Stop Population Growth Now

Bob Couch and Michael Roberts will be contesting the Legislative Council on behalf of Stop Population Growth Now at the March election. Their website is at www.stoppopulationgrowthnow.com.

Bob Couch and Michael_Roberts will nominate for the Legislative Council for the March 2018 SA election.

The Stop Population Growth now Party calls on more members to nominate for the next SA election.
Contact Bob Couch, Convenor on 0488 071 799 in the first instance.

Registration

The party is now officially registered as a political party in South Australia. Donations to our party are tax deductible up to $1500 per annum).

Membership

More members are needed to formally register as a federal political party. Please join up, and/or encourage others to join. Membership (Associate) is now free.
You can find an application from at the website.

Remember, the existing parties will ignore your wish for stopping population growth until they are not getting your vote.
We will give you an alternative.

When I lodged my nomination as a candidate for the SA House of Assembly seat of Fisher 2 years ago, the very first communication I received was a letter from the ABC telling me I would not get any coverage for my campaign. This was despite the fact that I was the nominated candidate for a registered political party with over 300 members, and I was spending about $6000 of my savings on campaign expenses and nomination fees." [...] "the Earth adds approx. 225,000 mouths to feed EVERY DAY. Australia adds approx. 1000 to its population each day. The implications of this are enormous, and yet it is very clear to me that the ABC soft pedals the matter. To be more specific, it is very common that, when an issue of national importance such as housing affordability comes up, there is very little mention of the influence population growth is having on the matter. The interviewers commonly host guests from the property industry to put their views, but people from such bodies as Sustainable Population Australia never seem to be asked to comment."

Mr Justin Milne
ABC Chairman
Box 9994
Sydney NSW 2001

Dear Chairman

I am writing to you instead of ABC Management because I lack confidence that the content of this letter will be taken seriously by that management. This lack of confidence is based on the fact that a complaint I lodged with the ABC in September 2015 was not answered until April of the following year, and then only after I wrote a personal letter to every member of the ABC Board.

There are 2 matters I wish to raise - firstly, ABC policy regarding airtime given to state election candidates. And secondly, ABC bias in relation to covering the issue of population growth in Australia.

Airtime given to election candidates

When I lodged my nomination as a candidate for the SA House of Assembly seat of Fisher 2 years ago, the very first communication I received was a letter from the ABC telling me I would not get any coverage for my campaign. This was despite the fact that I was the nominated candidate for a registered political party with over 300 members, and I was spending about $6000 of my savings on campaign expenses and nomination fees.

However, in the lead up to that campaign, Matt and Dave on 891 Adelaide chose to interview a selection of candidates for Fisher on their morning program. They comprised Liberal, Labour, Greens and an Independent (Woolyat), whose particular talent was sidestepping every question put to him about controversial issues. And, when I attempted to access ABC talk back, I was afforded little respect or opportunity to put my case before being cut off.

Around this time, the Adelaide Advertiser was kind enough to publish a letter from me that pointed out the ABC was not willing to give me any airtime, and yet Zakky Mullah, a convicted criminal, was given a platform on Q and A to push his twisted agenda.

Chairman, myself and members of our party (Stop Population Growth Now) intend to run in the SA elections in March next year. I request that you direct ABC management to give our party (and other registered parties) sufficient air time to promote our policies, which, by the way, are not racist - they are based on the absolute necessity to create a society that is sustainable and where preservation of our environment is regarded as critical.

ABC bias in relation to population issues

ABC records will indicate I have complained to your organization about this subject before.

Chairman, the Earth adds approx. 225,000 mouths to feed EVERY DAY. Australia adds approx. 1000 to its population each day. The implications of this are enormous, and yet it is very clear to me that the ABC soft pedals the matter. To be more specific, it is very common that, when an issue of national importance such as housing affordability comes up, there is very little mention of the influence population growth is having on the matter. The interviewers commonly host guests from the property industry to put their views, but people from such bodies as Sustainable Population Australia never seem to be asked to comment. It is completely unreasonable to believe that adding 1000 persons per day to Australia’s population is not going to have a very significant effect on housing prices. And there are many other areas where population growth has a major impact. The Adelaide Advertiser was kind enough to publish a letter from me a few weeks ago in which I pointed out that, on current growth rates, the population of Australia will grow from approx 24.5 million today to approx 32.5 million by 2040, an increase of 33%, and that all these extra people would need power, when it is clear we are having problems catering for our existing population, let alone provide for such a huge increase. The commercial media is willing to give publicity to this fact, but where is the ABC on that hugely significant matter.

Recently the DRUM and Media Watch have been borderline contemptuous of the efforts of Dick Smith, who, with his own money, is trying to bring about a proper debate on population growth. Well, Mr Chairman, the ABC is not helping such a debate. Yet when a detainee on Manus so much as stubs a toe, the ABC is all over it, with, I might add, a very clear pro refugee bias.

Please do not assume I am against everything the ABC does. The ABC has some wonderful talent (Anthony Green, Dr Norman Swan to name 2), and I cannot wait for each new episode of UTOPIA. But there is definitely bias in some areas, and it needs to be rooted out.

Chairman, I am a 74 years old senior citizen, with no criminal record (unlike Mullah). I believe I am a respected member of my local community. I have worked (and am still working) paying taxes for 57 years. My taxes have supported “my ABC” for all that time. Why do I feel that my views supporting zero population growth are ignored by your organization. I am not being given a voice by the ABC, yet the commercial media is often willing to publish my letters and take my calls (Jeremy Cordeux gave me 20 minutes on Radio 5AA some time ago), and Leon Byner of the same station is always willing to talk to me. This is so even though it can be argued the interests of commercial media are not served by stopping population growth.

I respectfully request you and your Board to consider this letter, and act accordingly.

Bob Couch

The South Australian Greens have given their first preferences at next Saturday’s 15th March state election to the Stop Population Growth Now party.

In an enlightened move for the Greens, the party in SA is actually acknowledging the strong and obvious link between living standards, environmental conservation and climate change – something that shouldn't be so obscure for the rest of the party with an environmental focus!

Mark Parnell MLC is the current sitting Greens member in the Legislative Council, and supports the protection of the environment and everyone's right to live in a just, humane and healthy world. Policies dominated by the vested interests of property developers, and corporations that feed of population growth, are contrary to these aims.

The South Australian Greens’ policy also appears at odds with that of the federal Greens, which states that “an Australian population policy must consider the geographical distribution of human settlements rather than just concentrate upon population size”.

The Australian: Greens preference fringe group pushing zero population growth This article is "premium content" behind a Murdoch media paywall. If asked to pay or provide personal details to view this diatribe, we recommend you don't. - Ed

The “geographical distribution” of our human settlements is largely in our coastal cities, our “green belt”, fringing the world's driest continent. Avoiding the population size in the debate has been characteristic of the Green's population policy – which is more an apology rather than something they can actually implement.

The SA Greens say “part of reducing our ecological footprint requires reducing the rate of population growth”. While the Greens, and most other “green” groups, concentrate on the footprints of individuals, and living sustainably, they ignore the absolute overall growth in the number of feet! It's a convenient diversion, and intellectual dishonesty to stay politically correct.

“The Greens will aim to stabilise South Australia’s population within a generation,” is a policy platform says. Thanks to years of high growth rates, slowing down the momentum takes time, but at least there should be a stable population if we start now, with this generation. We owe it to future generations that the nation, the planet, we hand down to them is largely intact, and there is room for move for innovation, quality lifestyles, conservation and existing ecosystems, - and that they are not crushed by the greed of this generation's pro-growthists!

Mark Parnell, an upper house MP and leader of the Greens in South Australia, said “zero population growth on this planet is absolutely inevitable”. However, the ABS reveals that South Australia's fertility levels are below the other states, at 1.89, compared to other States of over 2.0 in Tasmania.

The desired “growth” will be from net overseas immigration levels, running at 60% of our population growth nationally, not from the number of children being born. It's artificial growth, socially engineered by Federal and State governments.

The SA Green's population policy says that: South Australia, even with its relatively small population, has a disproportionately large ecological footprint. In fact, if everyone in the world were to live like us, we would need more than three planet Earths to provide us with the all the resources we consume and deal with all the waste we produce....In South Australia, both the number of people and the per-person consumption are increasing, intensifying our unsustainable impact. Improvements in technology may help reduce our impact, but we also need to stabilise our population and deal with overconsumption and waste.

We need a new approach to prosperity that challenges the underlying assumptions of growth and consumption.

Parnell recognises that his policy on population are at odds with the Greens at national level. Stabilising our popualtion needs to be a national target, and a good start is at State level.
Once land is subdivided, planning laws are made maleable and flexible, and “growth” becomes ingrained into the culture and texture of the economy, it becomes inevitable.

SPGN

The executive of the SPGN is comprised of former members of the Australian Democrats, scientists, accountants and IT professionals. With the demise of the Democrats, they have morphed in to a millennial ‘save the earth’ party. The SPNG’s aim is to “Reduce Australia's rate of population growth to zero as rapidly as possible. If the resulting stable population is still environmentally unsustainable then work to reduce the size of the population until we achieve environmental sustainability.”

For too long, our nation's demographic patterns causing record-breaking rates of growth have been artificially manipulated, without public debate, and democratic reference.

How Stop Population Growth Now will seek to implement its zero population growth policy:
1.Reduce immigration. Australia's present very high rate of immigration has been foisted on the Australian public without any chance to vote on this issue. -
2.Strongly discourage  families of more than 2 children, whilst continuing to welcome 1 or 2 child families. “We do not favour any coercive strategies for family planning such as the Chinese one-child policy but we do not believe that couples should be encouraged or rewarded to have families of more than 2 children through baby bonuses or other benefits”.

The so-called “population control” agenda has been corrupted by the mainsteam media to assert that the party will malignantly “control” the number of children families will be allowed to have. It's hardly any vision of humans being invasive vermin like rats, ravaging the Earth! Most of our population growth is due to government immigration policies, (running at 60% of our population growth) to propagate the housing industry, and not based on Australia's fragile landscape of increasingly hostile weather patterns, declining living standards, ecological damage from urban expansion, rising fuel prices and declining jobs.

This year my 8-year-old daughter's school class has been studying “sustainability”. Last term she was all over me like a rash about not wasting water. Unfortunately, I had to explain to her that saving every last drop of water was actually a waste of time, 'The water you save will just let the government bring in more people because it wants to grow the population. It actually makes more sense for you to use as much water as possible because that may slow the government down'. Article by Michael Lardelli [1].

Adelaide's population has now grown to a size where coping with the growth has outpaced our capacity to pay. SA's $2 billion desalination plant (costing $130 million per year to run) was built explicitly to cope with population growth and would be unnecessary without it. Then there are the costs of extra hospital beds, congested roads, crowded schools etc. Counterintuitively, these dyseconomies of scale are counted as positives when GDP figures are calculated!

As a scientist I am used to reality sometimes appearing counterintuitive. The most famous example is Galileo dropping two metal balls of different weights from the leaning tower of Pisa to demonstrate that they would both hit the ground simultaneously. Demography – the study of the structure of human populations – is another area where the obvious answer is not necessarily the correct one. An interesting example of this was Senator Nick Xenophon's insistence before the recent election that he wanted to promote faster population growth in South Australia. Apparently Nick believes that, with SA's population growing at 1% per year, "We're sitting on a demographic time bomb. There'll be fewer taxpayers compared to the rest of the population." Nick appears envious of WA's population growth of more than 3.4% even though this will double WA's population in only two decades! Imagine trying to double a state's infrastructure – hospitals, roads, sewerage, power etc. - in 20 years when the current estimate is that each additional person requires about $200,000 of infrastructure. From where will that money come?

Unfortunately, Nick has been deceived by the notion that it is possible to significantly “youngify” our population through migration. But even pro-migration demographers reject this idea. As demographers McDonald and Kippen stated in a report for the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs in 1999, “Levels of annual net migration [into Australia] above 80,000 become increasingly ineffective and inefficient in the retardation of ageing. Those who wish to argue for a higher level of immigration need to base their argument on the benefits of a larger population, not upon the illusory 'younging power' of high immigration.” At the moment annual net migration is about three times higher than the 80,000 recommended! A 2008 paper by Katherine Betts a sociologist who specialises in Australin demographics shows how Australia's current sky-high rate of population growth could more than double our population by the end of the century (and our water, food and fuel consumption etc.) but make little difference to our population's median age. In fact, if we encourage immigration rather than supporting women to have children we could end up with an older population structure than otherwise! With ideas this counterintuitive it is no wonder that our normally intelligent Senator Nick is confused.

Australia's current rate of population growth is truly exceptional– or 'third world' – depending on your viewpoint. At the moment we are growing at three times the rate of the rest of the OECD. But despite the yawning infrastructure shortfalls that rate is not fast enough for Labor's Bill Shorten who wants to see still higher levels of immigration. The next arrival could “be the next Albert Einstein or a good taxpayer”. But it could just as well be the next crime boss or a welfare recipient. And while the current SA Labor government starts to talk about dismantling our current planning approval system (to make it easier to realise its urban expansion and densification dreams) the leader of the alternative Liberal government wants more incentives to boost our population growth. It's enough to make you bury your head in your hands in despair – or join Stop Population Growth Now.

NOTES

[1]The author of this article, Michael Lardelli, is senior lecturer in genetics at the University of Adelaide, translator of Prof. Kjell Aleklett's book “Peeking at Peak Oil”, a committee member of Sustainable Population Australia and a member of the management committee of the political party Stop Population Growth Now.