multiculturalism

"Sweden has failed to integrate the vast numbers of immigrants it has taken in over the past two decades, leading to parallel societies and gang violence, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Thursday, as she launched a series of initiatives to combat organised crime." Australia, however, oft

Innes Willox, the Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Group or AIGroup, aims to bolster the economy by resurrecting the discredited mass-immigration agenda. His group has been described as: A leading organisation representing business in a broad range of sectors including manufacturing, defence, ICT and labour hire, by the Australian Advanced Manufacturing Council (accessed 1 September 2020), which lists him, among other positions, as “Board Member of Migration Council of Australia,” and notes that he “was Chief of Staff to the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, from 2004 to 2006.”

To appreciate the agenda, in the article, Migration, tax reform a key to revival, (Geoff Chambers, The Australian, 24 August 2020). Chambers wrote that the Australian Industry Group was calling for “a long-term, systematic shake-up of the tax system focused upon the removal of the worst taxes.”

But the overriding aspect of AIGroup’s push requires the Federal government to achieve,“An increase of the migration cap.”

Innes Willox, repeats his decades-long mantra:

“Restore the migration cap to 190,000 places a year and [furthermore] move to [implement] a growth rate target for annual permanent migration [levels, because] migration was critical to Australian prosperity.”

Willox and, indeed, that coterie of like-minded Big Australia cohorts, construe that merely importing copious numbers of immigrants will bolster ‘demand’. Therefore, the sacrosanct supply and demand factors which economic-rationalists embrace, will summarily kick-in - and boost economic growth. It all seems so straightforward and logical.
There’s nothing there about what might happen when these immigrant groups become so large that they could use their numbers to establish political entities to organise for their own benefit and possibly against Australia’s!

Of course, this disaster already seems obvious to many. Rancour inside the major parties shows it. In Victoria an Indian woman in the Liberal Party has established a ‘religious Right’ faction based on certain migrant groups. In South Australia a Chinese woman and upper-house MP is openly advocating for China and Chinese migrants. Are we surprised?

Without doubt, Innes Willox and Co would gloat about this scenario, as being culturally diverse and enriching. When, in fact, what it really is cultural separatism; if not downright divisive. And this is evident in that, outside workplace requirements, many in the array of ethnocultural groups in Australia, rarely interact with those outside of their cultural-bubbles. Except, perhaps, as Clive Hamilton, in Silent Invasion: China's Influence in Australia, argues, they seek to flatter and influence people holding political and business positions.

At any rate, Australia’s Prime Minister has reacted, introducing legislation requiring Federal oversight of any agreements with foreign powers/investments: “The government will introduce legislation next week empowering the foreign affairs minister to review and cancel agreements – such as Victoria’s decision to sign up to China’s belt and road initiative – if the commonwealth judges the arrangement adversely affects Australia’s foreign relations.” See, Victorian premier defends China deal as PM pushes to override state pacts with foreign nations. On the other side of the coin, many Australians continue to worry about Australia’s role as an international deputy to the United States war machine. (See, for instance, The Independent and Peaceful Australian Network, “Don’t buy into war.”). Most of us can probably agree that we would rather be independent and sovereign.

In past times, advocates of open-door immigration programs claimed this would enrich Australia. Alas, what has transpired is that immigrants had arrived in such droves, over the past decade, that they have rapidly displaced established Anglo-Celtic-European ethnicities from scores of suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne. The end result more closely resembles a collection of peoples, with diverse national or ethnic allegiances, rather than those of what once-was, termed ‘mainstream Australia’.

Further, over the past few months, we’ve seen the Big Australia advocates, like Willox and the AiGroup, calling for the government to fast-track international students in Australia from temporary migrants to permanent residents, as the stepping stone to fill job requirements. The effect of this would be to counter the drop in immigrant numbers which has followed from COVID-19 closing the borders to foreigners. What manner of gross-insanity exists here, with them demanding international students fill the void, when unemployment presently stands at 14% and underemployment is at a comparable percentage?

Willox reportedly purports that

”Immigration was critical to Australian prosperity and the pandemic has necessarily constrained inward immigration, but Australia would need to think long and hard before any decision [was made] to sustain lower levels over a longer term and the reduction in permanent migration visas had contributed to a reliance on temporary migration flows, dominated by students and backpackers. (”Coronavirus: migration, tax reform ‘key to recovery’”.)

Clearly, what Willox and AiGroup’s long-term migration strategy entails is summed up in the following two statements:

“[Australia’s future prosperity] would be enhanced by moving to an annual growth rate target for annual permanent migration that is linked to [the] national labour market growth, instead of a fixed quota number.”

“The changed outlook for immigration has huge implications for many industries, especially of immigration in housing and construction, which have been fueled by high levels both permanent and temporary levels.”[Emphasis added]

Well, taking into account that immigration intakes into Australia between January 2014 until June 2019 were, comparatively, 2.25 times higher than that of the US, prompts these queries:

If, as Willox and his cohorts claim mass-immigration makes Australia richer, then how come we are the most indebted society in the world? Surely, if the theory espoused by Willox and all of the Big Australia Brigadistâs is correct then prices/costs should, at the very least, be stagnant? Unlike as over these past 75 months during an era of huge immigration levels - since the LNP won office in September 2013 - house prices have increased by 60%, but wages only rose 15%?

Clearly, in spite of the relentless-claims made by the Big Australia Brigade, open-door immigration into Australia, hasn’t made us wealthier at all. These policies have actually encumbered the country with the exact opposite scenario. Alas, in spite of this situation being indisputable, we yet again find lobbyists like Willox calling for the government to resurrect those failed schemes.

But Willox is so concerned about the decline in building, if immigration is not increased, talking of:

“[…]The huge implications for many industries, particularly housing and construction.”

And it is the housing/construction sector interests that expose precisely what the whole Big Australia agenda is built upon. Excessive numbers of highly compliant immigrants will fall for the con-trick of borrowing big sums of money to buy a property. This will sustain the huge Ponzi-scheme.

Australia is now wallowing in crisis but those with the money are pushing for a new round of lunacy in furthering the disaster dumped upon Australians.

The history of Australia as a nation has been brutal to the humans who lived here first, to the animals and birds, and brutal to the landscape. Australia needs a day to stop and reflect on what has been done, where we are now and where we are going. We cannot fix the problem by continuing to do the same thing that caused it. Current discussion about Australia Day focuses on the way colonisation affected and continues to affect the aboriginal population. In addition to the injustices and atrocities, Australian Aborigines have been, and continue to be, overwhelmed by sheer numbers from elsewhere. The non-Aboriginal population born here is now being overwhelmed in the same way. The fast growing population as a whole has ongoing devastating environmental impacts on this land. It has social impacts too, as it enriches a very few members of the growth lobby, while the rest pay for population growth.

In the run-up to Jan 26th, the anniversary of the arrival of the "First Fleet" into Port Jackson from Botany Bay under the command of Commodore Arthur Phillip (who had brought them from Portsmouth some 8 months earlier ) there has been much discussion regarding the appropriateness of this date as Australia's national day of celebration. It is not the day that Australia became a nation, it's not the day that the British first landed on the continent. It was the day the British flag was raised at Sydney Cove, a day that marks the beginning of massive colonisation from Britain to the Pacific Island of Australia.

The colonisation begun then is a fait accompli. It is irreversible. The hapless convicts who were brought to Australia have made themselves part of the place.Their descendants cannot go back and live in Britain as their forbears are too far removed to give them any rights of abode.

The sequelae of the Port Jackson landing amounts to an ongoing, unceasing chain of migration from not only Britain but other parts of the world, unceremoniously taking over the land of the previous human custodians

Importations of exotic animals on the scale of multi giant cruise ships have also followed - horses, deer, foxes, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs camels, dogs , cats all loaded onto the finely balanced and well adapted fauna of the continent. They now live here in their millions.These animals are by no means ideally suited to Australian soils and climate . Foxes were released so that the English gentry could resume one of their bloody pleasures,- fox hunting. Goats and deer have escaped into the wild making tracks throughout the fragile landscape with their hard hooves. Camels and horses were brought in as workers and as transport as there was no equivalent native animal. -indigenous (or exotic ) birds were brought in despite a resident cornucopia of marvellous native and migratory birds.

The vegetation of the continent took and still takes a tremendous beating. The state of Victoria has lost most of its forest cover. Grasslands are being swamped with housing to the west of Melbourne. Exotic plants have been introduced and have taken over as weeds. The biosphere of the continent of Australia- the most diverse on Earth at the time of European arrival is only a shadow of its former glory. Now we are watching the remainder of it disappear.

The humans who inhabited the continent of Australia for the previous 60,000 years in varying degrees of density from coast to coast and across the desert had learned to exist within the constraints of the land. On arrival, the first explorers and settlers found people leading their lives in what appeared to harmony with nature. The land was abundant with wildlife. The people were self sufficient. They were not waiting with baited breath for some sort of salvation through invasion. Following "our" arrival their lives would never be the same again. They were rounded up and killed or displaced at the convenience of the invaders. Until 1967 they were considered under the constitution as part of the Australian fauna. They now have status, land rights and even their own TV stations but I can see their relatively newly found voices being drowned out by the noise of the competing multicultural groups within Australia. It seems that these groups are not so much interested in hearing one another but in being heard. What space in their agendas will the be afforded the First People of Australia?

The groups of audience comprised families and groups of friends, the usual multi -cultural mix of English-speaking Australians and other ethnic groups. The Chinese-speaking group in front of us paid little attention to the singer's music and even less to his introductory narratives. What relevance would it have to them? Indeed, what relevance could it have for the Manchester-accented couple to our right who were commenting on real-estate-ads on their phones? I could just hear Archie over the barking dogs, the clatter of camp furniture prematurely packed up, and the loud good-byes as people parted company, while Archie continued to sing on the stage. I struggled to see Archie as our neighbours in front stood up for a long chat before leaving, obstructing even our view of the singer.

Where does this leave us with respect to Australia Day? The history of Australia as a nation has been brutal to the humans who lived here first, to the animals and birds, and brutal to the landscape. Australia needs a day to stop and reflect on what has been done, where we are now and where we are going. We cannot fix the problem by continuing to do the same thing that caused it. Current discussion about Australia Day focuses on the way colonisation affected and continues to affect the aboriginal population. In addition to the injustices and atrocities, Australian Aborigines have been, and continue to be, overwhelmed by sheer numbers from elsewhere. The non-Aboriginal population born here is now being overwhelmed in the same way. The fast growing population as a whole has ongoing devastating environmental impacts on this land. It has social impacts too, as it enriches a very few members of the growth lobby, while the rest pay for population growth.

We cannot alter our course without reflection. Yet we must change our course and soon. I suggest we keep the date, January 26th, as a marker of the beginning of immense, irreversible change. But let's be grown-up about it! Rather than seeing it as a day of celebration and beer, let's see it as a day of reflection and re-assessment of our situation and our direction.

If we could look at things more objectively, historically, critically and realistically, then all parts of our society could participate in trying to set the right course, one which will be the best possible for all on board. Make it a day to reflect on where we are going, because if there is a brick wall in the way,and we do not change direction, we will certainly crash into it. A lot of damage has been done and we need to salvage what we can. Changing the date of Australia Day achieves little in this respect. Let's take the old Australia Day to a new level and try to get the public thinking about the next 230 years as well as the 230 years since that landing at Port Jackson!

Did you know that Great Britain is going down the drain because the citizens want to remain British?

Did you know that the British are inherently racist, jingoistic, bigots, and obnoxious because they don't want to become Pakistanis, Syrians, Africans or some multicultural combination?

Did you know that the British people voted to leave the European Union not because they oppose their loss of sovereignty to a foreign and unelected power in Brussels, but because of their hatred and contempt of foreigners, especially the dark-skinned ones that the EU forces them to accept in unlimited numbers?

If you don't know this, you are not stupid like Brian Cloughley, who lays it out for you in the website strategic-culture.org. Here is the URL for Cloughley's imbecillic article:

Britain Going down the Drain: Racism and Bigotry Are Growing (21/11/16) | Strategic Culture._{#fn1" id="fntxt1">[1]}

While Cloughley calls the white British racists, last May these racists elected a Muslim, Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London. Can you imagine the Mayor of London, England, is a Muslim named Sadiq Khan? Either the British are not racists or the Pakistanis outnumber Englishmen in London, which might before long be renamed New Islamabad.

Cloughley calls the British people every name in the book and then upbraids them for "the racial abuse" of using words such as "Pakis" and "niggers."

Cloughley, obviously a self-hating Britisher, reports that Brexit (the British people's vote to restore their sovereignty by departing the EU) has caused hate crimes to rise by 41 percent. Why would departing the EU cause a rise in hate crimes?

Perhaps the answer is related to the fact that the use of traditional British words, such as "wog," has been criminalized. "Wog" is a British word that according to the English Oxford Dictionaries means simply "a person who is not white."_{#fn2" id="fntxt2">[2] #fn3" id="fntxt3">[3]} Despite this innocent meaning, for a white Britisher to use this word as a description of a not white person or group can result in hate crime charges. What is most peculiar about politically correct speech is that political correctness itself marginalizes non-white people by eliminating the use of words that mean non-white. Political correctness has made it so shameful to be non-white that ordinary words such as negro and wog that mean a non-white person have been turned into slurs. How can non-whites have racial pride when words that mean non-white cannot even be used?

As Cloughley's screed against the British people develops, we see that it is a brief against leaving the EU. As the EU was an OSS (original name of the CIA) initiative, Cloughley, knowingly or unknowingly, is serving as a CIA asset.

Cloughley is at perfect ease calling his fellow British every hateful name, seemingly impervious to the fact that if he were not calling white people names he would be committing hate crimes.

In addition to their loss of sovereignty to an unelected EU commission sitting in a foreign country, what the British people are objecting to is that they have been made second class citizens in their own country. White people in Great Britain have to be very careful about what words they use to describe illegal and legal aliens or they can be charged with "hate crimes" for employing vocabulary formerly used by prime ministers themselves.

Yes, Britain is going down the drain. But not because it is trying to rescue itself at this late date from loss of sovereignty and multicultural hell. Britain is going to hell because, judging by the closeness of the Brexit vote, almost half of the British population have been so brainwashed that they are ashamed to be British.

This article was previously published 28/11/2016 on PaulCraigRoberts.org. It was initially republished only in part here on 28/11/2016, but, now, with the author's kind permission, has been re-published in full.

Footnotes

#fn1" id="fn1">[1]#fntxt1"> ↑ In spite of its publication of this ridiculous article, Strategic Culture also publishes insightful and informative articles about many of the world's current geopolitical conflicts.

#fn2" id="fn2">[2]#fntxt2"> ↑ NOTE (by author, Paul Craig Roberts): I have been reminded from England that WOG stands for Worthy Oriental Gentlemen, a term imposed by British officers on uncouth troops to stop them from using racist names for colonized peoples.

#fn3" id="fn3">[3]#fntxt3"> ↑ (by Candobetter editor): It is some years since I have heard the term 'wog' used, but, in my own experience in Australia, and not in Great Britain, back in the 1960s and 1970's, contrary to what the author has written, 'wog' was considered an offensive and racist term. However, like Paul Craig Roberts, I consider it outrageous that the use of the term should be criminalised.

On Q & A of 6 July 2015, ex-jillaroo, Louisa Vaupel, asked the panel's opinion on a proposed sale to a foreign state of the Glengyle, a huge cattle station near Lake Eyre in South Australia, owned by Kidman & Co. Vaupel said she was worried about food security, that she believed that Australian farming needed foreign investment, but was concerned that foreign state-owned enterprises might buy it. We followed the story up and located a photographer called Rod Moffatt, who is trying to have this huge area with many striking natural features conserved for a Lake Eyre Superbasin Park. He made the short youtube video inside this article for Q & A. They did not air it but we are, plus his well-written argument for the superbasin park.

You can read the Q & A panel responses in the appendix. They are all over the place on foreign ownership. Green Larissa Waters did state that the Greens were against selling Australian land, food producing land in particular, in this age of food insecurity, given the changing climate, to state owned outfits. However they are not against foreign investment. Vrasidas Karalis's response mixed foreign investment up with multiculturalism, openness and globalism - all of which he felt we 'must' have for fear of becoming 'inward looking economies because essentially they are self consuming passions'. It seemed that almost everyone was unable to question globalism. Amazingly the legendary right wing owner of the Sydney Institute, Greg Sheridan, was better on this and several other questions than anyone else.

Rod Moffatt's proposal for Glengyle becoming part of a Lake Eyre Basin Super Park

Lake Eyre Basin Super Park
Open letter to all Australian politicians:
Imminent Sale of S.Kidman & Co Ltd Pastoral Leases in Lake Eyre Basin

I am writing to you, seeking your urgent support to halt the planned sale of the S. Kidman & Co Ltd pastoral leases located in the Lake Eyre Basin and the Channel Country - where cattle grazing activities are conducted on land that contains natural values of international conservation significance - worthy of World Heritage listing.

I propose the Commonwealth (with the assistance and cooperation of the relevant State Governments), acquires these Kidman pastoral assets to form Australia’s largest sub-contiguous national park.

On Wednesday 10th June 2015, Ernst & Young (Adelaide) released an Information Memorandum pertaining to the proposed sale of Australia’s largest private landholder, S. Kidman & Co, which has pastoral interests spanning more than 10 cattle stations, and covering more than 100,000 square kilometres, across South Australia, Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Over 80 percent (80,529 square kilometres) of the Kidman portfolio comprises pastoral leases situated in the arid desert rangelands of the Lake Eyre Basin of northern South Australia, and the Channel Country of southwestern Queensland and northeastern South Australia - including Anna Creek, Innamincka, Macumba, Durham Downs, Naryilco, Durrie, Morney Plains and Glengyle Stations.

Collectively these cattle grazing holdings constitute nearly 1% of Australia's landmass and occupy a significant footprint over the fragile, arid, and environmentally significant Lake Eyre Basin and Simpson-Strzelecki Dunefields bioregions.

Introduced hoofed animals, such as cattle, and inappropriate grazing management are among the most significant causes of chronic modification of arid and semi-arid land in the Lake Eyre Basin and the Channel Country, and one of the greatest contributors to the increased desertification of these regions.

With the effects of climate change (anthropogenic or otherwise) becoming much more apparent across Australia, it is likely the continued pressure of cattle grazing on arid land pastoral leases in and around the Lake Eyre Basin and the Channel Country will accelerate wind erosion of the soil resource and increase the frequency and intensity of dust storms along the eastern seaboard.

The total cost of the 23 September 2009 ‘Red Dawn Event’ dust storm (just to the NSW economy), was estimated by the CSIRO to have been in the order of $299 million (Tozer & Leys, 2012).

The sale of the Kidman pastoral empire marks the end of the colonial pastoral era, and provides an opportunity for contemporary Australian Government to redress a significant historical environmental mistake.

By acquiring, and extinguishing the leases over a considerable tract of the internationally significant Lake Eyre Basin and Channel Country landscape, and converting the land to an iconic national park...this fragile, arid desert landscape (including its extensive surface aquatic drainage systems) can be preserved and protected for posterity.

Such decisive action by our nation will send a potent and unequivocal message to the world that Australia is proactive in mitigating the anthropogenic impact on its natural environment and is genuinely committed to addressing the conservation of the biodiversity of this continent...and, most importantly...the elephant in the room, climate change.

Ordinary Australians crave visionary bipartisan leadership from strategic politicians, who possess intestinal fortitude and conviction, and your success in persuading your colleagues to support and facilitate the creation of the Lake Eyre Basin - Channel Country national park will be a totemic achievement for you personally...and a victory for our nation.

It is in the national interest that this land be preserved for the people and, with your assistance, history can be made.

On behalf of all sensible Australians, passionate about preserving our environment, I implore you to act.

Rod Moffatt

PO Box 588

Bribie Island QLD 4507

Ph:0417 995 485

APPENDIX- Q & A Question about Foreign Farm Ownership

Monday, 6 July 2015 Greece, Gags & Grazing Land
Panellists: Vrasidas Karalis, Professor of Modern Greek; Richard Marles, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection; Larissa Waters, Queensland Greens Senator; Trisha Jha, Centre for Independent Studies; and Greg Sheridan, Foreign Affairs Editor, The Australian.

Excerpt

TONY JONES: Okay, all right. Okay, all right. Yes, all right. So we’ve got to go to another question I'm told. It is from Louisa Vaupel.

FOREIGN FARM OWNERSHIP00:48:59

LOUISA VAUPEL: Yeah, my question was originally for Barnaby Joyce, Minister For Agriculture. I think it’s a shame he is not here to answer it but I will put it to the panel because I think we urgently need to talk about the future of Australia's food security and agriculture. I worked as a jillaroo for two mustering seasons on Glengyle station in western Queensland, which is a property of Kidman & Co and Kidman is one of Australia's largest beef producers. It's got 100,000 square kilometres. That's three quarters of the size of England, almost 2% of the land mass of the Australian continent, and for the first time ever, this farmland is up for sale for just $325 million. Interested bidders include State owned enterprises from the US, South America, Indonesia and China. And my question is should foreign State owned enterprises be allowed to buy up Australian farmland?

TONY JONES: Trisha, we will start with you.

TRISHA JHA: My view is that I'm basically in favour of foreign investment. My understanding, although I don't understand agriculture very well, is that the sector is in dire need of fresh capital. I'm open to suggestions that it may be very much contrary to the national interest, particularly in terms of national security to basically refuse an offer for a foreign state owned enterprise to invest in agricultural property in Australia but so far I haven't heard that case being made and so I am inclined to perhaps not share your concerns.

TONY JONES: Larissa Waters, should foreign state owned enterprises be allowed to buy up Australian farmland?

LARISSA WATERS: Well, thank you, Louisa, for your question and well done on working the land as a young woman. It would be nice to see more young women following in your footsteps. This is a vexed issue because, with the white paper being released today, foreign ownership is a key issue and the Foreign Investment Review Board have quite a high threshold for when they review what's considered in the national interest when there is a proposal for purchase by a foreign entity. When it comes to state owned enterprises, it’s a bit of a different kettle of fish and the Greens believe that we should not be selling Australian land, food producing land in particular, in this age of food insecurity, given the changing climate, to state owned outfits. So lower the FIRB threshold for foreign investment, yes, and apply that national interest test but I think, for state owned entities, the sale of food producing land look, food security is going to become increasingly problematic as the climate continues to change, which is why it’s such a shame that that agricultural White Paper released just earlier today, the fact that it's got five paragraphs on climate change towards the end of the book, what a tragic missed opportunity. It’s going to change the face of agriculture.

TONY JONES: Well, Barnaby Joyce is not here to make this point but no doubt he would, that there are elements of climate change action right through the entire report. That’s his argument.

LARISSA WATERS: Well, I wish that were the case. Certainly I’ve not seen any evidence of that. The other issue I want to raise in relation to food security is the fact that coal seam gas and coal mines can currently go onto our best food producing land and landholders don't have the right to say no. They don’t have the right to safeguard their aquifers. And I think that's a real shame and I’ve had legislation in the Senate to try to rectify that with no support so far.

TONY JONES: We’re going to stick with the actual question that was asked here and I’ll go to Greg Sheridan to hear from him.

GREG SHERIDAN: Look, this is a difficult question full of contradictory impulses. I am very uneasy about state owned enterprises buying agricultural land. The Prime Minister once said we don't believe in socialism when it is an Australian Government owning Australian enterprises, why would we want foreign governments to own Australian enterprises. On the other hand and there is also a big danger in convincing foreign governments that, in order to trade with us, they need to own our assets, whereas it’s much better if they just buy the things that we produce in a good market. On the other hand, we’ve kind of buggered ourselves up pretty badly in this country. We’ve made our cost structures terrible. We’ve put massive disincentives in the way of domestic investment and, you know, a system finds a way of coping with that. One way the system copes with our terrible insane cost structures is by sort of subleasing enterprise to foreign entities. We went through, in the resources boom, a period where we kind of became Saudi Australia. We paid ourselves more than we were really earning and we didn't like to do dirty, difficult, dangerous and demanding work and I think we need to get back to developing our own agricultural land. But I'm very uneasy about state owned enterprises owning Australian land.

TONY JONES: Vrasidas, what do you think?

VRASIDAS KARALIS: May I say that I agree with what's said because but we live in a period of globalisation and what we need from government is to regulate these markets, especially for state owned and want to buy something in Australia but, at the same time, I believe that we have to open up this economy because we can't have inward looking economies because essentially they are self consuming passions at the end and it is not enough anymore to feed a population as diverse as the Australian one simply with what is produced here. We are a consumer society, we have so many needs from all over the world, we have so many communities from all over the world, so multiculturalism becomes something very important in the whole mixture here but I think what we need is a government who will be able to regulate this market instead of regulating the secrecy about the refugees and have to pay more attention in this regulation of the market instead of looking to impose more sort of secretive legislation on these cases.

TONY JONES: And you’ve slipped off the topic and I’ll go to Richard Marles to get back onto it.

RICHARD MARLES: Look, agriculture represents one of the enormous opportunities for the Australian economy going forward. Being a food bowl for the growth of the middle class in Asia, particularly in China, is going to be a huge source of production and employment in Australia going forward but to make that happen, we are going to need foreign investment. Some of that is going to come from state owned enterprises. Now, at the moment, if you are a state owned enterprise, you need to go through the Foreign Investment Review Board. Invariably you get approval for that. I think that's appropriate. But, you know, for us to go out there and be trying to put more restrictions on foreign investment in Australia, I think, is a huge mistake. It is actually going to stifle the growth of what is one of the most important production parts of our economy going forward and, can I say, this Government has been completely hopeless when it comes to its regime around foreign investment. Rather than encouraging it, it has been discouraging, which is remarkable from what is meant to be a conservative government and it flies in the face of what's our economic opportunity in the future.

TONY JONES: Okay. Well, it’s been a great discussion. We are just about to run out of time. Our last question is on politics from Xanthi Kouvatas.

Update: See note [1] on where candobetter.net's values differ from those apparent on Party for Freedom site. John Ajaka, the NSW Minister for Multiculturalism's indignation at Nick Folkes's (Party for Freedom)[1] protests against foreign property ownership in Australia would ring truer if Ajaka distanced multiculturalism from the billion dollar property development growth lobby that has captured the multicultural tag. See Background on the Australian Multicultural Foundation. Instead he sounds like a hypocrite attacking an Australian who tries to stand up to this Goliath.[2] Unfortunately multiculturalism has become code for mass migration and a political shield for a powerful global network of engineers, banks and financiers, property developers, government departments and academic propagandists, represented by numerous peak bodies of which the Property Council of Australia is probably foremost. The Fairfax and Murdoch Press are members of this growth lobby with strong vested interests in their own huge property dot coms, realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. The major political parties are similarly invested, with the Labor Party's stake best known, but it is no Robinson Crusoe.

The multicultural cloak has been given unmerited authority and power by vested interest and protection from political figures. Nick Folkes is a working man attempting to lead protests against mass dispossession of Australian citizens by virtually unregulated foreign property buyers who are outbidding Australians and contributing to an overpriced Australian housing market.

The multiculturalist Goliath is well-organised to maintain and increase focused financial benefits from high immigration, but the Australian public, which wears the cost of mass immigration and land-speculation, has great difficulty organising to combat it.

This disorganisation of the masses is largely due to the way the Fairfax, Murdoch and ABC media manage 'public' debate to reflect the opinions of the big end of town whilst pretending to reflect those of the majority. Although population growth is a constant topic in the mass media, the media usually only publishes criticism of the growth lobby if they can pretend such criticism is laced with innuendos of racism, NIMBYism or can be stigmatised as 'ignorant'. Whilst Tony Abbott is cocooned by his party and the mainstream media against public criticism for wearing his foot in his mouth, we can expect that Nick Folkes will be afforded no such protection for speaking plainly against narrow financial interests that cost most Australians.

There are huge sums of money involved in the population growth and foreign investment that uses multiculturalism to censor criticism of its projects and muzzle those it disadvantages. According to the Foreign Investment Review Board, China overtook the United States as the biggest source of proposed foreign investment in Australia in 2013-14 and may soon 'pump $60 billion into housing' here. The ABC reports that Knight Frank property developers and realtors 'showed Chinese investment in the Sydney and Melbourne property markets doubled last year and that Chinese investors spent more on Australian real estate than on properties in London and New York for the first time'. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-29/chinese-invasion-leaflet-campaign-slammed-as-idiotic/6506412

Numbers and wedge politics

It makes you think that Pauline Hanson's speech writer was on to something when he had her say in 1996 that Australia was in danger of being 'swamped' by Asians. Americans and Canadians are still not far behind though in driving up housing prices, resource demand and development expansion over Australia's fast diminishing green spaces.

In 1996 Australia's population was 18,300,100. At 31 May 2015 it had grown by 5,306,010, that is, by more than a quarter, and was 23,838,210 (Source). From 2009 planned invited economic mass immigration of between 250,000 and 300,000 per annum far outweighed Australia's natural increase (births minus deaths) of 150,000 per annum.

Every effort has been made by the authorities to confuse the public about the numbers. In 2006 immigration statistics became uncomparable with those before 2009 after the statistical method was changed.[3] There have been concerted mediatised wedge politics to

(a) confuse planned invited economic immigration and paying foreign students with refugees and asylum seekers, and
(b) stigmatise asylum seekers and refugees as overwhelmingly freeloaders and criminals

This confusion has divided the community, journalists and political party members.

A better informed public could unite against overpopulation that is inflating the cost of living and housing here and the illegal wars that are creating huge numbers of refugees and economic immigrants as economies and nations are destroyed by global investment in war and 'development'. Instead the wider community has been relegated to a passive and worried audience as mass media anointed 'community leaders' pontificate on the imminence of terrorism and the need to retreat into a police state or engage indefinitely overseas in wars against terrorism. (See, for example, David Kilcullen, "Blood Year,"Quarterly Essay, No.58, May 2015).

Leaflets distributed by Nick Folkes say, "Aussie battlers are being pushed to the fringes of our cities while foreign intruders are reaping the benefits of our hard-working previous generations." "The new dispossessed or forgotten people will one day be remembered as the 'stolen generation' priced out of their market by invading Chinese foreigners." He might have rephrased his proposition more 'correctly' as a complaint that organised mass migration was inflating the property market, without pointing at particular national or ethnic beneficiaries, but he wouldn't have received mass media coverage then by taking advantage of the mass media headlines which said exactly the same thing:
"Cashed-up Chinese are pricing the young out of the property market".
"Sydney house prices driven by Chinese 'bolthole' buyers".
"Chinese investors are pushing into Melbourne and Sydney."

Although some put it in triumphant economic terms:

"Real Estate: Vendors delighted as Chinese buyers flock to Glen Waverley and Mt Waverley."
"Chinese property investment through the roof: What it really means."
"China's $60 billion Australian property splurge"

It didn't matter whether the media put its articles about Chinese investment in positive or negative terms, property agents still advertised close to these stories. The developers and investors, including the newspaper property dot coms cannot lose in this globalised market as long as there is population growth.

Politics and power

Ecological groups have for years earnestly and soberly criticised trends to overpopulate Australia by citing immigration statistics and the impact of overdevelopment on Australia's environment and ecology, hardly making a ripple in the mainstream media or the awareness of the general public, despite the fact that population growth is the number one topic in the mass media. The fact is that the Australian public have been sensitised by commercial and public mass media to multiculturalism and economic terms and desensitised to ecological and scientific terms. A political movement that succeeds in mobilising Australians against population growth is likely to use the terms the public are most familiar with and those are the ones that the mass media consistently use. This is the case with Nick Folkes's Party for Freedom.

Nick Folkes is trying to register his Party for Freedom as a political party. Success could be dangerous. Tony Abbott, then parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs , organised the Australians for Honest Politics Trust in 1996, which financed litigious activity culminating in the jailing of Australian politician Pauline Hanson in 2003 on the grounds that her party was improperly constituted. See https://newmatilda.com/2012/12/11/how-abbott-funded-fight-against-one-nation. Although sentenced to prison for three years, Hanson was freed on an appeal which found that her party was in fact legally constituted. But the message had been delivered to Australian citizens and residents that if they criticise mass immigration and the industries that cultivate it, punishment will come from the top. John Howard, the Prime Minister in 2003 explained to Lateline, "It's the job of the Liberal Party to politically attack other parties," but actually, it looks as if the top job is to protect the growth lobby. Tony Abbott is now Australia’s Prime Minister.

NOTES

[1] The title of this article was originally, "Nick Folkes a David standing up to a Multicultural Goliath," but we have changed it, regretfully. Even though Mr Folkes shows some courage in standing up to power, in the form of the multicultural property development lobby, his website features articles and comments of which we don't want to appear to approve. These comments and articles use 'scientific' theory against specific groups of peoples. For instance, one article discusses a high rate of cousin marriage in a particular people as if it were unusual or hazardous incest. That is a popular view that does not take into account the widespread role of endogamy in preserving land within a people, and other factors that need to be taken into account when assessing cousin marriage. In fact, a high rate of endogamy need not be genetically damaging; it can be beneficial, both in terms of preserving control over territory and in strengthening positive traits. Depending on the public relations, where one highly endogamous group can be stigmatised for 'inbreeding stupidity' another may be famous for 'inbreeding genius'. When assessing the impact of marriage and land-tenure traditions on genetic inheritance, environment and changes to economy, diet, and social organisation also need to be taken into account. See http://candobetter.net/node/3197 about the importance of dynasties in modern power. There is also a comment on the Party for Freedom site suggesting that a particular group of people have lower average I.Q.s that other people. IQ tests are not reliable when dealing with culture and language differences and this theory also does not take into account mass dispossession and changes to economy, diet and social organisation - and the impact of drugs and alcohol. It's a pity that the Party for Freedom does not seem to be able to see how fighting between groups weakens the ability of Australians to stand up to the powers that have overtaken national control of land, housing and economic benefits.

[2] "The man behind a letterbox campaign warning Sydney's housing market is under threat from 'Chinese invasion' is an idiot, New South Wales' Multiculturalism Minister says."

[3]#txtNf2"> ↑  "Technical note: '12/16 month rule' methodology for calculating net overseas migration from September Quarter 2006 onwards." In itself this was a tragedy because Australia shared with France the distinction of havg the longest set of comparable demographic statistics in the world.

(This article also looks at related population, immigration and democracy issues in the West.) A film, Innocence of Muslims has been released of which parts available on you-tube portray the founder of Islam in a bad personal and political light, to say the least. A strong theme depicts Muslims as aggressively anti-Christian. Apparently largely as a response to this film, there have been widespread riots by Muslims against foreign embassies, particularly US embassies, including riots in Sydney on 15 September 2012, with police injured. Meanwhile warships from more than 25 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are together launching a military exercise in the Straits of Hormuz, in response to threats to close it off. There is plenty of reason for Muslims to be angry with and frightened by the West apart from that film. And maybe Westerners should hold their own governments to greater account if we are to avoid World War Three.

In this youtube film Syrian Girl Partisan puts forward a thoughtful hypothesis surrounding the timing of the release of the anti-Islamic film.

A Wikipedia article, although incomplete and ongoing, shows that authorship of the film Innocence of Muslims, remains extremely cloudy and confused.[1] Jewish sources have denied involvement but some aggressive marketing of the film by US Christian militants seems well documented.[1]

The President of the United States has apologised to Islam for the film. In Australia some politicians have come out saying that riots by Muslims in response to the film have exposed a 'downside' of multiculturalism, but they seem mute on the contradictions between fighting oil wars in Islamic countries and causing displacement that creates refugees and immigrants seeking homes here. I have received correspondence highlighting that the ability to express views in art and media is preferable to expressing those views via war and that non-censorship is a Western value worth defending. I agree. Reacting to a Muslim demonstrator's sign calling for beheading of critics of Islam, Australian MP, Kelvin Thomson, made a speech in parliament declaring that Australians, including those of migrant origin, are expected to uphold all laws in this country, even those they disagree with. He meant laws against inciting violence.

Muslim reactions

Despite the rightfulness of the need to uphold the law and avoid violence, I can understand why some Muslims are very insulted. Australians are poorly educated in history, or more might be aware of the context of current military interventions and a history of western interference beginning with colonial takeovers in the late 19th century and the fostering of worse and worse governments by British, US, French and other colonial and corporate forces. All countries become basket cases after colonisation, some sooner rather than later. Australia is on the way. In the mean time, making 'the enemy' look ridiculous dehumanises them and makes it easier for them to dehumanise Westerners. Dehumanising by both sides makes war seem excusable, even irresistable, to each side.

Although I have heard the argument that Christians do not riot violently in the street every time a work comes out making fun of Christianity (Life of Brian, Piss Christ etc), I think that maybe they would if Muslims rolled into Western states in tanks, put us under curfew, told us how to run our countries and went about privatising our government oil companies. In fact, what the foreign Christian-and secular-backed western governments are doing to the Islamic countries is a hell of a lot nastier than rioting in the streets. [2]

The film is a symbol - not the main game

Because of these realities, I am reluctant to publish articles that unilaterally mock Muslims who reacted furiously to the film in question, without also mocking the hypocrisy of non-Muslim regimes which create refugees in one place and take them in for safety in another, whilst pushing commercial interests as if they were democracy. There is more to this than a film. The film is just a symbol, but wars are actually in progress and people in the Middle East are terrified, as we all should be. I also don't think it achieves anything for ants to stir up other ants' nests with a stick, especially when Russia and China are the traditional lords of the region and the angry ants are sitting on most of the world's remaining oil reserves.

How did we get to here in Australia and where is the anti-war movement when you need them?

On discussion pages attached to recent SBS programs about the conditions that create asylum seekers, (Re "Go back to where you came from" - what about the NON-asylum seekers?)" someone observed that we have very strong pro-asylum seeker and pro-refugee protests in Australia these days, but almost none against the wars we are participating in, even though those wars coincide with exoduses of people claiming persecution. The comment pointed out that significant refugee streams from such situations consist of people who worked with the invading armies, noting that, in the asylum seeker film, one man stated that he had fought on our side: "I helped you," and presented this as an argument for his being accepted as an asylum seeker. The comment thus raised a number of controversial issues not often discussed in Australia and seems to have been removed.

Wars and invasions present citizens or inhabitants in the embattled and invaded country with invidious 'choices' which notably include fighting the invaders or working for them. See Greg Muttitt's Fuel on the fire, Bodley Head, London, 2011, for a brilliant history of oil and politics in Iraq. In a country where most of the population usually have not agreed to have their government taken over by foreigners, anyone apparently working willingly with the invaders, whether or not the invaders see themselves as peace-makers, risks being identified by their compatriots as collaborators with the enemy.[3] For this reason alone a person working with foreigners will incur the wrath of their compatriots. Since 'our' armies [i.e. allies of Australia] and interventions are currently always purportedly in support of minority dissidents and revolutionary armies, perhaps anyone who can show they fought on Australia's side tends to have a well-founded fear of persecution.

We never address these illogicalities, these contradictions in our asylum seeker and refugee discussions, where at least some of the people seeking asylum here may be considered heroes by Australians but traitors by their own countrymen. What sort of responsibility do we have for nationals who took positions as salaried workers or occasional assistants for foreign officials in an occupation? Is it not more likely that people who are already on the outer in their own country will take their chances with the occupying army? In a country where food and shelter are luxuries, working for the occupying forces may be the only way of surviving at any particular time, and resisting those forces may verge on suicidal. It may also be necessary to work with the occupying forces in order to save what is left of the country, even though the occupying forces initiated the destruction. This situation is again described superbly in Greg Muttitt's Fuel on the fire, mentioned above.

Refugees from Algerian and Vietnamese wars

When Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, brought in Vietnamese refugees, many of these favoured the right wing government and fought against the nationalist wars in Vietnam. Years later the Vietnamese war is largely seen as a war for independence from colonial rule by the French, the Japanese, the British, the French again, then the United States. The Communist Party at the time was probably the largest of several political parties involved in the resistance. This observation should not be taken to label all Australians of Vietnamese origin here as right-wing, but the inference cannot be avoided that people who sided with Australia's allies during the war in Vietnam were not on the side that ultimately won in a war where Australia's participation is now widely seen as unjust.[3]

In the Algerian wars of independence against France the Harkis is the term given to those Algerians (mostly muslims) who were working for, either covertly or overtly, the French colonial government and who had an interest in defending that status quo. After the French withdrew - nearly one million of them, many who had been born and bred in Algeria going to live in France - the Harkis faced reprisals from their countrymen, who saw them as traitors. Many Harkis sought asylum in France, but the French government avoided what was seen by many as a responsibility to look after these people.

Where do militant religious sects fit in?

Where do militant religious sects, like the Taliban, or the less 'extreme' Hezbollah fit in? There are two ways that such sects serve a practical need. One is that they provide a cover for political action, organisation and resistance in countries where overt political meetings attract execution (both from national governments and from occupying forces). Another reason is that, in countries disorganised by war and occupation, they often retain some organising capability to meet local needs for food distribution, care for the sick, distribution of inheritances, care of orphans and widows. They also provide work, food and shelter. Some alternatives may present in the form of foreign aid organisations, including non-Muslim religious missionaries as well as the Red Cross or other non-sectarian samaritans. Seeking help from these non-local or alternative organisations may also carry the stigma of perceived collaboration with enemies, outsiders or poorly viewed minorities, and generally weakening local or national solidarity. Therefore seeking help from local organisations is likely to be safer. In Muslim countries, Western economic cultural practices which include banks that lend money with interest, buying, selling and consuming alcohol and incorporation of national assets and resources for private profit all run counter to religious and social philosophy. Siding with forces that market these practices is to accept the unacceptable and undermine your peoples' economic interests. Muslims share these values with many Westerners who do not, however, have the support of their social and religious communities or the local organisation to help them fight these economic ills.

Australia's silent anti-war movement, vocal pro-immigration lobby - what's the connection?

As well as Australia having a lot of protest about the need to take in asylum seekers and refugees, but little or no recent protest against involvement in wars in their countries of origin, Australia also lacks concerted protest against an undemocratic and unwanted policy of high immigration. Part of the reason for this is probably that high immigration is dishonestly marketed by government and commercial growth lobbyists as if it consisted largely of refugees and asylum seekers, although the vast majority of immigrants to Australia are wealthy economic migrants. You would think that this situation should still lead to protests against our involvement in unjust wars, but somehow it does not. One explanation could be that our mass media wants to promote both war and mass migration and therefore suppresses publication of contrary views, giving us the false impression that no-one cares about the other side.

Divide, conquer and grow

Another reason that protest is muted seems to be the doctrine of multiculturalism. This ideology is used covertly to engineer massive population growth by growing populations of different ethnic identities, at the same time dividing and conquering democratic input about high immigration. When people protest about the increase in immigration numbers causing inflation, and pressure on the environment and services, they are accused of attacking the ethnicity of those immigrants. Australian and state governments generally side-step the numbers issue and divert talk to how they welcome people from different ethnicities and races, implying that complaints about high immigration are really only about shifts in Australia's cultural center of gravity. In fact the official encouragement of multiple separate ethnic communities in Australia is obviously a source of concern to Australians of all origins. It seems that most people have a sense that after "Divide" comes "Conquer," and Australians feel they are being divided and losing their standard of living, quality of life and security. Housing inflation causing new levels of debt and homelessness is the most obvious example of the cost of population growth.

Look out for the enemy

Along with "Divide and Conquer" there is the policy of "Look out for the enemy". The enemy at the moment is identified as Islam. Since 9-11 the presentation of this old traditional enemy of Europe as an imminent threat has been ramped up to fever pitch and offered as a reason to enter Islamic countries - even where they were secular states - and endlessly seek weapons of mass destruction even after it has been shown there were none. At home in the Anglophone and other European states, harsh new anti-democratic policies have been brought in to counter threats of Islamic terrorism, making it possible to accuse people of terrorism without giving public proof. The wars for 'democracy' in the Middle East are eroding democracy in the West. At the same time new streams of Islamic immigrants (and refugees) have been welcomed to the very states making war on their homes.

Saudi Arabia - curiously part of the Western club

One Islamic state stands out for its exemption from foreign intervention and its collusion with the allies against its Islamic neighbours. That is Saudi Arabia. Saudi royal family members are legion. Jet-setting globe-trotters, they are members of an international power elite, founded on oil-wells. At the same time they are among the most repressive governments in the world, with astounding records of human rights abuse and slavery, crowned by their nation-wide enchattlement of women. These representatives of Islam seem to be the only Middle Eastern Islamic government friends of European governments and immune to revolution or NATO intervention.

Confusion from West to East

Should we be surprised that there is now confusion all round, with many Westerners convinced that Islam is out to destroy their way of life, and many Muslims convinced that Westernism is out to destroy their way of life? If you look at what is happening in the world today, the evidence seems to be weighted in favour of the Muslim perception, with a history going back to the 19th century. It is hard to say that Islam is persecuting the West when Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya lie in pieces after foreign 'intervention' and warships from more than 25 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are together launching a military exercise in the Straits of Hormuz as I write.

In this context, riots in response to the release of a film, Innocence of Muslims, that seems extremely inflammatory and insulting to Islam and its popularisation by US Christian militants, seem predictable. I have not seen most of the film, but I have seen several minutes on you-tube and I can see what the Muslims are angry about. It may well be that the film makes justifiable criticisms of Islamic culture and beliefs, but, as Jon Faine recently said, "Why poke a stick in an anthill?" Under such circumstances, the launch of Innocence of Muslims looks suspiciously like a politically detonating device, so I am glad that Obama has apologised.

Real political pressures created by high immigration and wars to fuel big populations

The fact remains that, in Australia, as in Canada, the United States and Britain, high immigration and overseas wars are creating political pressures. The power and commercial elites responsible for the high immigration that is depriving incumbent populations of their rights are the same people who are pushing in the Middle East for control of oil production and infrastructure roll-out so as to be able to grow corporate profits and continue their population growth and economic 'growth' agendas at home. Although democracy is a word so often brandished in the Middle East by Western forces, what is more often meant is capitalism, imposed by force, incurring many deaths. Iraq is a sad example of this - see Oil on the Fire and The Shock Doctrine and Saving the Baghdad Zoo: A True Story of Hope and Heroes. Libya's atomization through foreign intervention, purportedly to bring democracy, is a more recent example of the same kind of activity. We are now watching on the world theatre, with our bags of pop-corn, the purported democratization forces gather in the Bay of Hormuz, ready to 'reform'.

Grass roots democracy on the internet - not so easy to keep us in the dark now

But the internet has broadened the information we can get about wars now. Syrians who don't like the war there are managing to get its own side out to the world. Syrian Girl Partisan is a notable example, and she has broadened her commentary and explanations now to include an interpretation of what happened in Libya on "US Ambassador Lynched like Gaddafi And Youtube Censors." as well as the later film linked a the top of this article.

Several Egyptian demonstrators have confessed that they were paid to protest about the Innocence of Muslims near the US Embassy in Cairo, the Middle East News Agency cites Prime Minister Hesham Kandil as saying. (Source: RT News Anti-US riots grip Muslim world," http://rt.com/news/anti-american-protests-live-updates-053/

Former Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney

On 16 September 2012, in an email, Former US Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney wrote:

"U.S. bombs continue to fall in Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and now it is reported that the US drones are flying all over Libya and are bombing from Benghazi to Tripoli. Reports from Libya today are that foreign oil companies have evacuated their employees and stopped operations and that U.S. troops are in various parts of the country.

Tragedy continues to unfold in Libya. [...]"

McKinney: Questions on killings in Libya

"Every loss of life is tragic and that is why I oppose the current US policy of killing. The US is currently regularly killing people in Asia and in Africa. Taken to its extreme, the Obama Administration even claims authority to kill US citizens on US soil!

The unfolding situation in Libya is troubling, not only for the bloodletting and carnage that is taking place, but also because of the murkiness that surrounds the events themselves. I have several observations and a few questions:

1. The scenario of an anti-Islamic hate film triggering a protest that leads to violence replicates the events that took place in the initial uprising in Benghazi in early 2011. At that time, the annual protest in Benghazi against the anti-Islamic Danish cartoons was taking place. The march was infiltrated by persons with an agenda, who used the event as an opportunity to seize military equipment from the Jamahiriya government and use it against the Libyan population. If it is known that Muslim protest on the streets can be touched off by attacking the Qur'an, then once again parties with another agenda can spark then infiltrate that protest and use it as cover. It worked before to launch an entire chain of events in Libya, why not again? The reports on who created and financed the film are very muddled.

2. Today, the Libyan/Al Qaeda/US/NATO/Israel government is bombing Sabha and the black Libyan Toubu people who constitute a stronghold of the vibrant Libyan resistance. Interestingly, no R2P is being invoked to do so here, but could this be covertly directed against the Green Resistance (self-described as well financed and ready to fight to the last bullet, the last man, the last dollar)?

3. A video is available of the 12 September attack on the US convoy that killed 2 US citizens and injured 14, indicating Day Two of an uprising/action.

4. There are photos published today of US special ops forces landing in Libya. If true, is this to counter the Green Resistance, or springboard into Egypt if need be, or worse? Foreign troops are in Libya already securing oil platforms. What might this have to do with Iran? Libyan oil was theorized to ensure oil to Europe in the case of a shutoff from Iran. Does this have anything to do with the impending Netanyahu visit to the US?"

NOTES

[1] Excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_of_Muslims" describes known history of film production.
"Production

The cast and crew have publicly stated that they were deceived about the purpose and content of the film. In a statement obtained by CNN, the film's 80 cast and crew members disavowed the film, saying: "The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer. We are 100% not behind this film and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose." It further explained, "We are shocked by the drastic re-writes of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply saddened by the tragedies that have occurred." Cindy Lee Garcia, who played the mother of Muhammad's bride-to-be, said the script was for a movie about life in Egypt 2,000 years ago, called Desert Warrior (and possibly also Desert Storm), and that the character "Muhammad" was referred to as "Master George" on set. According to Garcia, "Bacile" claimed to be an Israeli real estate mogul. Later, however, he told her he was Egyptian and she heard him speaking in Arabic with other men on set. Garcia stated it makes her "sick" that she was involved in the film and that she is considering legal action against "Bacile." Sarah Abdurrahman, a producer for WNYC's On the Media program, watched the trailer and concluded that all of the religious references were overdubbed after filming.[30] The independent film was directed by a person first identified in casting calls as Alan Roberts, whose original cut did not include references to Muhammad or Islam.

In September 2012, "Sam Bacile" was initially described as a 56-year-old (52-year-old according to the Wall Street Journal) real estate developer from Israel who spoke by phone with the Associated Press. Israeli authorities found no sign of him being an Israeli citizen, and there was no indication of a 'Sam Bacile' around 50 years old living in California, having a real estate license or participating in Hollywood filmmaking. Though "Bacile" claimed the film had been made for $5 million from more than 100 Jewish donors, Hollywood Reporter described the film's appearance as unprofessional, bringing this claim into doubt. According to a man who identified himself to the Wall Street Journal as Bacile, the film was produced to call attention to what he called the "hypocrisies" of Islam.[40] After further reports suggested that Bacile was neither Israeli nor Jewish, Rabbi Abraham Cooper condemned initial reports that Bacile was Jewish and the movie was financed by "100 Jewish donors," saying that whoever told this to the Associated Press committed a blood libel and said that the media did not thoroughly research this claim. Cooper said that to "catapult what might be a nonexistent Jewish element could lead to violence against Jews," and called on the media to learn from this incident, while investigating who exactly created the film.

Later, "Sam Bacile" was identified as Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Christian immigrant from Egypt living in Cerritos, California, near Los Angeles. In 2010, Nakoula, who had served prison time on a 1990s conviction for manufacturing methamphetamine, pleaded no contest to bank fraud and was sentenced to 21 months in prison; he was released on probation from prison in June 2011. Authorities said Nakoula told the police that he had written the movie's script while in prison and, together with his son, Abanob Basseley, raised between $50,000 and $60,000 from his wife's family in Egypt to finance the film. According to CNN, the FBI contacted him because of the potential for threats, but he is not under investigation by the FBI. However, federal officials are investigating whether Nakoula violated the terms of his probation, which barred him from using the Internet for five years. According to The Smoking Gun, Nakoula had planned to produce the film as early as May 2009, when he first took out ads for crew members. However, he was arrested on the bank fraud charges a month later; after his arrest, Nakoula cooperated with prosecution to obtain a reduced sentence.

American non-profit Media for Christ obtained film permits to shoot the movie in August 2011, and Nakoula provided his home as a set and paid the actors, according to government officials and those involved in the production. Media for Christ president Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih reportedly went into hiding after the violent response to the film.

Steve Klein, a Vietnam veteran who has been active in opposing Islam and has been associated with paramilitary style "hate groups" at his church according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, was asked by Nakoula to be the spokesman for the film. The movie's self-identified consultant, Klein reportedly told Nakoula: "You're going to be the next Theo van Gogh." Klein later told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that "Bacile" is not a real person and is neither Israeli nor Jewish, as has been reported, and that the name is a pseudonym for about 15 Copts and Evangelical Christians from Syria, Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt; Goldberg questioned the reliability of Klein. Klein rejected any blame for the violent reaction to the movie, saying, "Do I feel guilty that these people were incited? Guess what? I didn't incite them. They're pre-incited, they're pre-programmed to do this."
Release

The film's screening as "Innocence of Bn Laden" was advertised in the "Arab World newspaper" during the months of both May and June. The ad cost $300 to run three times in the paper and was paid by an individual identified only as "Joseph". The ads were noted by the Anti-Defamation League. The Islamic affairs director stated: "When we saw the advertisement in the paper, we were interested in knowing if it was some kind of pro-jihadist movie." Brian Donnelly, a guide for a Los Angeles based tour of famous crime scenes, noticed the poster advertising at the Vine Theatre. "I didn't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. We didn't know what it was about because we can't read Arabic. The earlier version of the film was screened once at the Vine Theatre in Hollywood California of June 23, 2012 to an audience of only ten people. The film had no subtitles and was presented in English. An employee of the theatre stated: “The film we screened was titled ‘The Innocence of Bin Laden’,” and added that it was a “small viewing.”

A second screening was planned for June 30, 2012. A local Hollywood blogger, John Walsh attended a June 29 Los Angeles City Council meeting where he raised his concerns about the film's screening. “There is an alarming event occurring in Hollywood on Saturday,” he stated. “A group has rented the Vine Street theater to show a video entitled ‘Innocence of Bin Laden.’ We have no idea what this group is.” The blog site reported that the June 30 screening had been canceled. A Current TV producer photographed the poster while it was being displayed at the theatre as advertising to later discuss on the program "The Young Turks." According to one attendee, "the acting was of the worst caliber," and he "had no inkling that that movie was anti-Islamic and did not recall the movie referencing the prophet Mohammad," but he did not see the whole film.

It was reported on September 14, 2012, that a planned screening by a Hindu organization in Toronto will be coupled with "snippets from other movies that are offensive to Christians and Hindus." Because of security concerns no public venue has been willing to show the film; it will be shown in private for a small audience of 200 people. Siobhán Dowling of the The Guardian reported that "a far-right Islamophobic group in Germany", The Pro Deutschland Citizens' Movement, has uploaded the trailer on their own website and wants to show the entire film but authorities are attempting to prevent it.

Two clips were posted on YouTube on July 1 (13'02", title "The Real Life of Muhammad", comment "Part of the movie, "Life of Muhammad"..... ????? ?? ???? ???? ????") and 2nd (13'50", title "Muhammad Movie Trailer", comment "????? ??????? ??????") by user "sam bacile". By September, the film had been dubbed into Arabic and was brought to the attention of the Arabic-speaking world by Coptic blogger Morris Sadek, whose Egyptian citizenship had been revoked for promoting calls for an attack on Egypt. A two-minute excerpt dubbed in Arabic was broadcast on September 8 by Sheikh Khalad Abdalla[65] on Al-Nas, an Egyptian television station, On September 11, "Sam Bacile" YouTube account commented in Egyptian Arabic on a video from Al-Nahar TV uploaded 2 days earlier "??????? ?? ???? ?????? 100%" which means: "Idiots, this is an American film 100%".

The film was supported by pastor Terry Jones, whose burning of copies of the Quran previously led to deadly riots around the world. On September 11, 2012, Jones said that he planned to show a 13-minute trailer that night at his church the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. Jones said in a statement that "it is an American production, not designed to attack Muslims but to show the destructive ideology of Islam. The movie further reveals in a satirical fashion the life of Muhammad."

[2] I realise that our governments are currently privatising our resources, encouraging overpopulation and making harsh laws, but so far the Australian government has not taken up arms against citizens, nor have the foreign corporate entities that have taken over Australian resources and assets - yet.

[3] An unusual source documenting the problems of survival in an occupied capital it the remarkable book by Babylon's Ark by authors Lawrence Anthony and Graham Spence
"Most of the Iraqi zoo staff who walked to and from work braved a daily gauntlet of bullets, looters, and murderous fedayeen [see definition end paragraph] keen to slit the throats of anyone associating with foreigners. Despite being senior-ranking veterinarians, Dr. Adel and Dr. Husham also trekked the hazardous miles from their homes, taking the same chances as the humblest laborer. We never knew who would pitch up each morning, and we never blamed those who deemed it too dangerous to make it that day." Anthony, Lawrence; Spence, Graham (2007-03-06). Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo (Kindle Locations 1932-1936). Macmillan. Kindle Edition. " "Fedayeen": The Fedayeen was first created by an Iranian from Qom named Hassan-i-Sabbah, who held the main headquarters in Alamut-- modern day Qazvin, Iran. Fedayeen are any of various groups of people known to be volunteers, not connected to an organized government or military, in the Near East. They are usually deployed for a cause where the government has been viewed as failed or non-existent. They are associated with the role of resistance against occupation or tyranny. The name "fedayeen" is used to refer to armed struggle against any form of enslavement with actions based on resistance." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedayeen

[3] There is also a view that under the Fraser government they were encouraged to weaken the Australian union movement, notably the Australian Postal and Telecommunications Union in Victoria.

Attention: This an urgent message to the entire country to assist in the search for and recovery of journalistic integrity, impartiality and independence in our state broadcaster.

The real CBC was last seen on a playground in the 1970s. Witnesses reported seeing a suspicious red van in the vicinity, driven by the immigration lobby.

Missing are journalists like Doug Collins, George Jonas, Douglas Fisher, Larry Zolf, and Danny Finkleman. People who had a unique take on the world they saw and were not afraid to say it to an audience who chose not to take offence at what they heard. That was an era when “diversity” was not a buzzword but a reality. When there was a diversity of thought and expression, a fuller range of opinion that stretched from one end of the political spectrum to the other. A Canada where it was not considered to be a constitutional right for any citizen in a robust democracy “not to be offended” . A Canada where we didn’t care about how you “feel”, but what you thought.

Now that old and bold Canada is gone, as are journalists of the fearless calibre just mentioned. Taken in broad daylight, right under our collective noses, almost without witness.

http://img4.prosperent.com/images/250x250/dm61q01mhxuli.cloudfront.net/images/m123/image2/gc7068.jpg

Missing----Objective Investigative CBC Journalist

The abductors left a hollow look-a-like behind as a decoy to fool listeners into believing that the former standards of independent investigative journalism still resides in this make-believe shadow of what once was. But upon closer inspection, it is apparent that this not-so-cheap imitation is just a billion- dollar money pit and mouthpiece for the political class and the cheerleaders of mass immigration. It’s mandate is not, as one might assume, to represent every strand of opinion in this grand multicultural tapestry, but rather to project Canadian “identity. An identity which they apparently believe is simply a microcosm of the United Nations. Their determined goal is to give a microphone to the “Immigrant” Voice, The Voice of Minorities, New Canadians, the marginalized, the unheard----or rather the talking heads who are paid to lobby in their name. (If ordinary New Canadians were given that chance, they might say politically incorrect and unscripted things----like they did when they voted for Rob Ford. Can’t have that! )

Their mission is to reflect “diversity”, the diversity of groups, of ethnicities, races and genders---but not of thought and thoughtful Canadians. The Canada that listeners will see in this CBC is a rainbow of faces but not a rainbow of conflicting ideas. Let a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand thoughts contend---as long as they fall within the narrow spectrum of politically acceptable speech. Every Canadian of course, is entitled to an opinion. They are just not entitled to have it aired on this cool version of the CBC.

The “Friends of the CBC” are befriending an imposter. A propagandist. A cheerleader for the state religion of “Multiculturalism”. The old CBC, the CBC we knew and loved is not here. This CBC, CBC Pravda, is a shell of its former self. Canada most definitely does not “live here”.

If anyone has seen something suspicious, or something that looks like it could be an independent-minded journalist cowering in the back of a camper, van or truck or trunk in shackles or behind the curtains of a cabin set in the woods, please phone 1-800-REALCBC or email [email protected].

Any tip that leads to the arrest and conviction of the Growth Lobby for kidnapping will be rewarded. You claim must first be authenticated by a certified crypto-zoologist able to recognize an investigative journalist from the CBC archive of old photos and broadcasts recorded 40 years ago.

In the meantime, if we can speak into the camera, we want to say this:

Ol’CBC....Baby.....If you are still alive and you can hear us, can you please, please somehow tell us that you are alright? Please, please come home, do you hear? We really miss you. We all really miss you and we all really love you, just as you were when we last remembered you--when you were young and fearless. And to those who have abducted you----if you are watching this----we will pay any ransom. We will even make a donation to “The Friends of the CBC” so that they can fight to keep the government from cutting funding and depriving the political class and the growth lobby of their reliable voice.

Don’t let anybody tell you that we don’t care about you, or don’t want you back. We are not hostile to the concept of public broadcasting, in fact, we really like the PBS and NPR model down south. We are just hostile to the concept of a taxpayer-funded institution using our tax dollars to push one ideological vision. The vision of compliant Canadians willingly embracing their own cultural, economic and demographic displacement. We just don’t want to keep subsidizing a rogue corporation intent on shaping public opinion to fit the PC mould. We only want to promote a national conversation on taboo issues, not a vehicle to manufacture consent. We know that the debate on the important issues we care about has been declared “CLOSED”, but we still hold onto this quaint notion that is the people, not their “representatives” who should determine what can be discussed. Maybe we’re naive, but we still think it is our right to re-open any forbidden topic and have it aired on the broadcasting corporation we pay for.

Tim Murray, July 28, 2012

Question. How do you create a culture of dependence? Answer: Add a strong dose of state promoted multiculturalism to a welfare state and presto, you get identity politics where group identification and cultivated victimhood combine to discourage individual responsibility. It is on Canada Day that we celebrate this buck-passing as the distinctive feature of Canadianism and seize the opportunity to sneer at Americans for making a cult of individualism and self-reliance which we equate with selfishness. Americans have rights, but we have entitlements. I am proud to live in the best country in the world. I know it is because that is what our state broadcaster told us.

US Independence Day

Today, America’s Independence Day, falls closely on heels of “Canada Day”, celebrated on July 1st. Naturally, that gives rise to comparisons between the two neighbouring countries.

Two Nations Divided By Our Self-Definitions

Too often, Canadians take pride not so much in what Canada is but what it is not---it is not America. We are told that we are different ---and superior---because of our reputed “tolerance” and “diversity”, and our social programs, which supposedly evidence our ethic of “caring and sharing” and collective responsibility. Our assumption is that government must be the instrument of these values, that government is our friend and protector, mandated to protect us from poverty, illiteracy, poor health and “hurtful” speech---- as if the citizens of a democracy have a self-evident right never to feel offended.

America, however, was founded by people who had good reason to mistrust government, people who believed, and still believe, as Ronald Reagan said, that “a government that can do things FOR you can do things TO you.” They also have this quaint notion that it is the citizens who should censor government, not the other way around, that, as JFK said, a government that prevents the free traffic of ideas is afraid of its own citizens. This is just not the Canadian way. I am responsible for you, brother. Or rather, Big Brother is responsible for you little brother---and me too.

It seems that we need to state our national differences in a more emphatic way. I can think of two ways we can do that.

A New Declaration of Loyalty To Canada---A Left Wing Manifesto of Entitlement and Non-Responsibility

Peter Goodchild has just designed a manifesto that could serve as the Canadian riposte to the Declaration of Independence. He calls it “The Left-Wing Manifesto for an Age of Declining Literacy”. It’s tenets are:

I'm hard done by.
I have a right.
It's not fair.
I'm entitled.
"They" are controlling the world.
"Nobody loves me but my mother, and sometimes I think she's jivin' too." (B. B. King)

I think that one day soon this Manifesto has the potential to become a mandatory declaration of loyalty to the Canadian state, a replacement for the Oath of allegiance that New Canadians must take. In the meantime, however, we can support it voluntarily until it becomes law. I have another suggestion as well.

Poor-Me Cards

I think that those of us who sign on to this Manifesto should be issued a set of "Poor Me" cards---- a deck of cards that demand exemption from societal expectations. Whenever you encounter someone who attempts to hold you accountable for not being courteous, civil, punctual, faithful, honest, honorable, or respectful, you can pull out the appropriate card and "play it".

For example, you can say that as a Libran, you are entitled to be unbalanced on this particular day. If you are told that other Librans are even-keeled (so what is your excuse?), you can play another Poor Me card, "Poor me, I was abused as a child, so I am entitled to be abusive". If the reply is that other Librans who were abused as children manage to be even-keeled and respectful (so what’s your excuse?), then you can play the race card. "I was bullied because I was the only black kid in the class, and blacks have been oppressed for 400 years." If you are told that other abused Librans with black pigmentation and a lineage of oppression and slavery have nevertheless managed to be even-keeled and respectful (so what’s your excuse?), you can up the ante by playing yet another card. In fact, you will be armed with 52 cards in your deck that give you licence to be a jerk, and deal with all comers.

I was thinking in terms of wearing a rain coat with inside pockets like Fagan (Alec Guinness) had in Oliver Twist. A pocket for each "Poor Me---I have a right---I am entitled-----I am a helpless pawn---I have an excuse to be a jerk" card. The “Poor Me Deck”could be sold with a complimentary Fagan rain coat as a package, and retail for around $200 Canadian. I imagine that this could become a Canadian fashion, converting each social encounter into a Monty Python skit like the one where two Yorkshiremen compared notes about the hardships they faced in their respectful lives and entered into a bidding war by taking turns trumping each other's hard luck stories.

Poor-Me One-Upmanship

I thought about this concept an hour ago in the supermarket.

I arrived at the check-out aisle precisely at the same time as a woman who had the same amount of groceries as I did. After a moment of awkwardness, I joked that since I had seniority, I should go first--- "age before beauty". She, with equal humour, replied that affirmative action rules require that she should go first. I replied that since my Dad's ancestors in Ireland were displaced by the English and had to come to Canada in steerage, I am the one who should go first, "race before gender". She replied that she too had Irish blood, so she should go first as an oppressed and displaced Irishwoman who has had to face the glass ceiling in this country. The conversation then became one of poor-me one-upmanship. In the end, she went first because I told her that since I was an old chauvinist keen to retain my exalted station, I wanted to preserve the ladies-first tradition as a means to give women a false sense of privilege.

When you think about it, that is what Canadian society has become. A game of poor-me identity politics. A place where group affiliation and group-rights trump individual rights---something that Pierre Elliot Trudeau spent a career trying to avert. Ironically, that mentality is taking hold in America too, the home of the formerly brave, outspoken and free. So America is now a victim of Canadianization. Hey, it’s their turn. They took our comedians so now they must embrace our social engineering. Wasn't it Euripedes who said that, "Those Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Canadian"?

I think Chris Clugston could make some money by customizing this idea for the American market. In that case, though, it would be a deck of "Look Nature, gimme a break, I'm American and I am exceptional because...." cards.

Tim Murray
July 4th, 2012

Australians have found it very hard to protest against high immigration because of constant subtle messages from government and media implying that they had no right to object. They have been given the idea that there was nothing special about them that gave them the right to object. They only lived here. Although only Australians might vote in governments, the importance of this was subsumed to a cult of plutocracy, where governments prioritised commercial and corporate demands over the wishes of the actual electorate. The mainstream press (the ABC, the Murdoch Press, the Fairfax Press) promoted a cult of elite authoritarianism and the official alternative press never really encouraged questioning of this process on issues of real dissent. And the elite authorities all endorsed 'multiculturalism'. One has only to glance at the membership of the Multicultural Foundation of Australia to realise how true this is.

Pino Migliorino, Chairman of the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia, cited by John Marlowe in "Immigrants calling for more immigrants - dare one criticise and we will brand them 'RACIST'!", says:

"In 1989, we showed international leadership and created a National Multicultural Policy, the principles of which are still relevant. We then retreated from this vision and began a discourse about integration rather than about dialogue, which, similar to the principle of assimilation, implies that one side has more rights than the other simply because they were there first, or what is worse, because they are superior."

For me there are two problems created through the policy of multiculturalism as practised in Australia, and they are not really about 'culture' in the sense of 'ethnicity'.

They are both political problems to do with democracy and the civil rights that should go with citizenship.

Citizens rights

1. The first problem is that, in a democracy, the incumbents -"those who were here first" - the citizens - are members of a community which should have the right to self-government. The right to self-government should not be limited, except by the citizens themselves. I believe that multiculturalism has been used as a way of blurring the fair expectation of civil rights for a citizen by implying that citizenship - or 'being here first' - carries no special rights.

Citizenship should be clearly different from the state of being an immigrant, tourist or visitor. In many countries (such as France) even being a 'permanent immigrant' means having the right to stay in that country only for up to one year. To be a 'permanent immigrant' with the same sense that term has in Australia, the person needs to become a citizen. It is problematic that being a permanent immigrant, according to the Australian definition, carries similar rights to citizenship in Australia, if it does not also carry the expectation of membership of a community that recognises itself as a political entity of members sharing responsibility for their community and its territory and is able to act to preserve these. An approach to this ambiguity is made in this article Rubenstein, Kim “Constitutional issues associated with integration: the question of citizenship,” Bureau of Immigration and Population Bulletin No 11, 1994, pp 41-43.)

Although citizens in Australia have far fewer straightforward rights than European citizens (who mostly have Civil Codes setting out their rights at law), an Australian citizen can vote. can run for office, (although our corporatised media dominates elections) has a right to primary and secondary education, and to hospital and medical treatment.

Australian citizens also did have, until recently, relatively good industrial relations laws. Premier Kennett in Victoria in 1996, allowed Victorian State industrial Awards to be dismantled and turned over to the Federal system, then Primeminister Howard undermined Australian industrial rights to conciliation and arbitration under s.51 xxxv of the Australian constitution, with his WorkChoices, which sought to bring as many people as possible under s55xx of the constitution, applicable to corporations and thus outside the jurisdiction of s.51xxxv. With this protection gone, Australian working conditions can now be easily undermined by labour hired overseas at lower wages and imported here as immigrants.

Australians used to own most of the resources in this country, as a group of citizens. Increasingly, many of these resources, assets and commodities have been privatised. This takes them out of effective control by citizens, see Justice Michael Kirby's skilful argument, here, in "Why privatisation is wrong." Population growth, in raising demand for resources, assets and commodities, makes them attractive acquisitions for corporations, political parties and wealthy elites. This is why those elites defend high immigration and why their media attack its critics.

Australians once also had chief rights to study in Australian universities, with only limited places allocated for foreign students, who were usually on scholarships, not coming as 'cash cows'. The commercialisation of universities contributed not only to lower ethical standards, but it also caused a preference for high fee-paying foreign students. This created competition for Australians who found that they had to borrow more to meet higher fees themselves. Where fees for Australians remained lower than those for foreign students, the numbers of places available for Australians declined.

In France and other European countries, universities are still free to citizens, places for foreign students are still limited, and they still come on scholarships.

Australians also used to have exclusive rights to purchase 'built property' , i.e. houses, in Australia. This right protected them from having house prices bidded-up by foreigners with better currency, such as happened with Japanese buyers in Hawaii. Unfortunately we have lost this protection recently as well. Just have a look at the National Foreign Investment Review Board's Annual General Reports over the years to see how much Australian Real Estate has gone into foreign hands. Over the past twelve years particularly, loosening of the foreign acquisition, land and house-buying laws, (begun under Primeminister Fraser) has seen Australian property flogged mercilessly via the Murdoch and Fairfax press property dot coms on the internet, and has also seen a huge number of solicitors, migration agents, bankers, real-estate agents, property developers and schools and universities touting property, migration and education in Australia over the internet.

Much of this seems to have been achieved by bringing in lots of immigrants to raise demand for Australian land, housing, jobs and education, thus pricing these things more and more beyond the reach of the majority of local people, who should be in control of what is happening to them.

Australians have found it very hard to protest against this high immigration because of constant subtle messages from government and media implying that they had no right to object. That there was nothing special about them that gave them the right to object. They only lived here. Although only Australian citizens may vote, a growing cult of elite authoritarianism - of a plutocracy - was promoted by the mainstream press - the ABC, the Murdoch Press, the Fairfax Press - and the official alternative press never really encouraged questioning of this process on issues of real dissent. And the elite authorities all endorsed 'multiculturalism'. One has only to glance at the membership of the Multicultural Foundation of Australia to realise how true this is.

In its turn, the policy of multiculturalism had been used to make citizenship ambiguous. The statement quoted above, from Pino Migliorino is typical in questioning the idea that "one side has more rights than the other simply because they were there first." This kind of introduced ambiguity has stifled protest by angry citizens at this obvious erosion of their rights, and the power of Australian citizens to govern their own country. To call the citizens of a self-governing community, "those who were here first," is to diminish the role of the community and thereby of its right to democratic self-determination; to imply that those who come here do not come to join that community, but some other community, governed perhaps by big business and the elite authorities, (who tend to own the very assets, commodities and resources for which population growth inflates the prices).

Erosion of democratic expression

2. The second political problem is the use of multiculturalism as a foil for growing the population without democratic consultation and implying that those who do not want more people must be anti-'multicultural' /racist.

As if it were not bad enough for Australian citizens to have their legitimate expectations of citizenship thus belittled and put aside, a second prong has been found for multiculturalism by the creation of a racist straw-man. The racist straw-man is trotted out and set on fire by the corporate press, the ABC, and the elite authorities any time that Australians object to population growth because of environmental and cost-of-living concerns as they see green spaces filled with houses, expensive and unwanted desalination plants replace clean and free running water, and native animals trapped by expanding infrastructure. And the elite authorities reliably receive support for this destructive process from the oddest sources.

Here is an example

Damien Lawson, FoFA [Friends of the Earth] National Climate Justice Coordinator, signed an open letter declaring that: 'We are shocked and angered that the ACF has supported Labor MP Kelvin Thomson's calls to cut Australia's migration rates". The letter concludes by calling on 'the ACF and Kelvin Thomson to withdraw their anti-migrant statements'. (28) The issue has since been addressed by the group's National Liaison Officer, Cam Walker:

[A]s always happens when population and the environment comes into the mainstream debate, it becomes a useful smoke screen for people
and organisations with racist agendas who can then call for limitations on population growth, while purporting to be concerned about the environments. [Source: Walker, Matthew P.A., "Population growth in Australia: how environmental groups are responding," People and Place, April 1, 2010.

If multiculturalism were simply a policy for giving people a fair go, no matter where they came from, whilst preserving the democratic rights of citizens to self-government, it would be a fine thing. But isn't that the purpose of human rights and citizens' rights in a functioning democracy anyway? And, can you enforce human rights without citizens' rights? No, you can't. So, why not have a policy for citizens' rights?

For too long the immigration program has been out of public control and run purely for the interests of an elite number of business groups and portions of a pro-ethnic lobby who are both quick to throw the term "racist" or "nimby" when their their interests aren't pandered to.

Housing prices are at levels that can only be called unaffordable, cruel and family hostile. We used to be a country famously known for our rate of home-ownership! Now we have rising homelessness, mortgage stress and "shortage" of land and housing.

Companies no longer bother to run traineeships and apprenticeship programs because they prefer to import skills. Universities aren't training sufficient Australian doctors, so we have "skills shortages". They are poached from overseas to save on education costs, and create another justification for immigration.

Universities aren't funded sufficiently, so they must rely on foreign students.

Roads are congested, water and electricity costs are accelerating as fresh food prices inflate due to market becoming high density housing and as water is rationed to farms. Freeways costing billions must be built, in denial of peak oil, to keep up with traffic demands.

The growth lobby never admit that their population growth doesn't improve GDP per capita but only the overall size of the economy, or that the infrastructure shortfall makes everything more expensive.

You don't have to know that 35 per cent of Sydney's population was born overseas. Some areas are even higher. The ethnic diversity is overwhelming!

The elite business interests, the ethnic lobby, and the pampered property developers have their own selfish interests at heart not that of the general population.

http://www.fecca.org.au/

There appears to be another group of people that just enjoy screaming "racist" as a way of feeling superior! Secular humanitarian ideologies have become a major force, and keep promoting "equality" and a "one world" approach to everyone instead of patriotism.

Racism is more prevalent in poorer areas, and where third- and fourth-generation Australians live in ethnic enclaves, feeling like minorities. All this "diversity" and "multiculturalism" that we are supposed to embrace is the result of mass immigration, something we have no say about.

Immigration lobbies' selfish arguments have created their own myths for too long to justify our ongoing population growth. However, ideologies, economies and ideals are infinite, but not our land, our ecosystems, our limited fertile "green belt", our natural resources, our water, energy and our hip-pockets.

Sitting Bull (c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man who led his locally indigenous people as a war chief during years of resistance to migrant colonisers in what is now South Dakota, USA.]
Read about the Native Americans

Cultural assimilation is about respecting and adopting the prevailing local ways of a place - language, laws, social values, behavioural standards, customs, intermarriage, and spatial distribution across the community, etc. Assimilation is a gradual change process.

Australia's most excessive immigration Prime Minister on record, Kevin Rudd, just gone, by allowing 300,000 immigrants into Australia in 2008 denied any chance of assimilation.

The idiom 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do', is an instructive guide applicable to any land - Australia, Kosovo, Mongolia, Tibet, Saudi Arabia, not just for visitors, but especially for immigrants. A country has no obligation to change and adapt to suit those from foreign soils. Indeed, immigrants have an obligation to be humbly grateful to their new host country and their new hosts. That gratitude deserves the respect of accepting the local ways, not seeking to change them.

Respecting locals, local rights and local values is akin to respecting one's elders - an underpinning principle of all human societies. Those that arrived first have highest moral claim. Nobody has greater right to a place than where they are born. No-one has control where one is born - as such birth rights morally prevail over non-birth (immigrant) rights; indigenous rights morally prevail over immigrant rights.

Where this lore has been savaged through human history is by the use of armed conflict.
That human history has been dogged with rape, pillage and plunder does not make it morally right that it should be repeated. Local rights morally prevail. This is a universal right deserving not just of the human world but also the natural world.

Immigrants rejecting cultural assimilation with the local population are unwelcome invaders by definition. Newcomers by rejecting adoption of the local culture, are disrespectfully asserting an unjustified claim to establish and impose a foreign culture. It is an invasion, albeit short of armed conflict, or what colonists euphemistically term 'annexing', but arguably that is one of the few differences.

Immigrants seeking 'a new life' in Australia or New Zealand have a moral obligation to respect and adopt the ways of life of the local inhabitants, not to impose their foreign ways of life upon their new hosts.

Both Australia and New Zealand immigration policies have historically performed a disservice to both the local population and immigrants alike, by abandoning immigrants in the assimilation process. By ignoring the full cost of assimilation under the cloak of multiculturalism, successive governments may have kept their quarterly cash books in the black, but let the social costs soar. Government immigration responsibility stops not at the airport arrivals gate but after assimilation.

The British were unwelcome invaders when Cook landed at Poverty Bay New Zealand in 1769 and then at Botany Bay, Australia in 1770. Subsequent exploitation, colonisation and mass murder in these islands by the invaders was wrong and immoral and indigenous generations have remained aggrieved and downtrodden ever since. Both histories are of violent invasions of native peoples lands. History cannot be undone, but must not be repeated. The current indigenous peoples remain complex open wounds awaiting healing.

With history unchangeable, it would take many more generations to come to achieve acceptable conciliation by the respective indigenous peoples. This unresolved conflict has a higher priority than adding to the problem with new immigration waves - and that is even if a genuine conciliation process was to start now.

But the national identity problem faced by both New Zealand and Australia stews at the psyche mainly because this process has not even started. It is symptomatic of the national immaturity of both nations.

Instead history has been successively repeated - immigrant wave after immigrant wave. The problems have been compounded because of the lack of assimiliation.
Enclaves of ethnic migrants have cemented themselves and more recently been exacerbated by short-sighted concepts of multi-culturalism, addressing skills shortages, fueling economic growth and allowing massive influx.

It is the disgrace of both these nations that generation after generation they shun conciliation with their indigenous, while generation after generation both nations perpetuate the fragmentation of their societies by encouraging migrants bringing 'old country' baggage with them. Seeking a 'new life' in a new country means just that!
Perhaps New Zealand as always leads Australia in some respect as it questions the 1840 multiple versions of the Treaty of Waitangi and M?ori-P?keh? relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Australian Aborigines have not yet been offered a treaty. [Read More]

As the immigration wave cycle is allowed to continue without assimilation, the largest populations of the world will ultimately swamp both nations, overwhelming locals, local rights and local values, ultimately with their own. As both New Zealand and Australia are democracies, once the migrant number reach majority, migrants will be in politics and power. Locals will become downtrodden and ultimately extinct like the Thylacene and Moa.

Related articles and comments on CanDoBetter on this issue:

The Australian Growth Lobby has only a couple of primitive weapons - calling the PM a racist and misrepresenting the figures. The other side has all the good arguments, as well as truth on its side. This article analyses the childish statistical misrepresentation and social innuendo in the Australian Financial Review editorial, "PM's own goal on population," 5 July 2010, p.54.

Who's afraid of Julia Gillard?

Fears about what Gillard's population policy statements mean are coming from the commercial growth lobby and, to a lesser extent, from the NGO sustainable population lobby. The first fears that Gillard is serious about not wanting a big Australia and beyond their control. The second fears that Gillard, too, will let democracy down and fall in line with the depraved agenda of the growth lobbyists, like so many Australian prime ministers. Using the commercial media, the Growth Lobby has prevailed over this country since Captain Cook brought over the first political prisoners, known then as convicts, later as colonists, never really as citizens with rights.

The apparent fear in the hearts (do they have them?) ... well, minds ... what about small, reptilian brains? (Oh, dang it, that's disrespectful to snakes)... of the growth lobbyists is therefore encouraging, because unless they are playing a truly elaborate farce, they really are worried that they have lost control of the P.M.

A few more intelligent ones may realise that it is the economic situation over which they have lost control, but the multitude are dimmer witted fundamentalists who still believe they can control the economic situation by controlling the P.M.

They only have a couple of primitive weapons to do this with - calling the PM a racist and misrepresenting the immigration and economic figures. All the good arguments are on their opponents' side. However the Growth Lobby does control the mainstream media still.

Silly numbers

"PM's own goal on population" (Australian Financial Review, Editorial, p. 5 July 2010, p. 54) misrepresents the immigration figures by presenting them as percentiles of population growth. By stretching an average over 40 years between 1971 and a projected 2011 they manage to get a figure of 0.6% risk of being an immigrant per 100 people in Australia. What they don't say is that that percentage steadily declined over that time because the actual numbers of immigrants stayed the same at around 80,000 per annum. What changed was the total population numbers, as immigration and natural increase added to them.

See, if you start out with 13,177,000 people in 1972, 80,000 represents about 0.6%. Added to the baby-boom, that 0.6% grew the population at quite a clip, until, in 2000, Australia had a total population of 19,169,083. The actual number of immigrants, averaging around 80,000, now only represented 0.41% of the total population. [1] By the time the population reached 21,180,632 in 2007, 80,000 would only have represented 0.3% and the growth rate would have have been slowing continually (on average, although there were spikes, notably around the time of Tianamen Square under Bob Hawke and a negative number under Gough Whitlam, during the first oil shock).

But, as the anonymous author of the Australian Financial Review editorial says, in 2007, 2008 and 2009, the numbers of immigrants did not stay around the average. They more than doubled, to about 180,000. He or she also does not say that 180,000 represented 0.85% of the total population in 2007 instead of 0.3%. That's quite a leap.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which really is where the expert demographers are, doesn't talk in terms of immigration as a percentage of the total population because it is actually far more usual and more relevant to say what per cent of the total annual increase immigration represents.

This more usual measurement of immigration, however, wouldn't help The Australian's anonymous writer to fudge the facts.

In fact, in 2007 the ABS sent out media releases to tell Australians that the population had just increased by the most people ever and that net immigration had contributed 54% of that increase. This was the first time that immigrants minus emigrants had outnumbered births minus deaths in Australia.

ABS MEDIA RELEASE September 24, 2007

"Largest population increase ever: ABS

"Australia recorded its largest annual population increase ever, according to figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Australia grew by an estimated 307,100 people for the year ended March 2007, the largest increase since record keeping began in 1789. The increase gave Australia an annual growth rate of 1.5% (the highest rate since 1990), and brings the population to an estimated 20.9 million.

Net overseas migration contributed 54% (162,600 people) to this growth, which was more than the natural increase of 46% (138,100 people or 273,500 births minus 135,400 deaths).

Queensland again recorded the highest growth rate of all the states and territories, at 2.3%, followed by Western Australia at 2.2%, the Northern Territory 2%, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory 1.5 %, South Australia and New South Wales 1% and Tasmania 0.6%. "

On 30 June 2010, the ABS put out another headline, which said that immigration was now contributing to two thirds of the annual population increase!

"Population growth

There were 22.2 million people resident in Australia in December 2009, with 432,600 people added in the year to December 2009. Despite recent increases in the fertility rate, nearly two-thirds of the gain was from net overseas migration. In the year to June 2008, there was a doubling in the net gain of people on student visas (to 109,000). ABS projections show, depending on assumptions about migration and fertility, that Australia's population may be between 34 and 40 million in 2051."

The editorial in the Australian Financial Review also describes the intakes as if they had occurred accidentally or naturally, when in fact the growth lobby organs played a role in forcing those figures up.

Growth Lobby scapegoats PM to avoid its own responsibility

But the Growth Lobby doesn't want to be identified with its actions, let alone take responsibility for them. It would rather imply that the Prime Minister - an immigrant - is a racist or an immigrant turn-coat, in as contrived a manner as it has used in its 'explanation' of immigration statistics.

See what you make of this concluding statement in the anonymous editorial:

"Ms Gillard is Australia's first foreign-born prime minister since Billy Hughes. It will be a sad irony if the first word of her premiership becomes the final word of historians on her time in office: the leader who diverted the country from a future open to the ideas, creativity and effort of tomorrow's equivalents of her own parents, into a cul de sac of stagnation, insularity and rapid ageing."

Rather than a 'sad irony', many Australians would see Gillard's attitude as comforting in its loyalty to her new country and a sign of courage. Courage in the face of a low kind of blackmail which has seen fainter-hearted immigrants shut up about the dangers of over population simply because they are afraid of being accused of shutting the door behind them. Such immigrants are a liability in a time when the growth lobby has forced us to pay through the nose for desalination plants, when the supply of cheap oil upon which the unprecedented population numbers of the 20th and 21st century rely upon, is dwindling, and food and water are looming as scarcities.

These costs of population growth are never weighed up against the paltry gains of those who directly invest in it, in the narrow and false economic arguments which are the final weak links in the Growth Lobby's chain that binds us.

NOTES

Just to complicate things, that meant that the population growth rate was slowing. Because the population was so much bigger, however, the smaller rate of increase still represented a much greater number of people.

We've been publicising political alternatives in Australia, notably parties which promise to fight population growth, because we don't believe that the mainstream political parties are taking the adverse impacts of population growth seriously. Another party that wants a sustainable population is The Australia First Party (not to be confused with the New Australia Party). It also wants to abolish multiculturalism. Australia First cops a lot of flack, but it also attracts the people in our society who carry the biggest loads and cop the worst treatment. Here is an article about fronting up to the dole office. Anyone who has had to do this in the past few years will understand the sentiments.

Aussie Senior Citizens

Aussie Senior Citizens are now experiencing the effects of the collapsing Globalist economic system, which has been imposed upon Australians over recent decades by Liberal and Labor politicians dutifully implementing the Big Business agenda.

Seniors who have worked productively over a life time, have contributed to society with family and community activity, put some money aside, have paid taxation of 1/3 plus of income, and were duped into superannuation schemes, are now seeing their savings evaporate as this Globalist ideology crashes.

The wholesale sell out of our Australian manufacturing and productive capacity to foreign interests, and the deregulation of our financial sector, to create a subservient cog in the Global economic order as a “trinket” type raw materials supplier, and an immigrant dumping ground - is the root cause of the crisis likely to now descend upon Australians. [Members of the 3000 Club excepted].

Compulsory superannuation monies, instead of being allocated for Australian owned productive development, have been used to stoke the Stock Exchanges, and for other usage in speculative exploitation. It was all inherently prone to collapse as per the contradictions of capitalism.

A rude awakening is now descending on increasing numbers of Seniors as they are forced to undertake the “Centrelink Run” - coming to grips with a pension system programmed to comply with the IMF/ Internationalist/ Globalist agenda to minimise Social Security payments.

The Centrelink Run

Step I: You front to the local office, and can experience first hand the Liberal/Labor/Green politicians’
immigration/ guest workers/ refugee rackets, but you fall into the queue for you still believe you count for something as a productive citizen, and your years of paying taxation had a purpose. You have your turn for the bureaucrat - and the near 100 question application form to see if the paltry $230 a week is to come your way. A number is allotted to you for the “system”. [No Members of the 3000 Club sighted].

Step 2: You bare your soul in the multitude of questions - any thought of the Aussie tradition that your
affairs are your business soon dissipates. Who are you? Prove it! How much cash have you under the bed? Have you been overseas and how much money did you take? Did you give any money away? What are your bank accounts? Any rooms rented out? Who has your super fund and how much is it? Prove it! What property do you own/got a beach shack/what’s it worth? How much for your house contents? What jewellery have you got? Can you cash in any life assurance?

It starts to dawn on you that this might all be about ensuring you get as little pension entitlement as possible.

But you are enticed by the idea that you might qualify for a health card for medical benefits, and reduced rates and government charges. How good is that!

When finished, you look at your arm to see if by chance a tattoo of the allotted system number has appeared, as you are starting to think that as an Aussie you no longer rate for much.

Step 3: You front before the bureaucrat, forms [and cap] in hand to be scrutinised. You are reminded
again about the Pension Bonus of $30k, available to you if you will slave on in full time work for another five years. [3000 Club Members get that in 10 weeks].

Your getting a bit edgy, aware that all your personal information is now going onto Big Brother’s database and available virtually to any Government department, and who knows who else.

You are informed that on your details, that after 45 years of work and paying taxes, your in for a part pension - $85 a week, as is your spouse - yes, a pension of $170 a week between you for the good life. And, you must also report in each month on any extra income you may generate so your pension would be reduced. [Still no 3000 Club Members sighted].

The penny finally drops that in the Australia of today Aussie seniors count for nothing!

What can be done.

As a group of citizens, the reality is that Seniors are past “use by date” to the Liberal/Labor politicians who have inflicted the Globalist agenda upon Australia.

Protesting Pensioners can “bare their bras” for the systems’ media, or petition these same politicians, but it is pointless. Genuine Seniors may find this difficult to accept, but it is this very same political ilk down the decades who have restricted, and devalued pension entitlements to the current poverty line level, and who continue to parrot that a liveable pension cannot be afforded. [But not for 3000 Club Members].

Petitioning Globalist politicians that have overseen our productive enterprises and natural wealth taken by foreigners, connived for near zero tax for multinational corporations, and other schemes of tax avoidance, squandered untold $billions on alien immigration and anti Australian multiculturalism, AND, stealing the 7% taxation surcharge [passed by referendum in 1947] to fund all Aussies a pension, is a total waste of Seniors time.

The facts are that “Regime Change” - a change of attitude, psychology, economic and cultural direction through the complete and utter rejection of the present traitor political caste and their Big Business masters, is essential to now attain social justice for Aussie Seniors.

The Australia First Core Policy of Citizens Initiated Referenda [CIR] and Parliamentary Recall can ensure this change - CIR remakes the political landscape - no ifs - no buts, for the citizen is again in charge of our society and values, not vested interest politicians.

The Australia First Party program is for all Aussie seniors at retirement age to have a liveable pension, related to the average wage, and secured on supply of appropriate identity to the relevant government administration. Nothing else is needed!

Australia First will take back our productive and natural wealth; we want Aussie control, direction, and ownership of our Australian economy, free of all Globalist dictates, and with equitable payment of taxation to provide pension funding. And, no Globalist political parrots like the 3000 Club Members.

If you don't fight, you lose. Join the Australia First Party for the change for a livable pension.

The 3000 Club

Members on this easy street ride include Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Meg Lees, Jeff Kennett, John Howard, Gareth Evans, Tim Fisher, Joan Kirner, John Cain, Alexander Downer, Steve Bracks, Paul Keating, Nick Greiner, etc, etc, all feeding off the taxpayer with their $3000 a week pensions. You won’t see this lot on the Centrelink run!

Australia First Policy Page
Australia First has some good policies for those who wish to stop population growth and globalisation. It was founded by West Australian, Graeme Campbell, years ago, after he was drummed out of the ALP for speaking out against high immigration (at a time when immigration was perhaps less than one quarter of what it is now).

Membership Application for Australia First

I wish to become a member of the Australia First Party and the Australia First Party [NSW] Incorporated, and agree to abide by the Constitution and Rules. Seniors Membership $10. Donations gratefully accepted.

Name: Phone:
Address: DOB:
Signed Date Email
Reply post to Australia First Party P O Box 223 Croydon 3136. Telephone: 0408 554542

Voting for other than Australia First is now largely just a waste of time

Vancouver a world in a city

It was a poignant homecoming. It has been over three years since I last visited Vancouver, “the big smoke”, the grand old lady who, despite our half-century-long relationship, still manages to surprise me. She’s had an expensive facelift recently, with multi-billion dollar monorails and Olympic venues complimenting the forest of new high rises which sprout up with astonishing speed. But the makeover only serves to highlight the wrinkles Vancouver can’t hide. The homeless, the addicted, the mentally troubled and the stressed-out masses who run faster and faster just to remain stationary.

…Lower Manhattan and Vancouver’s downtown peninsula share a problem that most North American cities would love to have – too much interest in new downtown housing. [But] it is important to look beyond the current housing bubble to ask whether the wholesale exchange of offices for condos is in the long-term interests of the economic health, even the urbanity and livability of these two cities.”

Vancouver ... doesn’t have another commercial core even while it wipes out the one it had in the name of developing a densely populated urbanist paradise (and we all know “paradise” is just another word for “too much of a good thing”). Source of inset and photos: PolisNYC

There is a reason why Vancouver is called “a world within a city”. Speak to any representative spectrum of people and you feel like you are watching a foreign travelogue. Especially on the gritty east side, where I grew up. I earned my degree in cross-cultural relations at school, at work and in the neighbourhoods I lived in. These were my people, the ones I still feel most comfortable with. The Portugese, the Italians, the Greeks, the East Europeans, the Chinese. Subtract their accent and their cuisine, and they are guys just like me. Their language deficits actually facilitated a deeper communication-- while Anglo-Canadians can find the words to obfuscate and beat around the bush, those with rudimentary English tend to be direct and blunt, employing expressive body language to fill in the gaps and emphasize their points. Our cultural differences were overshadowed by our common class affiliation, and on the picket line, we belonged to the same tribe. When I spend a day in East Vancouver, I feel like a man released from solitary confinement and given a day pass. Finally I get to speak to people with blood in their veins, not the Borg units in my artsy-fartsy soft-green haven who robotically regurgitate CBC-speak and live on the spoon-fed filtered information of Sierra Club newsletters. (God help them if their Mother Ship---CBC Pravda---went down and their umbilical cord was severed----the solitude of independent thought would fatally traumatize them. Imagine them having passed through a gauntlet of PC courses at college or university that screen out original or unorthodox thinking only to be suddenly left to think for themselves. Or worse yet, having to resort to candour.)

The things that immigrants say that ethnic leaders don’t

Each Vancouverite, it seems, is a library, and those from abroad consist of many volumes. I met several who had much to tell. Of the five people at the hotel desk in Richmond, four were of Chinese origin and one South Asian. The fast food outlets in Burnaby were the same, and half the tellers in my old bank branch likewise. I took every opportunity to speak with these individuals, to hear their story. One young man revealed that he had left Hong Kong some six years ago, and found life here marginally less frenetic than the city he left. The bank guard, a gentleman from India, told me how he struggled to provide for his family on the meagre salary his position afforded, and that his efforts to organize a union met with intimidation and threats of dismissal from the Royal Bank, the one that has apparently bought David Suzuki’s silence on immigrant-driven population growth. He told me how Vancouver had become progressively more congested, expensive and crime-ridden in the twenty years that he had lived here. Then I spoke at length with a shopkeeper from Iran, who once lectured in electronics at a prestigious London university, but found the promise of professional employment in Canada hollow. He made a point that most Canadians do not appreciate. While he has made it his mission to impress upon his sons that Canada and only Canada is their home and nation, he maintained that immigrants are too damn exhausted trying to establish themselves to learn much about the politics and culture of this country. Too often it is their children who act the only conduits to mainstream culture. It took him five years to get on his feet, and like most of us, his energy is too consumed fighting to survive debt and dispossession to be spent on any political or community activity. His take on multiculturalism was similar to mine. Exotic cuisines and splendid costumes do not disguise its motive: to provide a fig-leaf for the corporate goal of driving down labour costs by displacing relatively expensive indigenous workers with cheaper imported ones. “That is what immigration has always been about”, he declared in an accent that blended Farsi with a mid-Atlantic hybrid of Canadian and Geordie English.

Indebted consumers too busy and exhausted to jump off the treadmill

Mass immigration has also been about expanding the number of consumers. Especially the consumers of real estate. The shift away from “traditional” European sources was convenient for the big banks, who have set up shop in South Asian to cultivate customer loyalty before the customers emigrated to Canada. Financial institutions see the growing Asian demographic as superior savers and avid clients for hefty mortgages. Moreover, workers recruited from Europe had the bad habit of organizing unions or participating in them with vigour. Workers from undeveloped societies were more compliant. Their focus was on their extended families, not their civic responsibilities, and working at a minimum wage can suffice for someone who pools his income with a large extended family. A tenuous foothold in a fast food outlet or driving a taxi is seen an acceptable stepping stone on the road to eventual prosperity. Trouble is, while it once took five years for an average immigrant to earn the income enjoyed by the average Canadian, it takes ten years now. According to the Centre for Policy Alternatives, 38% of Vancouverites fail to achieve the wage level deemed necessary to eke out a semi-decent living. Coincidentally, 38% of Vancouverites are immigrants. Some are wealthy, but most are not.

Photo: Uknown homeless female Canadian citizen & Vancouver street resident.

Actions have recently been taken by the Vancouver Anti-Poverty Committee against the various levels of Government (provincial:BC Liberals & civic:Vancouver Non-Partisan Association (NPA)).Some media outlets and political pundits have gone so far as calling the APC's protests borderline terrorism.This is somewhat laughable.In fact I laud those people that take a stand against the proverbial 21st century Goliath,that being Government & Bureaucracy.
All that I know about this protest is that certain promises & prerequisites for staging the 2010 Winter Olympics have not been met or acknowledged (ie.low income & affordable housing).It could also be said that Vancouver has become a haven for construction of luxury apartment towers,whereas affordable housing has become non-existent.As of May,2007 these unfulfilled promises have given substantial weight for the protesters cause.
Posted by VancouverBlueEyedGuero at http://vancouverblueeyedguero.blogspot.com/

As labour historian Mark Lehrer of Simon Fraser University recently noted, over the last 35 years Canadians have had to work much longer hours for much less in real wages. The major inflationary factor has been the cost of housing. The cost of rents, mortgages and property taxes consume at least 40% of the average disposable income. The rising cost of living has driven married women into the workforce and put all of us on a treadmill. Feminists call this process "women's liberation", but in fact it has resulted in our collective, gender-neutral enslavement. Immigrants, 80% of whom are unskilled from "non-traditional" sources, and half of whom are functionally illiterate in both English and French, must run on this treadmill at an even faster pace for a longer time. Ironically, it has been immigrant-driven population growth that has inflated the housing costs which have forced them into a lifestyle of chronic workaholics, cloying to the company of other émigrés and relatives for mutual support. For this sin, they often reviled for their failure to “fit in”.

Immigrants want to assimilate, but are denied the time to do so

We have imported a slave labour class and condemned them for their inability or unwillingness to assimilate. But the truth is, the vast majority of these immigrants want to assimilate. They want to become Canadians and fully participate in our society---but their circumstances do not allow them to do so. Ethnic enclaves should be regarded more as life rafts than defiant fortresses for those who would resist acculturation to Canadian values. They are a testimony to economic apartheid, not divided loyalties. Scan the footage of the 2010 Winter Games, and you will notice that a great many of the spectators who waved Maple Leaf flags were New Canadians.

”Calif”, who came from Somalia some two decades ago, is a case in point. He virtually lives in his taxi, fighting Vancouver traffic all day and night in order to support his son, whose passion for our Canadian fixation, ice hockey, formed much of his conversation. His gratitude for my interest was witnessed by his refusal to accept payment for the ride. It would be perverse to regard him as an agent of our cultural marginalization and displacement rather than what he is---a victim of economically imposed isolation. He is a pawn, not a colonist. Meanwhile, ethnic power-brokers, the self-appointed advocates of people like him, suck from the tit of government grants and appointments advancing a cause----cultural sovereignty and fragmentation---which immigrants themselves do not want. Calif is a passenger from an African shipwreck who boarded a Canadian lifeboat that, despite its apparent size, is overloaded. He cannot be made a scapegoat for our misguided policy. Eighty percent of immigrants and most asylum-seekers are unskilled. They do not earn the necessary $25,000 in annual income to pay enough taxes for the government services they receive. As such, they impose a net fiscal burden on the rest of us. So who benefits? Those who must spend their lives on a treadmill to eke out an insufficient living? Or those who employ them? Get it?

Multiculturalism more the effect than the cause of atomization

Multiculturalism has brought us mixed results at best. Harvard's Robert Putnam and Monash University's Bob Birrell, among other academics, are right. Along with delectable food, entertaining music, and interesting people with fresh perspectives, cultural diversity weakens trust, solidarity and civic participation. No wonder Dr. William Rees has called for a more "integrative" model of multiculturalism that would foster the kind of societal consensus we need to face up to the daunting ecological challenges ahead. But whatever its vices or virtues, it must be seen, at least in Canada, as a symptom and not a cause. The cart, not the horse. A useful smokescreen for the corporate agenda. The game plan was always to displace an indigenous work force with a cheaper one, and to design laws that would make them feel more comfortable in the workforce and society at large---even if our legal traditions and rights were compromised in the bargain.

If our culture was that important to us, the way to defend it would have been to establish a tax regime that discourages "flipping" and real estate speculation, and in progressive labour laws, laws which would have robbed employers and their political handmaidens of the incentive to import a slave labour caste. As South African whites found, you can't have it both ways. You can't keep your culture safe behind gated communities but send out for cheap help from the untouchables. If you want local jobs to go local people, then pay more money for your home-delivered pizzas and TV repairs so that local people can make a reasonable living providing them. Otherwise, as they say on the eastside, “Shut--The--Fuck—Up”.

Vancouver left me with one overwhelming impression. That of a gateway city that showcases a sinister, time-honoured Canadian tradition. We have apparently effected a massive cultural transformation, but the diversity we behold is superficial. Beneath the rainbow of faces and the multitude of foreign tongues, there remains the same old culture of greed and exploitation. That is the common thread that runs through our colonial history. As Joel Grey sang in the hit musical “Cabaret”, money makes the world go around. Keep em’ busy competing for it, and the system can keep on runnin’ like the Energizer bunny in that TV battery commercial.

It must have been difficult to establish national solidarity in the Tower of Babel. No doubt tower dwellers wanted to connect with each other, but I guess somebody made too much money keeping them apart. And the rent was so high that at the end of their long day, they were too burned out working for it to attend any tenants’ rights meetings. I think the landlord called their predicament “cultural diversity”, didn’t he?

Tim Murray
May 9, 2010

'For many in this city that prides itself on its social contract, Bergman's horrifying death was the last straw. The government announced the opening of five emergency shelters, 14 new permanent public-housing developments and plans to purchase and revamp 25 inner-city hotels. The British Columbia parliament passed a law giving police more power to get endangered people into shelters.

But with the Olympic Games approaching, there were widespread predictions that the police, as is often the case in host cities, would round up the homeless in a final cosmetic hose-down before the dignitaries swept into town.

"I swear to you on my mother's grave, that is not going to happen," Lemcke pledged to an activist recently. "We will protect the rights of people down there, and the world will see what the world sees on the downtown Eastside. The world needs to know."'

What's interesting to me is that Vancouver's homeless problem is due to reasons similar to the US's:

Vancouver had little or no homelessness problem 15 years ago. But Canada, like the U.S., moved to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill in the 1980s -- and like the U.S., it provided few follow-up assistance programs. At the same time, the federal government got out of the business of building public housing, transferring responsibility to the provinces.

"People are kind of getting used to [homelessness], thinking, well, it's like prostitution or robbery, we're never going to be able to solve it," said Jill Davidson, the city's assistant housing director. "Well, we can solve it. Because we had it solved only 15 years ago."

That's an encouraging message, but it requires that we actually spend some money to make it happen. I've lived in two places where homelessness was an issue — Seoul, which didn't have many but where little was done to help, and Honolulu, where homelessness is pervasive, especially along the beaches and downtown — and it just seems like average citizens don't care about the people involved.' (Source of comments on homelessness and of photo of immigrants sleeping on church pews.)

A few years ago I heard about the Australian Multicultural Foundation in the context of donations by the Scanlon Foundation (formerly the Brencorp Foundation) to the Australian Academy of Technical Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) for the production of the "Scanlon Report on "The technological implications of Australia at 30 million in 2030". The AMF was also the recipient of Scanlon Foundation funding together with the Institute of Global Movements, at Monash University, run by Professor Nieuwenhuysen, who used to be with the Bureau of Immigration. What initially got my attention was the enormous amount of money and publicity the AMF and the IGF attracted. Then what absolutely arrested my attention was the membership of the Australian Multicultural Foundation - made up largely of prime ministers and almost-prime ministers of every political complexion. I then became interested in the history of the AMF and decided to try to track down its origins and early associations. This is an interim report.

Private organisations and public policy

A few years ago I heard about the Australian Multicultural Foundation in the context of donations by the Scanlon Foundation (formerly the Brencorp Foundation) to the Australian Academy of Technical Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) for the production of the "Scanlon Report on "The technological implications of Australia at 30 million in 2030".[1] The AMF was also the recipient of Scanlon Foundation funding together with the Monash University Institute of Global Movements, run by Professor Nieuwenhuysen, who used to be with the Bureau of Immigration. ( Do have a look at this article which shows the Australian Multicultural Foundation in the bigger political and corporate picture.) What initially got my attention was the enormous amount of money and publicity the AMF and the IGF attracted. Then what absolutely arrested my attention was the membership of the Australian Multicultural Foundation - made up largely of prime ministers and almost-prime ministers (such as John Hewson and Mark Latham) of every political complexion - (but not Gough Whitlam). I then became interested in the history of the AMF and decided to try to track down its origins and early associations.

Australian Prime Ministers and social engineering programs

It seems pretty clear that the Scanlon Foundation and ATSE's, "The Scanlon Report 30/50 - The Technological Implications of an Australian Population of 30 million by 2050," (2007) has furnished a sort of recent technological blueprint for successive governments to impose higher and higher intakes of immigrants on Australia.[2] The donations to the Institute of Global Movements and the Australian Multicultural Foundation fit broadly into the area of social engineering to try to get Australians to accept these impositions. The association of successive prime ministers all the way back to Bob Hawke with this is absolutely fascinating and somewhat chilling, because it seems to indicate objectives at a high level which have not, to my knowledge, ever been discussed with the Australian public and for which their consent has not been sought.

The Memorandum of Association of the Foundation was signed by R.J. Hawke in 1988. The President of ATSE was one of the signatories. The Foundation is supposed to be non-profit. I have previously published the information below, but only as a footnote to this article. If anyone can stitch some of this together, please write to me.

The Australian Multicultural Foundation

[Links to information about members are made by candobetter.net and do not appear on the AMF page itself.]
Australian Multicultural Foundation (AMF)
Board of Directors

The Hon Sir James Gobbo AC CVO (Chairman)
Major General Peter Maurice Arnison AC CVO
Ms Carla Zampatti AM
Professor Kwong Lee Dow AM
Executive Director and Company Secretary

Dr B. (Hass) Dellal OAM
Administrative Assistant

Mrs Brigit Murikumthara

Ms Azmeena Hussain
Project Co-ordinator

Ms Athalia Zwartz
Training and Project Development Manager

Ms Lynn Cain

Members of the Foundation

The Hon. Malcolm Turnbull MP
[Added here from the Multicultural Foundation site on 5 May 2013.]

The Hon. Julia Gillard MP, Prime Minister of Australia
The Hon. Tony Abbott MHR, Leader of the Opposition [Ed. Added here from Multicultural Foundation site on 5 July 2012]

The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP (Prime Minister of Australia)
The Hon. John Howard AC
Dame Beryl Beaurepaire DBE AC [Generally noted for activism in girls' education and women's affairs in Liberal Party and historic involvement in WAAF, but described as company director in the registration of the Foundation.]
The Hon. Kim Beazley AC (See Pronatalist policy in Australia 1945-2000)
The Hon Mr Simon Crean MP
Mr Ivan A. Deveson AO
The Hon. Alexander Downer
Sir Llewellyn Edwards AC
Mr William Charles Fairbanks [?Secretary of Landcare Australia P/L)
Ms Gaye Rosemary Hart AM
The Hon. Robert Hawke AC
Dr J. R. Hewson AM
Ms Vivien Suit-Cheng Hope (Careers and Counselling Centre Tutor, Centre of Asian Students, University of Adelaide)
The Hon. Paul Keating
Mr Mark Latham
Mrs Irene Kwong Moss AO [Home Building regulation]
Mr Robert Brooker Maher AM Executive Director, American Chamber of Commerce in Australia, Paddington NSW and Former board member of The Australian Rail Track Corporation
Ms Wendy Elizabeth McCarthy AO Interestingly, this woman is also a patron of the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance, which has links with Sustainable Population Australia. She is also Chair of McGrath Estate Agents, currently expanding into Australia's iconic Blue Mountains.
Mr Lindsay Gordon Crossley Moyle AM
Professor John Nieuwenhuysen AM
The Hon. Andrew Peacock AC
Lady Stephen
Mr Ross Tzannes AM
Mr George Wojak AO MBE

Source: http://amf.net.au/about/australian-multicultural-foundation/
Further documentation

Link to Memorandum of Association of Australian Bicentennial Multicultural Foundation Limited

The link has changed. Updated here on 5 May 2013 to http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CEQQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aph.gov.au%2FParliamentary_Business%2FCommittees%2FSenate_Committees%3Furl%3Dlegcon_ctte%2Festimates%2Fbud_0910%2Fag%2FQON_011_AHRC_ATTACHMENT_A.pdf&ei=Vq2FUfK8IcSziQfUqYDQDw&usg=AFQjCNH-SIHtY-DkyBzzK97NkqAG7pLueA&sig2=KYb6k_I2Exqr9Zop46odBQ&bvm=bv.45960087,d.dGI&cad=rja
If that link also fails, there is now a pdf copy on the candobetter.net site. Access by clicking on the link here: /files/http___www.aphref.aph_.gov_.au_senate_committee_legcon_ctte_estimates_bud_0910_ag_qon_011_ahrc_attachment_a.pdf.

[For documentation purposes, the discontinued link originally used in this article was Memorandum of Association of the Company, known as the Australian Bicentennial Multicultural Foundation Limited. ]

Dated 1988, with illegible month (maybe September), it is signed by R.J.Hawke, (witnessed by his senior private secretary in the prime ministerial lodge in Canberra); Sir James Augustine Gobbo (Judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria); Michael George Kailis, Governing Director of M G Kailis Group of Companies, West Australia [Seafood and pearl culture industries]; George Wojak; Lindsay Gordon Crossley Moyle, Chief Executive Officer, State Bank of Victoria, 131 Powlett Street, East Melbourne; Sir David Ronald Zeidler, Company Director, Park Avenue Towers, Parkville, Victoria [Past Chairman of ICI and 1983 - 1988 President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering];Dame Beryl Edith Beaurepaire, Company Director, Mt Eliza, Victoria; Vivien Suit-Cheng Hope, Careers and Counselling Centre, Tutor, Centre of Asian Students, University of Adelaide, S.A.; Ross Tzarthes, Solicitor, Pryor, Tzannes, Glebe, NSW; Marie Anna Elizabeth Blake, Managing Director Jetset Tours (Old) Pty Ltd, New Farm QLD; William Charles Fairbanks, General Manager, Finance and Management Services, The Australian Bicentennial Authority, Wahroonga NSW; Gaye Rosemary Hart, General Manager Programs, The Australian Bicentennial Authority, Elizabeth Bay, NSW; James Frank Kirk, Chairman and Chief Executive, The Australian Bicentennial Authority, Edgecliffe, NSW; Wendy Elizabeth McCarthy, General Manager Communications, The Australian Bicentennial Authority, Mary St., Longueville, NSW.

The Scanlon Foundation

The information below is taken from the Foundation's website at
Social Cohesion and it provides confirmation of links between the organisations already mentioned, plus demographers from the ANU.

"The Scanlon Foundation believes that the future prosperity of Australia, underpinned by continued population growth, will depend on our ability to maintain social cohesion in a society with even more cultural diversity than we have successfully accommodated historically.

The Foundation, in seeking to create awareness and knowledge based discussion about Australia's population growth and its relationship to social cohesion, has provided substantial funding grants in the following areas of research:

1. The Australian Centre for Population Research at the Australian National University, led by Professor Peter McDonald and Rebecca Kippen, have undertaken projections of Australia's population that have enabled the Foundation to “lock in” on a future population target of 30 million Australians by 2050. In shorthand we refer to this as 30/50.

2. The Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering in 2007 have released a major study Report entitled “30/50 The Technological Implications of an Australian Population of 30 Million by 2050” which concludes that there are no insurmountable technological, engineering or environmental barriers to Australia sustaining a population of 30 million by 2050, assuming that thorough analysis and planning occur and that leadership is exercised by governments. See the Foundation's Chairman, Peter Scanlon's address at the ATSE launch of this Report;

3. The Monash Institute for the Study of Global Movements, in partnership with the Australian Multicultural Foundation, are continuing to undertake a major Social Cohesion Research Program for the Foundation. Further to a first National Benchmark Mapping of Social Cohesion 2007,survey this has been followed up with a second round Mapping Social Cohesion 2009 survey. See the Foundation Chairman, Peter Scanlon's address at the launch of this second round Report. This research is focused on monitoring how Australia in the future can maintain the “immigration with social cohesion” success story of the last five decades.

4. Monash University’s Institute for the Study of Global Movements have recently published a Discussion Paper on the Implications of the Economic Downturn for Immigration and Social Cohesion."

NOTES

[1] If anyone wants an electronic copy of the 2007 ATTSE Report itself, "The technological implications of Australia at 30 million in 2030," contact me through candobetter.net and I will send one to you. The file was too big to upload here. There old URL for "The technological implications of Australia at 30 million in 2030" was a href="http://www.atse.org.au/index.php?sectionid=128 no longer works. I have linked above to an new URL. I have also copied and pasted the 'Address' by Peter Scanlon in the Appendix below, to document the launching of the document. This speech is quite interesting because it gives us an economic belief context and even admiringly cites a chapter written by Harvard economist, Benjamin M. Friedman, written with the notorious Milton Friedman: Benjamin M. Friedman, Milton Friedman, A. W. Clausen, "Postwar Changes in the American Financial Markets," in Martin Feldstein, ed., The American Economy in Transition," University of Chicago Press, 1980.

[2] The 2007 Report is no longer accessible on the ATSE site or from the Scanlon Foundation site, perhaps because projections for 2050 have Australia massively overshooting 30 million and heading towards 45 million. The population project has got totally out of hand, yet none of the people responsible for these population growth stimulation projects are sounding the alarm.

APPENDIX

ADDRESS BY

FOUNDATION CHAIRMAN, PETER SCANLON

TO ATSE REPORT LAUNCH

18th April 07

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ladies and Gentlemen:

The Honourable Robert Smith MLC, President of the Legislative Assembly.

The Honorable Jenny Lindell MP. Speaker of the Legislative Assembly and Parliamentarians;

Mr. Peter Laver, Vice president of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering

Mr. Vaughan Beck
Distinguished guests.

The Scanlon Foundation is committed to the belief that Australia needs to continue to grow and that this growth will require a substantial and increasing role for migration. As a consequence we see social cohesion as critical to both migration and Australia’s growth.

In that context and separately from the study by ATSE The Scanlon Foundation’s Social Cohesion Research Program incorporates six (6) individual projects, managed by the Monash Institute for the Study of Global Movements and the Australian Multicultural Foundation.

One of these projects is the innovative benchmark survey throughout Australia measuring the current status of social cohesion in Australia. This survey has been commissioned and field interviews will commence in May. We anticipate results in July ready for analysis and preparation for release at Metropolis 2007.

However, the study released today by ATSE, and although very much part of our program, has different origins. In the early days of our work on social cohesion it was clear to us that there are a number of people in Australia across a broad spectrum who queried the underlying principal of growth because they worried whether the country was able to accommodate more people. In essence they asked “can we have a population of 30 million people by the year 2050 without creating substantial infrastructure and environmental issues”.
It was to deal with this perception, this question that led the Foundation to commission this study. That is why it is specific both as to numbers and Australia. That is why we went to ATSE as the independent expert with its 750 eminent Fellows.

Clearly the study says we can accommodate 30 million people by 2050. However it does say there are issues and that these are legitimate issues that need to be discussed and dealt with. ATSE concludes in fact they need to be dealt with irrespective to 30/50.

However I ask that as you reflect on this study that you do not do so in isolation. There is a flip side to the debate. That is the consequences of Growth. Too often growth is mistakenly seen to be only about material outcomes.

In his book “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth” Benjamin Friedman demonstrates why the elements, held out by the Enlightenment thinkers so central to Western philosophy, of openness, opportunity, tolerance, economic and social mobility, fairness and democracy are all enhanced by growth.

Freidman explains that growth, rather than simply creating a higher standard of living, is the key to effecting political and social liberalization in the third world. He shows that even the wealthiest of nations puts its democratic values at risk when growth stops. Merely being wealthy is no protection against a turn toward rigidity and intolerance when a country’s citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead.

Post war we had the growth of economic socialism which tried to deal with the imbalance of material well being by relying on redistribution rather than creation. It failed miserably.

Today, to me, in many ways there seems to be a populous move to a form of environmental socialism in that there is a concentration on regulating and redistributing what we have as was the case with economic socialism. It won’t be the answer. Separately from mans proven record of ingenuity and adaptation we need to get back to planning and doing. This will be the answer.

That we need to manage better is without doubt. The ATSE report is very clear about this. The short period of elected governments, our system of Federation together with upper and lower houses, the politicisation of the public service and so on has left us with ineffective long term planning. And this when there has never been a better time to set these priorities with our prosperity and surplus investment capital which is searching the world trying to find a home.

If Social Cohesion was not the Foundations main game I think we would have tackled this issue. Pressure and knowledge needs to be focused on our infrastructure and environmental planning. The current situation is a disgrace. We probably need for the want of a better title a Reserve Bank of Infrastructure.

However right now that’s not for us other than to support ATSE’s call for leadership and planning.

In conclusion the Foundation expresses it appreciation to ATSE. In particular my thanks to Vaughan Beck, Ian Duncan, Ian Rae and of course many talented authors and contributors to the 30/50 study.

We at the Foundation look forward to pursuing our ongoing work on social cohesion and positive migration strategies for the future prosperity of Australia.

Thank you

Australia is copping an annual record 383,000 net migration as of last year. Why? Historically, this is tantamount to foreign invasion by stealth. In any preceding deacde in Australia's history, this number would be publicly considered an 'immigration invasion'. That it is not funded with proportionate government infrastructure to secure and maintain Australian living standards (aka home affordability, the idealised 1/4 acre block achieved by our parents, 2-3 kids able to attend affordable childcare, schools followed by affordable tertiary education, time with the children.

Wake up! Middle Australia and its ideal of a comfortable disposable income, low costs, spare time, paid overtime has gone. It has all gone since business was given cheaper options of overseas contract labour who knew nothing about unions and our legacy of fighting for workers rights, and since Australia's immigration tsumani forced an escalation in domestic demand.

Problem is Governments keep listening to their economic performance druids so as to pacify a media brainwashed in economic-or-bust theory. Perhaps as ancient Pagans listened to their druids, we are captive of the same aura.

Kevin Rudd and his Labor Party and the Liberal Party are conditioned to following modern day economic druids to guide them on national economic policy, but also to guide them on national social policy and national environmental policy. This is even though their druids have no knowledge, training or omnipresent guidance in social or environmental issues.

Makes one wonder!

Australians are being pacified and re-educated into believing misleading justifications like economic growth, addressing skills shortages, multi-culturalism, being a world citizen, etc.

Pacification is the final stage of any invasion and we're copping that when all criticism gets morally put down as 'racist'. But race has nothing into do with it. The problem is the sheer numbers, not whether they're from Suffolk or Timbuktu.

Emigration poster 1948: ‘Australia, land of tomorrow’, Joe Greenberg. Courtesy Museum Victoria


Australia's post-WWII notion of 'populate or perish' was a falsehood promoted by PM John Curtin's man Arthur Caldwell, fearing Australia's vulnerability to invasion from the north in the wake of how close the Japanese got in 1942. Our government no longer uses the justification 'populate or perish'; it's been long tried, debated and dismissed as nonsense.

But Rudd's Mass Immigration is nonsensical. He is fuelling domestic demand on the one hand and yet supposedly leading the international charge to cut greenhouse emissions on the other side of the world. Is this two-faced, dumb or is there an ulterior motive? Look at all the stress increasing population is putting on urban infrastructure and resources in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - where all most of the migrants chose to stay! There is an absence of demographic planning to spread the populatiion demand burden. Rudd is accelerating urban sprawl in these cities, repeating California's Dust Bowl Migration of the 1930s which caused the massive urban sprawl in Los Angeles. We have also adopted the US 20th Century car-centric urban design model. Rudd has a 20th Century US mindset and prima facie condemning Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to a Hong Kong vision.

A consequence of this invasion is the emergence of ghetto cultures. Assimiliating Immigration (sporadic, small scale) works when a few from many different nationalities integrate, then after a few generations they assimilate into the mainstream culture. New Australians learn the language, acclimatise, get accustomed to Australian mores and values. We witnessed this gradually, progressively over decades with the Greek and Italians, then the Vietnamese, and we are midway through with the Lebanese. Each of these people in many cases were fleeeing poverty, like the initial British colonists a hundred years before them. They were seeking a new life and oppogC?M?>??d?V???e?_?|?6hey keenly acculturate, adapt, blend in, intermix and become accepted as Australians. This is how immigration should work to maximise the benefits to both settler and host country and to minimise the problems...again to both settler and host country.

Muslim immigrants demanding minarets in Switzerland. Courtesy The Economist, 3rd Dec 2009, 'Return of the nativists'

But the 'Rudd Gates' policy of Mass Unsustainable Immigration is churning such a mass influx of new arrivals in such a short time. The social outcomes have been ignored is a desperate attempt to maximise the perceived faster economic benefits. New arrivals are abandoned at the airport arrivals gates to fend for themselves. With so many arriving so quickly, there is no time for them to properly assimilate into Australian society, culture and way of life.

Through no fault of their own, new immigrants without a sense or compulsion of assimilation retreat to their own group and end up forming ghettos of different cultures, quite emotionally detached from the Australian mainstream. How is this good for the host country, Australia, and indeed for the new arrivals themselves? This government abandonment helps no-one - the locals, nor the new arrivals. Immigration without active integration is flagrant social neglect and abuse on a national scale to all involved.

Mass unsustainable immigration over a short time has been shown to cause a deculturation of the prevaling society's values, cultures and ways of life. On only has to look at the social outcome and costs of the mass influx of Turkish immigrants in Germany, or the recent mass influx of Middle Eastern muslims into Switzerland or closer to home at the 2005 Cronulla Riots.

Mass immigration without integration unnecessarily hightens the risk of fuelling social friction and antagonism on both sides. It breeds nationalism and in the worst cases, racism and racist violence. And it is all because governments naively manage complex societies with an economic hat on, wanting to boost its economic performance figures.

But immigration without integration and assimilation is effectively a decultural invasion, that threatens the identity of the imcumbent culture. Look at what a Koel does: >em>"The Common Koel is a brood parasite, that is, it lays its eggs in the nests of other bird species. Common hosts are the Red Wattlebird, Anthochaera carnunculata, friarbirds, the Magpie-lark, Grallina cyanoleuca, and figbirds. A single egg is laid in the host's nest and once hatched the chick forces the other eggs and hatchlings out of the nest." [SOURCE: http://birdsinbackyards.net/bird/54]

Common Koel, male. Photo: N Fifer ©

So what are 'Australian Values'?

Australians need to start debating what it means to be Australian, what values we treasure, and which aspects of our way of life we are prepared to compromise and which ones we are not. Then we need to look at what is happening to those values and way of life and start addressing their erosion.

If we don't and just sit back, 'she won't be right'. Those values will have eroded and have become relegated to history, under our watch. When 383,000 from overseas are rocking up every year, their sheer numbers unchecked will inevitably reshape Australia.

What is Immigration Policy accountable for?

Government immigration policy needs to be held accountable to immigrants and to the consequential impacts that immigration brings to Australia and to Australians. It has become clear that it is unacceptable to all parties that immigration policy stops at the International Arrivals Gate, that it ignores the special needs of immigrants, ignores integration and assimilation, ignores the costs to accommodate this direct increase in demand, ignores the consequential costs on Australia. Assimilation takes time and generations.

Public and private infrastructure and resources are proportionally consumed for every additional person added to Australia (be it by birth or immigration) - housing, roads, schools, public transport, hospitals, childcare, fuel, groceries, and every human consumption need and want. Marginal planning for immigration that stops at the International Arrivals Gates and hand balls the triple bottom line problems to under-resourced State government budgets is irresponsible. It is no different to allowing cheap import dumping into Australian markets and sending local industry broke.

This is not an argument for protectionism. It is an argument about the lack of accountability of Australia's current immigration policy for the economic, social and environmental consequences it is causing. Immigrants deserve protecting and nurturing more than most and it takes decades to assimilate. Look how long it took the Greeks and Italians post-WWII to assimilate. My estimate it took two generations and it wasn't until the 1970s until the Australia-Italian mixed culture was embraced by the mainstream, even then there must have been a lot of trauma in the intergenerational acculturation process.

Are we really 'sorry' for marginalising some of Australia's society?

What is appalling is the continued marginalisation of Australia's traditional people from the mix. If Australia's way of life and values embraced aspects of that of Aboriginal peoples, like in some way the Maori in New Zealand have shaped Kiwi culture - (look at the All Blacks Haka), then as a society Australia may not have as much need now to reverse its environmental damage.

Rudd-gazing

Mass immigration is indeed the elephant in the room. For Rudd to ignore this, the dominant driver of consumption, and to spend time on trading green house gas emissions is to negligently navel gaze as if pre-occupied in Sudoku on one of the Titanic deck chairs. 'Rudd-gazing' has become the greatest eroder of Australian way of life.

Poaching skilled workers and removing political activists; dividing and conquering; restructuring communities to remove democratic organisation, multiculturalism as a cover for big business links with politicians

Political outcome of poaching skilled and educated elites

The poaching of skilled and educated people from other overpopulated countries is a way of removing a class of people in those countries, who might otherwise lead their compatriots to struggle against overpopulation and exploitation by corporations and crooked governments and religions.

It serves a base political purpose and helps keep people of the third world in misery.

What is more, when large volumes of skilled and educated people come to a new country, they naturally focus initially on establishing themselves and their families. It takes quite some time to establish oneself materially. They do not tend to focus on the political well-being of their new country any more than they did on the political well-being of their old country. It may not be until the second generation that most immigrants become spontaneously politically active.

If and when they are ready to look at real political integration here, they will discover that their new country is ruled by the same corporate press and the same two 'pretend' political party system as existed in their old country. They will discover in Australia the same globalising, ecociding and populationist policies, the same lack of democracy, the same cynical and evil marketing of water and soil as commodities, and the same breakdown of local networks and self-government in the suburbs where they settle. They will see, if they can see through the political propaganda all around, that Australia is a country on the way down to the condition of the countries that they left. They will see that Australians are being forced into a struggle to survive debt and dispossession that is also taking their energies away from useful political activity.

Australian elites keep new and old Australians apart on purpose

When I said that immigrants are usually not politically active until the second generation, that does not stop them from being organised into silence and against national solidarity for the political ends of the dishonest elite that dominate Australia's media and government. I would identify the daily allegations by the press and by national and state politicians of Australians as 'racist' or 'selfish' as being a calculated way to keep the new immigrants and the native-born apart, thereby atomising any likelihood of national solidarity. As long as new immigrants believe that Australians are racist or stupidly selfish, they are not going to trust us, so they will not help us to defend the nation they have come to be a part of, against exploitation, degradation, poverty and dictatorship. Also, as long as new and old Australians believe what the government and the mainstream media tell them, they will not be able to see what is really happening around them and find common cause with their neighbours and workmates.

How Developers structure political disorganisation

There is a new land-use planning structure which also has the effect of keeping new and old Australians apart and ruining natural organic settlement and social organisation. This is the streaming of overseas immigrants into newly built suburban enclaves. When property is advertised off the plan to people overseas, along with visas and job contracts, you can finish up with entire suburbs where most of the inhabitants are new Australians from the same region, with similar incomes (defined by the cost of the housing), possibly even with similar occupations (suburbs full of doctors, nurses and town planners according to the 'needed occupations stream'), all arriving more or less together, as the houses are built. This is also convenient for politicians who wish to target voters in blocks by identifying common local or ethnic or social concerns. It is convenient for business wanting to build new private schools, swimming pools, hospitals and infrastructure. They know that they will have a captive market. It is essentially a money-making proposition for business and a vote market for politicians. It artificially segregates people from others with common interests.

In the workplace as well, those new nurses and doctors won't dare to speak out for fear of losing their contracts or not being able to acquire citizenship. So once again, you have silenced a community. As for the imported town planners - well, they have probably already been brainwashed by the industry. We cannot expect them to uphold democracy, only capitalism.

(I welcome contact with any planners who can demonstrate support for organic democracy. I will be happy to publicly apologise and to publicly support them. Here is hoping some contact us at candobetter.org!)

Australians need solidarity with new Australians and real democracy

Australians need solidarity with new Australians. This means that the people here need to find a way to identify as a nation despite the political and media classes and to communicate to new Australians that what they read in the papers and hear from our Prime Minister and Premiers is not what is important to the people.

We all have to start to distinguish reality from media production and government spin.

The importance of national identity is the ability to organise to get real rights and real political choices and a real press. This is what the French Revolution got the world. The French Revolution is the basis of modern democracy. Capitalism is not the basis of modern democracy; it did not bring democracy to the USA or anywhere else; it brought exploitative capitalism. Just look at the sub-prime global heist as taxpayers are forced to subsidise banks. That ain't representation! Democracy and capitalism (and communism for that matter) should not be confused, but are, constantly, by the global anglo elite and their colonial and emerging partners in ransacking this planet. (Communism is just a reaction to industrial capitalism, with similar values which include population growth = wealth and centralised authoritarian government in huge polities.)

If we are not a united nation, with clear rights to self-government at all levels, and the ability to control our numbers and the size and impact of our cities, and to choose whether we live as hunter-gatherers, farmers or as industrialised workers in cities, we are not free and we are not a democracy and we have no power to stop what is being done to us.

Structural disorganisation means political disempowerment of grass-roots

A further point is that, apart from the structure of new enclaves, we are being physically disorganised in other ways by mass immigration and by our economic structure. People have little time, due to travel and long hours, to participate in community. Their neighborhoods are being disorganised by infilling, huge highways, winding new roads in new suburbs, and other infrastructure, including things like desal plants and new heavy industry. Even the delivery of services has been disorganised by outsourcing. This has the effect of disorganising political expression about these services.

Our local governments have lost their power which now lies with the State governments and the state governments have been infiltrated and outsourced to property developers. Public servants now serve private interests. The National government takes its cues from banking and big business. The ruling clique - the ALP - owns massive investments in property and banking - set up, amazingly, by our Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swann in Queensland before they entered Federal politics, notably in the form of Labor Holdings P/L and Labor Resources P/L. I don't pretend that the Liberal Party is not underpinned by the same business interests, but they are not as 'successful' as yet. That clique belongs to a bigger mysterious clique which manifests in arcane coalitions, such as the Australian Multicultural Foundation, which has a host of connections which would not be of any interest were it not that its small membership is mostly made up of very high profile politicians from Liberal and Labour - The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP (Prime Minister of Australia), The Hon. John Howard AC, The Hon. Kim Beazley AC, The Hon Mr Simon Crean MP, The Hon. Alexander Downer, The Hon. Robert Hawke AC, Dr J. R. Hewson AM, The Hon. Paul Keating, Mr Mark Latham, The Hon. Andrew Peacock AC... [More interesting membership details and page info reproduced at end of this article.]

These are some reasons why Australians must organise politically outside the established political parties. We need many more independents to form coalitions of common interests and we need to ensure that those independents are not actually fakes, ready to vote with the dominant political parties.

Australia's history of political oppression

It is likely that many of the convicts sent to Australia were in fact political prisoners. Removing them from Britain made it all the easier to keep the British from demanding real rights as citizens. Many other protesters were, of course, executed in England.

This is something that Australians should be able to make clear to new Australians. Our country was founded on political oppression - of the indigenous people and of the first convicts and indentured servants. Unfortunately this condition has continued because of the structure of representative government and the power of the mainstream press to support and manipulate it for economic ends.

We are still a colony and treated legally like colonial citizens. This needs to change, but not through top-down republicanism.

Notes

Do also have a look at this page which shows the Australian Multicultural Foundation in the bigger political and corporate picture.

[Links to information about members are made by candobetter.org and do not appear on the AMF page itself.]
Australian Multicultural Foundation (AMF)
Board of Directors

The Hon Sir James Gobbo AC CVO (Chairman)
Major General Peter Maurice Arnison AC CVO
Ms Carla Zampatti AM
Professor Kwong Lee Dow AM
Executive Director and Company Secretary

Dr B. (Hass) Dellal OAM
Administrative Assistant

Mrs Brigit Murikumthara

Ms Azmeena Hussain
Project Co-ordinator

Ms Athalia Zwartz
Training and Project Development Manager

Ms Lynn Cain

Members of the Foundation
The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP (Prime Minister of Australia)
The Hon. John Howard AC
Dame Beryl Beaurepaire DBE AC [Generally noted for activism in girls' education and women's affairs in Liberal Party and historic involvement in WAAF, but described as company director in the registration of the Foundation.]
The Hon. Kim Beazley AC
The Hon Mr Simon Crean MP
Mr Ivan A. Deveson AO
The Hon. Alexander Downer
Sir Llewellyn Edwards AC
Mr William Charles Fairbanks [?Secretary of Landcare Australia P/L)
Ms Gaye Rosemary Hart AM
The Hon. Robert Hawke AC
Dr J. R. Hewson AM
Ms Vivien Suit-Cheng Hope (Careers and Counselling Centre Tutor, Centre of Asian Students, University of Adelaide)
The Hon. Paul Keating
Mr Mark Latham
Mrs Irene Kwong Moss AO [Home Building regulation]
Mr Robert Brooker Maher AM Executive Director, American Chamber of Commerce in Australia, Paddington NSW and Former board member of The Australian Rail Track Corporation and with the
Ms Wendy Elizabeth McCarthy AO Interestingly, this woman is also a patron of the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance, which has links with Sustainable Population Australia. Interestingly, she is also Chair of McGrath Estate Agents, currently expanding into Australia's iconic Blue Mountains.
Mr Lindsay Gordon Crossley Moyle AM
Professor John Nieuwenhuysen AM
The Hon. Andrew Peacock AC
Lady Stephen
Mr Ross Tzannes AM
Mr George Wojak AO MBE

Source: http://amf.net.au/about/australian-multicultural-foundation/
Further documentation

Also, here is the Memorandum of Association of the Company, known as the Australian Bicentennial Multicultural Foundation Limited.

Dated 1988, with illegible month, it is signed by R.J.Hawke, (witnessed by his senior private secretary in the prime ministerial lodge in Canberra); Sir James Augustine Gobbo (Judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria); Michael George Kailis, Governing Director of M G Kailis Group of Companies, West Australia [Seafood and pearl culture industries]; George Wojak; Lindsay Gordon Crossley Moyle, Chief Executive Officer, State Bank of Victoria, 131 Powlett Street, East Melbourne; Sir David Ronald Zeidler, Company Director, Park Avenue Towers, Parkville, Victoria [Past Chairman of ICI and 1983 - 1988 President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering];Dame Beryl Edith Beaurepaire, Company Director, Mt Eliza, Victoria; Vivien Suit-Cheng Hope, Careers and Counselling Centre, Tutor, Centre of Asian Students, University of Adelaide, S.A.; Ross Tzarthes, Solicitor, Pryor, Tzannes, Glebe, NSW; Marie Anna Elizabeth Blake, Managing Director Jetset Tours (Old) Pty Ltd, New Farm QLD; William Charles Fairbanks, General Manager, Finance and Management Services, The Australian Bicentennial Authority, Wahroonga NSW; Gaye Rosemary Hart, General Manager Programs, The Australian Bicentennial Authority, Elizabeth Bay, NSW; James Frank Kirk, Chairman and Chief Executive, The Australian Bicentennial Authority, Edgecliffe, NSW; Wendy Elizabeth McCarthy, General Manager Communications, The Australian Bicentennial Authority, Mary St., Longueville, NSW.

The following paper, published in the Winter 1997-98 issue of The Social Contract journal, was given by Mark O'Connor to the Fourth National Conference of the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia (FECCA) on December 7, 1996 in Adelaide. FECCA is a major promoter of immigration and multiculturalism in Australia.

Where Does the PC Line on Immigration Come From?

By Mark O'Connor

As a member of a group dedicated to reducing Australia's population growth, I worry that Australia over the past 15 years has had by far the world's highest per capita immigration rate. Luckily we seem to have turned a corner, and our net immigration (if you believe the lowest of the figures being put out by government sources) may now be only 50,000 a year, which is a little over one-third of our net natural increase (i.e. the excess of total births over total deaths - currently about 142,000 persons annually). [Sadly, O'Connor's optimistic observation that Australia seemed to have turned a corner has since been proven incorrect. Immigration has crept ever upwards since the late 1990s, and is now running at record high levels.] Clearly our first priority now should be to work on attitudes as to family size.

Yet immigration remains important. It sends a most negative message to the community. How can the ordinary citizen see having a small family as a contribution to the community's well-being when he or she must also watch (and pay taxes to help) the government increasing our population through immigration? Indeed the Department of Immigration has favorably cited a recommendation from the growth economist John Neville that if the birthrate falls or stays low then immigration should be increased to compensate for this.

Clearly we environmentalists must question the rather bizarre assumptions on which the immigration debate is conducted. How can it be "selfish" to resist immigration yet be enormously to our benefit to take in immigrants? How could former Prime Minister Keating simultaneously claim immigration benefits the economy yet want to charge New Zealand for dole payments to our NZ immigrants? How can it be "racist" to want to control immigration when most immigrants, especially until the last few years, have been of the same Caucasian race as the overwhelming majority of Australians? How is it that when we have rescued people whose own countries or cultures have failed them, we are so often and so complacently told by "ethnic leaders" that we are in their debt rather than they in ours?

Similar questions are asked in the United States. In October 1993 I was an invited guest at the annual conference of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. At its final session Professor Otis Graham from the History Faculty at Santa Barbara (CA) spoke brilliantly about the internal contradictions of the USA's current official (or politically correct or PC) line on immigration. Subsequently he was asked how such self-contradictory positions had become established as dogma. He answered, "I simply don't know - I wish someone would explain it to me."

Later in the discussion I offered a rather tentative explanation in the form of a very simplified "story" of how these positions may have been reached. I wasn't very sure how complete or accurate this story (or theory) was, either as a comment on American or even on Australian history; but several of those present, including Professor Graham, pressed me to write it down and publish it. So here it is, still tentative, but a little more fleshed out.

Perhaps our "politically correct" attitudes to immigration come from particular conditions produced in the decay of 1960s and 1970s radicalism. Sociologists like Alvin Gouldner and Katharine Betts have pointed out the paradox that entire groups of the tertiary-educated, who once saw themselves as anti-establishment radicals in fierce opposition to the values of their parents, have now moved up the social system and are running bureaucracies and governments. The old "anti-establishment," these scholars imply, now runs the establishment.

This is clearer in Australia where the more left-wing of the two major parties has won the last five elections. (In the U.S., the Bush and Reagan years prevented there being quite such a conspiratorial left-wing tone to the current bureaucratic power group.) Many such people were among those who "saw the light" in the Sixties and Seventies but then in the Eighties, when they were getting a little complacent, were offered money instead - "the money or the light?" - until they eventually chose the money. They were also (again, this is more clearly true in Australia than in the U.S.) the first generation in which easy access to tertiary education became open to a meritocracy of the talented.

"[This New Class] sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions." Gouldner and Betts_#main-fn1">1 see this new ruling class as differing from a traditional aristocracy in that it does not depend on inherited wealth. Its capital is largely intellectual capital, represented by its tertiary degrees. It sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions. Let us accept this term "New Class" on probation, for the moment, and see what we can do with it. (Luckily this is not a matter of speculating about some poorly known and distantly observed group; it is essentially my own class I am talking about, and includes many of my own friends and former class mates. Reading this, they may well complain that I have "turned conservative," though, oddly enough, I believe that it is they who have done so.)

In Australia in the 1980s, many members of this class entered the bureaucracy and went on to earn degrees in economics, often training in the most cynical of economic rationalist schools (like that of the Australian National University). Thus, underneath the cement of avowed radicalism which binds the new ruling class together (serving as their meal ticket and union card) is sometimes a guilty conscience about having betrayed so many of their utopian and Aquarian ideals - for this was a generation whose hopes went far beyond the dull obviousness of social justice. The triumphalism of their politics often reflected the lyrics from the musical Hair "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" - an age of transcendent and psychedelic possibilities, of trusting the universe, and of release from constraints.

The result of this guilt can be a desperate attempt to find new grounds for difference and for moral superiority - no longer, this time, to justify revolution, but rather to maintain an establishment. Any ruling class that lasts more than a decade will feel the need to justify itself by having some ideal to which it appeals. It will invent some central legitimizing principle - usually a moral one. Thus a traditional aristocracy may place a moral value on the notion of "nobility" itself - a quality on which, by definition, it has something of a monopoly. By contrast it may see the classes it exploits as not merely "villains" but "villainous" and therefore needing to be ruled and guided. Our modern ruling class needs some similar principle to justify its free lunches and overseas travel.

They - or let me say "we" - used to be comrades in the struggle that built a better, more humane society. But what radical ideals are left when so many have been abandoned for pragmatic reasons and profit? Most utopian and Aquarian concepts of the 1970s have been quietly drowned. The psychedelic substances are only occasionally used by the successful baby boomers. Experience in running bureaucracies and governments has taught them not to be unduly idealistic about human nature. And so they have fallen back on a more basic or background ideal, one which, at least in Australia, was almost forgotten during the high point of 1970s radicalism. Yet when I went up to university in 1962 this had been the one ideal we all took for granted to treat everyone equally, regardless of race, color or creed (and some were beginning to add of gender).

Almost everyone in Australia believed in this ideal, at least in theory. So it is hardly surprising that the New Class still believe in it, at least in theory. The problem is that it is hard to claim moral superiority on grounds of such a common ideal.

The left-wing and tertiary-educated elite was now quite used to the fruits of power, yet already troubled by increasing evidence that it was just as corruptible as any previous establishment, and that it might soon lose favor with the electorate. In the resulting search for moral self-assurance and legitimacy, radical egalitarianism was the virtue it eventually focused on.

Why? It seems that the divide between left and right, liberal and conservative, is a persistent if fuzzy human tendency. It may be the characteristic mild schizophrenia of our species. And yet, most of the qualities that mark this divide between left and right "Both idealism and self-advancement combined to produce ... believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views."are as morally neutral as those that differentiate, say, French culture from Greek culture. For example, tending to believe or disbelieve in the perfectability of human nature is not of itself a moral position; nor is the tendency to visualize oneself as a rebellious youth rather than as a controlling parent. The one quality by way of which the left can plausibly claim a specifically moral superiority is its concern with equality - its tendency to side with the underdog.

Before long some politicians and media people who were members or aspirants to this successful class were prepared to side with such underdogs as illegal immigrants, and even against the clear interests and beliefs of their own constituents and nation. Both idealism and self-advancement now combined to produce the mild paradoxes of an establishment that favors anti-establishment sentiments and styles in the arts (and often elsewhere), of believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views, and of an elite whose claim to privileged status is based quite largely on anti-elitism.

Yet, even a decade ago it was getting harder and harder, at least in Australia, to find true racist rednecks against whom the no-longer-very-young, left-wing, educated classes could rebel - especially after those classes had been running the government and much of the media for years.

Their answer was a trick borrowed, I believe unconsciously, from the McCarthy-ites of the 1950s, and from their spiritual cousins, the Stalinists of the same era. It involves what Freudians call "projection." You project upon some real or invented victim-class your own secret guilts. If you were one of Stalin's henchmen, your secret guilt was an aspiration to privileged middle-class status in a very poor country. Down with the Kulaks! If you were someone like J. Edgar Hoover you could project upon others your own betrayals of public trust and public interest. Down with the communists!

You might then encourage the media to work up an intense obsessive concern about this evil, a concern which contains its own built-in, self-reinforcing loop. The pursuit of communist conspiracy (or in the USSR of a capitalist-revisionist conspiracy) became so omnipresent and all-encompassing that it readily discovered all the evidence it needed to sustain and even intensify its own belief.

By the 1980s, if "racists" (i.e. anti-egalitarians) had not existed it would have been necessary for the meritocracy to invent them. (In Australia, where most ethnic leaders were Europeans and thus of the same Caucasian race as the population that had invited them in, they used the term "racist" just as freely, even though the differences at issue were not racial but cultural - unless one believes in sub-racial classifications.) For some members of the New Class the term "racist" became a way to disparage anyone who believed in "inappropriate" meritocracies and elites - i.e., ones other than those by which they themselves were sustained.

Their other great trick, also consciously imitated from the McCarthy era, was that when you need to enhance your own moral position you discover a conspiracy against some widely-revered public virtue - a virtue to which you can easily lay claim. Thus, by imagining (or exaggerating) a communist conspiracy the McCarthy-ites turned their own minimal and commonplace virtue - that of allegiance to the democratic rule of law and to the legitimacy of the American state - into grounds for a claim of moral superiority, even of heroism.

How could Betts' New Class, the new ruling bureaucratic class of the 1980s and 1990s, turn their own minimal and commonplace virtue of believing in the brotherhood of man (the siblinghood of humanity) into a special virtue that justified their rule? The high immigration policy, toward which some special interest groups were pushing them, inadvertently supplied an answer.

High immigration alienated and indeed damaged the interests of the non-tertiary-educated majority, yet it did so in ways that were deniable. A media blitz, started or helped by special interest groups, soon turned high immigration into a symbol for acceptance of human rights. Once this assumption was swallowed it became clear that those who opposed high immigration - the majority of ordinary citizens - were wallowing in moral error, denying human equality, and in dire need of "guidance" from an elite. ("How satisfactory!" purrs the Mikado in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.)

Initially high immigration had little cost to the New Class. It wasn't usually their jobs the immigrant workers were after, and poverty-related crime took place mainly in suburbs far from their own. For those who had hitched their bureaucratic careers to ethnic programs or multicultural policies, high immigration was pure profit. They could preach against "selfishness" and take the moral credit to themselves, sending the bill to the ordinary citizen. Like the Unjust Steward in the New Testament parable they had found a failsafe way to buy moral credit with someone's else's money (Luke 16 2-4).

The New Class tend to be internationalists (for a mix of idealistic and business reasons) who are strongly opposed to the evergreen appeal of nationalism. Worldwide, it would seem that nation-states based on ethnicity are being formed at a faster rate than at any time since just after World War I.

Ironically, the internationalists soon found themselves in alliance with those who want to Balkanize, multiculturize or racialize the nation-state. (Remember how often multiculturalism was associated with globalization in the discussions about NAFTA?) By a further, now familiar, paradox the cry of "racism" became a trademark of both the globalist New Class and of its allies, the racialists. Some members of the New Class discovered that high immigration, like some of the extreme forms of multiculturalism, could be a way to bring down the nation-state and undercut its loyal supporters. It was twice blessed it could enhance one's status as an international high flyer and simultaneously as a noble fighter for the underdog.

The New Class globalists found themselves in effective alliance with leaders of certain immigrant groups who were practicing globalists only so long as the rhetoric of globalism could help them increase their "market share" and hence their power within the country. Some of these leaders are chauvinists who play the politics of ethnic pride in a way to resemble the Nineteenth century colonials "We do have the right to enter your country, and on our own terms, because we need it and you don't really own it; and in any case we are doing you a favor by adding an admixture of our wonderfully rich culture to your sterile, narrow and un-diverse Anglo culture."

The new politically correct line on immigration - much like the plethora of new "culturally sensitive" terms with which the ordinary citizen could hardly keep up - was one more way for the New Class to assert its leadership over the insensitive masses, on whose behalf they had shouted in the streets barely twenty years earlier.

And the fact that there was popular resistance to high immigration was reassuring to the New Class. It enabled them to ward off any nagging doubts that they might have lost their radical edge and suffered the common fate of aging into conservatism. If the New Class could not stay forever young they could at least stay forever radical. Some indeed seemed to desire even more public resistance to their ideas. Mark Ulmann recently accused one group in Australia of being "desperate for a witch to burn."

In high immigration and multiculturalism the New Class had found its difference from the bulk of society, and what seemed to many of them a legitimizing moral principle. They could deliver expansive population growth with the steadily rising property values that meant billions of dollars to some of their friends in business. They could extend contempt to all those excluded classes that had failed to advance like them through the mandatory tertiary education into the new enlightenment.

From patronizing a people's culture it can be a short step (as the history of imperialism shows) to denying their aspirations and interests. It soon became politically correct for the New Class to deny that there was such a thing as an Australian or American cultural identity, other than a multicultural one. This made it easier to deny that the American or Australian people had any exclusive right to their own country, or even that there was such a thing as a cohesive Australian or American people. If the nation does not really exist, then why should not its elected and appointed servants sell out its interests in favor of a global one?

That's the story/theory. How well does it fit the facts - in Canada? in the United States? in Australia? in New Zealand?

Notes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York, Seaburg Press, 1979.

Katharine Betts, Ideology and Immigration: Australia 1976 to 1987, Melbourne University Press, 1988; "The Environmental Movement, New Class, and Immigration Reform," Papers of the 1993 BIR Conference: The Politics of Immigration, available from the Department of Immigration, PO Box 25, Woden ACT. I am indebted to Dr. Betts for a number of insights woven into my "story."

See also: Forum discussion on Andrew Bartlett's blog in response to this article commencing 5 Nov 09, "Population is destiny" editorial in the Australian of 19 Sep 09, Population boom 'a recipe for tragedy' in News Ltd Online of 18 Sep 09, "35 million Australians? Start preparing now" editorial in the SMH of 18 Sep 09.

The consequential problems of maximising immigration intake and associated encouragement of multiculturalism should not be a race issue, but they are unavoidably about displacement of those already here and the unjust pressures of 'dissimilation' (...causing the loss or abandonment of culture or cultural characteristics of a people, society) If Australian's by birth should feel pushed aside by the current flood from immigration, consider what 220 years of colonisation has aflicted Australia's Aboriginal peoples!

If the Australian dominant culture accepts its legimate sovereignty out of historic invasion by armed attrition then these days should Australian-descendants and new borns accept as legimate sovereignty right those arrived through mass immigration? What if the new arrivals outnumber the indigenous and with birth rights? Do sheer numbers mean they have the numbers to overrule and shape Australia?

I could use a specific ethnic example, but then my argument could be dismissed as racist, and I am not. So let me use the example of a non-human invasive species, a species of bird, the Common Myna and the adverse impact it has caused to native birds.

"Common Mynas were brought to Melbourne in 1862 to control insect pests in market gardens, but even though they were not successful at this, they were taken from Melbourne to many other places in Australia, including north Queensland, where it was thought they would control insect pests of sugar cane. Cane Toads were introduced to Queensland for the same reason and have also become pests. Common Mynas have established feral populations in many parts of the world.

Common Mynas can be an economic problem because they damage fruit and grain crops and their noise and smell can be annoying where they are in large numbers.

Perhaps the Common Myna’s most serious “crime” is that it competes aggressively with native wildlife for nesting hollows. Mynas reduce biodiversity by fighting for hollows with native birds like Rosellas, destroying their eggs and chicks and stopping them from breeding. Mynas are capable of evicting even large birds such as Kookaburras and Dollar Birds from their nests. They also evict small mammals, like Sugar Gliders from hollows – which commonly means a death sentence for the Gliders because they have nowhere else to go. It is not uncommon for groups of mynas to mob other birds and mammals like possums.

In the ACT and some other places in Australia Mynas have invaded woodland habitats. There is not much woodland left in Australia and this additional threat to native wildlife can be a serious problem for biodiversity conservation.

Feral Common Mynas are a serious problem for biodiversity conservation in many countries other than Australia. In the year 2000, Common Mynas were listed by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as one of the World’s 100 Worst Invasive Species

Ironically, Common Mynas have not been formally recognised as a problem by conservation agencies in Australia, except in the ACT, where the ACT Government has directed resources to seeking solutions."[SOURCE: Australia National University].

"The Common Myna is an omnivorous open woodland bird with a strong territorial instinct, the Myna has adapted extremely well to urban environments. The Myna has been introduced in many other parts of the world and its distribution range is on the increase to an extent that in 2000 the IUCN Species Survival Commission (IUCN) declared it as one of the just three birds among the World's 100 worst invasive species. It is a serious threat to the ecologies of Australia.

"The common myna thrives in urban and suburban environments; in Canberra, for instance, 110 common mynas were released between 1968 and 1971. By 1991, common myna population density in Canberra averaged 15 birds per square kilometer. Only three years later, a second study found an average population density of 75 birds per square kilometre in the same area.

"In Australia, the Common Myna is an invasive pest. They are now often the predominant bird in urban areas all along the East coast. Currently, common myna populations in Australia are concentrated along the eastern coast around Sydney and its surrounding suburbs." They have also spread into urban Victoria and Queensland.

Compared to native hollow-nesting species, the common myna is extremely aggressive, and breeding males will actively defend areas ranging up to 0.83 hectares in size. This aggressiveness has enabled the common myna to displace many breeding pairs of native hollow-nesters, thereby reducing their reproductive success. In particular, the reproduction rates of native hollow-nesting parrots in the bush land of eastern Australia have been reduced by up to 80% by the common myna. It is known to maintain up to two roosts simultaneously, and both male and female common mynas will fiercely protect both roosts at all times, leading to further exclusion of native birds."Source: Wikipedia

So these species of birds displace native bird colonies and are quick to colonise.

Displacement is the key problem associated with the Common Myna. It is also the key problem that emerges when migrants CHOOSE not to acculturate into their new country, but instead CHOOSE to maintain their existing culture, language, customs, traditions and values. When mass immigration policy stops at the airport, cultural pluralism naturally establishes. It is primitive understandable self-preservation. The larger the immigrant group, the more dominant and more likely to cluster geographically together, establish a distinct territory, change their surroundings and recreate familiarities of the old country. Locals become outnumbered, see their amenity and cultural environment altering. The locality becomes a Chinatown, a Spanish Quarter, a Little Lebanon, a synagogue is built, a islamic school is built, the burkha walks the streets of say Wagga Wagga, the local mayor who has Iranian ancestry then calls for sharia law to be introduced. This is an extreme example, but it highlights what unchecked cultural pluralism can lead to. It can lead to deculturation of the native species.

And ethnic tensions in urban Australia have indeed increased as a consequence of federal flood gate immigration without an overriding population policy. Australian governments continue to abrogate their responsibility for social assimilation and social cohesion flow on needs of immigration. The 2005 Cronulla racial riots and the recent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney are harbingers of ethnic unrest that could escalate if the underlying root causes are not addressed.

This is not to say that members of distinct groups within a society should not be allowed to maintain and celebrate their different cultures or cultural identities. This is not to say that a society should not extend tolerance to distinct ethnic and religious groups in order to promote social cohesion. And do we continue to marginalise the traditional Australians, who were here first, to third world status?

So is it appropriate that immigrants within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities. Many third world countries have maintained cultural pluralism under a 'caste' system. None has worked without ethnic tension and periodically descending into civil unrest as a direct consequence. The issue is do doubt complex, but cannot be ignored.
The dominant culture can't have its cake and eat it too! If enough Chinese, Indians or Lilliputians or whomever immigrate, they may become eventually the dominant culture in Australia.

Multiculturalism theory seeks the ideal of promoting acceptance of various cultural divisions for the sake of diversity, as if being likened to the ideals of biodiversity. Good will to all men etc, etc. Wonderful in theory!

An so immigration is embraced and like the United States, Australia becomes a 'melting pot' for many diverse culture, races and religions all living harmoniously. Heterogeneous societies become more homogeneous - a utopian love fest! Until someone wants special treatment and cries accusations of minority discrimination!

Whereas 'cultural assimilation' or 'immigrant assimilation' is the adoption by an individual/immigrant of some or all aspects of a dominant culture, typically by quarantining immigrants to ensure comparable socioeconomic status, reducing spatial concentration of any one group, local language attainment, and through intermarriage.

But what is Australia's dominant culture. How do we define it. What are its core principles and values? Do we want to preserve it? Such core issues require broad public debate to clarify and crystalise, before Australia can move from multiculturalism to immigration assimilation, if indeed it is prepared to.

Until this important debate is brought to the mainstream, Australia's record unchecked and unsupported immigration risks exacerbating costs on our triple bottom line and steady dissimilation.

I have been silent for a while, because there were not much news worth reporting, aside from the usual Italian obsessions with Sex and Politics, such as "Have the new pretty and young female Ministers of the Berlusconi Government bartered their professional position for those of a sexual nature with the Boss?"

These questions seem far from the tragic reality of the moment (or maybe a welcome and psychologically needed diversion), reflecting a desire to score points - for sex equality, justice, integrity, etc.- by whoever is NOT in power.

However, going through the site www.italianiliberi.it, an association whose objective is to preserve the identity of Italian unique culture and historic memory, against the European Union power, I came across some pertinent articles that I would like to share with you.

We, at Candobetter, may be familiar with the genre, and this is a variation on the theme of a wholesale loss of European identity and of national territory to an apparently non-stop alien invasion. The main sufferers are the countries that have created the European Union, not knowing that they were to renounce their cultural heritage.

I have chosen for your attention, two articles that express anguish at the process of collapse of a cherished traditional way of life.

They are the Italian paleontologist Ida Magli and the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, some of whose ideas are convergent, though Magli, called the successor to the late journalist and writer Oriana Fallaci, is more virulent in her judgement. Her more Italo-centric article is entitled:

"Why the left wishes the end of Italians?"

Here we need some clarifications. The Left Parties in Italy are all pro-immigration, and they assume that all the anti-immigration stances are motivated by racism, while most of the times are a reaction to real economic distress and just as real social insecurity brought about by unseemly and unlawful customs.

Magli tries to analyse the reason why the Italian "left" so much hates its traditions, its ancestors, it history, its language, to the point of wishing their annihilation.

The policy of what in effect should be described as "open borders" or "open season on Italian soil, security, education and cultural heritage" is anti-economic and destructive. But rationality is not something that animates politics:

"The violence with which the Left insists on an immigrant invasion, will have only one result: the future end of the Italian civilisation. They know it, even if they pretend not to know it....The social sciences, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, ethnology, etc., have definitely demonstrated that what guides the behaviour of people and of individuals is determined by a complex environmental web, where language, customs, religion, tradition, history, are united in what we brazenly call "culture"...But this understanding has been suddenly erased, when it was decided to formalise the old project of an European Union, which has actually eliminated the awareness of its own history, to substitute in its place the fusion of every existing population on Earth... But we know that only "the people"are responsible for passing on their culture to keep it alive. The immigrants will keep and transmit their own, and rightly so."

If Magli asks herself why the Left is so keen on destroying our culture to introduce Multiculturalism - and the resulting chaos - Finkielkraut gives a convincing answer, coated in ironic terms:

"Do Europeans still live in Europe?"

We all have the same sensation: sorting out the question about what is Europe, nobody seems to know anymore.

"...an impressive number of opinion makers, journalists, citizens, politicians, affirm that there's no answer, or, better still, no answer is required. Europe, they say, is nothing tangible, and this Nothing is not an handicap, but its destiny, its vocation, its latest and cardinal virtue.

The French philosopher Jean-Marc Ferry defines Europe as an identity whose principle is to be open to other identities..."

He is saying that its identity is not to have one. To be stranger to itself. Unknowable and unloved.

"This way of thinking" continues Finkielkraut " is due to the trauma of Auschwitz. The apocalyptic form that has assumed the exclusion of the Other in death camps, has to be rescued by the birth of a different idea of humanity, which cannot be divided by any interior dissension. And Europe, the very place of origin of the crime, must give an example and atone for it by destroying that place ..."

This thesis is very interesting and it may have truth in it. It explains also the furious debates over any type of laws regarding normal duty by foreigners required to adapt to the host country (the obligation to remove the veil for identification purposes, special language classes for children of immigrants, regulation of gypsy camp sites and the measures against gypsies who force their children to beg and steal, etc.,) criticised as human rights abuses and latent xenophobia, when not openly accused of racism. In this case, the rhetoric raises its ugly head and we hear screams of: Nazis! Fascists!"

Another example is the ideological debate on admitting Turkey into the Union, debate which assumes a surreal character, as it refers to a country that has, in past centuries

been an enemy of Europe and its ideals.

"To ask if Turkey is part of Europe - or if this country is at its margins or been part of the experiences that have moulded the Old Continent and given its particular physiognomy: Christianity, Renaissance, Reform, Enlightenment, Romanticism - means to forget that Europe itself is not anymore part of Europe because it has cut itself from its sanguinary past... I am Nothing therefore I am Everything, seems to affirm the post-national, post-European Europe... This Europe of the Memory has become a Tabula Rasa. But another modality exists: to live in the duty of preserving the Culture... Man lives in society not because he inherits it from other men, but because he commemorates other men. To commemorate means to revive what is great in our dead..."

But this type of memory is not anymore practised. If Europe grows away from itself without looking at its past, it is not just because of the memory of past atrocities - and which country or society is immune from violence ? - but because, alas, culture, this great transmitter of values, the heritage of our humanism, has no more importance.

In this context of de-Europisation, we're facing not only a lax attitude towards immigration on part of leftist Italian politicians, but a general complicity in erasing national traditions and sense of belonging, everywhere on the whole European territory. Immigrants know that they can count on the sense of guilt which confuses the society they are prepared to invade. They know, in spite of government's declarations and good intention, there is the countereffect of a political left which, in the name of virtuous sentiments, sabotages every attempt at establishing some sort of order.

It is too late: the European Parliament and the European Commission have decreed the death by stealth of the Old Continent. One day at the time, one more Mosque, one more more Rom child forced to beg in the street instead of going to school. because--as the Italian Supreme Court has admitted--begging is part of their culture and deserves respect, one more under-age Nigerian prostitute, one less barrier of the Schengen treatise to border trafficking: it happens all here, in front of our very eyes, but then we are impelled to look away. It is all too disturbing, what can we do?

Welcome to the Happy Realm of the Ostrich!

Comment: The above article was originally posted on 3 December 2008. I don't regard the cause as being hopeless as Marisa seems to. It should still be possible for Europeans to find a way to stop their becoming demographically overwhelmed if they stand up for their rights assertively. Perhaps some pragmatic compromise can be made even with the non-Europeans in their midst as it would not even be in their interests to allow Europe's population to continue to grow indefinitely. The article "Why U.S. immigration reformers can still remain hopeful" of 13 Nov 08 by Leon Kolankiewicz may point to a way forward. - JS

Thursday 9th August readers of the Italian papers were awakening to 'wonderful' news: the 'crisis' of the empty cradles is coming to an end, at least in the industrial area of Lombardia, north/west of Italy.

Men also breed

In spite of the economic crisis, women have started to breed again. By the way, I don’t understand why we refer only to women, as men are extraneous to births. Maybe we should rather refer to : couples ?

The news, which I want to share with you all, is that storks have been very active between July and August this year: there’s’ been an unexpected influx of babies. The official statistics counted 4000 new babies, fortunately boys more than girls (have we contracted the Chinese syndrome?). It’s a record! The feared demographic decline is yesterday’s history: now we can look forward to a more crowded future.

Another hole in demographic transition dogma

Contrary to the prevalent dogma, the new trend is concurrent with a depression in the economy, which should- in theory- give rise to a mode of pessimism not conducive to breeding, which is an optimistic sort of activity. Statistical analysis concur in concluding that young people cannot find jobs or housing, prerequisites for create families and prefer to take the last advantage of the willing Mama’s care.

Muslim immigrants barred from education

Well, immigration helps to explain the upward trend. The disparate ethnic groups that animate our urban landscapes, have one unifying trait: a tradition of large patriarchal families, which preserve the role of womanhood as breeder. Indeed, the Muslim wives, who are the most numerous ethnic group, have no life outside the home and have no use for learning Italian as any form of education is barred from them.

Besides, immigrants found better opportunities in the new land and see in the birth of children the fulfillment of sacrifices and hopes.

Indeed, in 2007 in the northern city of Milano, there were 9156 Italian children and 2709 from immigrant parents. The more numerous of them are Egyptians, Philippinos, Chinese. And the wealth of such variegated multi-ethnic society is represented by 65 nationalities.

Italian birth rate affected by immigrant competition?

Maybe spurred by competition or the forces of example and imitation, Italian households are also participating in this newfound fecundity. Economic recession, social difficulties, the costs of raising a child, were presented as factors that lately have limited the Italian fertility rate, ignoring previous theories ( the demographic transition) which explained that couples, dazed by the lure of wealth and sexual liberation, choose to produce fewer children.

It may be time to deviate from concentrating on a purely economic vision for human behaviour. The new demographic growth may reflect different needs: deliverance from material constraint and the the search for affective relationships .

Economists optimism misplaced

I do not share the demographers, politicians and various commentators’ optimism for the current demographic growth.

It has more than one negative result: beside the inexorable environmental damage imposed on an already hyper-dense landscape, whose ecological degradation dates back to the first human settlements. It will mean social/cultural and economic consequences. It will create on the one hand a fractured society, and on the other, a growing demand for more government – assisted measures: bonuses, more nurseries, flexibility of working hours for women.

Do not get me wrong, I have nothing against immigrants. There are numerous criminals among them, but the majority are hard working people, more so than the locals. I am not impressed either with different skin colour.

And I have nothing against children: I love them, I am a sucker for the smile of little babies.

These are brave and generous sentiments.

Invasion by any other name, such as Babel

But a massive, though peaceful, invasion of people, who have diverse hygienic habits, customs, ethics, degrees of instruction, etc., differ not only from us, but also from each other, and cannot be easily absorbed into the fabric of the receiving society. God, so the story of the Babel tower goes, destroyed an ancient civilisation by confounding the languages, (Confusion of Tongues) to the point that nobody understood what the others was saying, and therefore couldn’t live together.

This is a powerful metaphor, used by the language critic George Steiner, for incommunicability of culture, which reflects the cultural and social disintegration of Italian society– and perhaps in a not-far-off- future, the whole of Europe . It is not the fault of the immigrants. After all, if you think that your life would be better off somewhere else, why the hell should you worry if your arrival is disrupting someone else’s life, so long as yours is comparatively improved?

It is up to the Italian government to regulate this disorderly influx reminiscent of a new Babel Tower, where not only languages are at odds with each others, but the thought processes which these languages define are out of line with our millenary culture. It is a sort of cupio dissolvi, a death wish, that inspires confused Italian legislation. The Government is not sure if and when and how it should accommodate such a growing number of immigrants.

Ancestor amnesia and Levi Strauss

Sadly, it seems that we do not believe anymore in our cultural heritage. The revolution of political correctness has swept away layers and layers of awareness and pride . The anthropologist Levi Strauss’s influence has successfully brainwashed us by tales that our Western civilisation is no better than the customs of a primitive tribe. The education of our children has become a shameful, perfunctory exercise, where programs change continually, teachers are badly paid and below standard, discipline inexistent and teaching is no more the way of connecting the past with the present. The interpretation of globalisation, as a sort of badly digested accumulation of generalised knowledge cribbed from the Net, where even the language has undergone a standardisation of vocabulary and syntax, is culminating in a void: we do not know who we are. On top of this dissolution of national identity, we receive industrial doses of institutionalised jargon and clichés. The unregulated arrival of people, who know nothing about our past traditions, is disastrous in a country like Italy, which, after many colonisations, already has such a weak sense of identity.

To be more specific: What will be the fate of our monuments and works of art, in the hand of semiliterate incomers of such alien backgrounds ?

Decline of teaching standards and rewards

Of course, everybody has a potential educability; but there are classes, as in the Milano hinterland, composed by a majority of children of foreign origin, and the Italian teachers themselves have no confidence in the value of own culture, confused between the notion of preserving the children’s ethnic diversity, and the need to prepare them to be Italian citizens: what will happen next ?

Secondly, the other dangerous development of the baby boom is the ever-expanding request for state-help in the “free” choice of motherhood.

Feminism

Here I step into another minefield, even hotter than the subject of immigration - feminism.

We have been told – another tale- that women who work do not make babies. Female education was presented as having triple benefits: 1) it liberated them from inferior status and offer them the same intellectual freedom , 2) it was good for the economy ( Okay, old-style economy) ,3) and it was the best contraceptive. According to these views: ” … a high return to a female market world generates high participation, a lower demand for children and higher attainment for these children” (Population Matters, Oxford University Press).

Unfortunately, the reality is different, because the state has decided to interfere in the working of the “invisible hand”.

Statistical evidence contradicts such beliefs. In France, for example, the high participation of women in the workforce – 60,6% of women are working- has resulted in a bigger contribution to the demographic growth. The equation is: more births = more women at work. Sociologists and demographers are banging their heads over this phenomenon, which contradicts all received ideas. Finally they found out why: France’s government spends for the family 2,8% against only 1% by that mean Italian government. Entire pages of Italian newspapers are dedicated to this discovery, which represents a humiliating set back for Italy in the rivalry with its neighbour, which has achieved the record among European countries of 800.000 newborns a year. It doesn’t matter if half of the children are born out of wedlock- this is a problem for later, when the cute babies, reach adolescent status and start rioting, taking drugs and wielding knives.

The 'international' Anglophone press, posing as if they were actually relaying official EU policy, have for some time pretended that a democratic competition is underway among European countries, concentrating on who gives the best deal for working women, as such policies will result in puffing up their GNP and a parallel increment of the future workforce.

They imply that the European Union has one stated objective: two mandatory children per woman. In Italy we have finally reached 1,34 (thanks to immigration!). This corporatised media complains that we are still at a primitive stage, as regard support of working mothers. We want the same French treatment: long paternity and maternity leave, nurseries a gogo’, fiscal deductions according to the number of children, more deductions for education , A godsend. A child becomes a family business, a financial investment. But a burden for the State and its citizens. I do not know why I should pay for other people’s expenditure, which as result, will only damage the environment where I live.

If having babies is a free choice, it is the responsibility of those who made them, not mine.

A child is not a toy or a status symbol. It is a job imbued with absolute dedication to the emotional formation and happiness of a human being The first years of a child’s life cannot be delegated, especially not to a state-paid practitioner, because the child’s sense of belonging and affective development will suffer. Children’s experiences last a lifetime and parents have the duty of caring for them, during the most vulnerable period which takes place before six. Those are most critical years for neurological development.

Baby brains

Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph, author of Raising Babies: Should Under 3s Go To Nursery? advocates that parents should stay home with their kids for as long as possible, because the brain grows in response to love and affection.

If a woman will find that to stay at home looking after a small child is not her calling, if she feels frustrated, bored, and it is not able to see the beauty and interest inherent in her function, she should not have children. If the government offers her all sort of facilities, in order that she can have her cake and eat it, well, the result is that we will have more and more children. Children relegated in nurseries across the country, looked after by other women, maybe from immigrant minorities that offer themselves at low wages, in an endless circular motion of mothers-children-mothers of other children who are looked after by other mothers … the whole economy expanding and swell at the cost of a child’s psychological deprivation.

Il Fattore D

In his new book Il Fattore D”, Maurizio Ferrera, professor of Political theory of Milano University, lays down the economic program for female workforce expansion: the GNP. Every woman entering the labour market will create another 15 places in the sector of family help and correlated functions. Other women, of course. The employment of 100,000 women will create therefore another 15,000 more employees, and at the same time it will inflate the GNP by 1/3. Has anybody thought about all the series of consequences derived by certain profound social changes ? The law of the unexpected consequences is always at work.

Now, I know that many will object: poor women won’t be able to have babies. I suggest some stay-at-home voucher for poor families who would devote themselves to bringing up a child for the first years of its life, in exchange for further part time education of the mother, after the child is at school.

Instinctive

But the urge to reproduce is instinctive and doesn’t need too many incentives.

Lately, Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute wrote a book, with the hopeful title: “What women want”: hopeful because it assumed that they wanted fewer children. But what if they want more of them ? A man never knows. In old Europe, already full to the brim and soon to be overflowing, it looks like we will see the awakening of that dormant impulse, which will dumfound all the sages’ predictions.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

This commentary on Mark Krikorian's latest book on immigration is typical of James Schipper's fresh and independent outlook. He shows the problem of assimilation from a different angle. It is not simply a matter of "too many too soon". Other factors come into play as well. Why is integration of newcomers important from an environmental perspective? Dr. William Rees, co-author of Our Ecological Footprint, said that social cohesion will be necessary to meet the upcoming ecological challenges that will face us. - Tim Murray

Hello. I just received and started to read “The New Case Against Immigration” by Mark Krikorian. His central thesis is that mass immigration is undesirable, not so much because immigration today are quite different from those in the past, but because the US and the world are different.

One difference that he mentions is that modern means of communication and transportation make it much easier for immigrants to remain in contact with their country of origin and practice what he calls trans-nationalism, which hinders their assimilation.

I think that the problem of trans-nationalism is vastly overstated. What matters more for purposes of assimilation are the frequency of contacts between immigrants and the natives of the new country than those between immigrants and their country of origin.

Let's take two Polish immigrants: Karol and Tadeusz. Both speak Polish at home, are members of a Polish club and a local Polish Catholic church, phone Poland twice a week, e-mail people in Poland regularly, read Polish newspapers on-line, receive a Polish TV channel at home and visit Poland every summer for 4 weeks. We can say that they have not been cut off from Poland.

Karol lives in a Polish-dominated neighborhood, his co-workers are mainly Polish and his children go to a school where over 50% of the pupils are children of Polish immigrants. Tadeusz, by contrast, lives in a neighborhood which has only a few Polish families, his co-workers are all non-immigrants and his children go to a school where there are only a few Polish children. I would say that Tadeusz is subject to constant assimilatory pressure because for 48 weeks per year most of his contacts outside the home are with natives. The same applies to his children.

It may be useful to make a distinction between additive assimilation and substitutive assimilation (my terms). With additive assimilation, the immigrant masters the language and culture of the new country without losing those of the old country. With substitutive assimilation, the language and culture of the new country replace those of old country.

I don't see a problem with additive assimilation as long as it is not carried forward to the second, third, fourth, etc generation. Of course, this refers only to objective assimilation, that is, mastery of the language and familiarity with the culture of the new country. Subjective assimilation, that is, going native, feeling like natives and identifying totally with them, is another matter. I would say that very few adults immigrants, regardless of circumstances, attain full subjective assimilation.

It should be pointed out that modern means of communication can also favor assimilation. TV and radio from the new country can enter the immigrant home at each hour of the day. I know a Greek woman whose TV watching essentially consists of a channel from Greece. When I asked her once whether her children watch that channel too, she laughed. "Are you kidding", she replied. This woman speaks nearly perfect English, so seems to be a case of additive assimilation.

In Paraná, my home state in Brazil, there were dozens of Polish colonies, many of which remained Polish for over a century. This occured, not because those Poles had such frequent contacts with Poland, which of course they didn't, but because they had such infrequent contacts with native Brazilians. They tended to live in largely self-sufficient rural communities with their own church and school.

In Southern Russia, the Germans imported by Catherine the Great in the second half of the 18th century resisted Russification for many generation.Mind you, many if not most of them were Mennonites. In Eastern Europe, many Jews lived in separate Yiddish-speaking communities for several centuries. I would say that those three examples illustrate the importance of contacts with the host population for assimilation.

One important difference between the world today and the world of 1900 is that schooling is much more prolonged. This favors rather than hinders assimilation. When children of immigrants have to spend 12 years in schools of the host country, they are are subject to constant assimilatory pressure, unless the children from one immigrant group are the overwhelming majority at the school.

It is generally assumed that Hispanic immigrants in the US are the least assimilated. If that is true, it isn't because they have more frequent contacts with the homeland than other immigrants but because their large numbers and their concentration in a few states allow them to have contacts mainly with their own kind.

The lesson in the above is very simple. If you want your immigrants to be assimilated, don't import too many of them from one country or from countries that are similar, such as the Spanish-American countries.

James Schipper is a resident of London, Ontario (August 2/08)

Submitted by Tim Murray, Director Immigration Watch Canada www.immigrationwatchcanada.org

Being half-Icelandic in background I'd like to believe in intrinsic Norse wisdom but …

1. The reason my great grandfather's trade (carpenter) was so revered was because Icelanders deforested their country (like the English).
2. Icelanders are worse than Kiwis for being travellers. They are dumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in their constant trips to hot climes.
3. They still think its their cultural right to hunt endangered whales.
4. I think they are building or have built with big corporate dough a smelter with terrible implications for the atmosphere.

They are a wealthy people, but they pay a big price for that. As Scandinavians, they simply out-work most of the human race. A CBC documentary compared the Newfoundland economy with that of Iceland and really couldn't come up with anything much more than the fact that Celts are lazy drunks and Icelanders are hard working drunks. Work hard, Play Hard. Their hygiene and housekeeping standards reflect that too.

Both Newfoundland and Iceland are big islands dependant on fishery except now the Newfies have oil money to help. But the difference is that the Icelanders know that if they don't work hard, they starve, with no one to bail them out.

Newfies have been able to rely on constant welfare inputs from Ottawa and took on an Aboriginal work ethic. Whole joke books have been published exploiting that character trait. Except it is PC to tell Newfie jokes (the jokes are published in Newfoundland) but First Nations jokes are off-side. With the Alberta oil economy to lure them out, this welfare culture, five decades old, is disappearing.

Now Newfoundland and Iceland are both beginning to resemble each other more, especially in their disregard of the environment.

Other interesting parallels, both cultures, Celtic and Norse, place a huge value on literary accomplishments, writers and poets are highly esteemed and political debate is a pastime. Both societies boast a tradition of feisty women, but Icelandic women are actually more independent because they broke free of the church. They go on strike once a year and shut the whole country down to prove their importance to the economy.

Because it has always been a socialized welfare state with free health, education, employment and child care benefits and total female employment participation, taxes are sky high and inflation as well. This latter fact is something you should reflect upon. Because double-digit inflation discourages savings so much—in fact it makes it nonsensical to put aside anything—people are encouraged to be hyper-consumers.

They run out and buy things and blow everything they have on cars, clothes and trips. Live for today has always been the motto. So being seen in fancy clothes in a smart car and in a well-furnished apartment becomes a cultural requirement. I would be looked upon as a hillbilly. Also the pressure to work long hours at two jobs—not an Icelandic phenomena exclusively obviously—just to get the money to pay the huge rent and grocery bills ($5 for a lettuce) creates the stress that makes young people and everyone turn to alcoholism big time.

Promiscuous sex is also a cultural trademark with all its emotional and physical costs. It is like when socialist Gunnar Myrdal was criticizing the Swedish welfare state. Whatever model of society we design, whatever set of problems we solve, a new set arises with the better model. There are always trade-offs. But somehow the grass is always greener in other countries.

BTW, my mother's cousin, Helgi Seljun was a Communist deputy (Peoples Party) deputy in the Icelandic parliament. There were 7 parties at the time and I think 5 of them were left of centre. Today there would be a very interesting coalition I'm sure. The president I believe is still a woman whom I saw in Vancouver about a decade ago I think.

One positive statement I would like to make about the land of my mother—and obviously don't circulate this—is that they have always pursued true National Socialist_#main-fn1">1 objectives. They know they are keepers of a precious culture that is 1200 years old and have no right to let that be absorbed or diluted by the influx of other cultures.

As matter of fact, whenever a foreign word invades the language, a special government commission replaces that word with a Norse neologism. Anyone who becomes an Icelandic citizen through marriage must change his or her name to old Norse names. Thus the language spoken today would have been entirely intelligible to Eric the Red a millenia ago, and he could have read the Icelandic Bible that sits in my living room.

Icelandic libraries are full of Norse sagas, poems, ghost stories and debates. The food they eat is second to none. Fish and lamb and all the deserts my grandmother made for me, and coffee made like no one else did. Only you hold the sugar cubes in your tongue when you drink it. Point being, there is nothing “deficient” in Icelandic culture that needs “enrichment” from the immigration of other cultures that would threaten it and also rob the people of their irreplaceable low-density living.

Tim Murray, 27 Dec 2007
Quadra Island, British Columbia, Canada

See also The Australian's April fool's joke

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1.#main-fn1-txt">↑ This means ‘national socialist’ in the earlier sense, which pre-dated the appropriation of that term in the 1920's by Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Party.