of resources, and good for everyone. Voices of the establishment allayed fears that the the dumping of tons of e-waste in developing nations is good for all involved. Mass immigration we were told, was a 'win-win' scenario, a bet on a horse race where all punters come out winners.

This set up It is nothing more than a sham system that those in power have to maintain to keep the support of those that keep them in power. Because it is the 'new normal', we no longer question the logic and maths behind it. Those days are past, and we are in a new era with a new mathematics. We believe the balance sheet remains reconciled. We have convinced ourselves that we can prepare for retirement by using government funds to subsidise a loss-making investment property, which appreciates in value more than the productive capacity of the nation is increasing, and that no one loses out. We treat the planet as infinite, resources as infinite. Stuck in a system where consumption and resource use must always increase, we invent reasons for why we shouldn't worry about this logical problem.

We shelter ourselves with 'nice' theories'. We distort the markets to make it appear that wealth is being generated and leave debt for future generations. Markets are rigged and deliberately distorted. Despite the fact that this practice conflicts with fundamental laws, we adopt the theories which suit us.

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
- Linus Torvalds.

This is the 'entitlement' which is ending, and has to come to an end. The 'entitlement' to burden future generations with debt to increase current consumption and inflate asset prices. The 'entitlement' to live a lifestyle we haven't created for ourselves. The 'entitlement' to pretend that T-shirts really do only cost two dollars and that is it perfectly OK to go through a new phone every year, phones which produce toxic e-waste and use the rare metal Indium.

Throughout the world, slowly, theory is colliding with practice. The tremors are felt in the form of financial crisis, deteriorating quality of life, deteriorating national integrity, loss of sovereignty, loss of stability and increasing pessimism. All the while we are told that this is temporary. Just a little more debt, just another bailout, just a little more migration, just a bit more 'stimulus', just a bit more 'growth'. Each time this fails, we are told that it wasn't enough 'stimulus', not enough new debt created, not enough 'growth'. Time to double down and open those borders further, allow more foreign exploitation and encourage even greater personal debt levels.

We either rebalance the books and bring our society back into equilibrium in a controlled fashion, or do it in a chaotic and uncontrolled manner by colliding violently with reality.

Austerity versus paradigm shift

Austerity measures, such as those tried in the 'PIGS' nations, and the budget cutbacks proposed by Joe Hockey aren't a solution for a rather simple reason. They exist to enforce the status quo by placing the blame elsewhere, anywhere but the system. "Austerity" measures are implemented by technocrats who maintain faith in neo-liberalism.

Austerity kills productive ability without addressing any of the issues which led to austerity being necessary in the first place. Joe's budget does nothing at all to get Australia manufacturing again, to encourage new business, or to redirect money to productive activity and away from speculative waste. It does little to address the problems which led to the budget crisis in the first places. The upper middle class welfare remains. Despite there being a current rise in the creation of new jobs, unemployment is still rising with our population growth rate negating this rare positive development.

Ending the age of entitlement in a post growth world.

The challenge is in moving society away from its addiction to consumption and growth, away from largesse and waste. Few, if any political parties exist which have feasible plans, so we may have to wait until the situation further degrades before parties appear promising action.

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
- Lord Woodhouselee

The debt from overconsumption may be paid, in part, by loss of freedom and quality of life. This is a price already being paid, as decision making regarding planning is moved away from local communities to accommodate growth, to accommodate debt, and new laws are brought in to curtail freedom of speech and increase surveillance, which largely seemingly have root in the results of Australia's population-engineering policies.

In a broad sense, the following reforms need to happen. These are not minor reforms, but fundamental shifts in the way we view society, conduct business and run our nations.

- Economic transparency and honesty: Tighter regulation of the financial sector, in particular regulation against market distorting financial instruments, fraud, corruption, monopolies and collusion. Reforms to the way in which money is issued into the economy are also required. The specifics are beyond the scope of this article, and may be looked at in future but significant, fundamental changes are required in the way we run central backs and in fractional reserve banking. Money needs to be reinstated as a representation of real wealth, with real backing and not a tool to manipulate economies. Government must be kept separate from business and money and political systems must be reformed to be more resistant to being bought by money. A more direct democracy, perhaps even involving citizens drafted to serve in government may be preferable. Government should have a separate regulatory body to ensure that vested interests are kept separate from politicians, and those politicians who betray democratic principles can be ejected.

- Decentralisation and localisation: Large cities are examples of dis-economies of scale. Costs involved with transportation and infrastructure increase per capita, and problems become more expensive to solve.

In order to reduce energy consumption, people must be encouraged and allowed to move to more low energy lifestyles. More efficient cars are a help, but environmental gains are offset by increased commute times and increased travel times, caused by urban sprawl and limited affordability which pushes people away from places of business and leisure. Smaller scale, self contained communities can reduce travel distance and make public transport more feasible, reducing the requirement for people to travel. Detached dwellings have lower energy requirements for lighting, heating and cooling than units and apartment towers. Back yards allow a degree of self sufficiency in growing basic foods, with a far lower carbon footprint for transport, as compared to vegetables shipped from China, stored in a Sydney warehouse then trucked to Melbourne. It is the overall trend here which is important, that the more 'rural' model which allows people space to practice self sufficiency through growing food, placing solar panels and water tanks can reduce consumption and cost. High speed rail and fibre optic internet makes distance less relevant.

It is important to note that increasing density to avoid urban sprawl trades one set of problems (increasing distance and loss of land to urbanisation) for another (increasing energy usage, loss of independence and increasing crime rates)

- Rediscovery of workmanship and quality:

The influx of cheap products has changed attitudes towards consumer goods. Where in the past, items like computers and TV's were expensive acquisitions to be maintained and repaired, cheap goods foster a 'throw away' mentality. It is cheaper to dispose of a DVD player and buy a new one than repair a minor fault. This waste results in an environmental cost, but our economy values this economic destruction less than a small proportion of our time. This is a false economy, as the costs are considered externalities and left off the price tag. By leaving out the environmental cost of production, consumption and disposal from the price tag, we have adjusted ourselves to this 'new economy'. An economy of cheap shoddy products which are to be obsoleted quickly, where quality, durability or workmanship means little. We must factor in the true cost in the price tag, which will result in rising prices.

- Rediscovery of the Nation:

People need to take back ownership of their nation, their communities, their government, their economies, environment and systems. Placing ownership and control of societies infrastructure and apparatus in the hands of those who don't have personal interests in it is problematic. Do international bankers care about local communities, about identity, culture, a countries future? No, there are merely tools for a system, commodities and resources. It is the people within the nation and the community who have a shared vested interest in maintaining it, and when their shared interests conflict with the will of those who run it at distance, clashes occur. In Europe this is manifesting itself in the clash between the EU super bureaucracy and the new populist parties. The people want control of their country back, but the cosmopolitan globalists see this is a barrier to their continued domination. As a result, many of the populist parties are subject to smears from the establishment.

The founding of the USA provides a good example of "enlightened nationalism", where a nation "By the people, of the people and for the people" was established for OUR (The American peoples) prosperity. A nation for a people, not a proposition, theocracy, monarchy or dictator. The USA has moved away from this, to a propositional nation, based on an economy, on ideals, and as a result is losing its freedom, power and spirit.

De-Globalisation: Another fundamental error in neo-liberal economics, is the assumption that nations are interchangeable, and that differing manufacturing costs, wages and costs of living are merely the result of economic systems. This is a major misjudgement. This assumption supposes that the market rate regarding wages and costs is purely a factor of systems in place, and words which define those systems. If nations adopted the same systems, the same regulations, the same words, then in theory, the economies would equalise.

This is a significant error in judgement which is discussed... nowhere at all.

This model leaves out one very important factor, demographics. That is, the disparity in wages between, for example Australia or Germany and the Philippines or Bangladesh is NOT just a matter of whether one has certain central banking policies, certain attitudes towards Capitalism, but it is indicative of the nations ability to create a desirable lifestyle. The current globalist assumption, is that the disparity in wages between the workers from different nations has no fundamental basis, so why not the cheaper one? In reality, there is a basis, and it has real world ramifications.

Conclusion

Australia, as does much of the Western world, in order to survive and prosper into the future need broad political and economic reforms. Reforms which go further than adjusting interest rates, changing term limits or changing how the voting preferences system works. Reforms of game changing significant. Our political system is simply not up to this, so only by popular political revolution can this come about. Europe is seeing the rise of populist parties which step outside of “centrist” policies, and despite fierce opposition from the establishment, they continue to grow. Likewise in Australia, we need to further divorce ourselves from the current systems and push real changes.

It isn't so much that we need to adopt new ideas, but that we should jettison old ideas which don't work, but which some people stick to as those who stick doggedly to ideas tend to do. Those ideas are the economic falsehoods which have entered our collective consciousness, various modern political 'ideologies' which make moral demands of us but offer no tangible benefits in return and the idea that in a modern world, the individual must further and further cede control to large bureaucracies and technocrats, who in reality are generally no more entitled or capable than anyone else. We have to drop the 'inevitable future' that we are told we must prepare for, and create our own, as no future is inevitable, except those pushed by force on complicit subjects.

Lastly, we have to accept our limitations, assess what it is we are really entitled to as opposed to what we think we deserve.

NOTES

'

[1] Joe Hockey's speech to the Institute of economic affairs in London on April 17, 2012.

This article forms the basis of a brochure, attached for download and printing, prepared by Roland Johnson for the Victorian and Tasmanian Branch of Sustainable Population Australia.

‘The modern plague of over population is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is …universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of the billions of people who are its victims’. [1]
Photo: Martin Luther King, 1966 (revered symbol of human rights)

But powerful forces have opposed population control and the world’s population has more than doubled since 1966 to seven billion, with three billion desperately poor. Migration to rich countries is not a solution. Watch Roy Beck’s YouTube video , ‘World Poverty, Immigration and Gumballs’, to see why.

In the screenshot below, one gumball equals one million people; the tall jars represent the three billion poor. The wine glass holds five years’ migrant intake at one million a year (the current intake of the United States). Even if Australia took one million people a year (nearly four times our current intake) the numbers of the poor would continue to grow at around the rate of 80 million each year. [2] Besides, Australia’s immigrants are more middle class than poor.

Poor people desperately need help where they are, including with family planning. We must stabilise our numbers, both nationally and globally. Currently the world is finding it difficult to feed all of the seven billion already here. [4] It won’t get easier if the global population grows to 9.75 billion or more by 2050. [5]

AUSTRALIA

From 2007-13 Australia’s net migration averaged over 230,000 p.a. which, added to an average annual natural increase of 157,000 p.a, meant growth of 387,000 p.a. and an annual growth rate of 1.8 per cent. [6] This is among the highest in the world. [7] It is destroying Australia’s ability to help the world’s poor and this growth will take us from 24 to 64 million in 2100. [8] It must stop some time.

WHY NOT NOW?

A sustainable Australian population

Australia’s total fertility rate (TFR) is around 1.9 per woman, [9] technically below replacement— 2.1. But the population is still youthful. So we would keep growing due to natural increase until 2046, leveling off at 26 million. A policy to stabilise our population closer to 26 million rather than 64 million is needed.

The growth lobby of big business, developers and media moguls is forcing Australia’s growth to be among the fastest in the world. Our total increase of 387,000 a year is more than the population of Canberra (381,488 in 2013). [11] This growth is against the wishes of 70 per cent of voters. [12] Our 1.8 per cent p.a. exceeds Canada’s high 1.2 per cent & NZ’s 0.8 per cent. [13]

The Immigration Department is overloaded

Immigration Department files reveal “…enforcement capacity has collapsed…nine in ten skilled migrant visas may be fraudulent …[investigation into] a Somali people - smuggling cell linked to a terror suspect … ceased due to a lack of resources’. [14]

Two thirds of new arrivals are on some kind of working visas, which are issued by licensed agents subject to rorting and bribes. Many visa holders, through a well understood system of visa churning, eventually gain permanent residency. [15]

Immigration policy can be changed. Around 80,000 people leave Australia permanently each year. This means that we could have a refugee intake of 20,000 p.a., plus other special cases, and achieve nil, or at least very low, net migration.

Economic Costs

Dr Jane O’Sullivan’s submission to the Productivity Commission, re ‘Public Infrastructure Report’ shows that each new person added to the Australian population costs taxpayers over $100,000 in infrastructure. [16]

“[P]opulation growth and ageing will affect labour supply, economic output, infrastructure requirements and government budgets… Total private and public investment requirements over this 50 year period [to 2060] are estimated to be more than 5 times the cumulative investment made over the last half century…”

[17] Building the equivalent of a new Canberra every year is not cheap.

The Federal Government is dominated by the growth lobby and State governments compete for the prestige of a higher population. They promote immigration and advertise for immigrants. They rezone prime agricultural land for housing. Local governments then increase rates, which forces the famers off the land. Local councils also convert pleasant suburban streets to high-rise ghettos to collect more rates. The costs of the extra services are paid for by existing tax- and rate-payers.

Choking Cities

‘Population growth is great for business but governments can’t keep up. Roads are clogged and public transport is groaning. The health and education systems can’t cope with demand’. [18]

Employment

With many new workers and the loss of our manufacturing capacity, we are already unable to employ many of our young.

‘Between 2011 and 2014 the number of jobs increased by 400,000 but new migrants took 380,000. Some 240,000 more young Australians entered working age compared with those who retired, but they had to compete for only 20,000 extra jobs’. [20]

Agriculture

Australia looks big on the map but it’s an old, dry, infertile continent. Sprawling cities are taking some of our best land—land high on the two factors of good soil and reliable rainfall. (These are the areas shaded dark green on the map.) Much of Australia is marginal agricultural land (shaded yellow), and the greater part is unsuitable for any agriculture (shaded red).

Australia might be able to feed a domestic population of 60 million for a while, but this would leave us without food for export to pay for imports. A sustainable population must stay below 30 million; over that we start to sink to third-world standards.

Climate Change

Climate change will badly affect Australia’s agriculture with reduced irrigation in the Murray-Darling Basin and marginal land becoming arid. The so-called inexhaustible Great Artesian Basin is now declining. The idea of Australia as the food bowl of Asia is a myth!

Minerals

Iron ore reserves were once thought to be almost inexhaustible. But all of the high grade, easily accessed mineral deposits in Australia have been mined out and energy consumption in mining has increased by 450 per cent in the last 40 years. [21] We are one of the world’s largest exporters of LNG, but this leaves little for the local market. [22] In order to find more, pressure for fracking access to coal-seam gas builds up. This risks polluting underground water and increasing food insecurity.

THE GROWTH LOBBY

While all Australians pay the cost of population growth, big business profits from it. Their self interest in growth is understandable. But it is unconscionable that politicians, most journalists and many academics support them. (See ‘How the Growth Lobby Threatens Australia’s Future’, James Sinnamon.) [23]

The growth lobby finds ways to silence its critics. In the USA the prestigious Sierra Club was given $100 million on the understanding that it would not continue to oppose the one million p.a. migrating to America. [24]

The slur of racism by the growth lobby has stifled the population debate.

BUT

Martin Luther King understood the cost of growth. Was he a racist?

‘I don't think slowing the rate of growth is blaming immigration or ethnic communities’
(Voula Messimeri, Chairwoman of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia). [25]

Immigrants also suffer the effects of population growth. Poor migrants suffer the most.

The lobby promotes the fear of an ageing population

But the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that ‘Even large difference in the level of net immigration will have a relatively small impact on the age distribution’. [26]

Natural increase is still strong so our population would not decline without net migration. Immigration makes us bigger, not younger. Besides the aged contribute to society in many ways—ways worth billions of dollars. [27]

What about humanitarianism?

Australia’s policies serve the growth lobby, not the greater good. There is no virtue in luring away the best and brightest from poor nations. Australia poaches doctors and nurses from developing nations to service the huge rise in our population. We take about 1000 doctors and 2800 nurses a year. How many more come on temporary or 457 visas?

Most of Australia’s migrants come for economic reasons; this is no way to help the world’s poor. We should accept refuges and provide desperate women of the third world—who procreate even when their children are starving—with the means of family planning.

THE ENVIRONMENT

‘Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it’s time we control the population to allow the survival of the environment’. [28]

Sir David Attenbourough (celebrated conservationist)

The World Wildlife Fund reported in 2014 that the world wildlife population had been halved between 1970 and 2010. The human population doubled in the same peroiod contributing directly to 82 per cent of the loss of wild life. [29]

We are already destroying the environment by overstocking our poor soils, habitat destruction and deforestation all of which causes soil loss and salination. We are doing this in 2015 to support nearly 24 million people. What would we do to support 64 million?

GLOBAL WARMING

Global warming is our greatest immediate threat and as Figure 3 shows, Greenhouse gases increase with the world’s population.

And Australia’s per capita emissions are the highest in the OECD. [31]

Our responsibility to other people, those now living and those yet to be born, and our responsibility to other species, all mean that Australia must curb its runaway population growth. The world must slow down and stabilise too.

Prepared by Roland Johnson for Sustainable Population Australia Vic/Tas.
www.population.org.au

This material is available in pdf form for downloading and printing here: Population Flyer cropped.pdf

References

[1] tp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Overpopulationaccessed 18 January 2015
[2] Roy Beck, World Poverty, Immigration and Gumballs The Population Reference Bureau’s annual World population data sheet shows a world population of 7.238 billion in mid 2014 and 1.137 billion in mid 2013, an estimated increase of 101 million people, 98 million of this increase in less developed countries. See www.prb.org
[3] Roy Beck, op. cit.
[4] Paddy Manning, ‘“Global” risks on food security mean us too’, The Age, 3 December 2011, p. 16
[5] The United Nations’ projections for 2050 include 9.746 billion (medium), 16.218 (medium high) and 24.834 billion (high).tp://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange/longrangeExecSum.pdfaccessed 18 January 2015
[6] Data on growth calculated from the ABS, Demographic Statistics, Catalogue no. 3101.0 various issues. The average NOM for 2007 to 2013 was 237,000 pa and the average annual growth rate was 1.81 per cent
[7] See World Bank http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW accessed 18 January 2015
[8] Projection series 20, published online with, Australian Bureau of Statistics (2013), Population Projections, Australia, 2012 (Base) to 2101, Catalogue no. 3222.0.
[9] The average total fertility rate from 2008-09 to 2013-14 was 1.9085. Calculated from ABS, Demographic Statistics, Catalogue no. 3101.0, June 2014, p. 39.
[10] See ibid.
[11] ABS, Demographic Statistics, July 2014, Catalogue no. 3101.0, p. 26
[12] Katharine Betts (2010), ‘A bigger Australia: opinions for and against’, People and Place 18(2), pp. 25-38
[13] World Bank data bank
[14] Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker, ‘Terror touches down’, The Age, 7 August 2014, pp. 1, 4.
[15] See Dr. R Birrell, Sydney Morning Herald online , 7 August 2014.

[16] Jane O’Sullivan (2014), ‘Submission to the Productivity Commission Inquiry into Infrastructure provision and funding in Australia’, p. 3 http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/135517/subdr156-infrastructure.pdf
[17] Productivity Commission (2013). An Ageing Australia: Preparing for the Future — Overview. Melbourne, Productivity Commission, p. 2
[18] Alan Kohler, ‘Healthcare and infrastructure spend tearing budget apart’, The Australian, 6 May 2014, p. 30
[19] Source: Department of Infrastructure and Transport, Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport, Road vehicle-kilometres travelled: estimated from state and territory fuel sales, Report 124, Canberra, Department of Infrastructure and Transport, 2011, pp. 372-3
[20] Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy (2014), Immigration and Unemployment in 2014,/em>. Monash University, Melbourne, Centre for Population and Urban Research
[21] Simon Michaux (2014) ‘The coming radical change in mining practice’ in Jenny Goldie and Katharine Betts (Eds) Sustainable Futures: Linking population, resources and the environment, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria, pp. 75-76
[22] See ‘Reform needed to minimise LNG export impact on manufacturers: report’, ,em>Gas Today, 24 July 2014 http://gastoday.com.au/news/reform_needed_to_minimise_lng_export_impact_on_manufacturers_report/088251/ accessed 25 November 2014
James Sinnamon, "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future."

Kenneth R. Weiss, ‘The man behind the land’, Los Angeles Times 27 October 2004
Quoted in Mark O'Connor and William Lines (2008), Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, Envirobooks, Sydney, p. 145
ABS (2000), Projections of the Populations of Australia, States and Territories: 1999-2101, Catalogue no. 3222.0, p. 2
For more on the benefits (and costs) of demographic ageing see Katharine Betts (2014), The ageing of the Australian population: triumph or disaster?, Centre for Population and Urban Research, Monash University
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Attenborough accessed 25 November 14
Living Planet Report 2014 accessed 25 November 2014
Population data are from United Nations Department of economic and social affairs http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/population.htm ; Carbon emissions data are from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre (CDIAC)
The Garnaut Climate Change Review, Chapter 7, ‘Australia’s emissions in a global context’ 2008, updated in 2011 http://www.garnautreview.org.au/chp7.htm

"In a country with baby bonuses, paid parental leave schemes and a high immigration intake, to argue that rapid growth can't be avoided is like claiming that speeding is inevitable while your foot is on the accelerator." (Melvin Bolton)

We so often hear about Melbourne's 'livability' according to the specious and self-fulfilling criteria of the 'Economist group' that it is nice to hear about "Another major liveability index for cities is produced by the American consulting firm, Mercer. "The Mercer Quality of Living Survey for cities is continually being updated and it ranks more than 220 cities on scores under dozens of different criteria of liveability. In this list Vienna has come top for three years in a row and Sydney has come in at number ten, also for the past three years. Melbourne doesn't make it to the top ten and the other nine have populations smaller than Sydney's." (Melvin Bolton)

Transcript from "Finding the Right Size"
Ockham's Razor, Sunday, 14 December 2014.

Robyn Williams interviews science writer, Melvin Bolton, who talks about the work of Professor John Burden Sanderson Haldane

Robyn Williams: J.B.S. Haldane has always been a hero of mine, mainly because he was bonkers, but also because he was seriously clever. I ran a poem of his in the Science Show a couple of weeks back: ‘I wish I had the voice of Homer, to sing of rectal carcinoma…’ or something like that. Yes, Haldane wrote a poem about his tumour. He also used to blow himself up during the war to test explosive atmospheres in ships and submarines because he wanted to make them safe for soldiers and sailors. Haldane was a sort of aristo, Eton and Oxford, but also, weirdly, the communist party and he wrote magnificent pieces on sciences. He was a great science communicator, writing classics, like the once you’re going to hear about from Melvin Bolton in Yeppoon in Queensland.

Melvin Bolton: Many years ago, in England, I was trying to find my way in the dark round the back of a building, when I tumbled into a pit that led to a coal cellar. I came out in nasty bruises and had to walk with a stick for fortnight, but it occurred to me that if I'd been a much heavier person I would not have got off so lightly. It really is true that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

I had this in mind at the time because I'd been reading an essay On Being the Right Size by J.B.S. Haldane. Haldane was a mathematician but he was so brilliant he could turn to whatever he liked in science and in 1933, after teaching biochemistry at Cambridge, he became professor of genetics at University College London. Haldane was one of the pioneers of genetics. It was he who came up with the word 'clone' in the sense that we know it today, and some of his predictions were taken up by his friend, Aldous Huxley, and worked into the novel Brave New World.

In that essay on being the right size, Haldane pointed out that if a beetle fell into a mineshaft, a kilometre deep, it would be none the worse for it. Even a mouse might get over the shock if the ground wasn't too hard, but a rat would be killed, a human would break up, and a horse would splash.

This is because the resistance to falling through air is proportional to the surface that meets the air to cause friction. And as volume and weight are scaled up, the surface area gets relatively less. A horse might be a thousand times heavier than a rat but would have only about a hundred times the surface to slow its fall.

The relationship between weight, or volume, and surface, largely accounts for all the sizes and shapes that we see in nature because things can't just get bigger and keep the same shape. It would be impossible, for instance, to have a rhinocerus shaped like a gazelle. A rhino might be four times the length of a gazelle but if the gazelle were scaled up to be four times as long, it would be 64 times heavier—its weight would increase from 30 kilos to nearly two tonnes. On the same-shaped legs it would lie in a heap, unable to stand up.

Nature can never break the laws of maths and physics so has come up with ways of working around them, just as engineers and planners do, but I'll come to that in a minute. I first want to make the point that big animals and plants are more complicated than small ones because they have to be; it's a consequence of being bigger. Single cells, like bacteria, were the only form of life on Earth for more than a billion years, and they are still highly successful but they must stay small. All exchange with the outside world has to take place through the surface, and the centre of the cell has to be close enough to the outside for gases and liquids to move adequately, just by diffusion.

When cells join together to form bigger forms of life, the surface gets proportionally smaller, the centre gets further from the outside, and there needs to be some sort of transport system such as blood or sap that can deliver the necessities of life a lot faster and more efficiently than can happen by simple diffusion.

In nature, there is often a need for bigger surfaces in places that can't be expanded any further—such as inside heads or intestines. In a bird's head the brain is quite smooth on the outside but a chimpanzee has to pack many more neurones around its brain so the surface has a lot of folds or convolutions—which increase the area without making the head any bigger. This is a process that's gone furthest of all in humans.

A small Intestine needs a huge surface to deal with digestion so the lining has projections, like the pile on a carpet. This increases the surface enormously. It varies between individuals, but an adult small intestine has a surface area of thirty to forty square metres—which is close to half a badminton court.

In a final example, let's take a simple shape like an egg, no projections of any sort. Inside a bird's egg the developing chick has the equivalent of a placenta close to the inside of the shell. The chick gets all its oxygen and gets rid of carbon dioxide through tiny holes, or pores, in the shell. and that presents a problem with bigger eggs. An emu's egg is about six times longer and wider than a sparrow's egg but it weighs about 250 times as much. The shell has to be twelve times as thick and a thick shell is a huge barrier to the passage of gases. The problem has been solved in birds by having the pores closer together, and with a much bigger diameter in thicker shells.

Evolution is essentially a numbers game and nature is made up of compromises that have evolved, step-by-step, minute by minute, through mutations and the filtering effects of natural selection over millions of years. The best compromise emerges because everything that's exposed to natural selection is weighed in the balance for such long periods of time.

Engineers, and others who build things and create new materials, are working with exactly the same constraints set by the laws of physics and maths, and they sometimes get their ideas from nature.

Professor Haldane, in his essay on size, did not get into the topic of deliberately trying to copy nature, but he did make the point that just as there is a best size for every animal, so there must be for every human institution. He pointed out that in ancient greece all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and then vote directly on matters of legislation. So philosophers at that time had reason to believe that a small city was the largest possible democratic state.

New methods of communication had changed things a lot by Haldane's time and they've changed a lot more since then. Although when you look at all the duplications of our old federal system you might think that the tyranny of distance is still a major problem in Australia.

So is it still true today that there is an optimum size for human institutions, for nations, for cities? We hear political leaders on all sides of politics declaring that they believe in a big Australia. They don't say how big, though they can't possibly think we can keep making things bigger and bigger indefinitely. They just say they believe in a big Australia as if it is a matter of belief; an article of faith.

Why do they believe it? Usually they say it's because it will produce a better quality of life for all Australians. Is that likely? How many Melbournians think that life will be better in a Melbourne that's twice the size it is now, with twice the number needing housing, services and transport?

Is there any evidence for thinking either way? Well, we can start by looking at the Human Development Index. This is published each year by the United Nations Development Programme and it ranks the UN member countries according to how well their people are doing in terms of health, education, lifespan and general standard of living.

For the past few years, Australia has come second after Norway, with Denmark third. Another index, that goes further than the United Nations one, is put out each year by the Economist Intelligence Unit, based in London. Originally called the Quality of Life Index, it's now known as the Where to be Born Index, which I suppose makes it sound more foward-looking for prospective parents as well as investors. In addition to all the basic welfare issues of health, education, security and so on, it factors in people's feelings of satisfaction with life, based on scores derived from Gallup polls. It even takes climate into consideration.

And with all that, the interesting thing is that it places exactly the same countries in the top ten that the United Nations comes up with. They are in a slightly different order; Australia comes second, with Switzerland first and Norway in third place, but the same ten countries top the list. Six of those top ten countries have smaller populations than Australia.

We can look at cities in the same way. Every year, the Economist Intelligence Unit produces liveability rankings for cities around the world. These are based on scores reached under headings that include stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. In the most recent report, released in 2013, Melbourne came top of the list of 140 cities, followed by Vienna and Vancouver. Of the top ten cities, seven were smaller than Melbourne.

Another major liveability index for cities is produced by the American consulting firm, Mercer. The Mercer Quality of Living Survey for cities is continually being updated and it ranks more than 220 cities on scores under dozens of different criteria of liveability. In this list Vienna has come top for three years in a row and Sydney has come in at number ten, also for the past three years. Melbourne doesn't make it to the top ten and the other nine have populations smaller than Sydney's.

Now, these league tables may not prove anything but they certainly don't offer any support for the belief that getting bigger and bigger will do anything to improve the quality of life for all Australians. They suggest, if anything, that Melbourne and Sydney are doing well despite their size, not because of it.

And such evidence as there is from surveys here in Australia indicates that most Australians are putting up with high population growth rather than wanting it. Why we are putting up with it is another question entirely, and your guess is as good as mine.

When Big Australia believers are quizzed about their reasoning, some of them back off and say simply that our growth rate is unavoidable so we just have to keep on accommodating it—building upwards, over farmland, making more flyovers, freeways, by-passes, tunnels, whatever it takes to cope with centres getting further and further from peripheries and all the other complications of increasing size.

But in a country with baby bonuses, paid parental leave schemes and a high immigration intake, to argue that rapid growth can't be avoided is like claiming that speeding is inevitable while your foot is on the accelerator.

Professor Haldane, in case you are wondering, died in 1964 at the age of 72. His full name, incidentally, was John Burden Sanderson Haldane and he died in India, having emigrated there eight years earlier. He had also taken to wearing Indian dress, remarking that "sixty years in socks is enough." I doubt that he really did have a problem with socks, although, if there was a lot of stretching and shrinking ... no, surely not.

Robyn Williams: Maybe not Melvin, but I’ll tell you one thing that happened when Haldane went to India: Everyone expected him to turn up with tons of shiny apparatus. Instead he gave the Indian scientists pencils and paper and asked them to count the leaves on trees. As a result they found that there were two crop species instead of one. Selecting the best enabled them to double the yield. Yes, Haldane was a genius, if nuts. Melvin Bolton comes from Yeppoon in Queensland.

Next week Ockham’s Razor comes from Western Australia where Dr Peter Underwood tries to corrupt his grandson. That’ll be in Science Extra.

RT's Abby Martin interviews Kambale Musavuli, Spokesperson for Friends of the Congo, about the vital role of cobalt in many industrial and electronic manufactures and the use of cobalt in predator drones. The interview connects the genocide of many Congolese with corporate and government cobalt mining. Entire villages have been bulldozed to around mines.

(Original video is at http://rt.com/shows/breaking-set-summary/211303-police-us-congo-gas/)

The world does not realise the importance of the Congo's cobalt reserves in the political misery there and the human rights abuses. Because of this it does not realise the role that foreign investment in mining cobalt plays in the dispossession, disorganisation, and death of people in the Congo and in the maintenance and support of dictatorships.

People in the population movement often ascribe poverty, misery and dispossession to overpopulation, especially when the poverty is obvious, as in Africa. What they often fail to realise is that it was not always so. My books in the Demography, Territory, Law series explore this. [1] And here is another article - about Ethiopia's population history, Development caused overpopulation in Ethiopia that sumarises some of the arguments against what we are usually told is so.

Congo's overpopulation has coincided with its 'development' and industrial exploitation. Today Australia imports many educated professionals from the Congo - in a way that can only weaken its social structure further. Australian billionaire, Gina Rhinehart has suggested that Australians are uncompetitive, comparing them with Africans who work for terrible wages: " ... Africans want to work and its workers are willing to work for less than two dollars a day." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Rinehart This is what invasion, 'development' and 'industrialisation' do to a country and they do it on purpose because it creates a situation of abject wage slavery. A variation on this was to simply marginalise the original indigenous populations if they were sparse or small-scale, then import slaves, prisoners or immigrant labour - as in Haiti, Costa Rica, Australia, and many other Pacific islands.

In the late 19th century, when European 'development' began, the population of Congo was estimated at less than 4 million. Under King Leopold of Belgium the population was grossly disorganised and dispossessed by genocide and other violence. In 1950 the total population of Congo was estimated at 12,184,000. This was already a huge increase over the population it had had when its was structured according to tribes. By 2010 the population was 65,966,000.

In 1876, Leopold II of Belgium formed the philanthropic organisation “Association Internationale Africaine“ (International African Association) and became its single shareholder. Typically, Leopold's industrial take-over was spearheaded initially by missionaries, who prepared the way.[2]

"Leopold's rule over the Congo involved a complex interlocking of private enterprise and state power. In the first place, his operations were carried out in the name of the International Association of the Congo. This Association, independent of Belgium or any other state but completely under Leopold's private control, proceeded to set up a sovereign state in the Congo, with Leopold as king and its own army, the Force Publique. Later on, the Congo State would lease out large tracts of its territory to private companies, which exercised virtual state power in their own zones.

A further twist was that the state (i.e. Leopold himself) held blocks of shares in the companies. Leopold's agents got local chiefs to sign treaties yielding up their sovereignty. The treaties also granted Leopold the land, a trading monopoly, control of roads and waterways, mineral and forest rights and - most ominously of all, the right to labour services. The chiefs had no knowledge of written documents, the French language or the legal concepts of capitalist Europe, and may have been under the impression that they were making treaties of friendship. Moreover, Leopold's men used chicanery such as delivering an electric shock from a concealed battery to convince the Africans that they possessed magical powers. All 'vacant lands' were declared to be state property. This conveniently ignored the reality of traditional land use in Africa. Often, apparently uncultivated land was just lying fallow as part of a farming cycle. Other land was used for hunting or gathering firewood. In any case, the state would determine whether land was 'vacant' or not." Source: http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h32002_RC_Leopold.htm

NOTES

[1]My books, Demography, Territory, Law: The Rules of animal and human population, Countershock Press 2013 and Demography, Territory, Law2: Land-tenure and the origins of capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press 2014, explore this fallacy generally, but it is not hard to work out for yourself that there is something wrong with the assumption that Africa, India, China and overpopulated islands in the Pacific, could not always have been like that.
[2] "The Butcher of Congo: King Leopold II of Belgium" and http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h32002_RC_Leopold.htm

Migration is hardly a solution to world poverty and conflict, but the mainstream media predictably push this line. Even the Guardian, for all its purported democratic values, continuously pushes for open borders without disclosing that these also facilitate a right-wing agenda for cheap imported labour sources and the crushing of local industry and employment. Its recently issued 'special report' entitled, "Hardline Australia, confused Scandinavia and tense Russia: the global immigration picture" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/30/hardline-australia-confused-scandinavia-and-tense-russia-the-global-immigration-picture has been described as 'an appalling, if predictable, piece of propaganda."

An appalling, if predictable, piece of propaganda from the Guardian.

Dr Jane Sullivan, of Sustainable Population Australia, writes

"The idea that immigrants actually might have a negative impact on native people is completely rejected, so that any ill-feeling is attributed to racism and far-right neo-nazi manipulation of the great unwashed (who are too lazy to do the work that the immigrants are doing).

No mention of population pressure at all - not in what is causing them to move, nor in the concerns of receiving countries. All immigrants are saints, all native people who don't welcome them with open arms are facists.

When the Guardian does actually refer to the size of the immigration flows, it is full of inconsistencies - China's welcoming attitude to immigrants is contrasted with the UK's meanness, having just said that China has only given 5,000 permanent residency visas since 1980!

Spain is claimed to have had a net exodus since 2010, but they give the figure of (positive) 600,000 as its net immigration for 2010-2014. The massive inflow to Spain, adding 10% to its population between 1999 and 2009, is not connected by the Guardian in any way with the massive unemployment now driving them away.

The Guardian makes a big thing of how silly it is for the Spanish to resist immigration when they have more people leaving than coming (if in fact they do), but completely rejects any idea that the Scandinavians or Australians might have justification given their high net inflow."

As for the piece on Australia, apart from greatly understating the size of our net immigration (it's been well over a million in the past 5 years, but they say 750,000), the author chides that the conversation is all about refugees and ignores the bulk of immigration, then proceeds to talk only about refugees and ignore the rest of our immigration.

Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything - good work but confusion persists

The same Guardian incoherence is to be found in the otherwise superb works of another Guardian writer and author, Naomi Klein. She writes in This Changes everything, Penguin, 2014, how international trade laws have effectively destroyed local employment and manufacturing initiatives, yet campaigns for open borders.

"One of the key provisions in almost all free trade agreements involves something called 'national treatment', which requires governments to make no distinction between goods produced by local companies and goods produced by foreign firms outside their borders. Indeed, favoring local industry constitutes illegal 'discrimination.' This was a flashpoint in the free trade wars back in the 1990s, precisely because these restrictions effectively prevent governments from doing what Ontario was trying to do: create jobs by requiring the sourcing of local goods as a condition of government support. This was just one of the many fateful battles that progressives lost in those years."

Naomi writes specifically about the contradictory impact of globalism on efforts to combat climate change, which she recognises as needing to be locally based. She is however unable or finds it unwise to criticise the same contradictions when it comes to citizens' rights to self-determination. It seems that where she comes from you can only tell so much of the truth - or perhaps this is mainly due to ignorance. After all, she has only just begun to realise how important our biophysical environment is. She can see how economic ideology conflicts with environmental health but she hasn't worked out how the politics of open borders conflict with democracy and citizens' rights.

On the issue of immigration, whilst she is vocal on Australia's treatment of asylum seekers, she apparently knows nothing of Australia's intake of vast numbers of planned invited economic immigrants in the context of changes to Australian industrial law, which now make immigrant workers a threat to local workers. Nor of how the issue of asylum seekers has been used as a wedge to prevent sensible discussion of population numbers.

"We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder why people can't afford to shop as much as they used to. We offer those failed shoppers subprime mortgages instead of steady jobs and then wonder why no one foresaw that a system built on bad debts would collapse."

Whilst she talks about indigenous groups using their land-rights to fight against fracking and other carbon emitting processes, she also barracks for more open borders, which is antithetical to the survival of indigenous peoples and land, which is defined endogamously and territorially. She also uncritically endorses internationalist corporate 'environmental organisations' because they are 'large'. The ones she cites are known for their business models and to prioritise open borders over democracy, the conservation of natural ecologies and local self-determination - just like the capitalist globalist deregulators. It seems that, in this case, the author of No Logo, Picador, 1999, cannot tell the difference between brand names and actual products.

"As we will see, communities trying to stop dangerous oil pipelines or natural gas fracking are building powerful new alliances with Indigenous peoples whose territories are also at risk from these activities. And several large environmental organizations in the U.S. - including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the BlueGreen Alliance, and 350.org took stands in support of demands for comprehensive reform of the U.S. immigration system, in part because migration is increasingly linked to climate and also because members of immigrant communities are often prevented from defending thesmelves against heightened environmental risk since doing so could lead to incarceration or deportation."

Klein's work in This Changes Everything should not, of course, be dismissed for these failings. It is another great contribution to critical political literature.

Population numbers are now a democratic issue because the two big parties and the Greens are colluding to push extreme population growth. People will vote against population growth if given the opportunity because it is causing a decline in urban lifestyle. Some of the problems it is causing is severe competition for schooling, hospitals, housing and places on public transport. People are upset by the destruction of established built environment to keep pace with this imposed population growth. If we were able to achieve zero population growth over time and reduce our per capita consumption, we would use less coal, possibly even stop needing to use it and we would never need to turn on the desal plant. It's a no-brainer really.

Steven Armstrong is running in Albert Park as an independent. He is, however, supported by Sustainable Population Party, which, because it is federally registered, cannot run a candidate in a state election. Steven was a federal candidate for Sustainable Population Partyc in the last federal elections.

He says that he is running in regard to Sustainable Population Party because it would be a pity to let opportunity go by. He can offer some democratic choice to the people of Albert Park over the population issue. He can exercise the mechanisms of the party to find out what's possible when they concentrate their efforts on one electorate.

Decline in urban lifestyle a symptom of population growth

Steven thinks that people might vote for him due to their awareness of the symptoms of population growth. He gives a few examples:

There is a decline in standard of urban lifestyle:

- You can't get on tram or train in the morning.
- If you want to go from Albert Park to visit someone in Northcote, it takes an hour to get there on a Saturday afternoon. - People can't get their children into school.
- One in three houses needs to be knocked down and replaced by dual occupancy.
- It worries people to see houses knocked down.

Population numbers are a democratic issue

He says that, in Elwood high density happened in 1960s and 70s but that process is starting again and will proceed throughout the electorate. Population growth presents an issue of democracy in that Greens, ALP and Libs are all colluding in pushing extreme population growth. The populace don't have a choice except in electorates where the Sustainable Population Party runs a candidate.

What Steven would like to do if elected or if more like him were elected

He would like to hold the balance of power in a parliament and hold the government to carry out wishes of people with respect to population growth. He could then advocate for zero population growth. If he could achieve that, then any new infrastructure would represent an improvement in our lives rather than a desperate attempt to catch up with growing population. Our quality of life would improve.

He would like the future to be similar to that period in Australian history when successive generations enjoyed a better standard of living than the previous one. He observes that that process has stopped and gone into reverse. He says that we need to get it back to how it used to be. With zero population growth, this would be a place where people enjoyed enough space in the inner city parks, where they could get transport around the city, where the level of health care was not swamped by immigration and where housing was once more affordable.

The [natural] environment on which we all depend; can the decline be halted by stabilising population?

Steven says,

"If population stabilised and per capita use of the environment decreased in energy, space and waste production, then our environment would improve greatly. We would never ever have to turn on the desalination plant. We would not use more coal; we would use less of it. We may even be able to stop using it completely. So the environment would benefit greatly from a stable population."

An old mate of mine and his son are doing their bit to promote awareness of climate change. Good on them. They arranged a presentation and invited an audience of around 100 people. The focus was on what WE could each do to reduce emissions. The direct link between population growth and climate change was not identified as a key issue.

Examples of storm impacts in the Philippines and acidification of the sea had been provided to explain the impacts of climate change and carbon dioxide. I provided the following supportive comments afterwards:

"I learnt a few things. The 4 million left homeless in the Philippines would have been 2.7 million if their population hadn't grown 50% in the previous 20 years.

The sea has already lost 90% of its fish, and that is caused by the same force as climate change. Acidification and over fishing are caused by population growth. All new oil and gas projects have design lives of 30 to 70 years. It's unlikely they will be abandoned before those lives end. But the number built to meet expanding demand can be immediately be impacted by family planning.

Can't overcome the sense of absurdity associated with deconstructing the environmental argument in this way. The population issue is no more challenging than emissions. It's just a different part of the same problem.

Seems to me that if you go to the effort of creating awareness of sustainability in the form of climate, why wouldn't you also mention the driving force behind both GDP growth and environmental destruction? The US economy has been driven by population growth for over 100 years. In 1962 there was one Wal-Mart. Now there are 8500 of them all selling fish. There are no cod left off Newfoundland.

As I have always sincerely believed; half an argument is like no argument because the big picture problem can't be solved with half a solution!"

As an ironic footnote to this story, the Wal-Mart Syndrome is my definition of what happens when economic growth driven by population growth goes to ridiculous extremes. As Russell Brand has explained, the six Wal-Mart heirs have wealth equal to the total wealth of the US's 185 million poorest citizens. Population growth was a driving force behind the creation of that massive inequity.

As I sat listening to the climate change presentation I was aware that many of the baby boomers in the audience were multi-millionaires who were born at the right time in the right place. These days you only need to have bought 4 houses with borrowed money 30 years ago to be worth more than $10 million.

So these fortunate wealthy epitomise the Wal-Mart Syndrome. The population growth that drove their relatively easy path to wealth has actually dispossessed future generations of similar opportunities. In the context of the climate change debate I am more convinced than ever that those who choose to disconnect the climate change (emissions management) debate from its Siamese twin population growth are living in exactly the state of denial that climate change activists think exists amongst those they are trying to enlist to their cause.

"half an argument is like no argument".......and that is why nothing is happening. WE can do nothing if we deny the most important half of the scientific reality; Exponential Population Growth and Australia's leading role in this debacle.

The Federal Government is not the sole responsible for Australia's planned and economic immigration; in fact the States seem to be leading it. State governments and political parties tend to try to mislead Australians on this very issue, so I felt it was time to write an article. Now is the time to head to your local member's office and ask him or her what he or she is going to do about this. If you don't get a sensible answer, vote small parties before Lib, Lab or Green.

Your most telling examples of how the States impact on immigration are the State migration websites. The States 'nominate' migrants. I think the Feds just pretend to 'vet ' them. In Victoria it is www.liveinvictoria.gov.com.au, in WA www.migration.wa.gov.au/, South Australia, https://www.migration.sa.gov.au; in Queensland, migration.qld.gov.au/, ACT: www.canberrayourfuture.com.au/, Northern Territory: www.australiasnorthernterritory.com.au/; Tasmania, www.migration.tas.gov.au/
And there are the national pages: www.immi.gov.au/Work/Pages/Work.aspx

The States pressure the Federal government for immigration. They organise to redefine areas of the states as regions in need of migration. Jeff Kennett managed to reverse Victoria's negative population growth in the 1990s in part by doing this. He made it possible for rural people to sponsor nephews and other distant relatives as immigrants because they were places in need of migration for workers etc. I think following on from him, State governments around Australia did things like make their CBDs 'regions in need of immigration'. Note that on the NT site above, for instance, there is a display that explains that it is a "designated area Migration Agreement".

The States are in charge of land, water and power. They earn money from land-sales through stamp duties and rely a great deal on this. The political parties are invested in land, development and finance (including banks) as well and States have institutions which facilitate private investment in public land for property development. It is all quite incestuous.

The States also earn money from private public development, over our protests. How many of you knew that "Places Victoria" is actually the Victorian Government's public-private property development arm, and that it is a payed up member of the Property Council of Australia - which heads up the Australian growth lobby. And, for those who care about the homeless, the Department of Human Services, Office of Housing, is also a member. Truly, in the land of the not so lucky anymore, the foxes are credentialled chicken guardians.

(By Jane Dreaper Health correspondent, BBC News) The new easy-to-use contraceptive device will be available to women in poorer countries for just $1. The new easy-to-use contraceptive device will be available to women in poorer countries for just $1. An agreement has been signed which will make contraceptive injections available to women in 69 of the world's poorest countries. It is an injection - but not as you know it. The special device, with a smaller needle and no traditional syringe, will be sold at just $1 a unit. An agreement - signed in the past few days - will make the new way of giving contraceptive injections available to women in 69 of the world's poorest countries. The deal has been reached between the Gates Foundation, the drug company Pfizer and the Children's Investment Fund Foundation. Previously the technology has been used for giving hepatitis B jabs in Indonesia. Burkina Faso was the first country to use it for contraception.

The special device, with a smaller needle and no traditional syringe, will be sold at just $1 a unit.

An agreement - signed in the past few days - will make the new way of giving contraceptive injections available to women in 69 of the world's poorest countries.

The deal has been reached between the Gates Foundation, the drug company Pfizer and the Children's Investment Fund Foundation.

Previously the technology has been used for giving hepatitis B jabs in Indonesia. Burkina Faso was the first country to use it for contraception.

Soré is using contraception for the first time and decides the new device is the best option for her.

Soré Néimatou, 20, has a boyfriend, and is visiting a family planning clinic in the capital Ouagadougou.

"I don't want to get pregnant," she says. "I want to get married first."

She has never used contraception before, and is given a choice of methods. She opts for the new injection - called Sayana Press.

'More acceptable'

The pre-packaged device means there is no need for health workers to prepare a syringe.

The new device's all-in-one design avoids the need to prepare a syringe.

The drug is dispensed by simply squeezing a plastic bubble, giving Soré the protection she wants for three months.

Thanks to the design, which is called Uniject, there is no risk of spillages or dosing errors, and because the device cannot be re-used, it cuts out the risk of infection due to needle-sharing.

The simplicity of the device means health workers can be trained more quickly too - a vital consideration for developing countries.

Kadidia Diallo, the midwife who helped Soré, says the device is more acceptable for women in rural areas.

She said: "Normally for injections you have to put them in someone's bottom, or the top of their leg, but with this - you use the arm.

"That's an advantage for women living in the bush. Many women don't come forward for injections if they have to pull their dresses up - but this is more discreet."

Injectables

In early trials women reported less pain at the injection site than with conventional jabs, too.

Rahimata wants to become an English translator, and is keen to avoid getting pregnant and disrupting her studies.

18-year-old Rahimata Tiendrébéogo also uses the new device.

She wants to go to university to study English and has seen too many of her friends get pregnant - especially the poorer ones.

"It's not good for people to have babies so young because they are students…they don't have money or the means to bring up children.

"I'm independent and I want to be responsible."

A lack of contraception in sub-Saharan Africa remains a problem.

Almost a quarter of women of child-bearing age in Burkina Faso would like to plan their families by getting pregnant when they want to. Women there have six children on average.

Although the proportion of women using contraception in Africa has doubled in the past two decades - to 26% - it is much harder to obtain for women who are poor, uneducated or living in a rural area.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 222m women in developing countries would like to delay or stop conception, but are not currently using any form of contraception.

Injectable contraceptives are a widely-used family planning method among women in developing countries, where the lifetime risk for death due to a maternal cause can be as high as one in 15.

The next countries to start using Sayana Press are Niger, Senegal and Uganda.

The launch comes after many years of work at Path, the organisation behind the design of the device - and money from international donors.

Health workers in Niger are being trained how to use Sayana Press.

A Path spokeswoman, Sara Tifft, told BBC News: "Burkina Faso was one of four countries identified for this initial pilot introduction, as an outgrowth of the 2012 Family Planning Summit in London."

The summit was co-hosted by the UK government.

International Development Secretary, Justine Greening, said: "Access to modern, safe and reliable family planning methods is vital.

"Without the ability to choose for themselves when they have children and how many they have, women lose the opportunity to participate fully in their economies and societies."

The makers of Sayana Press hope that one day it could even be used by women to inject themselves with contraception at home

There is now a long record of interventions in foreign countries that have been followed by floods of refugees. For Ethiopia modern development began at the end of the 19th century. In a recently recirculated 2008 article, Irish journalist, Kevin Myers wrote despairingly of Ethiopia's overpopulation and the hopelessness of giving more aid. "By 2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million; the equivalent of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly Protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley." Myers grimly anticipates a massive overflow of emigrants with poorly nourished brains to Ireland, to America, to Australia.[1] So, why is Ethiopia in such a mess? Was it always thus?

I think that Ethiopia's problems go back to the end of the 19th century and were caused by industrialisation and furthered by 'development aid' in the cause of more industrialisation.

How long has Ethiopia been overpopulated for?

In the late 19th century Ethiopia's population was only 4 or 5 million, when Mennilik II began 'modernisation'.

After Mennilik's modernisation programs, which included massive land 'reforms' (enclosures), Ethiopia's population climbed to 10 million. In 1950, as development continued, the population climbed to 18.3 million. In 2010 it is 83 million and climbing rapidly still.

What changed?

Ethiopia is one of the oldest sites of human civilisation and international trade. It had a variety of populations within, mostly rural, including hill tribes who farmed using ploughs. The various tribal populations mostly kept to their traditional areas and were sustainable within them, although for a long time there have been conflicts between adjacent states and an ancient slave trade along certain routes.

Ethiopia after 'development':

In the late 19th century there were massive land 'reforms':

The land 'reforms' coincided with dispossession and 'integration' of clans and tribes with Mennelik II who was influenced by Russian imperialists. Thrown off their land - particularly those on the plains, the people drifted to the cities, which were growing as agriculture was industrialised and roads and electricity were installed.

This process destroyed local self-government and sustainable local economies where there was probably still men's and women's land, and marriage opportunities would have been kept low through kinship rules that limited approved spouses, [2], with late menarche the rule, and low fertility through local traditional birth control practices, including contraception, spousal non-cohabitation, abstinence, delay of coitus [3] and co-operative breeding [4] (where people live in an extended family around a principal fertile couple, taking the roles of servants, aunts, aunties).

As happened in the Netherlands and in Britain,[5] local populations were disorganised by classes that got control of the food production and government and, lacking the land that had once brought them independence, they were obliged to move to new settlements, with only their labour to sell. This is the kind of system where women and children become slaves to their husbands, fathers, uncles and brothers.

Irrigation was put in place and former grazing ranges were intensively cultivated, which required dispossessing the peoples that had led sustainable lives there for millenia, without overpopulation. Malaria became a huge problem, indicative of land-disturbance and new population movements.[6]

In the 1970s there were more huge land reforms.

In the 1980s there were mass government resettlements.

The 'reform' has not stopped. It has accelerated.[7]

It is not difficult to find many accounts of how foreign aid assisted in all these 'modernisation' projects that led to the dispossession of the peoples of Ethiopia and the surrounding regions and to the current overpopulation problem and enslavement of women, for which more 'development' continues to be recommended, under the malignant pretext that overpopulation was Ethiopia's eternal burden.

What is in it for the countries driving more 'development' in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Egypt etc? One of the major reasons for foreign powers to maintain these countries in disorder is so that the foreign powers can continue to dominate the surrounding region with military forces, supposedly to safeguard international investments. The pretence is that these African countries and all those around the Red Sea and to the North of Syria need international aid and management, however it is clear to anyone aware of the petroleum in this region that Ethiopia could be a source of primary wealth, as it was for other reasons in Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman times. [8]

Development, War and Refugees

Australians rightly complain that their country is overpopulated.[9] They also rightly complain that refugee and asylum-seeker numbers are adding to this problem. But they fail to link these problems to the wars the Australian government backs in the regions where the asylum seekers come from. Australia, like the United States in the film, Mother of 7 Billion,[10] adds over-consumption to its overpopulation problem. To maintain our commodity production and our importation of new residents to keep our land-sales up, we rely on huge amounts of petroleum and one of the most important sources of petroleum is the region bordered by the Land of Punt.

If Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan had maintained their efficient local economies, there would be no excuse for foreign troops and corporations to be in the region, but Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan would probably all be wealthy through association with the oil producing countries.

Instead the oil producing countries and the regions buffering them are in constant state of flux, overpopulation, poverty, and war and the foreign powers actually rule the region. We hear of Somalian pirates, trying to get control of the oil, but we call our own pirates 'peace keepers'.

NOTES

[1] Kevin Myers, "Somalia is not a humanitarian disaster," The Irish Independent, 2008

[2] Fertility opportunities would have been kept low through kinship rules requiring endogamous marriages that reflected the local environment with up to 8 degrees of incest avoidance and other variations that greatly decreased mating opportunities. See Sheila Newman, Development, Territory, Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013.

Details of the wide variety of these kinship impediments to marriage and fertility in Ethiopia can be found in Siegbert Uhlig, (Ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: He-N, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Germany, 2007, pp. 55, 405-406, cited by hbdchick at https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/tag/exogamy/. Although the afore-cited Encyclopaedia states that being unmarried is not an option in Ethiopia, this is contradicted by the presence of extended families. "The extended family arrangement is frequently found among Ethiopian families since children, male or female, who have married continue to live with their family. In some cases, unmarried aunts, uncles, cousins and even close family friends continue to dwell with the nuclear family. " http://www.africa-expert.com/ethiopia/family-and-housing/ ftp://ftp.cgiar.org/ifpri/ElizabethB/Ethiopia%20papers/diFalco_Bulte_2013.pdf,
Mhairi A. Gibson and Eshetu Gurmu, "Land inheritance establishes sibling competition for marriage and reproduction in rural Ethiopia"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3038728/#!po=21.4286: "We use rich anthropological, demographic, and socioeconomic data from five traditional rural villages in Ethiopia (Table S1), where wealth remains positively correlated with reproductive success (characteristic of preindustrial societies)."

Another likely indication of earlier prevalence of local birth control methods would be family-size trends in older women who may have had more links to traditional villages. The results varied according to tribal origins as well as religion. A survey in 1986 showed that childlessness varied from 20% to 3% in the earliest cohorts (women aged 59 or older) compared to 12% to 2% in the most recent cohorts (women aged 30-39). Although much of this was attributed to successful treatment of sexually transmitted diseases the article concludes that there is more to it than that.- See more at: http://www.popline.org/node/372469#sthash.OatvN3Yl.dpuf

[3] John Knowles (Lead author), Report, "History of Birth Control Methods," Katharine Dexter McCormick Library and the Education Division of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 2012, http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/2613/9611/6275/History_of_BC_Methods.pdf

[4] Cooperative breeding is similar to the extended families described (which existed in most pre-WW2 societies) in note [2] Traditional Ethiopian societies were comparable to traditional European ones in many ways, so I don't mean for the following references to imply that they were all hunter-gatherers, However, for some modern evolutionary research of the phenomenon in terms of inclusive benefits etc in human societies, see, for instance, Smaldino, Paul E., Newson, Lesley, Schank, Jeffrey C., Richerson, Peter J., "Simulating the Evolution of the Human Family: Cooperative Breeding Increases in Harsh Environments," http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0080753 and Hill, Kim, and Hurtado, A. Magdalena, "Cooperative breeding in South American hunter–gatherers, " School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, PO Box 872402, Tempe, AZ 85287-2402, USA, http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/08/18/rspb.2009.1061.full.pdf+html

[5a] Sheila Newman, Demography, Territory, Law 2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, 2014.

[6] David N. Weil, "The Impact of Malaria on African Development over the Longue Durée,"
Brown University and NBERhttp://www.indiana.edu/~econdept/workshops/Fall_2010_Papers/Malaria_and_Early_African_Development.pdf: "The current geographic distribution of malaria impact may not accurately represent the historical burden of the disease. Packard (2007) gives numerous examples of how human activity has changed the intensity of malaria. Clearing forests and introducing irrigation often produces the marshy environment needed for breeding of Anopheles mosquitoes. When large tracts of land are consolidated and controlled by a small number of landowners, people living on these lands are often deprived of the tools for properly tending to it and for avoiding malaria infection. This problem is exacerbated when seasonal labor is used, as migrants may come from non-malarious zones and lack immunity, then return to these zones carrying malaria with them. As for Africa, he notes that “while climate and the presence of highly efficient vectors contributed to the persistence of malaria, conditions of production played an equal if not greater role." Webb (2008) similarly describes how the introduction of agriculture led to malaria endemicity in lowlands throughout the Eurasian landmass. Population density is also important to the nature of malaria burden. Packard argues that in the African contexts, low population densities associated with mobile hunter-gatherer populations would have been unable to support the P. Falciparum infection because of the speed with which the disease exits or kills the human host. The emergence of Anopheles gambiae is also believed to closely associated with the development of agriculture. For all these reasons, the current distribution of malaria in Africa today is potentially a poor proxy for the historical distribution." See also malaria references in Sheila Newman, Demography, Territory, Law 2: Land Tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, 2014.

[7] "Ethiopia, 30 years after the famine," by David Smith (23 October 2014). "Three decades after images that shocked the world, country has become darling of the global development community – and the scourge of the human rights lobby." http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/22/-sp-ethiopia-30-years-famine-human-rights

[8] "This is pure common-sense commercial logic,” ... “There are numerous discoveries along the East African Rift in other nations and also it ends basically in Yemen, which is a known oil-bearing territory." "http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-21/gazprombank-s-gpb-global-signs-oil-exploration-deal-in-ethiopia.html; Ogaden Basin in Ethiopia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogaden_Basin; "Africa's next Frontier - Ethiopia?" http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Africas-Next-Oil-Frontier-Ethiopia.html]

[9] And some of us can see that the same thing is happening here, with 'development' as has happened to Ethiopia.

[10] I spoke at a screening of Mother of 7 billion in 2013 and was uncomfortable at some of the assumptions made in the film. Most difficult for me was the assumption that Ethiopians had always had huge families. There was seemingly no inkling that Ethiopia had ever been anything except poor and overpopulated - of the sudden leap from 4 million to 83 million. When one considers Ethiopia's remarkably long and impressive history, this is quite an oversight. It was because of this film that I started writing an article on Ethiopia's long and different past, but it has taken me until today to get this short version up.

Note that the United Nations is made up of many associate members, and this event includes the National Bank as a sponsor. I am publicising it because Katharine Betts will be speaking at it, and she has a good scientific approach to the issues around the concept of an 'aging population'. The notion of a 'demographic transition is also controversial.

United Nations Association of Australia (Victorian Division)
Sustainability Leadership Series

Join us at our upcoming seminar, entitled
Demographic
Transition: Addressing the economic and social impacts of an ageing population: Is there a silver lining? on Thursday 13th November in Melbourne.

Held in partnership with National Australia Bank as part of our

Sustainability Leadership Series, this seminar seeks to discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with an ageing society.

It will notably cover how the Australian government together with the corporate and civil society sectors are addressing the impacts of our ageing population on workforce participation and productivity, on our financial and welfare system, including on pensions,
and on the provision of aged care and other social services. It will also consider the issue of age discrimination, particularly in the workplace, and how to change business attitudes towards older people.

Keynote speaker

• #SR" target="_blank">The
  Hon #SR" target="_blank">Susan
  Ryan AO, Age Discrimination Commissioner

Guest speakers

• #RA" target="_blank">Rowan
  Arndt, Diversity and Inclusion Specialist, Sageco
• #KB" target="_blank">Katharine
  Betts, Adjunct Associate Professor of Sociology, Swinburne University of Technology
• #SH" target="_blank">Sue
  Hendy, Chief Executive Officer, Council on the Ageing Victoria
• #EM" target="_blank">Emily
  Millane, Research Fellow, Longevity and Positive Ageing Project, Per Capita

Facilitator

• #CB" target="_blank">Colette
  Browning, Professor of Healthy Ageing and Director of Research, School of Primary Health Care, Monash University

Seminar details

Date: Thursday 13 November, 2014
Time: 1.30pm Registration/Networking, 2pm-5pm Seminar
Venue: Hosted by National Australia Bank, The Academy (The Bowl Room), 500 Bourke Street, Melbourne
Registration Fees: Please note all fees are inclusive of GST but do not include Trybooking service fee ($0.30).
Business/Government: $180
Non-profit/Academia: $140
UNAA Members: $140
Student: $50
Registration deadline: 5pm, Tuesday 11 November

World and European overpopulation as viewed by a warm, humane, generous, down-to-earth and witty Irish senator in a surprising response to an interview about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights (LGBT rights). I am a great fan of the interviewer, Oksana Boyco, but in this episode her interviewee outshines her in my opinion, making for a most unusual program. David Norris, who speaks Irish and Hebrew, and has lived in Israel, is also famous for a recent parliamentary speech on Israel and Gaza, which I have embedded at the end of this article.

Heteronormative Russia

In this interview rt's Oksana Boyko, interviews Irish Senator, David Norris, on whether it is defensible for Russia and some other countries to 'delay' the introduction of gay marriage and public acknowledgement of homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle. Oksana says the world has been rather harsh on Russia over its 'slowness' to adopt western recognition of homosexual rights at institutional level. Cannot the world try to understand that Russia needs to go through some legislative 'back and forth'; some 'legislative transition' on these issues, asks Oksana. Homosexuality is not criminalised in Russia, but 'homonormative advocacy' is illegal.

Different views on population decline

Oksana actually suggests to David Norris that there is a concern that the fact that homosexuals have many fewer children than heterosexuals means that homosexual marriage rights could affect the birth rate and increase the threat of population decline. This is one of the reasons that she questions the advisability of 'homonormative advocacy'.

Norris's answer is an utter breath of fresh air. He says that, in his life, world population has tripled and what a good thing it would be if the birth rate were to decline. He notes that Europe's population uses an unsustainable amount of materials and energy, which would be reduced if the population were to reduce.

Contraception and not wanting to live in misery is the main reason the birth rate has dropped in Europe. Homosexuality has nothing to do with it, says Norris.

Ancient Greeks and parliaments today

In response to Oksana's suggestion that open homosexuality is a relatively new concept for Russia, Norris comes back at her with how homosexuality was present in 67% of 'primitive' societies according to Margaret Meade and was central to Ancient Greek civilisation and how so many giants among the Ancient Greeks were homosexual and celebrated their homosexuality, which was the dominant paradigm in Ancient Greece. (Indeed, the evidence in the Greek classics of the truth of this seems incontravertible.)

When Oksana puts it to David Norris that his views on homosexuality and the ancient Greeks may have cost him the Irish parliamentary presidency some years ago he says that he was the victim of a defamatory campaign by the mainstream press, whom he has successfully sued on this matter.

The program finishes with Norris having a dig at Vladimir Putin's bare-chested horse-riding (reference to a famous photo). Oksana mentions drolly that bare-chested horse-riding is something that Russian men like to do, and not an erotic specialty of Putin's.

Throughout I wondered if Oksana was playing devil's advocate, since she seems to enjoy the whole interview, and both she and David Norris remain in good humour.

David Norris's famous recent speech on Israel in Irish Parliament on 5 August 2014 follows here:

You can read more on David Norris on wikipedia, among many other sources, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Norris_%28politician%29#Education_and_academic_career

It seems that he typically tells the truth where others do not dare to. For instance, he has said, of drug legalisation,
"The blunt instrument of criminalisation is not working because of the vast profits it generates for organised crime ... my view is that the welfare of the community, including the victims of drug abuse, may be better served by having access to quality controlled, legally prescribed drugs." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Norris_%28politician%29#Education_and_academic_career It is indeed unusual for an elected politician to acknowledge that illegal drug profits are so important that they will always undermine criminal laws against them.