Australia's population problem

July 30. The film will be introduced by Australian population scientist, Sheila Newman, (Demography, Territory, Law) who will also lead discussion afterwards. Grounded in the theories of social scientist Riane Eisler, the film strives not to blame but to educate, to highlight a different path for humanity. Overpopulation is merely a symptom of an even larger problem - a "domination system" that for most of human history has glorified the domination of man over nature, man over child and man over woman. To break this pattern, the film demonstrates that we must change our conquering mindset into a nurturing one. And the first step is to raise the status of women worldwide.

Sheila Newman, who will be introducing the event, is the author of a new demographic theory book called Demography, territory and Law, the Rules of Animal and Human Populations.

The event is sponsored by Sustainable Population Australia and Arts in Action. You can find out more about it at www.artsinaction.com.au/mother-caring-for-7-billion. You can purchase tickets at the door or order them online. Tickets online are $7/$10 BF. At the door tickets will cost $12/$15.

Synopsis

Mother, the film, breaks a 40-year taboo by bringing to light an issue that silently fuels our most pressing environmental, humanitarian and social crises - population growth. In 2011 the world population reached 7 billion, a startling seven-fold increase since the first billion occurred 200 years ago.

Population was once at the top of the international agenda, dominating the first Earth Day and the subject of best-selling books like “The Population Bomb”. Since the 1960s the world population has nearly doubled, adding more than 3 billion people. At the same time, talking about population has become politically incorrect because of the sensitivity of the issues surrounding the topic–religion, economics, family planning and gender inequality. Yet it is an issue we cannot afford to ignore.

Today, nearly 1 billion people still suffer from chronic hunger even though the Green Revolution that has fed billions will soon come to an end due to the diminishing availability of its main ingredients–oil and water. Compounded with our ravenous appetite for natural resources, population growth is putting an unprecedented burden on the life system we all depend on, as we refuse to face the fact that more people equals more problems.

The film illustrates both the over-consumption and the inequity side of the population issue by following Beth, a mother and a child-rights activist as she comes to discover, along with the audience, the thorny complexities of the population issue. Beth – who comes from a large American family of 12 and has adopted an African-born daughter–travels to Ethiopia where she meets Zinet, the oldest daughter of a desperately poor family of 12. Zinet has found the courage to break free from thousand-year-old-cultural barriers, and their encounter will change Beth forever.

Grounded in the theories of social scientist Riane Eisler, the film strives not to blame but to educate, to highlight a different path for humanity. Overpopulation is merely a symptom of an even larger problem - a "domination system" that for most of human history has glorified the domination of man over nature, man over child and man over woman. To break this pattern, the film demonstrates that we must change our conquering mindset into a nurturing one. And the first step is to raise the status of women worldwide.

"Mother: Caring for 7 Billion" features world-renown experts and scientists including biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb;" economist Mathis Wackernagel, the creator of the ground-breaking Footprint Network; Malcolm Potts, a pioneer in human reproductive health; and Riane Eisler, whose book “The Chalice and the Blade” has been published in 23 countries.

This article features videos of the four Victorian based candidates for the Stable Population Party - Jill Quirk, Clifford Hayes, Michael Bayliss, Steven Armstrong and Jonathan Page - not necessarily in that order. It is very interesting to see what the candidates have to say and how they present. Australians have a chance of making a crucial difference by voting for these candidates in the Senate and in the lower house for the next Federal Election. Candidates are also running in other states. Check this website for details: http://www.populationparty.org.au/templates/pop/page/page_html_standard.php?secID=210

The first video is of senate candidate Jill Quirk, who gives quite a rundown of Victoria's population problems. Many candobetter net readers will know of Jill. It is good to see that the Stable Population Party is running a woman with such experience in population matters. Jill has been particularly active in campaigning for a sustainable population over the last 10 years after a lifelong interest and concern for the environment especially our native fauna. She approaches this issue as a writer and artist as well as leading and educating on the issue within an environmental population organisation. She is convinced that for future survival not only of Australia’s wildlife but ultimately for its people, we must plan towards a stable population living within the severe environmental constraints of our land.

Clifford Hayes has more than five years experience as a councillor at Bayside City Council in Melbourne. He held the position of Mayor and Deputy Mayor. Clifford was elected by the community on a platform of planning reform, opposing high rise over-development in Bayside (100,000 residents). Clifford also has significant experience in the film and television industry and farm management (viticulture). He enjoys swimming and the arts.

Michael Bayliss is running for Melbourne. Michael has post graduate degrees in both economics and sport science and has developed inclusive sports programs for people with disabilities in capital cities across Australia (was finalist in the WA support worker awards in 2012). He has also been an advocate and campaigner for disability inclusion, animal rights and sustainable town planning. Michael strongly believes that a stable population will help address Australia's housing crisis, environmental toll and infrastructure debt.

Steven Armstrong is an electronics contractor and a surfer. Steven became interested in the population issue 25 years ago when he was astounded to hear Bob Hawke urging us all on to 50 million. Having waited patiently for the major parties to come to their senses, Steven now realises this is not going to happen. In order to offer a democratic choice to the people of Melbourne Ports, and challenge 'big Australia' advocate Michael Danby MP, Steven has decided to act.

Jonathan Page is running for the seat of Lalor.
Jonathan has a professional background in science and a strong connection with the Australian environment, having spent much of his formative years bushwalking. He treasures the beauty of many other species on this planet and is pained when hearing about the next Australian species under threat due to land clearing or other human activity. Jonathan is also particularly concerned about the housing affordability crisis, which of course, is exacerbated by rapidly growing demand for a finite resource (habitable land in well serviced areas).

The last video is of NSW-based William Bourke, who is the leader of the party. I have featured this video in another article on candobetter.net. William gives a very clear idea of what the Stable Population Party is offering.

A better quality of life

SPPA calls for "A better quality of life" and articulates six reasons to vote for a stable population:

to Relieve overstretched infrastructure, incluidng hospitals, schools, roads and public transport;
to Ease cost of living pressures, including housing, energy, water and transport;
to Protect our environment, including food, water and energy resources, native bushland and animal habitats;
to Promote education and training to increase job opportunities for all Australians;
to Minimise overdevelopment, including high-rise and sprawl;
to Create a more resilient economy, to sustain and enhance prosperity.

Monash University's Dr. Bob Birrell of Monash University Centre for Population and Urban Research spoke at the Sustainable Population Australia AGM on July 20, 2013 to a conference center packed to standing room only. The speaker was retained for questions until long after the end of the talk. "It was chilling the way Dr Birrell calmly and factually revealed the deep globalised shit we are in. It just doesn’t make sense at all. If only the public understood what is being done to them and their children...not to mention our environment." Videos by Steven Armstrong.

The meeting yesterday was well summed-up by one of those present as a “rip snorter”. The room was filled to capacity with standing room only. The mean age of the audience was substantially reduced on previous AGMs, an indication of how the effects of overpopulation are hitting more and more people in the form of unavailable, unaffordable housing, massive power bills, congestion and stress at every level ... and unemployment.

One gentleman slapped a wad of 10x $10 notes on the table at the beginning of the branch meeting and people seemed keen to give money to help SPA.

"It was chilling the way Dr Birrell calmly and factually revealed the deep globalised shit we are in. It just doesn’t make sense at all. If only the public understood what is being done to them and their children. ..not to mention our environment." (A new SPA member).

The notes below were taken by a member of the audience and are an impressionistic paraphrase of some highlights of Birrell's speech. You will need to watch the videos of the speech for detailed quotes.

Bob Birrel in calm measured tones revealed the treachery of our governments to Australians especially workers.

The latest population increase was 370,000 people, representing a growth rate of 1.7%. This increase was made up of 210,000-215,000 permanent entry including humanitarian. It included temporary entry e.g. 457 visas and working holiday visas. About 30,000 people moved here from New Zealand (but not all were born there; many migrated there from elsewhere.) Natural increase (births over deaths) made up 150,000. That makes a huge excess of immigrants over native born, to the tune of 150,000: 270,000.

Snapshot - In December 2012 the ABS calculated that there were 1.1 million temporaries here. Most temporary visa holders have work rights. Visitors don't have work rights but many work anyway. This is all on top of the permanent entry people, numbering about 210,000- 215,000.

May 2012-13: 108,000 new arrivals added to labour market. Total employed persons only increased by 127,000.

Rate of workforce growth has declined sharply. During the mining boom it grew by 200,000 but this has halved- leading to an increase in unemployment.

Our Youth disadvantaged by immigration levels:

50-60,00 young people seek entry level jobs each year. Immigrants competing with them for these. There has also been a drop in workforce participation.

This is the CFMEU billboard Dr Birrell refers to: "In the 12 months to February 2013, Australian construction industry employment grew by only 1.1%, but the number of 457 visa holders employers had working in the industry actually increased by 25% to 14,080. Between December 2012 and March 2013, trades apprenticeship numbers dropped from 67.500 to 53.400."

Why is ALP not decreasing the migrant program when jobs are falling and unemployment is rising?

Labor elites now tend to see themselves as globalisers, harking back to the Hawke-Keating era of deregulation. By subjecting workers to enterprise bargaining and international migrant competition they are trying to overcome a bogey they perceive in "Protectionism".

Government has pushed the selection of migrants onto employers, failing to regulate to safeguard local job opportunities. The rules don't require the employer to test the local market. All this came to a head recently over the 457 visas. The CFMEU (mining and construction union) has led the ACTU in a comeback on behalf of workers (see picture of CFMEU Billboard: "More apprenticeships, fewer 457 visas.")

Globalisers In the 1980s the ALP opened the Australian economy to globalists- to “wake up” the sleeping economy. These policies overcame our protection heritage. 457s were good news for globalising forces. CFMEU (mining and construction) were very concerned. They saw 457s as breaking their control. Chris Bowen, the current Federal treasurer is not in favour of protecting local jobs and his book Hearts and minds is apparently very revealing of his preference for the globalist ideology.

457 Visas: Howard, Rudd and Doha 2000

The Howard government had given away our right to this Doha conference in 2000 in exchange for tariff concessions from other countries. Rudd confirmed this when he became prime minister.

There has been a split in ALP ranks over this- Craig Cameron and Kelvin Thomson are among those who support labour market testing.

Julia Gillard, last day of parliament passed protection for local workers against 457 visas

Julia Gillard said, just before she was removed, that Australians should be at the head of the (Job) queue- stated this publicly. One of the last things her government did was to subject the 457 visas to labor market testing. The new law has not yet been proclaimed, but went through on the very last day of parliament. The protections for workers are weak, but they are an improvement on the naked 457. They protect workers in trades but leave professions pretty unprotected.

This article Oz Population Growth Lunacy is a nice example of the scrambled head-space of some journalists. Yes, Monica Attard (ex ABC, now working for the Hoopla website) can see David Attenborough's point that population growth can't go on for ever,and she can even see that "It’s hard to fathom how governments (all levels of them) can act fast and smart enough to ease the congestion we are seeing in the major cities across Australia, the spiraling cost of housing and an environment which looks stressed."

Yet if a government-appointed committee says it's all right then it must be. She can then go back to suggesting it's just as well not to think too much about these things because that might lead to encouraging people who . . .well . . . think too much about them. Or are "anti-immigration" ---a term which she seems to equate both with anti-very-high-immigration and with anti-immigrant.

I did learn one thing from this piece of hers (of May 28th) that has just come to my notice. It seems that one of the initiatives of the now half-forgotten Ministry for Sustainable Population (headed by Tony Burke, who never even met with anyone from Sustainable Population Australia, and whose Sustainability portfolio vanished under Rudd) was to set up last October a "National Sustainability Council" (whose members Burke chose). This Council, it seems, has put out a report that has been so largely ignored that till now I never heard about it. (However you can find a summary of it here. It's pretty anodyne.)

Yet it seems the Report contained all the re-assuring and distracting noises that Monica needed to calm her disquiet on this issue. As she reports: "Though the Sustainable Australia report itself steers well clear of taking a position on what’s best – big population or small population – it does give us a glimpse of what it might be thinking. One point it makes clearly is that there seems little point in setting population targets because there are too many factors which are always in a state of flux – like fertility rates, longevity and emigration, all of which are unpredictable".

Monica swallows this cop-out. Then, throwing in some caricature of her own, assures her readers that "Someone should tell Sir David, Australia is thinking about these issues. Specialists and bureaucrats are working on how to deal with what lies ahead without having to resort to a Chinese style one-child policy!"

She also claims that, "Migrants not only contribute to higher levels of productivity and to labour force participation and growth." [For a simple refutation of this PR stuff, see “More bills than skills from this migration”, The National Times, 19 July 2011. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/more-bills-than-skills-from-this-migration-20110718-1hlgk.html ] Attard continues: "According to the Sustainable Australia report: “Migrants have also increasingly been contributing to growth and development in regional Australia. One in every six new permanent arrivals is now settling in a regional area.”
[ -- but not, it seems, necessarily staying there.]

She also meekly accepts the Tony Bourke line that it's not a matter of how many people we have but of where and how we put them. "As the report emphasizes, population change isn’t only about how many people Australia ends up housing at any particular point in time."

Oddly enough she doesn't accept the common line that we need a bigger population to stop our labour force aging, but somehow manages to twist the opposite view into yet another argument for population growth:

"But on the upside, being so healthy means “the proportion of working aged citizens is high compared to the number of non-working-aged people, resulting in high rates of productivity and economic growth” according to Sustainable Australia: a tick for the economy and the flow through effects which could make us better at getting bigger."

Heads I win, tails you lose! And by the end she has come round to the common innumerate belief that good management will enable Australia to take in the populations that the rest of the world can't accommodate, without any fall in our quality of life -- or presumably any important damage to the natural or the urban environments:

"Sir David Attenborough might think the debate isn’t worth having. But with such a large expanse of land and so many people the world over searching desperately for a new chance at the good life, it’s over to government to figure out how to make it work so we all get to live – sustainably – in the manner to which we have become accustomed."

So now it's David Attenborough, not Monica and not the government, that is refusing to think about population. Perhaps Monica failed to check who selected these experts [in fact a mixed group, who as Tony Burke well knew would produce a rather mixed message, which would leave the government free to do pretty much as it wished] and why their conclusions were so different from those of the Productivity Commission, or the Immigration Department's "Redbook" advice (which told incoming PM Gillard that there was no real prospect of preventing immigrants settling overwhelmingly in the already crowded capital cities).

This article was written by Mark O'Connor, who is running as a candidate for the Stable Population Party in the A.C.T. in the Federal Election. More information here.

Saturday 29 June 2013 was the Melbourne launch of the Stable Population Party Australia.
Its leader, William Bourke, gave the following interview.

Since its beginnings in 2010 this party has come a long way in terms of policy and presentation. Their website conveys a clear and positive message. Bourke and the other candidates for the next Federal election carry a business-sized card summarizing six hard to beat policies. The major parties and the Greens have nothing like this clarity.

A better quality of life

SPPA calls for "A better quality of life" and articulates six reasons to vote for a stable population:

to Relieve overstretched infrastructure, incluidng hospitals, schools, roads and public transport;
to Ease cost of living pressures, including housing, energy, water and transport;
to Protect our environment, including food, water and energy resources, native bushland and animal habitats;
to Promote education and training to increase job opportunities for all Australians;
to Minimise overdevelopment, including high-rise and sprawl;
to Create a more resilient economy, to sustain and enhance prosperity.

William Bourke speaks truly when he says, "Population is the everything issue." It touches on everything you can think of and more population makes for more impact.

Candidates for election

The Party is running five candidates in Victoria:
Lead Senate Candidate - Clifford Hayes

Senate candidate - Jill Quirk

Lalor candidate - Jonathan Page

Melbourne candidate - Michael Bayliss

Melbourne Ports candidate - Steven Armstrong

On 7 March 2013, Kevin Rudd was a lead speaker at a pro-population growth meeting held by the "Urban Development Institute of Australia", which is a property developer body that lobbies continually for higher immigration to grow Australia's population. Now Mr Rudd is our Prime Minister, but he still sounds as if he is working for a bunch of property developers.

It's sustainable if you say it is

"I believe in a sustainable Australia," Mr Rudd said. "If you've got the sustainability settings right, on land use, on water use and on infrastructure provision, then of course the country can grow, so I believe in a sustainable Australia."Source: http://www.theage.com.au/national/rudd-poll-bounce-boosts-labor-20130628-2p366.html#ixzz2XYX4kOhx

Rudd and Murdoch: one setting only

Mr. Rudd is in favour of a Big Australia. I believe (after much reading on the subject) that it will be unsustainable and will put our population in real peril. Australia is a desert continent with very poor soils. Because of fossil fuels we have been able to produce more food than ever before from this continent, but this will come to an end. 2 reasons 1. fossil fuels are finite and there are strong indications that global oil production has already peaked 2. Unless scientists are wrong about GGEs and climate change, we must stop using Fossil Fuels or we won’t have an environment as we know it.

Population policy under Julia Gillard

Mr. Rudd is glib and fanciful in what he says. Julia made a good start when she said she was in favour of a “sustainable Australia” rather than a “Big Australia” but then the whole issue was buried in Tony Burke’s report which recommended population be regionalized – thus sweeping the problem of population numbers into another realm and the government went on to preside over a huge migration program which is more than our natural increase and thus more than double our population growth rate.

Rudd’s intention to continue “ Big Australia” is contained in the quote “ then of course the country can grow”.

Population growth doesn't pay for itself: we do

A sign that our existence in Melbourne is going down hill is that Victorians are already paying more and more for water because of the desalination plant which would not have been necessary had the government not anticipated high population growth and that Melbourne will be a megalopolis. I can see a time when people won’t be able to pay for the water they need.

WA uses almost exclusively desalinated water and ground water. This is a recipe for collapse. Perth has the highest population growth rate of any capital city and comparable to many 3rd world countries.

The Victorian State of the environment Report 2008 showed that all environmental indicators in Victoria were declining because of human activity and population pressures. Since then the population has kept on growing. I understand all reports from other states have shown the same.

A national tragedy

We are already in environmental decline. The country is so delicate, so immensely biodiverse and intricate but since the European invasion we have been stomping all over it with hob nail boots.