dystopia

Word is that Melbourne is getting its 1 million more ten years early and that the Vic Government is in a panic because it has no idea how many permanent new guests have taken up its foolhardy invitations to come and stay. Who the hell is responsible?

Melbourne 2008: Living in a destruction zone

Once Melbourne number plates bore the motto, "The Garden State."
Then we got Kennett's formula, "Victoria on the Move." It sounded like some kind of unnecessary laxative, prescribed by a mad surgeon. Kennett tried to beat population up and, unfortunately for us, stopped the Victorian diaspora to Queensland. I guess he prepared the way for what Bracks did to Melbourne. Him and the editors and senior writers of the Fairfax and Murdoch press, who nagged shamelessly for population growth.

Since the Bracks Population Summit (2002) the Victorian government have ranted continuously and illogically about how we 'have' to have 1 million more Victorians. For local councils, population Projections exist in two forms:

Council data only go to 2011
ABS "Victoria in the Future" (VIF) series go to 2031.
But ...
The ABS has just discontinued VIF figures in circumstances which could mean that Victoria's actual growth has overshot both target and projections and has shot into the stratosphere. The word is that we are getting our 1 million more ten years early and that the Victorian government is in a panic because it has no idea how many permanent new guests have taken up its foolhardy invitations to come and live here.

This is almost certainly the reason for the hasty attempts to introduce draconian new "no-go", "slow-go" and "go-go" residential areas (now described as "areas of 'limited change', 'incremental change' and 'substantial change'.

“What I tell you three times is true.”
(Lewis Carrol, The Hunting of the Snark)

One of my most difficult tasks in writing about these matters is to overcome the propaganda which says that we must have economic growth and that for economic growth we must have population growth.

The Federal and State governments and the news-media repeat this all the time, despite much contrary evidence, and most people believe it because they have no other source of information.

On the one hand the State Government actively seeks to attract more and more immigrants to Melbourne.

On the other, it pretends that population growth is some irresistible force over which it has no control and for which we must all make way no matter what the demands.

Verify this by going to the Victorian Government’s immigration pages at http://www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au
Here's a sample of www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au:

and there is a special page to assist private immigration agents.

Yes, your government is really working overtime to overpopulate this country.

Alice in Victoria

Asking the public to accept massive intensification of infrastructure, huge cost increases, and loss of rights and space, and nature, on the grounds of a responsibility to reduce greenhouse emissions whilst bearing government imposed, unnecessary population growth is an Alice in Wonderland task.

Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." (Alice in Wonderland.)

But the Government is asking of the public to believe impossible things through the Melbourne 2030 program. Even the so-called independent auditors of Melbourne 2030 keep up the ridiculous charade:

Whilst recognising that almost everyone except developers hates Melbourne 2030, the ‘auditors’ of it write in their ‘independent report’:

“At the same time, local communities must be prepared to take a broad metropolitan view that recognises the necessity of urban consolidation,” they write, giving the reason as:

“(…)the urgent housing need resulting from unprecedented population increase and the need to reduce travel and greenhouse emissions to meet our responsibilities towards climate change.”

But even the Auditing Committee shows some unease, although not enough to save Melbourne or to question all the growth. They wrote:

“The recently released report of the Ministerial Working Group Making Local Policy Stronger (June 2007) and the subsequent State Government Five Point Priority Action Plan recognised community concerns in relation to existing residential zones. It proposed a way forward by enabling the identification of ‘no-go’, ‘slow-go’ and ‘go-go’ residential areas (now described as areas of ‘limited change’, ‘incremental change’ and ‘substantial change’) (...)”

“We would caution strongly, however, that the implementation of the five point action plan will not ease community tension unless local communities play a significant role in the application of new zones.”

Is conning the public going to make up for oil depletion and water scarcity?

Analyse the problem:

• Growing the population and expanding infrastructure will increase the number of car trips and the distance travelled.
• Modern high-rises are power-hungry.
• Building upwards increases the electrical power requirements for air conditioning, heating, drying clothing, moving things and people up and down in lifts and pumping water upwards.
• It is harder to cool and heat high-rises and it is harder to cool large, dense cities.
• Reducing vegetation reduces rainfall and cooling.
• Reducing access to land deprives people of access to vital resources when governments fail (as they invariably do.)
• Our Victorian government has already failed us by overshooting our water supply. It has attempted to supplement that supply by costly, power-hungry technologies, notably desalination. It has undertaken in ignorance an impossible promise to deliver these with alternative technologies.

Analyse the propaganda

We are running out of water, fuel, and affordable food; native flora and fauna are threatened, and democracy has been sacrificed to growth.

Driving these problems is Melbourne 2030 in its role as a vehicle for imposing massive population growth.

But what is driving Melbourne 2030?

Population growth via immigration is not, as we are led to believe, a kind response to the starving millions of the world.

And it is not to create a better world for the rest of us.

• Apart from a small number of refugees, the immigration program is actually all profit-driven by big business in Australia. The profit goes to a corporate and investor caste well out of the reach of the middle and the working classes.

• The number one profiteers in population growth in Australia are international property developers, which include Finance, construction, real-estate, engineering.

The 2002 Bracks Population Summit …

…was largely auspiced by Property Developers, in APop (The Australian Population Institute) and mortgage financiers. As well as Australia’s mainstream Press – Fairfax and Murdoch - which own www.realestate.com and www.domain.com.au, Mr Richard Pratt and Mr Steve Vizard, both involved in criminal activities for financial gain, were very prominent in this event.

Perhaps the two biggest peak bodies currently coordinating government lobbying on population growth to advantage the industries they represent are:
• The Property Council of Australia
• The Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (working with the Scanlon Foundation and the Australian Multicultural Foundation.

Here are the main aims of the Property Council of Australia, from their own document, "Powerhouse 2010 Update" downloadable as a powerpoint file here

Don't you love it! Melbourne - and the rest of Australia - under permanent construction.
Ah, the excitement of choking traffic in the mornings; the challenge of breathing in that dust.
The joy of watching your favourite piece of nature paved over.
The engagement of foregoing sleep to write useless submissions to your local member and state government.

Gee, our taxes at work! 33% of my wages. And then, on top of that, there are those rising council rates, that burgeoning homelessness, those skyrocketing rents, those outrageous property prices, that choking traffic...

And, here is their latest 'branch' member - the Victorian Government.

The Problem: Organising against population growth, dispossession and life-threatening hardship as oil and water deplete.

The mainstream media and government are corporatised and represent the interests of the corporate world. We cannot rely on them for information, guidance or to organise. We need to communicate outside of them: Internet, word of mouth, books, films, meetings and markets.

Organising requires comunication between neighbours and kin and power at a local level.

Default human social structure is along kinship lines of family and clan.

• Local Communities with a history together and especially with intact or strong kinship structures have the best chance of organising to survive well.

• Current land-use planning and population programs structurally split- up communities and prevent them from organising.

We need to challenge local laws that stop us having livestock and water for growing food.

• We need to re-design our communities so that we can grow food and keep domestic animals.

• It is vital to get back and conserve full use of suburban land and water. So look out for ways to do this.

The government is public-private corporatising rural land and giving more and cheaper water to their agribusiness program. Agribusiness does not care about you and me; agribusiness quotidienly watches people starve. That is why we have to fight government attempts to retain our water for other uses. We need it.

Laws should be primarily for benefit of local communities, then integrated into region and continent

Inheritance and Land-tenure systems need reform along Roman-law lines, like Western Continental Europe.

Roman-style laws
• Preserve land within families
• Share land equally between men and women
• Minimise land fragmentation and speculation

Basically this means that our inheritance system and land-use allocation and planning system need reform towards:

• male and female equal inheritance,

• prohibition against disinheritance of children (legitmate or illegitimate), and

• leasing to substitute for land-sales

Remember:

Cheap goods are the baubles to seduce and distract today’s indigenous populations.
Today’s indigenous populations are us.
We who were born here.
Let us not be distracted by beads and baubles.

• Land with water and a stable population and society are what counts.
• Land speculation is a mug’s and a con-man’s game.
• High profits in any field are not sustainable in the long term.
• No society that encourages one class to profit at the expense of all the other citizens is sustainable.

Posted by Sheila Newman on behalf of Mark O'Connor.

Tonight’s Insight program on SBS (June 17, 2008) –“Is Australia running out of workers” was very interesting about how we are now digging up and shipping out our minerals so fast, and so profitably, that other employers can’t compete with the wages paid by the mining companies. Employers are desperate for staff, but with unemployment currently low they can’t get workers at the wages, or the wages and conditions, they are able or willing to pay. (The most genuine case seemed to be the orchardist who had to leave several thousand dollars worth of mandarins unpicked because she couldn’t find pickers anywhere. Other employers seemed to be on the usual lurk of wanting the government to give them cheap workers.)

We are now so greedy that we want to ship abroad our mineral patrimony even faster than our existing workforce, with all the mechanical aids and vast machines now available, ­can manage. So the solution proposed by short-sighted business councils and some economists is to bring in ever more people to make up the shortfall in labor.

The result is of course that the extra workers will rapidly swell the population of Australia, so that the average Australian will own a steadily decreasing share of our mineral riches, which are themselves steadily decreasing. The future will be one of an unsustainable population in an impoverished continent –in a world beset by fuel shortages, climate change, and famines. And all for the short-term benefit of mining companies and those whose fortunes depend on a rising stock market.

Of course Jenny Brockie and her staff didn’t manage to see it in those terms. They took the reckless sell-off of our once-only mineral assets as a datum. Hence they also took as a given that there would not be enough workers in the country to service both the mining industry and the other more localized industries on which we depend for all sorts of supplies and services. And they also took as given that the mining industry would be able to pay rates other employers could not.

Granted all those unquestioned assumptions, they proceeded to examine quite rationally whether 457 visas (which it seems allow employers to pay about $10,000 on average less than they would have to pay Australian workers) were the best solution, or whether we should take in even more people as permanent migrants, or on the contrary run a guest worker system for Pacific migrants, or whether we needed to better train and motivate our own youth. The dishonesties and special pleading of employer organistions were fairly well exposed, and the CFMEU’s argument about it being no kindness to poor countries to take their skilled workers and doctors and nurses was respectfully examined.

But the underlying cause of the labor shortage, and the wisdom of selling off all your mineral assets as fast as possible, was not discussed.

Mark O'Connor

See also : Transcript of Insight program of 17 Jun 08 Labour Pains

Poet pens a plea to stop population push

By Mark Uhlmann Assembly Reporter

(Growth Concern: Mark O’Connor)

As the federal and ACT governments preach the virtues of high population growth a few individuals are prepared to put an alternative view.

One of those is Canberra poet Mark O’Connor, co-author of a book soon to be published by Enviro Books called Overloading Australia.

The Stanhope Government boasted this week of increases to interstate and international migration to Canberra, but O’Connor said, “Canberra’s going downhill rapidly."

“We have this mad pro-development Government that tries to push more and more people into it.”

He said most people wanted Canberra “kept more or less the way it is”, but could not get representation for this view in the ACT Legislative Assembly.

Canberra’s present population was more than enough and Government programs encouraging more people to come were irresponsible.

At the very least there should not be an open-ended commitment to ever more suburbs, which was the case at present, he said.
The economy was dependent on more suburbs being built. The result was a declining quality of life for those faced with higher population densities.

O’Connor said “citizen disobedience” was now appropriate. For example, that we should not conserve water.
This would “only be encouraging (Chief Minister) Jon Stanhope to push us further into a position where come the next drought we’ll have an even larger population”.

Until the Government had a plan to cap the population, it was counterproductive to conserve water.

Across the country, population growth was being demanded as a necessary part of economic growth, putting an increasing strain on the infrastructure of cities.

Australia’s annual population growth was 1.5 per cent.

“The UN Population Fund regards 1.1 per cent as too high in Asia.” O’Connor said.

The growth was about half natural increase and half immigration. Immigration was at record highs and all the pressure from government and industry was to be even more irresponsible.

There was recognition by governments that greenhouse gases had to be cut, but by some trick that had to be divorced from economic growth, and the economy just had to keep on growing. “That’s an unsustainable position, that will come unstuck before long,” O’Connor said.

There was a “selective deafness in the media” on the population issue.

The president of the Australian conservation Foundation, Ian Lowe, had tried to raise the population issue at the 2020 Summit, but had been up against a belief that population growth and economic growth were good.

O’Connor said, “Unless you win this (population) battle, in the long-run every environmental battle will be lost.”

(Reprinted with the author's permission from From The Canberra Times Saturday May 24 2008 page 15 News)

Perhaps the most urgent near-term issue for environmentalists is one that few yet talk about. It is what I call "the human bottleneck".

Just as the genus homo itself went through a bottleneck when all but one of its species vanished, and just as even that one survivor, homo sapiens, seems to have fallen at one point to less than 10,000 breeding pairs, so all other species on Earth will soon have to pass through a bottleneck as humans pass through what we hope will be a maximum population of about 9 billion, later this century. This will leave so little land and food for other species that many, perhaps most of them, will perish.

Note that the narrowest part of the bottleneck for other species will not necessarily come when the human population peaks. At that stage many, or even most humans will still be living in poverty but aspiring to affluence. Hence the squeeze on all other species will actually continue to get worse, and perhaps very much worse, after the human population peaks.

The assumption that world population could peak at approximately 9 billion is taken from
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html

For the assumption that much of that population will still be pursuing increased consumption, and thus intensifying rather than relaxing the squeeze on other species, the author relies on his perception of common experience of human nature and of social inequalities.

You'll notice that the graph has such a small scale on the X axis (which covers 200,000 years) that one cannot read fine detail from it about values on the Y axis over the next 50 years (which would be speculative in any case) or the last 50. This suits, because the figures would vary according to what measures are used.

e.g. it is commonly said that humans now use some 40% of the Earth's primary production (i.e. plant food created from sunlight). But it does not follow that 60% of Earth's surface is freely available for other species, and I presume less than 20% is in virgin state. It also depends whether one includes the oceans. Virtually no part of the ocean surface is not harvested by fishermen, so this might put us as at present intensively harvesting the production of 80% of the planet rather than 40%.

Fortunately, as I say, the graph does not permit of reading its values in such fine detail over short periods --which is another way of saying that the overall shape remains the same pretty much regardless of what measure one uses for human domination.

Mark O'Connor CMC,
home page: www.australianpoet.com

Mark O'Connor is the author of This Tired Brown Land, Duffy and Snelgrove, NSW, 1994. He was Australia's Olympic poet for the year of the olympics in Sydney. He has published many books of poetry, much of it on ecological subjects.

Towards the end of the 20th Century economists and demographers were promoted to ranks of public importance previously held by the church, as long as they fulfilled the church’s role, which is to prop up governments. All that demographers and economists did was crunch numbers and facilitate the passage of money by encouraging population growth, but, because of the prominence they were afforded by the corporate press, the public came to the misunderstanding that these were wise men.

Demographer Bernard Salt was an Australia 2020 Summit delegate in the Population, Water, Climate Change and Cities stream in 18-29 April 2008. (1)

This is what he calls a ‘big idea’:

He wants to ‘alter Australians’ concept of beauty from a verdant back yard to a desert rockery, so as to enable a population twice Australia’s current size.

Of course he doesn’t mention that this is the way he and his colleagues became rich and could become richer, and the reason that so many of the rest of us pay more for food, water, goods and housing already. Nor that more of the same will mean worsening conditions for the rest of us.

He presents this idea as one involving changing Australians’ perception of beauty. Although the sheer effrontery of engineering our perception, as if we were so many children and Mr Salt were an adult towering over us, is appalling in itself, it is what it conceals and removes from debate that is important.

Changing the national taste in what surrounds a house, would be a strange ambition if there were no reason for it. In fact there is a reason, but it won't benefit the average Australian. Mr Salt is working for people who want to fit another 20 or so million people into Australia in the next 50 years, and, for that, he must change the way we perceive value – or change the way that we are told we will perceive value, whether we like it or not.

He achieves this by simply downgrading the value of fertile soil to a flimsy aesthetic fashion statement, which he relegates to a symbol of the past with a questionable statement.

"Our values were forged in Surrey 220 years go and they have not changed."

He does not acknowledge the obvious, which is that verdant green will grow food and support livestock, hence ensuring at least a degree of independence for a family, as the cost of food and fuel spiral. Because he makes his statements from a position marketed as authorative, it becomes very hard for anyone on the receiving end to contradict them, silly as they are.

Reducing population growth and conserving such values would probably save Australians’ lives in the next 20 years.

But, to a politician looking for an idea to market to the electorate which will also please big business, swapping a vegetable garden and some fruit trees and a place for children and pets to play, for a couple of rocks and a cactus, seems smart. We know that the newspapers will support such an idea, because they are also in the land-speculation business.

Consider this ‘wisdom’:

[Salt writes:] “Two years ago, while driving through the suburbs of the desert city of Phoenix in the US, I immediately understood why it was possible for this city to have evolved from 250,000 residents to 4 million over 60 years.
The concept of suburban beauty is different in Phoenix.”

"They see an earth-toned adobe dwelling surrounded by a rock, scoria and cactus garden as beautiful, whereas we define suburban beauty as a separate house surrounded by a green lawn and verdant foliage. The Phoenicians have adopted values that reflect their environment; we haven't."

"If we could alter Australians' concept of suburban beauty, we could radically reduce our use of water …”(1), he writes. He might have added, but didn't, "...and bankers and developers could make a lot more money out of land whilst packing the rest of you in like chickens into batteries and charging the earth for rent and water."

Worse, in 2006, before the cost of oil went up so much, there was probably a big car parked outside those phonecian desert residences, indicating a little wealth besides their infertile plots, and a job to go to. Picture this in Australia in ten years, but without the car or the job.

I thought we elected government to protect us from this sort of predation.

In the words of King Crimson, “The fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools."
(1)Bernard Salt, “Nurturing big, better ideas for 2020”, the Australian, April 17, 2008