B.A.Santamaria

"Let me return to my old primary school, St Joseph's convent [in Cloncurry]. Saint Mary McKillop, I'm sure, was just like my principal, Sister Thomas..." Bob Katter's book, while retrieving some good Australian ideas and paying its respects to our ancestors, also markets big population ideas uncannily like those of B.A. Santamaria.

Bob Katter An Incredible Race of People Murdoch Books, September 13, 2012.

Down the rabbit hole

Hurrying through a mall in outer Brisbane, a few weeks ago a book by outback Queensland independent politician, Bob Katter Jr., caught my eye amongst the fat-foodie and ‘life-changing’ array in the bookshop. It was strangely alluring like the rabbit hole for Alice.

A friend and I found it so fascinating in its chronicle from a particular point of view of Australian political and economic history that we bought two copies; one for kindle and the other a hardback, so that we could compare notes.

Even so, this book review was very hard to write. Katter’s book reflects a long lifetime of quirky political observations and experience in a head-long rush of a narrative, opinion and anecdote. It is a long and detailed book. Even if you disagree with every word, it is hard to dislike the enthusiasm and overt individuality, so rare in an Australian politician.

Surprisingly, I found it easiest to start by comparing Katter’s book with professional journalist Laura Tingle’s article, “Great Expectations”, in Quarterly Essay recently. See [See "Tingle shoots blanks ..."]

Tingle dumbfounds in her strangely arrogant and unempathic painting of Australian convicts as wimps and whiners, and the Australian population as curiously dependent, whereas Katter writes warmly of an 'incredible race of people' who came from the "convict crucible".

Katter performs an educational service in telling of all the things that Australians managed to create and do with a population of only about 7 million - proportionately more than we now achieve in manufacture. But he seems not to realise the contradiction between his acknowledgement of how well we achieved and what we created at 7 million and his current perception that we now need a much bigger population. In fact, in his last two chapters, he puts on the growth spurs and urges for a population of 55 million by ... wait for it... 2037! That's in 24 years. One generation. An immigration invasion, no less.

Katter is a self-confessed 'developmentalist'. He admires 'doers' and despises ‘pygmyism’ [what he perceives as the opposite of developmentalism]. His whole book is a hymn to engineering, peasant farming, empire building and … did I say? … population growth.

The son of a Cloncurry Labor Party secretary, Katter seems to be a B.A. Santamariarist (a Grouper) at heart in his desire to irrigate the Australian desert and settle tens of millions of peasant farmers there. You wonder why and, in the very last chapter, you realise that he is the product of a Catholic education and the associated ideology about civilization as a moral imperative, medical science as having saved us from an eternal struggle against pestilence and disease, without which one in four would not survive birth, [1] and that population growth is normal or good. Despite all his lauding of the 'first Australians', he is a fan of the 'civilising' influence of the Conquistador.

"Let me return to my old primary school, St Joseph's convent [in Cloncurry]. Saint Mary McKillop, I'm sure, was just like my principal, Sister Thomas..."

Katter's values shape the things he chooses as important in history. It makes sense to compare Katter with Tingle because both use quite different interpretations of the same events to kick off opposite ideologies. Tingle uses the history of politicians selling off our institutions to argue that we can no longer expect anything of governments. Katter uses a different interpretation of the same thing to argue for the election of his party of 'doers' to bring back those lost empowering institutions - like a Peoples' Bank, patriotic Australian employers, Australian manufacturing and design, and an owner–operator society, in which men sell their labour or their produce through collectively owned ‘means of production’, or at least through statutory collective marketing arrangements.[2] Many Australians would welcome these among Katter’s policies.

Tingle mentions how Australia has been subject to constant mass immigration. She then glaringly omits to comment on this. Katter can hardly stop talking about it. He wants more, more, MORE!
Most Australians don’t want a bigger population.

Katter’s dream

What is to underpin Katter's vision of turning of rivers inland and the flooding of the interior with water to create an inland sea for a hugely swollen population? Katter believes that almost limitless coal resources underlie about 20 per cent of Queensland. In fact he believes that Australia has the most coal of any country in the world. (Usually Australia is placed around third in coal reserves globally). He actually believes that Australia can be a great power just on these, with 'clean coal technology' [3] and ethanol from sugar cane. These energy sources combined with massive irrigation throughout much of Australia, for Katter would enable a host of peasant farms across northern Australia, to feed the world and power Australian industry and huge new cities in the north and south, plus our current cities ballooned to megapolises.

Creating an inland sea, if you added trees (which Katter does not mention) might affect climate positively, although this is an old idea which has been criticized as unlikely to do what it purports, and of a scale so financially costly that no government has ever gone further than look at the idea and hastily discard it.[4] If our population stayed the same, in theory such a scheme might help our current environmental problems, however, Katter simply wants to use it to add to our problems by turbo-charging immigration. So we would have massive increased energy costs associated with a vast engineering scheme, plus all the additional costs of the new population. Katter, however, only assesses things in terms of a credit side to an imaginary financial balance sheet. He just doesn’t get that the financial balance sheet depends on the health of the environment and that we are already overpopulated. Or, maybe he does get it but he knows that he is more likely to get coverage in the mainstream press and funding if he makes an appeal to the big populationists of corporate Australia.

Population and scale

Katter believes that big populations carry ‘economies of scale’. He seems not to have heard about the diseconomies of scale we are all experiencing with congestion in Australian cities. Nor does he seem to notice the loss of democratic representation as our representatives preside at a great altitude over more and more vast electorates in a materialistic hierarchy antithetical to the Australian egalitarianism that Katter also extols. His answer to our overlarge population’s overshoot of Australia’s water supply is to turn the northern rivers inland. Katter is the kind of man who cannot acknowledge limits. (In this he is no different from nearly every Australian politician).

He thinks that Australia can return to farming and manufacturing and inventing with

"[...] an extra 100,000 migrants a year [...adding] to the current immigration mix of 250,000 a year, giving us a population by 2037 that would be in line with most countries: around 55 million."

Yet he began his book saying how much we manufactured with only 7 million people. He also notes how successive economic liberalization policies put Australian business out of business and promoted international corporations. It seems to me that, if we changed our anti [small and medium] -business laws, our enterprise would again flourish, probably better without the constant pressure on land and resources prices of a bigger population.

He does not explain how he arrives at a definition of 'most countries' nor why we would aim to be of a particular [big] size. If you look up countries with populations over 30m but less than 100m you get: Philippines, Vietnam, Germany, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Congo Democratic Republic, France, Thailand, United Kingdom, Italy, Myanmar, South Korea, South Africa, Spain, Ukraine, Colombia, Tanzania, Argentina, Kenya, Sudan, Poland, Algeria, Canada, Uganda, and Morocco. The list of countries with much smaller populations than that is much longer and includes Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, Denmark, Ireland, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Taiwan, Australia, Syria, Romania, Netherlands, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, Czech Republic, Hungary, Iraq, Venezuela, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and more...

Hydraulic engineering

In his barracking for a huge population for Australia, Katter is also calling for increased irrigation and the canalization of Australia's waterways on an unprecedented scale. He completely ignores wild ecology, animal rights, and the right of people to have wilderness. He celebrates as worthwhile the activities of engineering, road building, dam building, and irrigation channel building above all.
He is like a man in the grip of an ecstatic vision driving at 200 kpm down a highway in the middle of the night without any lights on, with no brakes and no insurance. In this he seems to be exactly like nearly every other politician in the country – except that he remains interested in primary products.

"Our mining product, our beef and our ethanol would be carried out on great canals fanning in from Spencer Gulf and south from [...] Two per cent of northern Asutralia's land and just 7 per cent of its water, combined with 10 per cent of Australia's grain [...] a real, open and sensible migration system. It will be unlike our current migration system that chokes off people [...] Some of this new population and much of the old will have moved out of rabbit-warren cities and onto their own one to three [...] A population of that size will provide great prosperity and great economies of scale. [...] All of northern Australia will become 'the land of 10,000 billabongs', with wildlife and nature no longer struggling [...]

Catholic education negates sensitivity to nature?

Note that this last statement is the only one that sounds even faintly kindly towards our natural environment. My impression was that Katter's catholic education probably taught him to block nature out, in the belief that endless human expansion was our manifest destiny. For Katter, science is not about understanding and cooperating with our wonderful natural world; it is about dominating it and subduing it. And that means dominating and subduing local senses of place and local empowerment with massive engineering projects and mass immigration, for all his talk about democracy.

Whilst one can understand his position as a representative for farming influencing his perception of engineering rivers and dams, he actually seems to be irrigation and production- mad, to the extent that there can never be enough! For this reason (as well as the extraordinary financial and engineering costs and poor chances of success), one cannot endorse his wish to revive the Bradfield Scheme to water Australia's inland deserts, leaving the rest of Australia trashed and going forth to multiply and trash the rest.

(For a dissection of the Bradfield scheme and its paroxysmal resurgence from time to time in Australia, see, Dr Robert Wooding, "Populate, parch and panic: two centuries of dreaming about nation-building in inland Australia," Chapter 6 of John Butcher (Ed.), Australia under construction : nation-building : past, present and future, ANU School of Government, 2008.] [For a discussion of the Australian tendency to big huge and costly projects of little real benefit, see, Dr Richard Evans' "A passion for white elephants: some lessons from Australia’s experience of nation building" in Chapter 5 of John Butcher (Ed.), Australia under construction : nation-building : past, present and future, ANU School of Government, 2008.)

Aboriginal Land and Water

For Katter, private property is the key to civilisation. Unfortunately he is unable to see that modern economics in Australia also has a downside in its zero-sum capitalisation of land.
Convinced of the British capitalist system as the way forward, Katter thinks that Aboriginal land should be alienable - that is, that Aborigines should be able to buy and sell their community land - principally in order to borrow from banks so as to start businesses.

"It should appear obvious to any objective social commentator or historian that the often portrayed ugly picture of ‘Aboriginal’ Australia would be exactly the same picture in every town, village and city in the rest of Australia if the inhabitants were suddenly bereft of the private ownership of land and realty, and all that land and realty was suddenly to belong to the so-called ‘community’." (Jnr, Bob Katter (2012-05-15). An Incredible Race of People (Kindle Locations 714-716). Murdoch Books Australia. Kindle Edition.)

He is right, of course, as far as his philosophy goes, but it doesn’t go very far. The problem is that all that privately-owned land and realty is exponentially gravitating to fewer and fewer hands because of our 'wonderful' land-tenure system, so that the majority of Australians are becoming increasingly land and capital poor and endebted. What is the point in turning Aboriginal land into this economic quicksand?

Equity is preserved far better in the European roman law or Napoleonic system, but Katter, like most Anglophone politicians does not know of this alternative system that almost every country in Europe uses. (Pity, because he might like French dirigism and he might learn something from a system that counts population growth as costs to the community.) Aboriginal land as the founding institution of their 60,000 year old society has a much better record than a 300 year old capitalism that is cannibalising its own people and their property. Try taking Maori land away! No-one would dare to suggest that as a good idea.

Katter damns the Queensland Labor Government for reversing attempts to privatise Aboriginal land. Basically he believes in 'progress' as an evolutionary and divinely inspired constant. He does not seem to appreciate (and it does not seem to occur to him) that the Australian Aboriginal way of life retains its intrinsic validity, any more than he seems to appreciate the intrinsic validity (or value) of nature itself without the imprint of industrial man. Even though he describes gallantly the stand that the Australian Aborigines made against the British invasion, one can see that he feels it is all in the past, in a time unredeemed by Progress, Catholicism, mining and irrigation.

He also cannot stand to see all that water in the north under native title.

Ethanol and Carbon Emissions

Inspired by the Brazilian ethanol industry, Katter promotes the idea that carbon emissions will be taken care of by the production of ethanol from sugar cane, which can be substituted for petroleum. The next sugar cane crop will reabsorb the carbon emissions, he believes. Although he is a rural politician, he has a strange disregard for soil.

The main problem with the production of biofuels from crops is the overuse of soil, which is biologically alive. The constituent soil organisms cannot survive frequent mechanical disturbance and applications of rich fertilizers, which is what is required for the production of monocrops. Another problem is the great amount of water necessary to grow the crops and create the fuel. Use of diesel fuel for mechanical operations, especially at farm level, detracts from the ultimate net energy production and from the ultimate net CO2 production. (It is true that the latter would be zero if it were not for the use of fossil fuels in production.)

Brazilian scientists have costed their ethanol industry:

“…the production of 1 liter of ethanol from sugarcane requires approximately 18.4 l of water, 0,07 kg of crude oil equivalent, and 1.52 m2 of annual land use and results in the lost of 1.8 kg of soil due to erosion. These results are impressive, especially when the Brazilian ethanol production, 16 billion of liters in 2006 (Brazil, 2007) is considered. The soil lost is of utmost importance since the ability in growing sugarcane to ethanol production, or any other crop, is directly related to this natural non-renewable resource.” Source: Consuelo L. F. Pereira and Enrique Ortega, 2005. “Sustainability Assessment of Ethanol Production from Sugarcane,” Conference Paper, , http://www.advancesincleanerproduction.net/first/textos%20e%20arquivos/sessoes/4a/1/Consuelo%20Fernandez%20Pereira%20-%20Resumo%20Exp..doc

“Although the popular belief that ethanol systems have no net CO2 emissions, they do have because of direct and indirect oil consumption; this system uses external inputs that demand petroleum in their production: fertilizers, equipments, chemical inputs, infra-structure and so on. Our estimate is that there is a release of 0.29 kg of CO2 per liter of ethanol produced.” Source: Source: Consuelo L. F. Pereira and Enrique Ortega, 2005. “Sustainability Assessment of Ethanol Production from Sugarcane,” Conference Paper,
http://www.advancesincleanerproduction.net/first/textos%20e%20arquivos/sessoes/4a/1/Consuelo%20Fernandez%20Pereira%20-%20Resumo%20Exp..doc

To summarise the above: There is no such thing as a free lunch; the transformation of one energy form to another costs. A lot. We are using giant fossil fuel oil reserves. When they are gone we won’t be able to replace them with anything even remotely so vast. Trying to do so with sugarcane is a wet dream.

Loaves and fishes mentality

Katter expresses religio-economic beliefs in the value of capitalism and a notion of 'progress' similar to those of most parliamentarians today. This makes him argue like an ecological and thermodynamic simpleton about economies of scale with an increased population when we are looking at fossil fuel resource depletion and cannot cope with the pollution and emissions fall-out from what he have already used. Confident as a brave hunter that there will always be something out there to spear, he sounds like too much of a Man to carry a dilly bag or stop to clean up the mess before inviting 35 million more people along to the barbecue.

As a "Developmentalist" much of his economic philosophy is founded on the Keynesian way out of the Great Depression, when, in an age of cheap oil, governments poured money into projects to employ their people to build infrastructure for future manufacture and expansion. Reasonable for that era, but not for ours. The circumstances have changed.

His hero, Ted Theodore, who built the Australian Workers Union up, was Premier of Queensland from 1919 to 1925, a member of the federal House of Representatives from 1927 to 1931, and Federal Treasurer from 1929 to 1930, was a champion of the Keynesian approach, but was not able to get support to implement it, due to a political scandal.

Katter’s opus is peppered with positive delivery of the kinds of statements that give ecologists and enlightened farmers the willies, such as:

"Les Thiess had revolutionised scrub clearing by putting a big cable or chain between two tractors, but the cable would ride up, particularly with brigalow scrub. Joh,[Bjelke Joh Petersen] using a similar method, had added a huge steel ball in the middle of the chain that stopped it from riding up over the scrub." [Kindle Location 3752]

Katter's heroes are typically the object of 'green attacks'. You can see where his solid antipathy to the Greens arises. Their rhetoric attacks the heart of his values.

Even if Katter's big population, big engineering, big irrigation, big roads, big development obsessions etc make you want to run away and hide, they aren't much different from those of the Liberal Party, the Queensland LNCP, or the Labor Party. Furthermore, the Greens do precious little to stop the push for population growth that causes all the big engineering projects and expansion that oppress and destroy nature, biodiversity and democracy. What's different is that Katter's writing is complimentary and sympathetic to most Australians and he pays his dues to those who laid down their lives or toiled to build this colony from its desert beginnings. You sense his fellow feeling and you respect his ancestors because he seems to respect yours.

He has noted and taken to his heart our battles. Often he was there. He is friend to the soldier, the miner, the worker, the disaffected ALP True Believer, the ex-Lib, the strayed CP member, the misunderstood Pauline Hanson party member, the capitalist Aborigine - and the Catholic Church.
I can't be the only Australian to wonder if Katter is for real or if he's just a brilliant politician in his ability to appeal to marginalised Australians in farm, mine, and satellite suburb and anyone who is just sick of the economic rationalist parliamentary babble. It takes more than luck to survive this long by yourself in Australian politics. But then Katter is second in a dynasty of rural politicians, headed by his father. Katter's father had a country store and Katter himself spent some time in mining – which probably accounts for the rigid solidification of his pioneer mentality. He now occasionally buys and sells cattle and mining interests and his wife buys and sells houses which might be worth around 700,000 (according to disclosure of interests for Parliament).

Katter might have written an unusual and interesting book, but I was surprised at the media coverage it got and the coverage of his party, The Australian Party in the mainstream media - including The Australian. In fact I thought that Katter's new salience in Australian politics probably relates to the huge promotion he makes for rapidly expanding the population in Australia, especially for The Australian. The Murdoch press constantly promotes the idea of a bigger population for Australia. Surely Katter’s book cannot have escaped the notice of the desperados in the growth lobby, who one would expect to be queuing up to throw money at him. Surprisingly, he seems not to be able to attract candidates to his Party, which would otherwise present competition to the Stable Population Party Australia candidates in marginal seats. I think many people would front up to join, were it not for his big population policies.

Finally, one cannot help noticing how Katter’s push for a big population for Australia and his Catholicism are, as I mentioned earlier, very reminiscent of B.A.Santamaria’s philosophy which, with the backing of the Pope, caused enormous harm to Australian democracy. The Catholic Church in Australia has a long history of immigrationism and the Vatican is possibly the richest corporation in the world, with a penchant for interfering in politics and economies. For years The Australian employed Santamaria as a journalist. For anyone interested in familiarising themselves with this fascinating era of Australian history, see "Pronatalist Policy in Australia: 1945-2000" On the other hand, I have no evidence that anything like that is going on with Mr Katter.

NOTES

[1] Katter, for instance, believes that one in four people alive today would be dead if it were not for modern medical technology - antibiotics and vaccinations. Like most people he has fallen for the lurid myth that people in simple societies had life expectancies of around 30 years old and that the appallingly low life expectancy of Europeans in early industrialisation was a norm that had existed up until then. This is complete and utter nonsense but it underpins much of the developmentalist dogma of the Catholic Church and capitalist foreign aid. For the real demographic story read Sheila Newman, Demography, Territory and Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, December 2012.
[2] These are deceased Queensland Premier Ted Theodore’s words, but they also seem to be among Katter’s policies.
[3] A good book to read about a future relying on coal and for an explanation of the concept of clean coal is Barbara Freeze, Coal, a Human History 2004.
[4] Dr Robert Wooding, "Populate, parch and panic: two centuries of dreaming about nation-building in inland Australia," Chapter 6 of John Butcher (Ed.), Australia under construction : nation-building : past, present and future, ANU School of Government, 2008.] [For a discussion of the Australian tendency to big huge and costly projects of little real benefit, see, Dr Richard Evans' "A passion for white elephants: some lessons from Australia’s experience of nation building" in Chapter 5 of John Butcher (Ed.), Australia under construction : nation-building : past, present and future, ANU School of Government, 2008.]

This is an interesting supplement to the drive for high immigration and a huge population in Australia. It also gives an account of the role played by The Movement (B.A. Santamaria) in the Australian Labor Party's long exile from government before Whitlam. Some interesting background on Labor Party figures currently in government or recently in opposition.

This research was concluded in 2000, when the ALP had been in opposition since Keating's fall, and the author welcomes feedback and new information on this period and its sequel. See also an analysis of what drives a similar pronatalist movements in Russia in Putin’s Pro-Natalism Miscarries

New South Wales Royal Commission into the Decline in the Birth Rate

In 1904, in response to the decline in the population growth rate in New South Wales and Victoria, the New South Wales Royal Commission into the Decline in the Birth Rate (RCDBR)[1], composed mainly of businessmen with a financial interest in liquidating stagnating property assets, launched pro-natalist and immigrationist recommendations that were to set the tone for a long time to come. In the future much Australian industry, but especially the housing construction and infrastructure industries, was to become dependent on population growth.[2] This is a dependency it shares with other new world colonial states, such as the United States and Canada.[3 ]

National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)

In 1944 the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) took up where the RCDBR had left off forty years ago. Deploring the “forty year decline in the birth rate” and disparaging a rise in the birth rate between 1940 and 1943 as due to a temporary rise in marriages due to war time, the NHMRC called for pronatalist policies [4], encompassing the provision of housing, home help, child care for everyone, and kindergartens and better medical services. They also drew attention to the importance of the role played by economic security. The only alternative to an increase in natural increase would be an increase in immigration, but in 1944 that seemed to them an unlikely prospect.

Chiffley and Menzies and Immigration

However the Chiffley (Labor) and Menzies (conservative, Liberal) governments, although strongly populationist, seem to have largely ignored the 1944 pronatalist policies recommended by the National Health and Medical Research Council and to have relied on immigration. This may have been because the baby boom made pronatalist measures seem redundant as long as it lasted. The initial hope was to rely on natural increase to make up one per cent of population growth and immigration to contribute another one per cent. In Australia the immigration program had marked nation building aims but also had the major function of providing a ready supply of labor for industrial expansion.

Papal conspiracy, Communism, Democratic Labor Party and ALP

But what had happened to the strong pronatalist traditions which had persisted through the Second World War to the 1944 Report of the National Health and Medical Research Council? How could they just have disappeared?
In fact pronatalism continued to exist, particularly in the Australian Labor Party, and especially among its Catholic members. However it is hard to find any record of related pronatalism and policies in the literature which has been written about family policy of this time. This may be because an entire block of pronatalists separated off from mainstream Labor parties in a traumatic split in 1954. The Democratic Labor Party which resulted from this failed to flourish.
Remarkably, these events do seem to have been the culmination of a down-under papist conspiracy, far-fetched as that may seem. At the time Protestants outnumbered Catholics in Australia and Catholics had encountered discrimination in the workforce, especially during the Great Depression. There developed a secret society of Catholics, organised and under the direction of bishops [5], to carry out a Vatican encyclical inspired plan to Catholise Australia.

Catholic Action and the Catholic Social Studies Movement and Dr Santamaria

The secret society, of which the full name was “The Catholic Social Studies Movement” grew out of “Catholic Action”, a concept developed in Europe in the 19th Century [6]. Catholic action had been active in Australia from the 1930s and was particularly concerned about the spread of communism. However “The Movement”, as it came to be called, had a wider range of free standing policies and combatting communism may in the end have been more of an excuse for its empire building activities. It was led by Dr Bob Santamaria, an Italian born Australian lawyer of unshakeable religious convictions, intelligence, charisma and a taste for power. The first edition of its weekly newspaper, Freedom, was launched in September 1943. The centre of the Movement was in the State of Victoria, although it was Australia wide.
The Movement was highly pronatalist and immigrationist [7]. The pronatalism and immigrationism, as well as important for increasing the number of Catholics in Australia, were also crucial to its major plan, which was to block further urban concentration and settle the hinterlands of Australia with a vast population of contented peasants congregated in rural communities. Redistribution of wealth – not communism, but in the context of setting up a population of small property and business holders - was the economic philosophy [8].
Among the stated policies of the Movement were:

“8. Payment of a marriage bonus and payment of adequate family allowances, 11. Possession of Family Homes for all.” [9]

In effect the campaign sought the reunion of Church and State, as we can see from the item about education:

“9. A National System of education, 20. Recognition of religion as the basis of education.”[10]

The leader of this movement, Bob Santamaria, gave pronatalist and defensive reasons for the emphasis on rural development in Rural Life, May 1951. He wrote,

“...The second reason was national. Professor Macdonald Holmes proved to us that the birth rate, the very strength, the very numbers of our community, depended upon the strength of rural life. We were given time and again the relative birth rates in metropolitan, provincial, and country areas, and it has been proved, not only through Australian experience, but through world wide experience, that any increase in population must come from the rural areas. Therefore if we hope for survival of the country everything has to be done to build up those areas which have been given us Australia.”[11]

Was Chiffley influenced by “The Movement” – Murray Darling Basin and Snowy Mountain scheme?

It is interesting to note that a number of policy items from the movement were eventually carried out. Arthur Calwell, (Labor) the first Minister for Immigration under the Chiffley Labor Government and main driver of the post 1945 massive immigration program was himself a practising Catholic [12], and, although he did not follow other Catholics into the Democratic Labor Party, it seems plausible his policies were influenced by ideas emanating from the Movement[13]. Among those polices taken up were two calling for the institution of a bigger migrant intake and intensive irrigation in the Murray Darling Basin, with hydro electricity generated in the Snowy Mountains to be used exclusively inland, to encourage industry [14].

ALP, Unions and Reds under the Beds and Santamaria

There is evidence that in later years the Labor Party showed a high degree of confusion on whether to take seriously the threat of imminent invasion, which, with the maoist revolution, suddenly replaced that of a communist takeover of Australian unions [15].

This is perhaps not surprising, given that Santamaria and Catholic activists who had preceded him in the Labor Party had initially been preoccupied with the 'enemy within', to wit, the issue of the communist take over of Australian unions. There was for years a battle for dominance within the party between its communist members and its Catholic members. When the Movement began to organise a secret resistance network to communism within the union movement and the Labor Party, the issue of communism as a threat was covertly sown but absolutely pervasive and deeply rooted. Suddenly, after the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, Santamaria virtually stopped pushing the communist union issue in order to take up foreign policy and the threat of invasion by Asian communists. His theme was “Ten minutes to midnight”[16].

ALP Split from within – confusion reigns

The seismic split that divided the Labor party in 1954 identified the Catholic activists from the Movement as the threat from within, and so this must have made those Labor party members outside the movement wonder if the communists really were the enemy. And, since the Movement activists had led the Ten to Midnight campaign about the threat of Asian invasion, it is not surprising that those Labor party survivors of the split had become disenchanted and distrustful of all that old rhetoric.

Liberal foreign policy

The rhetoric of course had taken on a life of its own, of reds under the beds and the yellow peril. It was now the basis of official foreign policy under the Liberals, with a major immigration program the chief strategy for defense. Birthrates were of course coming along quite nicely all by themselves.

Purge within ALP

In December 1954 the Movement-sympathetic Victorian Executive of the Australian Labor Party was outlawed. By means of elections run by the Federal Executive despite the defiance of the incumbent executive, it was replaced by a new anti-Movement Victorian Executive. On 30 March 1954 the John Cain Victorian State Labor Government resigned and reformed, excluding four Catholic supporters of the outlawed Movement-dominated Victorian Executive. Seven Victorian Federal parliamentarians – S.M. Keon, J.M. Mullens, R. Joshua, WM Bourke, TW Andrews, JL Cremean and WG Bryson – all Catholics except for R Joshua, were expelled from the Australian Labor Party because they refused to declare their loyalty for the new Executive.

Both ALP and the New Australian Labor Party (the early DLP) lose election

These seven expelled ALP members met in April 1954 and formed a new Australian Labor Party, known as the “Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist)”, which eventually became the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) [17].

Both Labor Parties contested the next Victorian election and, unsurprisingly, both parties lost to the Liberal Party.

It must all have been profoundly traumatic. Not only would documents and records have been lost, but there was a sudden rupture in the chain of human command and in the chain of human message bearers within the party.

Although the baby boom would have obviated any but extremist preoccupations about the birthrate, pronatalism must have been considerably “on the nose” anyway in the Labor Party, at both Victorian and Federal levels. It could not help but be associated with the policies of the treacherous Movement that had infiltrated the Party to such a degree. Even if there had been widespread concern about communism within and without the Party, the tactics of the Movement overshadowed this.

Whitlam Era: Pronatalism on the nose

At any rate, in these intrigues may lie the explanation for the apparent disappearance of pronatalism after 1945. It had been there but in one fell swoop a great many pronatalists had absented themselves to form a major political vehicle and had formed a new party. That party struggled on and probably assisted the maintenance of the Labor Party in opposition for many years. The Democratic Labor Party never really achieved much success for itself and whatever pronatalist agenda it retained failed to make much impact on Australian policy. In 1974, encouraged by Gough Whitlam, the last of the DLP members of parliament, Vincent Gair, resigned to take up an appointment as a diplomat to Ireland.

As well as distancing itself from a foreign policy based on threats of invasion, Whitlam’s government, from 1972, launched a number of widespread policies to promote family planning, women’s rights and equal opportunity. For a long time the Labor Party stayed well away from pronatalism.

“Movement” disbanded by Vatican 1957

The Movement was officially disbanded by the Vatican in 1957. The DLP became a Federal party, but never rose to any great success. Santamaria never became a member of parliament but was a major influence on the policies of the DLP. In December 1957 Santamaria formed the National Civic Council to continue anti-communist work.

The National Civic Council still exists. It has various offshoots, including the Australian Family Association, which is domiciled in the Thomas Moore Centre in North Melbourne. It is run by one of Santamaria’s daughters and produces a newspaper, the News Weekly, which has a circulation of 10,000. It is still a pronatalist organisation, but lately has become less supportive of high immigration [18].

For years Santamaria had a column in the Australian, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch who is a Catholic convert and was recently made a Knight of the Vatican. The newspaper is very much in favor of high population growth. Santamaria died in 1998. He had eleven children.

Pronatalism creeps back: Peter McDonald and others

Towards the end of the 1990s it seemed to me that pronatalism was returning to polite demographic discussion.

On the 14 October1999 there was a big demographic conference at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, “The Transformation of Australia’s Population 1970-2030.”

Chaired by ANU Demographer, Peter McDonald [19], the conference had a strong streak of pronatalism. It was the first conference of academic importance that I had attended where there was a serious and almost unquestioned assumption that Australia and much of the developed world were threatened by the ‘grave’ possibility of 'exponential decline' in population. Impressive Power Point displays showed the populations of the United States ballooning like a cheerful fat man, that of Australia dwindling and feeble and Japan, with a total fertility rate of 1.45 and zero net immigration fading to a pitiful anorexic spindle.

The presenter of this session on “Comparative Fertility Trends,” was Professor Phillip Morgan of Duke University. The assumption at the beginning was that Australia would not be able to get the kinds of skilled immigrants it was felt would be needed in sufficient quantities and that there would be economic chaos if the population were allowed to decline. This left the only option to somehow boost the birth rate. (Note that Bruce Chapman, ANU professor of Economics who presented the session on the future of the labor force did not share this opinion at all. Rather he surmised that, employment wise, it would probably be an easier world in the next 35 years than it had been!)

I have heard that the Federal Labor Party had eschewed mention of the declining Australian fertility rate for a long time through a strategic desire to avoid feminist backlash [20].

Kim Beasely as ALP leader, his MP father, and pronatalism

On 15 May 2000, however, the leader of the Australian Labor Party (in opposition), Kim Christian Beasely, made a press release regarding a discussion paper on ALP Family Policy. This was reported on West Australia local ABC news item on the 15th May.

Interestingly the current ALP leader’s father, Kim Edward Beazley, was still the patron of the Australian Family Association in 2000. The Australian Family Association in Victoria is housed in the same premises as as the NCC, at the Thomas Moore Centre and is something of a “sister group” to the NCC. Kim Edward Beazley was a West Australian member of Parliament and member of the Labor Party. In 1950 he was an Anglican [21] but showed sympathy to the Movement’s policy ideals, notably that of allying the party closer to US foreign defense policy than British [22]. He has long been a committed member of Moral Rearmament [23] and a dedicated anti-communist. In March 1955 the Federal Conference credentials of Kim Edward Beazley senior were suspended for three years by the Western Australian ALP along with those of three others who were identified as sympathetic to the divisive aims of the Movement [24].

The Family Policy that ALP leader (1996-) Kim Christian Beasely announced in 2000 included greater access to Child care and higher endowment, concluding with a statement to the effect that this policy package would also be likely to raise Australia's falling birth rate. This was most important as "the present birth rate was leading to an unsustainable population for Australia. There is a pressing need to encourage higher rates of childbirth."[25 ]

The paper itself, entitled “Family Futures” emanated from the office of South Australian member of Parliament, Mr Swan, the shadow minister for family affairs. It explicitly denied “putting pressure on people to have children, or any such antiquated rubbish, but rather, making life easier for families; both in financial terms and in terms of the time balance between work and family life. However, arresting our declining birth rate is only a threshold issue. If we can provide more people with the opportunity to start a family, we should be prepared to back this with policies that deliver ongoing support from the time children are born.” The bulk of the policies were for better provision of child care ; there was little, if any, financial inducement. Nevertheless it is inescapable that the document has for its major raison d’être increasing the birth rate.

Angela Shanahan

Apart from the more specialised Financial Review, the Australian (which also appears as the Weekend Australian) is the only wide circulation national newspaper in Australia [26]. In 1999 Angela Shanahan first appeared as an occasional feature writer in a column called Focus . Shanahan seems to have been selected by the Australian as a pronatalist writer. Her major qualification for this post, apart from her reasonable ability to write, is her claim to be the mother of nine children. Since mothers of nine are a distinct minority and therefore could not represent a large and influential market for the Australian, one assumes that the newspaper is towing a pronatalist line.

“Procreative minority” was the title of her piece in the Weekend Australian on 20-21/5/2000 [27]. In it she describes a “kind of pursed-lipped, neo-Darwinian attitude of “the poor breed like rabbits”” She pushes the line that Australia has a “shrinking and aging population”, concluding therefore that “opposition to income support for big families is puzzling.” She attributes this to “extreme environmentalism or an ideological antipathy to the nuclear, patriarchal family which, in feminist newspeak, is always oppressive.” She promotes the idea of greater financial support for big families because they produce the “taxpayers of the future.” Disparagingly, she describes single people as “lonely old singles who never did manage to confront their fading youth”, and she complains that her children will have to support these singles as well as herself and their father.

Essentially she is suggesting that government should pay a wage to women who produce children and that this should be scaled to the number of children and that the tax system should be reformed to tax families rather than individuals. She does not go into detail but refers to the policies of the National Civic Council linked Australian Family Association.

This paper was written in about 2000, placed here in pdf form on 28 June 2006, and slightly reedited for the internet on 9 Nov 2009. Copyright to Author, Sheila Newman
Astridnova[AT]gmail.com Please cite: Sheila Newman, “Pronatalist Policy in Australia from 1945 to the turn of the century,” (2000) candobetter.org/node/623

Notes

[1 ] See most documents dealing with the history of population enquiries in Australia, e.g. Neville Hicks, This Sin and Scandal, ANUP, Canberra, 1978, p.93, Stefania Siedlecky & Diana Wyndham, Populate and Perish, Australian Women Fight for Birth Control, Allen and Unwin, Australia, 1990 and Borrie, W.D., (Chairman), Population and Australia, A Demographic Analysis and Projection, First Report of the National Population Enquiry, Parliament of Australia, 1975, Parliamentary Paper No. 6, Printed by Courier Mail Service, Campbell Street, Bowen Hills, Brisbane, Queensland 4006., Vol.1

[2] Sheila Newman, Malthusianism, Neo-malthusianism and Women’s Rights in Australia, from 1770 to the 1990s, published on French internet site, Populatique, CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), http://www.ehess.fr/populatique/, Ed. LeBras et Ronsin of EHESS. Curiously, the Commission had ignored the impact of gold rushes to New South Wales and West Australia in removing males of reproductive age from the South Eastern States, and they also ignored the dampening effect the desperate economic times must have on the remaining population.

[3 ] Conversely, from 1974, Western European economies began to gear to population stabilisation and decline and the housing industry adapted to factory built housing on demand, instead of engaging in land speculation. See http://dieoff.com/page194.htm

[4] Borrie, W.D., (Chairman), Population and Australia, A Demographic Analysis and Projection, First Report of the National Population Enquiry, Parliament of Australia, 1975, Parliamentary Paper No. 6, Printed by Courier Mail Service, Campbell Street, Bowen Hills, Brisbane, Queensland 4006., Vol.1, pp193-194.

[5] Paul Ormond, The Movement, Nelson, 1968, p 122. Ormond cites part of a letter from the Editor of the Melbourne Catholic newspaper, The Tribune, Mr Ted Adams, to T.M. Butler, (5 May 1961): “As at April 1955, the Movement was an authentic Catholic activity with a madate from the Hierachy. It was directed by and its executive officers were responsible to an episcopal committee. In such circumstances it was surely the function of a paper under Catholic control to reflect its policies without question, and to reject any submission which brought them into the sphere of open debate.”

[6] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp44-46.

[7] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp44-47.

[8] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp47-48. Murray cites the first issue of the Movement’s weekly newspaper, Freedom, where the movement’s policy was described under twenty points: 1. Public control of monopolies, 2. Public conrol of credit, 3. The Institution of Industrial Councils, 4. Assistance to small owners, 5. Part ownership of industry for the workers, 6. Co-operation in all aspects – producers, consumers, marketing, insurance and credit, 7. The principle of an Adequate Income for all, including a minimum wage that will meet all the needs of the family, allow it to provide for the future, attain to the ownership of property and imporve its cultural condition, 8. Payment of a marriage bonus and payment of adequate family allowances, 9. Wages a first charge in industry, before dividends or profits, 10. Equal pay for equal work, 11. Possession of Family Homes for all, 12. A strong program of regionalism, including spreading of all the conveniences of the city to the country home, 13. A national campaign for Family Land Settlement, 14. A radical crisis to solve the problem of rural debt, 15. Independent Farming as the normal productive policy, 16. Co-operation in agriculture, 17. A Fair Return for the farm production, 18. Self-government of agriculture, 19. A National System of education, 20. Recognition of religion as the basis of education.

[9] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp47-48. Murray cites the first issue of the Movement’s weekly newspaper, Freedom, where the movement’s policy was described under twenty points.

[10 ] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp47-48. Murray cites the first issue of the Movement’s weekly newspaper, Freedom, where the movement’s policy was described under twenty points
[11] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p111
[12 ]Paul Ormond, The Movement, Nelson, 1968, p.116. Ormond comments that Calwell, who was a practising Catholic, felt that he had been ‘frozen out’ of his Parish Church when he did not go with the Democratic Labor Party at the height of the Labor Party Split in the 1950s. Instead he changed churches.

[13 ]Although note is taken that Calwell was criticised by Movement supporters for his failure to support the movement and was slurred as a communist. See for instance, Ormond, The Movement, Nelson, 1968, pp115-116.

[14] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, pp 55-56, “Mostly under the influence of [Colin Grant] Clark, [economic advisor to the Queensland Government and a convert to Catholicism], the main lines of Movement social policy by the early 1950s ... [included] 6. Social services designed to encourage big families, 7. A bigger migrant intake, to build up the population, with many of the migrants being settled on the land and a high proportion of them Catholics, 8. Intensive irrigation in the Murray Darling Basin, with hydroelectricity generated in the Snowy Mountains scheme to be used exclusively inland, to encourage industry....”

[15] K Betts, Ideology and Immigration, MUP, 1988, pp86-87. She cites Dennis Altman, Rehearsals for change: Politics and Culture in Australia, Fontana, Melbourne, 1980., p.101. Betts identifies the schema of threat of invasion as a motivation for populating the land. She comments that this was a topic of open debate towards the end of the 1960s, for a short time. “In the years after World War II the development of Asian communism seemed to make the issue simpler and starker, at least for conservatives.” She adds that the picture was rather more confused for the Labor Party, and describes Calwell’s attitude as combining strong committment to the threat schema, whilst refusing to assign that threat directly to either communism or to Vietnam. She cites Denis Altman as arguing that such confusion characterised Labor thinking in the pre-Whitlam era.

[16 ] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p56.

[17 ] Paul Ormond, The Movement, Nelson, 1968, p.93

[18] Personal communication from Robert Birrell, reader in Sociology and Anthropology at Monash University and author of many books on population growth in Australia.

[19] McDonald’s articles about population projections have been cited by the Minister for Immigration (who is the defacto minister for population) and some McDonald material was displayed on the website of the Minister.
http://minister.immi.gov.au/media_releases/media99/r99115.htm:

“Minister Releases New Findings on Australia's Ageing Population, MPS 115/99 .
...A new report entitled The Impact of Immigration on the Ageing of Australia's Population has been prepared by ANU demographers Professor Peter McDonald and Rebecca Kippen, and projects that the proportion of Australians over 65 will double over the next 40 years. Those over 65 are expected to represent 24 per cent of the Australian population - the result of Australians having fewer children and living longer. While the report found that the ageing of Australia's population is inevitable, it states that factors including current migration levels will have an impact on the composition of the population into the second half of the 21st Century. "This research indicates that calls for a significantly larger Migration Program on the grounds that it would help keep Australia younger are misdirected and ill informed. Higher net migration would add to the size of the population but would have little impact on the age of the population," Mr Ruddock said. "Equally, heeding calls for zero net migration would accelerate ageing of the population." Wednesday, 11 August 1999, Media inquiries: Susan Sare (02) 6277 7860 or 0407 415 797.

[20] In 2000 I listed my source as confidential, but I don’t think this factor is any great secret.

[21] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p.146.

[22] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p.42 & 146.

[23] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p.264

[24] Robert Murray, The Split, Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, 1970, p.241

[25] Report on ABC News Item sent to me by email on 16 May 2000 by Vice President of West Australian Branch of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population, Paddy Weaver.

[26] The print media is almost exclusively dominated by only two chains; the Murdoch and the Fairfax Press.
[27] “Procreative minority” is the title of her piece in the Weekend Australian on 20-21/5/2000 p.30.

Mark O'Connor on Barry Maley in 'Population Fallacies'

Barry Maley, in "Birth Rate Bubble" on ABC radio's Unleashed wrote, "Any nation needs to have a birth rate of not less than 2.1 children per woman to maintain its population. The second Intergenerational Report in 2007 observed that five people of working age were supporting every person 65 or older, but by 2047 there would be only 2.4 workers per aged person."

"A nice example of the 'Replacement Rate Fallacy'," quipped Mark O'Connor, author of Overloading Australia, [1] and a number of snapshot demographic analyses known as 'fallacies' prior to that. Here is what he has to say about claims by other pro-natalists that Australians' reproductive rate is running down:

The Replacement Rate Fallacy[2]

The late pro-natalist B.A. Santamaria once informed his readers in The Australian that for Australia’s population not to fall rapidly the average woman must have 2 surviving children. Such views are quite common, and often lead to a false belief that population is either falling or about to fall. Thus in July 2008, when the Pope visited Sydney for World youth Day (just after World Population Day), Australia’s Cardinal Pell told the media that Western nations faced a population crisis fuelled by ‘ruthless’ commercial forces, and that ‘No country in the Western world is producing enough children to keep the population stable.’

If Pell was thinking about his native Australia he was right?but not in the way he imagined. Australian women are having far too many babies to keep the population stable. In fact almost twice as many as necessary. Births in Australia (about half a million a year) are twice deaths (about a quarter of a million) and have been so for the past twenty years?even though Australian women have been averaging significantly less than two children each for at least that long.

Clearly there is something cock-eyed about this “replacement rate” argument. It involves a common, but elementary, error in demography. Can you spot it?

Can you spot the elementary error?

In fact to keep stable and just replace itself, a relatively young population like Australia’s would currently need something even lower than Western Europe’s rate of around 1.3 children per completed family. More like 0.93. And that’s without immigration!

(Barry Maley also writes: "One of the symptoms of this problem recently confronted Greg Combet, Minister for Defence Personnel and Science, when he drew attention to the demographic problem of a shrinking pool of young men available for recruitment to the defence forces." O'Connor puts this one in its place here but elsewhere as well.)

Misunderstandings like Pell’s often come from those who a decade earlier might have tried to argue that we need more people for defence, or for “respect” in the world. As those older props are discredited, more weight has fallen on the Replacement Rate Fallacy. Underlying all this is a natural bias of human beings towards pro-natalism.

The replacement rate was a useful, if theoretical, concept back when couples everywhere were having 4 and 5 children as a matter of course. Since couples often justified this by saying that the world must be populated, demographers would point out that all a couple need do to replace itself, was to have 2 children. More exactly, about 2.05 children, to allow for the odd child that dies before reaching reproductive age, and for the slight excess of male births. But basically, if women in their reproductive years average two surviving children, or one surviving daughter, a generation will simply replace itself, won’t it?

Humans are not fruitflies

Well, no! Humans are not fruitflies, where the generation of parents dies as their offspring are born. Children don’t replace parents, or even grandparents these days, but more often they replace great-grandparents. Hence if a generation of parents were to produce an equal-sized generation of children this would not mean the population had stabilized. In fact the population would not stabilize, at that rate, until the last generation to have more than 2.05 children had departed the scene. For instance, if India achieved so-called “replacement fertility” now, with all its couples in future averaging just 2.05 children, its population would still double, adding an extra 1 billion people!

Don't confuse the birth rate with the fertility rate!

Demographers need to clearly explain to journalists the difference between the Theoretical Long-Term Replacement Rate (TLTRR) and the Current Replacement Birth Rate (CRBR). The latter is the birth-rate that would currently (though not indefinitely) produce as many births as deaths. The only replacement rate that Australia could claim to be safely below is the Theoretical Long-Term Replacement Rate (TLTRR) of just over two children per completed family. But that is the replacement rate of an imaginary Australia, an already stabilized Australia, a society in which there would now be equal numbers in each generation.

By rights we should distinguish birthrate from fertility rate. The birthrate is the number of babies born per thousand people per year (and hence the replacement birthrate is that at which births per year would equal deaths); whereas ‘the fertility rate’ is the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime ? which is the demographers’ justification for speaking of 2.05 children per woman as ‘replacement fertility’. If only non-demographers could be got to observe this distinction, Santamaria’s error could be succinctly described as confusing the birthrate with the fertility rate. Since fertility rates are always below 10, and birthrates may be nearer to 100, the two terms ought not to be confused! However one must despair of getting the media to distinguish between birthrate and fertility rate.

[1] Overloading Australia by Mark O'Connor and William Lines, Published by Envirobook Sydney, 2008. The second edition is coming out soon in 2009. (The authors in Chapter 14, "Pyramid-selling Australia" kindly note that much of that chapter is 'endebted to' Candobetter's Sheila Newman's 'ground-breaking' research. Thank you Mark and William!)

[2] Source: http://www.australianpoet.com/overloading.html#rrf