I recently attended an ACF meeting. As the oldest environmental NGO in Australia they are doing a road tour seeking support. These people are fighting against the inevitable destruction of the Australian environment, which the ABC, our public broadcaster, on whom so many Australians rely for serious information, fully sanctions using pro population growth extremism. Unfortunately the argument put forth is akin to one where a driver, because he is wearing a seat-belt, believes that he now no longer needs to worry about travelling at high speed without brakes.

The ACF are unable to mention population growth in any of their 11 core campaigns, apparently because they are confused about what to do and how to do it. The ABC, on which Australians rely for much of their information, has partly driven this confusion through destructive propaganda which seeks to suppress discussion of the scientific truth about population growth.

Typically such Environmental NGO meetings are a combination of over 50s and younger people. A significant proportion of the older people recognise the population problem because they have the wisdom of the experience of rapid change iThe 20 somethings just can’t see how rapidly the degeneration is occurring because they lack that experience and remain uninformed by important broadcasters like the ABC.

I rang the ABC's RN Breakfast line yesterday again making a plea for impartial coverage of the population growth issue. A cause I have supported for the last 8 years and more.

I explained that refugees, migration and population growth management are related, but completely different, issues. What appeared to be a bigoted ABC fool on the other end of the line said she didn’t agree. To me this betrayed the reality of intolerance, prejudice and ignorance endemic at the ABC. Ever since the Pauline Hanson debacle the ABC has sought to confuse population growth management, which is a humanitarian and environmental issue, with anti refugee and anti migration attitudes.

Refugees are created by overpopulation, degraded environments and conflict over resources.

Migration, in Australia, is a government policy based on an outdated belief in population growth and a ‘populate or perish’ mentality that is a relic of a mid-20th century world with no limits to growth. Apart from the US and Canada, there are no other countries with longstanding mass migration policies. Such policies are in conflict with refugee policy. For example Australia's planned migration intake for 2014/15 is 190,000 while refugee intake is 13,750. And this is happening in the context of annual unemployment growth roughly 60% higher than annual population growth. The US has 50 million people below the poverty line and is arguably one of the most environmentally destructive, inhumane examples of capitalist malpractice on earth. Canada is similar to Australia because there is a delusion of no limits to growth there too; despite the evidence to the contrary.

Population growth management is essential for achieving for humanitarian and environmentally sustainable objectives. This is not a political issue; it is a scientific fact; just as global warming is a scientific fact.

Australia’s economy, in deteriorating more rapidly under the extreme population growth scenario, provides the proof of the unhumanitarian and unsustainable nature of extreme population growth. I have written at length about this scientific fact, explaining that Australia displays contempt for the risk management of this issue that any Australian business entity would be legally bound to apply based on WorkSafe legislation. All multinational corporations, including large mining and oil companies, follow guidelines similar to WorkSafe. The basis for these risk management strategies is based on maximising safe outcomes in an environment (the business environment) where there is a physical (and financial) limit to the available resources. This risk management strategy, if practiced by the Australian government, would lead to the following:

• Immediate evaluation of the impact of population growth on the economy to determine whether lower rates of growth would lead to better holistic financial outcomes
• If the evidence supports this conclusion this would lead to more money available for domestic and foreign aid to promote quality of life and family planning in the developing world (and in Australia)
• The simple risk management conclusion may be that moderating Australia’s rate of population growth will serve the greater good. This is why confusing such a strategy with anti-migration or anti-refugee attitudes is so destructive.

One analogy is a driver in a car wearing a seat belt. The seat belt represents renewable energy. The car represents population growth. The car is currently driving towards a brick wall at 100 km per hour. Unless the car slows down the seat belt will be of no use.

Or another driver in the car. The seatbelt represents government capacity to balance the budget. Same car, same population problem, same brick wall. Population growth denial doesn't work.

There have been many economic studies supporting the conclusion that rapid population growth is economically unsustainable due to the high cost of infrastructure expansion. Here is one example: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10137&page=0

The argument about reducing carbon footprints of the developed world is one thing. But if you are wearing a size 11 shoe in Melbourne you will need a size 0.08 shoe 200 years from now based on the current rate of population growth. That is because the current trend population growth in Melbourne will change today’s population of 4.25 million into 593 million in 2215.

We don’t have enough time left to continue with confused and bigoted ABC propaganda driving population growth denial.

Ref: RN Breakfast interview with Joe Hockey on 26 February 2015

Traitor: "A person who betrays someone or something, such as a friend, cause, or principle." Substitute "a nation of people" for "friend".......

Fran Kelly's interview with Joe Hockey provides yet another example of the "don't mention the population growth" policy of Government, all the major political parties and the ABC. This betrays the principles set out in the ABC Code of Practice. This betrays a cause, which is impartial discussion of humane and sustainable solutions for Australia and its international conduct. This betrays a nation of people.

Is the ABC's conduct an attack on causes including:

• Objective assessment of what Australia can do to maximise it's humanitarian support for the world's most needy people using responsible economic management that incorporates detailed analysis of the economic impact of extreme population growth?
• Objective assessment of what Australia can do to optimise its strategy for reducing carbon emissions by considering the impact of extreme population growth on these emissions and on the means (economic and technical) available for their reduction?
• Objective assessment of the impacts of extreme population growth on the Federal Budget and what measures, if any, might be taken to address these impacts?

Australians are a "Weird Mob". In Australian schools in the 60s Australian history lessons made very little mention of the convict origins of Australian settlers and the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples. Was this somehow due to shame and awkwardness?

Today we have Fran Kelly and her colleagues at the ABC using a far more destructive form of concealment and denial to bury the population growth issue. Are they ashamed and confused about the relationship between Pauline Hanson's perceived racism and xenophobic intolerance and the population growth management issue?

The interview with Joe Hockey displayed the contempt for logic we've come to expect from Kelly. She failed to ask Joe Hockey about a significant root cause of demand for real estate in the context of foreign buyers; which is extreme population growth.

The legacy of Pauline Hanson is a different issue to Population Growth Management for Goodness sake! Extreme Population Growth is like Convict Origins and Aboriginal Dispossession. It does exist!

There are three groups engaged in the population growth management debate:

• The inept, Pauline Hanson style, attacks on immigration which supported baser levels of resentment. This is analogous to an Aboriginal throwing a spear at someone from the First Fleet
• The ludicrous, ABC style, Government sanctioned, taxpayer funded, population growth denial
• The moderate, reasonable, scientific, humanitarian, intellectually competent group who may represent a majority of Australians who just want to see open, impartial, public policy debate of population growth management instead of an Intergenerational Report issued once every 5 years as a concocted justification for doing nothing to address the complex myriad of consequential issues

Without allowing the last group to have a voice on the ABC, Fran Kelly, and all who support her, are arguably traitors and criminals.

Politicians do not sign an oath of impartiality.

But the ABC is legally bound to act with impartiality and is therefore an unlawful organisation because it deliberately misrepresents or conceals (otherwise known as taxpayer funded fraud) what is arguably the most important humanitarian, social, environmental and economic issue facing modern Australia.

In 2010 I visited Queensland on several occasions to give speeches about rapid population growth, in Brisbane, on the Sunshine Coast, and at the Woodford Folk Festival. I encountered great unhappiness at the impact rapid population growth was having in Brisbane and South-East Queensland, and was not surprised when the Queensland Labor Government was defeated in 2012, although the scale of the defeat was remarkable. (Article republished from Kelvin Thomson's site: http://kelvinthomson.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/queensland-government-knocks-over.html

In many respects the Queensland Government had fallen victim to the same problems that had beset the Victorian Labor Government which was defeated in 2010. But like the Victorian Labor Party the Queensland Labor Party has now pulled off an astonishing turnaround, apparently regaining office in a single term and toppling an elected Premier in the process. Ted Baillieu was replaced by his own party and did not get to contest the election; Campbell Newman lost his seat.

Political commentators are astonished at this growing political volatility. Kevin Rudd was elected as Prime Minister and replaced by Julia Gillard before the 2010 election. She in turn was replaced by Kevin Rudd before the 2013 election. It is now widely speculated that Tony Abbott, too, will not get to seek re-election as Prime Minister. So what is going on?

No doubt factors like broken election promises, the 24/7 media cycle, the Global Financial Crisis, and voters choosing State and Federal Governments of different complexions, are having an impact. But one feature of the past decade is regularly overlooked. In 2004 Australia had a net migration program of 100,000. Then in the space of three years it ratcheted up to well over 200,000, where it has stayed. This doubling has given Australia rapid population growth for the past decade – we now have an extra million people every three years. Prime Minister Howard, who introduced this rapid increase, lost his seat at the 2007 election.

I have become convinced that rapid population growth and political instability go hand in hand. I think of this as the Witches' Hats theory of government. Think about those Advanced Driving Courses that require drivers to drive in slalom fashion through a set of plastic or rubber orange cones, commonly called witches hats. The driver's mission is to avoid the hats. If they hit a certain number, they fail the test.

I think the re-election task of a government has some similarities. It you think of each hat as an area of public policy, such as education, health, housing, transport, aged care etc, if a government mucks up an area of public policy it is akin to hitting one of the witches' hats. If a government hits a number of hats, ie fails a number of public policy tasks, it is likely to be voted out, just as the driver who hits the hats won't get their Advanced Driving Qualification.

Now it seems pretty obvious that if you're a driver, you are much more likely to avoid the hats if you are travelling at 50 kph, whereas if you're driving at 100 kph, you're pretty likely to hit some hats. And if you're a government you're much more likely to solve peoples' problems if you have a population that is growing slowly, rather than one that is growing rapidly.

The Queensland and Victorian Liberal Governments were elected on the back of public discontent with issues such as planning, public transport, cost of living, housing unaffordability and job insecurity. But as these things had been caused by rapid population growth, and the growth continued, they did not solve those problems, and paid a massive electoral price for it. For example Governments get punished for trying to sell off public assets. They do it to raise money to build new infrastructure, or pay down debts incurred as a result of past infrastructure building. But they would not need so much money, or so much infrastructure, if the population wasn't growing so fast. The Queensland academic Jane O'Sullivan says that population growth of 2 per cent doubles the infrastructure task compared with that in a stable population.

It is not only in Australia that rapid population growth drives political instability. It happens right around the world. Governments in the Scandinavian countries with slow population growth are able to solve people's problems and enjoy considerable political life expectancy. Countries which have high birth rates, like Egypt, Nigeria and the Philippines, have chaos. In the Pacific Islands Samoa has had a relatively stable population, and stable government, for decades, whereas Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands have had neither.

It is not fashionable to focus on our past decade of rapid population growth as a cause of Australia's political instability and volatility. Some are happier focussing on the alleged personal qualities of our leaders – they heap praise or derision on Anna Bligh, or Tony Abbott, or Campbell Newman, when the fact is that a different leader with the same policies would have led to the same result. Others want to interpret election results through a highly ideological prism, and come unstuck as a consequence of believing too much of their own propaganda.

It is probably too late for Tony Abbott. But perhaps his successor, or successors, and other political leaders around Australia, might want to ask themselves "do I want to be yet another casualty of our equivalent of the Colosseum, or do I want a respectable time in office, as Prime Ministers and Premiers had as recently as the 80s and 90s?" And if so, isn't the way to improve my political life expectancy to slow the population car down and focus on solving people's real life problems?

This article forms the basis of a brochure, attached for download and printing, prepared by Roland Johnson for the Victorian and Tasmanian Branch of Sustainable Population Australia.

‘The modern plague of over population is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is …universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of the billions of people who are its victims’. [1]
Photo: Martin Luther King, 1966 (revered symbol of human rights)

But powerful forces have opposed population control and the world’s population has more than doubled since 1966 to seven billion, with three billion desperately poor. Migration to rich countries is not a solution. Watch Roy Beck’s YouTube video , ‘World Poverty, Immigration and Gumballs’, to see why.

In the screenshot below, one gumball equals one million people; the tall jars represent the three billion poor. The wine glass holds five years’ migrant intake at one million a year (the current intake of the United States). Even if Australia took one million people a year (nearly four times our current intake) the numbers of the poor would continue to grow at around the rate of 80 million each year. [2] Besides, Australia’s immigrants are more middle class than poor.

Poor people desperately need help where they are, including with family planning. We must stabilise our numbers, both nationally and globally. Currently the world is finding it difficult to feed all of the seven billion already here. [4] It won’t get easier if the global population grows to 9.75 billion or more by 2050. [5]

AUSTRALIA

From 2007-13 Australia’s net migration averaged over 230,000 p.a. which, added to an average annual natural increase of 157,000 p.a, meant growth of 387,000 p.a. and an annual growth rate of 1.8 per cent. [6] This is among the highest in the world. [7] It is destroying Australia’s ability to help the world’s poor and this growth will take us from 24 to 64 million in 2100. [8] It must stop some time.

WHY NOT NOW?

A sustainable Australian population

Australia’s total fertility rate (TFR) is around 1.9 per woman, [9] technically below replacement— 2.1. But the population is still youthful. So we would keep growing due to natural increase until 2046, leveling off at 26 million. A policy to stabilise our population closer to 26 million rather than 64 million is needed.

The growth lobby of big business, developers and media moguls is forcing Australia’s growth to be among the fastest in the world. Our total increase of 387,000 a year is more than the population of Canberra (381,488 in 2013). [11] This growth is against the wishes of 70 per cent of voters. [12] Our 1.8 per cent p.a. exceeds Canada’s high 1.2 per cent & NZ’s 0.8 per cent. [13]

The Immigration Department is overloaded

Immigration Department files reveal “…enforcement capacity has collapsed…nine in ten skilled migrant visas may be fraudulent …[investigation into] a Somali people - smuggling cell linked to a terror suspect … ceased due to a lack of resources’. [14]

Two thirds of new arrivals are on some kind of working visas, which are issued by licensed agents subject to rorting and bribes. Many visa holders, through a well understood system of visa churning, eventually gain permanent residency. [15]

Immigration policy can be changed. Around 80,000 people leave Australia permanently each year. This means that we could have a refugee intake of 20,000 p.a., plus other special cases, and achieve nil, or at least very low, net migration.

Economic Costs

Dr Jane O’Sullivan’s submission to the Productivity Commission, re ‘Public Infrastructure Report’ shows that each new person added to the Australian population costs taxpayers over $100,000 in infrastructure. [16]

“[P]opulation growth and ageing will affect labour supply, economic output, infrastructure requirements and government budgets… Total private and public investment requirements over this 50 year period [to 2060] are estimated to be more than 5 times the cumulative investment made over the last half century…”

[17] Building the equivalent of a new Canberra every year is not cheap.

The Federal Government is dominated by the growth lobby and State governments compete for the prestige of a higher population. They promote immigration and advertise for immigrants. They rezone prime agricultural land for housing. Local governments then increase rates, which forces the famers off the land. Local councils also convert pleasant suburban streets to high-rise ghettos to collect more rates. The costs of the extra services are paid for by existing tax- and rate-payers.

Choking Cities

‘Population growth is great for business but governments can’t keep up. Roads are clogged and public transport is groaning. The health and education systems can’t cope with demand’. [18]

Employment

With many new workers and the loss of our manufacturing capacity, we are already unable to employ many of our young.

‘Between 2011 and 2014 the number of jobs increased by 400,000 but new migrants took 380,000. Some 240,000 more young Australians entered working age compared with those who retired, but they had to compete for only 20,000 extra jobs’. [20]

Agriculture

Australia looks big on the map but it’s an old, dry, infertile continent. Sprawling cities are taking some of our best land—land high on the two factors of good soil and reliable rainfall. (These are the areas shaded dark green on the map.) Much of Australia is marginal agricultural land (shaded yellow), and the greater part is unsuitable for any agriculture (shaded red).

Australia might be able to feed a domestic population of 60 million for a while, but this would leave us without food for export to pay for imports. A sustainable population must stay below 30 million; over that we start to sink to third-world standards.

Climate Change

Climate change will badly affect Australia’s agriculture with reduced irrigation in the Murray-Darling Basin and marginal land becoming arid. The so-called inexhaustible Great Artesian Basin is now declining. The idea of Australia as the food bowl of Asia is a myth!

Minerals

Iron ore reserves were once thought to be almost inexhaustible. But all of the high grade, easily accessed mineral deposits in Australia have been mined out and energy consumption in mining has increased by 450 per cent in the last 40 years. [21] We are one of the world’s largest exporters of LNG, but this leaves little for the local market. [22] In order to find more, pressure for fracking access to coal-seam gas builds up. This risks polluting underground water and increasing food insecurity.

THE GROWTH LOBBY

While all Australians pay the cost of population growth, big business profits from it. Their self interest in growth is understandable. But it is unconscionable that politicians, most journalists and many academics support them. (See ‘How the Growth Lobby Threatens Australia’s Future’, James Sinnamon.) [23]

The growth lobby finds ways to silence its critics. In the USA the prestigious Sierra Club was given $100 million on the understanding that it would not continue to oppose the one million p.a. migrating to America. [24]

The slur of racism by the growth lobby has stifled the population debate.

BUT

Martin Luther King understood the cost of growth. Was he a racist?

‘I don't think slowing the rate of growth is blaming immigration or ethnic communities’
(Voula Messimeri, Chairwoman of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia). [25]

Immigrants also suffer the effects of population growth. Poor migrants suffer the most.

The lobby promotes the fear of an ageing population

But the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that ‘Even large difference in the level of net immigration will have a relatively small impact on the age distribution’. [26]

Natural increase is still strong so our population would not decline without net migration. Immigration makes us bigger, not younger. Besides the aged contribute to society in many ways—ways worth billions of dollars. [27]

What about humanitarianism?

Australia’s policies serve the growth lobby, not the greater good. There is no virtue in luring away the best and brightest from poor nations. Australia poaches doctors and nurses from developing nations to service the huge rise in our population. We take about 1000 doctors and 2800 nurses a year. How many more come on temporary or 457 visas?

Most of Australia’s migrants come for economic reasons; this is no way to help the world’s poor. We should accept refuges and provide desperate women of the third world—who procreate even when their children are starving—with the means of family planning.

THE ENVIRONMENT

‘Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it’s time we control the population to allow the survival of the environment’. [28]

Sir David Attenbourough (celebrated conservationist)

The World Wildlife Fund reported in 2014 that the world wildlife population had been halved between 1970 and 2010. The human population doubled in the same peroiod contributing directly to 82 per cent of the loss of wild life. [29]

We are already destroying the environment by overstocking our poor soils, habitat destruction and deforestation all of which causes soil loss and salination. We are doing this in 2015 to support nearly 24 million people. What would we do to support 64 million?

GLOBAL WARMING

Global warming is our greatest immediate threat and as Figure 3 shows, Greenhouse gases increase with the world’s population.

And Australia’s per capita emissions are the highest in the OECD. [31]

Our responsibility to other people, those now living and those yet to be born, and our responsibility to other species, all mean that Australia must curb its runaway population growth. The world must slow down and stabilise too.

Prepared by Roland Johnson for Sustainable Population Australia Vic/Tas.
www.population.org.au

This material is available in pdf form for downloading and printing here: Population Flyer cropped.pdf

References

[1] tp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Overpopulationaccessed 18 January 2015
[2] Roy Beck, World Poverty, Immigration and Gumballs The Population Reference Bureau’s annual World population data sheet shows a world population of 7.238 billion in mid 2014 and 1.137 billion in mid 2013, an estimated increase of 101 million people, 98 million of this increase in less developed countries. See www.prb.org
[3] Roy Beck, op. cit.
[4] Paddy Manning, ‘“Global” risks on food security mean us too’, The Age, 3 December 2011, p. 16
[5] The United Nations’ projections for 2050 include 9.746 billion (medium), 16.218 (medium high) and 24.834 billion (high).tp://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange/longrangeExecSum.pdfaccessed 18 January 2015
[6] Data on growth calculated from the ABS, Demographic Statistics, Catalogue no. 3101.0 various issues. The average NOM for 2007 to 2013 was 237,000 pa and the average annual growth rate was 1.81 per cent
[7] See World Bank http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW accessed 18 January 2015
[8] Projection series 20, published online with, Australian Bureau of Statistics (2013), Population Projections, Australia, 2012 (Base) to 2101, Catalogue no. 3222.0.
[9] The average total fertility rate from 2008-09 to 2013-14 was 1.9085. Calculated from ABS, Demographic Statistics, Catalogue no. 3101.0, June 2014, p. 39.
[10] See ibid.
[11] ABS, Demographic Statistics, July 2014, Catalogue no. 3101.0, p. 26
[12] Katharine Betts (2010), ‘A bigger Australia: opinions for and against’, People and Place 18(2), pp. 25-38
[13] World Bank data bank
[14] Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker, ‘Terror touches down’, The Age, 7 August 2014, pp. 1, 4.
[15] See Dr. R Birrell, Sydney Morning Herald online , 7 August 2014.

[16] Jane O’Sullivan (2014), ‘Submission to the Productivity Commission Inquiry into Infrastructure provision and funding in Australia’, p. 3 http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/135517/subdr156-infrastructure.pdf
[17] Productivity Commission (2013). An Ageing Australia: Preparing for the Future — Overview. Melbourne, Productivity Commission, p. 2
[18] Alan Kohler, ‘Healthcare and infrastructure spend tearing budget apart’, The Australian, 6 May 2014, p. 30
[19] Source: Department of Infrastructure and Transport, Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport, Road vehicle-kilometres travelled: estimated from state and territory fuel sales, Report 124, Canberra, Department of Infrastructure and Transport, 2011, pp. 372-3
[20] Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy (2014), Immigration and Unemployment in 2014,/em>. Monash University, Melbourne, Centre for Population and Urban Research
[21] Simon Michaux (2014) ‘The coming radical change in mining practice’ in Jenny Goldie and Katharine Betts (Eds) Sustainable Futures: Linking population, resources and the environment, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria, pp. 75-76
[22] See ‘Reform needed to minimise LNG export impact on manufacturers: report’, ,em>Gas Today, 24 July 2014 http://gastoday.com.au/news/reform_needed_to_minimise_lng_export_impact_on_manufacturers_report/088251/ accessed 25 November 2014
James Sinnamon, "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future."

Kenneth R. Weiss, ‘The man behind the land’, Los Angeles Times 27 October 2004
Quoted in Mark O'Connor and William Lines (2008), Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, Envirobooks, Sydney, p. 145
ABS (2000), Projections of the Populations of Australia, States and Territories: 1999-2101, Catalogue no. 3222.0, p. 2
For more on the benefits (and costs) of demographic ageing see Katharine Betts (2014), The ageing of the Australian population: triumph or disaster?, Centre for Population and Urban Research, Monash University
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Attenborough accessed 25 November 14
Living Planet Report 2014 accessed 25 November 2014
Population data are from United Nations Department of economic and social affairs http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/population.htm ; Carbon emissions data are from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre (CDIAC)
The Garnaut Climate Change Review, Chapter 7, ‘Australia’s emissions in a global context’ 2008, updated in 2011 http://www.garnautreview.org.au/chp7.htm

A new temporary entry visa for skilled migrants, without any of the safeguards of labour market testing and English language requirements, would be a betrayal of Australian workers.

Unemployment has risen to 6.3 per cent. Over 775,000 Australians are out of work. The total number of hours worked in Australia in November actually fell by 0.3 per cent. Youth unemployment is at a 15 year high of 13.8%. In the northwest of Melbourne it is 17.2%, up from 13.1% in 2013. Originally published on Kelvin Thomson's website at http://kelvinthomson.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/local-workers-sold-out.html

The Liberal Government would be much more helpful if it cut back our migrant worker programs that are placing unfair competition on local young people, and invested instead in our skills and education sectors. The billions of dollars in cuts by the Liberal Federal and State Governments to our skills, training, TAFE, higher education, secondary and primary education sectors hampers job opportunities for young people. Making young people ineligible for the Newstart Allowance is punitive and will do nothing to tackle the real reasons behind rising unemployment.

Despite the rhetoric that high skilled migration is needed for the mining and agriculture sectors, the reality is a high proportion of migrant workers come to Victoria. The Skilled Migration Program grew from 125,755 places on 2011-12 to 128,973 in 2012-13. In 1995-96 the Skilled Migration Program was just 24,100. The Occupations with the highest number of primary visa grants were professionals (4,656 or 51.1%) and technicians and trade workers (2,416 or 26.5%) in the 457 Visa Class.

As Skilled Migration researcher Bob Birrell has said:

“There are already significant problems with graduate employment in professions such as dentistry, computer science, medicine and engineering.

Liberalisation such that being mooted is going to crash head-on with that situation.”

The Liberal Government should be focusing on how to maximise employment opportunities for our own university graduates and apprentices, and strengthening requirements for employers to advertise jobs locally before recruiting ­workers from overseas, not making it easier for companies to bypass Australian workers.

[Changed from original title of "Quantifying 62,000 visa overstayers in terms of population impact and our history".] The Australian Immigration Department has released a report, "Migration Trends 2012-2013," in which it estimates that 62,100 people were unaccounted for in Australia during 2014 - roughly 1.2 per cent of the 5.5 million people who enter the country each year on temporary visas. Visitors (44,800) and students (10,720) were the largest cohort of visa holders to overstay their permitted time here, and people from China (7690), Malaysia (6420), the US (5220) and the UK (3780) led the field. In this article I try to quantify and qualify this number of people and their impact in the Australian system.

Impact of 62,000 people as rural town

62,000 people makes for a town the size of Gladstone, in Queensland, 2014. Interesting to ponder the ramifications in a typical example of population growth in Australia. Gladstone has several primary schools, three high schools, (Gladstone State High, Toolooa State High and Chanel College), one university campus, Central Queensland University, and CQIT (TAFE) Gladstone Campus. It has a major public hospital and at least two private hospitals. An employment base is provided by the following industries (mostly mining) and those that service them - retail, health, cleaning, real estate, etc

Boyne Smelters Limited
Cement Australia
NRG Gladstone Operating Services (Coal generated electricity plant)
Queensland Alumina Limited
Rio Tinto Alcan – Yarwun

There are plans to development LNG facilities, among other industrial projects.
It is right on the barrier reef and it is advertising for skilled migrants.

Originally inhabited by the Baiali (or Byellee), Goereng and Goreng Goreng Aboriginal tribes.

Established as a colony in 1847 with 87 soldiers and convicts, but ordered to close down after two months. 1872 non-convict settlers began arriving. In 1893 a meatworks was established. In 1963, the aluminium industry started up there and the port facilities were expanded. In the 1868 photograph of Gladstone Port, you can glimpse the once vast forests in the background.

A cultural heritage assessment published in 2000 indicates that the Boyne Valley was home to aboriginal people for thousands of years prior to European discovery.

The first recorded meeting of the two cultures was on Curtis Island in 1802. After showering Matthew Flinders and his party with rocks and stones on their arrival, the “Indians” observed them for a fortnight before making contact. Two seamen became lost and spent a night tortured by mosquitoes in the mangrove swamps. They were rescued, fed, examined in a “personal manner” and guided safely back to their ship. Living on a diet of seafood, kangaroo and bird life they were described as, “stout, muscular men who went entirely naked, understood bartering better than most and were curious but not over excitable”.

The first white settlers in the Boyne Valley referred to a large permanent aboriginal camp on Raggote Creek. Their lands extended along the river between the Boyne and Many Peaks Ranges, downstream to within a few miles of the coast and upstream to The Bluff. Beyond this point a related tribe of several hundred individuals had camps around the numerous waterholes paralleling the river. One hole was called Euboba. The name remains as Ubobo, the adaptation used in 1899 by W.A.F. McDonald to name his 4000-acre selection.

Little is recorded of the life of these people but in less than thirty years their populations were decimated. McDonald (1988) reports, “The Toolooa, which still numbered about 700 in 1854, had dwindled to forty-three in 1882. The Byelee in the same period were reduced from 300 to thirty-two.” Source: http://boynevalley.org.au/history/

Goldmining in 1853. Rail in 1910. Soldier settler blocks in 1920s. All these activities would indicate that the forests were Dairy industry, which went bust from drought in the 1970s. Like most Queensland towns beautiful giant forests were probably chopped down for fuel and wood export and to build those cute little houses you see in Queensland that are too expensive to replicate now, due to lack of wood. In the 1970s a huge drought, possibly related to removal of the trees, ended the dairy industry.

In 1985, after a succession of dams and weirs, each bigger than the last, the land was inundated by the Awoonga Dam to meet Gladstone’s growing water demands. In 2014 housing is unaffordable to anyone with an income less than $80,000 p.a., according to the Property Council of Australia, which engineered this situation. It demands 'more land release' (but not less immigration). This is typical of the Property Council who are major investors in population growth, which the rest of us all pay for in rising housing prices, power prices etc.

What a species! I should say, What a system! Because the Australian Aborigines are the same species, but didn't have the same system. The British system is kind of like a wrecking ball that has an inexhaustible supply of fuel and people. See, "Demography, Territory and Law2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain" The Aboriginal system seems to have been steady state. See, on steady state land-tenure and political sytems Demography, Territory & Law: Rules of Animal and Human Populations (2013) They probably didn't even burn much, if any, forest. See "Video lecture: Did Australian Aboriginals burn the bush as we are told? Joel Wright, "The language of fire." "

Finally, although the government admits that about 62,000 people are outside of its 'control', the real problem is more like 240,000 planned invited economic immigrants who are outside Australians' democratic control. Most Australians have no idea of this number and how it is mounting up, year by year, with the Property Council of Australia and other growth lobbyists, constantly pushing to increase this number, which is three times the size of average annual net immigration from the 1960s to the 1990s. For more information on Australia's immigration history (and a comparison with France) see http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/vital/access/services/Download/swin:7395/SOURCE7

Speaking at an Australian Business Economist's dinner on 25 November, (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-26/rba-could-cut-rates-oecd-warns-of-housing-risks/5918946) the RBA's Deputy Governor Philip Lowe told the audience that Australians had gotten too accustomed to a world beating economy and seem to have become unduly depressed now that the nation has come back to the pack. He claimed that a factor boosting the economic outlook is population growth. Dr Lowe said it is much easier for domestic businesses to cope with uncertain economic times in the knowledge that "the overall size of the pie is getting bigger." The reality is that the pie per capita keeps getting smaller; so Philip seems somewhat confused.

RBA Deputy Governor's "bigger pie" on a suburban building block?

Let's compare this to the typical native settlement on the outer islands of Vanuatu. Let's say these natives have one hectare of land. They live a sustainable lifestyle with chickens, goats, coconuts, bananas and home grown vegetables much as they have for over a thousand years. No plastic, no debt.

Applying Dr Lowe's logic to the Vanuatu context, the more people living off that hectare of land the "bigger the pie" becomes. If we were to consult the natives, their prudent response would be that they can only support a limited number of natives on one hectare of land. That is how they had lived in relative harmony with their ecosystem for over a thousand years.

Is this an econo-moronic fantasy that assumes the more people you squeeze onto a hectare of land the "bigger the pie" becomes? Is this because economists think wealth is created by people alone, rather than by people harnessing resources from the environment that supports them? If one is in environmental denial, this would be a perfectly logical perspective. Is this why so many economists think carbon trading is an economic solution to an environmental problem? Do they think they can buy their way out of the problem?

If one is in environmental denial is one also in economic denial? For over a decade the Federal Budget has been growing at 6-8% per capita per annum while GDP has grown at less than 1% per capita per annum. The average growth of GDP per capita per annum has averaged 1.6% since Federation. So something is clearly very wrong and this is not just an aberration that can be explained as a consequence of the GFC.

The RBA has been performing a balancing act with interest rates for many years. One factor driving them up has been a desire to moderate the escalation of house prices and other demand related prices. But extreme population growth puts upward pressure on house prices as it creates demand in the economy. During the GFC the RBA kept interest rates higher than most countries while mass migration was ramped up as a strategy to avoid recession. In the immediate aftermath of the GFC there was a step change in Australian unemployment roughly equal to 25% of the number of migrants who entered Australia in the two years of Rudd's mass migration stimulus strategy. Was there a direct relationship between these two changes? Does the average migrant family comprise two parents and two children, with one working parent? If so, is this an example of correlation between a step change in migration and a step change in unemployment?

For many years the Australian dollar exchange rate has been very high. This has contributed to the destruction of Australia's manufacturing sector and to other adverse outcomes.

If we compare all this to the Vanuatu natives analogy, imagine making a decision to double the population on the one hectare settlement. There is no longer enough land to grow yams. Yams then become very valuable, a bit like house prices rising.

People become thinner and start to starve. They become weaker and cannot look after the animals and the vegetable plots. Crop yields reduce. Becoming thin in this way is a bit like going into debt that you cannot recover from, in conjunction with declining productivity.

The people are no longer able to help neighbouring villages by donating surplus food in times of need. This is a bit like Australia reducing foreign aid in the last two years by $7.5 billion and $4.5 billion.

This problem is not just about the insanity of endless population growth; it is about the rate of change, the speed of that growth. If you were to rapidly double the number of Kanakas [Kanaka was the term for a worker from various Pacific Islands such as the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) employed in British colonies] on one hectare of land before they had worked out how to grow sufficient yams the Kanakas would be "knackered". This is exactly analogous to the scenario presided over by the RBA and its economic cognoscenti.

Even if endless population growth was feasible, there would have to be a coherent plan for enabling that growth. By continuing with extreme population growth without a coherent plan, Government and all its Agencies demonstrate their collective incompetence. They need to step back and orchestrate open public policy debate on behalf of the people.

Is there something the Deputy Governor of the RBA can learn about the difference between "pies getting bigger" and "pies getting smaller" and what this really means for humanity and the environment which supports it?

This, of course, does not mean plotting a course back to subsistence agriculture. But Australia's role as world leader in extreme-population-growth-driven unsustainable development is clearly in need of a sanity check. That sanity check requires open public policy debate; not suppression and denial supported by irrational rhetoric.

The Group of 20 (G20) is meeting in Brisbane this week to discuss the global economy. William Bourke says we should focus less on the GDP and instead look at real progress indicators like high employment, a diverse economic base and sustainable resource management.

At the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in February, Australia’s Treasurer Joe Hockey pleaded with participating nations to increase their aggregate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2 per cent per annum. GDP growth will again top the billing at this week’s G20 Leaders' Summit in Brisbane.

But few if any commentators have paused to ask a simple question: What does GDP growth provide for ordinary citizens?

GDP is the primary indicator used by governments and media to gauge the health of a country's economy. It represents the total dollar value of all goods and services produced over a specific time period. But there are serious problems with this indicator. GDP theory not only presumes an impossible world of unlimited resources – such as forests, oil, fish stocks, arable land and water – it counts many negative elements as positive contributions. For example, did you know that both cancer and a car crash can increase GDP? They both demand goods and services.

Another major weakness in GDP is that the depletion of our non-renewable environmental resources such as minerals and natural gas is counted as a positive, instead of a negative as is required in proper accounting standards (via depreciation).

It is also improper that the headline GDP figure does not account for population growth. If GDP grows at (say) .3 per cent in a quarter, but population growth is .5 per cent, we are going backwards on the GDP scale. During the GFC Australia had a per capita recession, with negative per capita GDP over two consecutive quarters. But only one or two economists mentioned this, and the myth still exists that Australia has had over 20 years of unbroken ‘growth’. Even today population growth is well over half the rate of aggregate GDP. At the very least we should be reporting GDP per capita.

The bottom line with Joe’s aggregate GDP growth obsession is that he’s forgotten to ask whether ordinary citizens are actually happier. GDP is a useful measure of economic activity, but it doesn’t measure human wellbeing or happiness, or equality.

In a step towards true social justice, we need to redefine ‘growth’ in our finite world. Not just for our sake, but for future generations. If we are to secure a prosperous economy, healthy environment and better quality of life, growth must focus on quality, not quantity. At present, who could argue that Australia’s economy, environment or quality of life are heading in the right direction? Under the current political duopoly, we're getting much bigger, without getting better.

Australia’s economic prosperity does not depend on the GDP statistic. In fact, GDP is a side-show. It would be more accurate to say that our economic prosperity is underpinned by three key pillars:

1. Investment in better education and skills training to improve job security, workforce participation and innovation

2. Encouragement of a diverse range of productive industries and

3. Maintenance of our natural economic advantage via careful management of food, water, energy and mineral resources.

This third point is often overlooked in economic terms, and like the others, is undermined by rapid population growth. Rapid population growth acts as a disincentive for local training and education, and skews scarce economic investment into relatively unproductive city-building assets, like high-rise apartments.

We should not obsess over Joe’s arbitrary GDP target. In fact we should ignore it and focus on genuine progress indicators. If we achieve high employment, a diverse economic base, and sustainable resource management, GDP will take care of itself. We can be better without getting bigger.

William Bourke is President of the federally registered Sustainable Population Party.

What is a normal response from an environment minister to a straight question to a matter that alarms about 80% of Australians, as even self-styled demographer, Bernard Salt of KPMG admits? [1] Mr Kelvin Thomson, ALP member for Wills, asked Greg Hunt, the Liberal Government Minister for the Environment, whether the Government would consider adopting a stable population policy to avoid new infrastructure imperatives. Minister Hunt responded bluntly that "the answer to the honourable member's question was: No."[2]

Mr Hunt does not seem like much of a Minister for the Environment. And he does not appear to have much interest in democracy. This is the second time he has flouted the public right to accountable policy this year. See also, "Environment Minister Greg Hunt speaks fluent nonsense to Kelvin Thomson on population".

Calls for referendum on population growth

This refusal is particularly flagrant when his own state (Victoria) has recently had two events which resulted in resounding calls for a referendum on halting population growth. These were, "The Big Population Debate", organised by Mary Drost of Planning Backlash on 13 October 2014 and "Must Melbourne Keep Growing", organised by Jill Quirk of Sustainable Population Australia and Victoria First on 14 June 2014.

Before an audience of around 280 people, Mary Drost, Convener of Planning Backlash, commenting that "We the people have never been asked if we wanted a big population," obtained from Kelvin Thomson and Lord Mayor Robert Doyle that they were in favour of a referendum on population growth.

At the equally packed auditorium at the Hawthorne Arts Centre Chandelier Room for the Must Melbourne Keep Growing event, Julianne Bell of Protectors of Public Land, read a motion for a plebiscite on population growth, which was also passed unanimously.

"That this meeting calls on the Victorian government to convene a scientifically based Victorian conference on what constitutes a long term environmentally sustainable population for Victoria, with reference to the Victorian State of the environment reports of 2008 and 2013 indicating environmental damage from current population levels."

Is Mr Hunt so afraid that he can't defend his policies?

Then again, maybe Minister Hunt is simply afraid to open his mouth on the subject. Especially to Mr Thomson, who is awfully well informed about it. At the Big Population Debate, we saw a remarkably courageous or foolhardy Lord Mayor of Melbourne's fire go out like a doused squib at the first encounter with intelligent argument on the subject. Then again, he could have prepared better. Or could he?

It was the Victorian environmentalist, Jill Quirk, who remarked, not so long ago, "I dare anyone to argue the benefits of population growth to ordinary Australians without mentioning cappuccino or using the word 'vibrant'. Indeed, Lord Mayor Doyle returned again and again to the accessibility of a good cup of coffee in contemporary overpopulated Melbourne. Although no-one can actually remember him using the word 'vibrant' - he might have slipped one in somewhere as his arguments grew progressively harder to decipher.

NOTES

[1] Bernard Salt in Straightening out bananas 2010, who is in the business of trying to persuade Australians to embrace the population jugganaut, admits freely to colleagues in the Property Council of Australia that if you polled Australians on 'big Australia' 80% would come back against it.
[2] Minister for the Environment, Greg Hunt, House of Representatives Question No. 0103:
Mr Thomson asked the Minister for the Environment, in writing on 13 May 2014:
Will the Government consider adopting a stable population policy to avoid new infrastructure imperatives?
Mr Hunt: The answer to the honourable member's question is as follows: No. [Dated 25 July 2014]

Professional growth spruiker, Bernard Salt of KPMG, says that 80% of Australia does not want population growth. ("Straightening out Bananas", Property Council Congress, 2011) So how come we are being swamped?

There is a theory to explain how unpopular and costly policies survive in a 'democracy' when the benefits are focused among a few people who can organise to protect those benefits, whereas the costs are diffused among many people thus difficult to recognise and organise against. This theory explains why 80 % of Australia does not want population growth for good reasons like the cost of housing and the wrecking of the environment, but we still have it because the Growth Lobby makes billions of dollars (not just millions) out of it. (See Chapter 5 of Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby and its Absence.)

The cartoon illustrates this, as an organised and wealthy rent-collecting Growth Lobby Inc. swoops with a helicopter, while people look around them, confused about what’s happening.

There had been almost continuous high immigration from 1949-1970 – although immigration from 2009 dwarfs those figures now. Whitlam related population growth statistics to high land prices and the need for more appropriate management of development. Menzies had brought in policies that favoured the private housing industry over the public housing supply. Whitlam would try to counteract this tendency which now drives homelessness and overpopulation.

In 1973 land prices increased by up to 46 per cent in Melbourne and Adelaide and 34 per cent in Sydney. The highest increases were in outer-metropolitan areas where rapid population growth exceeded the supply of serviced blocks. The Whitlam government attempted to establish Federally funded public land development agencies in each State which would "establish a presence in the market sufficient to influence the general level of land prices and the rate of development of particular areas". This was intended to "create direct competition with private developers" "with a vested interest in the escalation of land prices" by "selling to home builders at the cost of production of the block." Whitlam also attempted to stabilise Australia's population numbers and to plan for Australia to become self-sufficient. See the full thesis.

Resistance to Change in the Residential Construction Industry in Australia after 1973

As discussed in an earlier chapter of Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby and its Absence in Australia and France (2002)_#fnEgw23">23, Australia had been unable or unwilling to educate and train enough skilled tradesmen._{#fnEgw1" id="txtEgw1"> 1} Greater funding and access to education and training were particularly important if the building industry was to change its boom and bust approach to business. The Whitlam Government's policies to improve access to training, combined with urban planning innovation, might have improved this situation, by producing skilled building workers for Australia. Like the French, Australians now had access to free tertiary education and technical and further education and training. This was a revolutionary policy, for, with the Whitlam government's plans for reducing immigration and the Commonwealth funding the States to buy up land cheaply, there would not have been the same opportunities for private speculation. This would have created pressure on the industry to change. With better skilled workers, however, the building industry would have had a greater chance of achieving modern restructuring, which would have assisted its adaptation to new conditions.

Anti-speculation Innovations attempted under the Whitlam Government : the Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD)

Whitlam writes at some length on these issues in his autobiography and in this, as in immigration, he favoured consolidation over growth. _{#fnEgw2" id="txtEgw2"> 2} The Department of Urban and Rural Development (DURD) was created under Whitlam and was the first federal department of its kind. It was meant to be virtually co-equal with treasury, dealing with the urban budget and co-ordinating departments with urban responsibilities, but competition and tradition within the public service hampered its function._{#fnEgw3" id="txtEgw3"> 3}

Whitlam believed that consolidation of urban development through better planning and services required more Federal intervention, since the Commonwealth Government had more tax funds at its disposal. He believed that part of the problem of high land prices and inappropriate developments had come about through urban planning being a responsibility of State governments._{#fnEgw4" id="txtEgw4"> 4} He also observed that "Government programs for housing renewals swim against the tide of private urban development. In the private housing market the greatest profits are made on the urban fringe".

In his opinion, urban redevelopment of depressed inner city areas would be greatly facilitated by Commonwealth grants for this purpose. He deemed that public acquisition of development land is necessary not only to reduce land prices and provide competition for private developers, but to ensure the orderly and comprehensive development of large areas of land. He was concerned at the sacrifice of previously designated green belts and the environmental and social costs this entailed. It was debatable, he wrote, whether the land should thence be returned to private ownership, but good initial development relied on public participation._{#fnEgw5" id="txtEgw5"> 5}

He commented that land speculation had been allowed to run unchecked as private developers held the supply of land constant so that its price would increase. He wrote that during the 1960s the average price of land in Australia had increased by 182 per cent. He attributed these characteristics of the Australian housing industry and market to the ideology of previous right wing governments._{#fnEgw6" id="txtEgw6"> 6} He also commented that planning was fragmented at State level between various isolated concerns such as education, electricity supply and water supply etc., which used Commonwealth loan money for State and Local Works, with little reference to State and local planning agencies, which were often staffed by innappropriately qualified persons._{#fnEgw7" id="txtEgw7"> 7} He also attempted to introduce a capital gains tax on profits made through land rezoning._{#fnEgw8" id="txtEgw8"> 8}

He deplored the premature development of suburbs like Blacktown and Green Valley in New South Wales, attributing to them later severe social problems, including unemployment (through simple inability due to distance and transport problems of employer to access employee and vice-versa), delinquency and criminality. Blacktown, he explained, had been developed by private developers on the fringes of the city because costs of development were lower there than in land available and zoned for future development closer to the city. Blacktown lacked adequate sewerage, paving, drainage, public transport, shopping amenities and schools and jobs. Green Valley was a public housing estate that had also been built on the fringes of Liverpool. Although this estate contained 20 per cent more blue-collar workers, 50 per cent less white-collar workers, and 15 per cent more children below the age of 16, and lower ownership of private transport than the national average, it was five kilometers from the nearest railway station, had no proper bus service, and was a long way from the location of jobs._{#fnEgw9" id="txtEgw9"> 9}

There had been almost continuous high immigration from 1949-1970. In his book, Whitlam constantly relates population growth statistics to high land prices and the need for more appropriate management of development. In 1973 land prices increased by up to 46 per cent in Melbourne and Adelaide and 34 per cent in Sydney._{#fnEgw10" id="txtEgw10">10} The highest increases were in outer-metropolitan areas where rapid population growth exceeded the supply of serviced blocks. The Whitlam government attempted to establish Federally funded public land development agencies in each State which would "establish a presence in the market sufficient to influence the general level of land prices and the rate of development of particular areas". This was intended to "create direct competition with private developers" "with a vested interest in the escalation of land prices" by "selling to home builders at the cost of production of the block."_{#fnEgw11" id="txtEgw11">11}

This was of course the long-standing policy of the French government.

The success of these policies was patchy,_{#fnEgw12" id="txtEgw12">12} mostly due to opposition from institutionalised vested interests. A South Australian land commission was created in 1973. In New South Wales (March 1975), Victoria (May 1975), and West Australia (May 1975) Urban Land Councils, with inadequate statutory authority and which were obliged to go through other State authorities were created. Queensland was in the process of confirming an agreement to establish one when the Whitlam Government fell. Tasmania reluctantly established an Interim State Land Co-ordination Council in October 1975, which never met._{#fnEgw13" id="txtEgw13">13}

Whitlam compares the impact of the powerful land commission in South Australia with the relatively impotent urban land council in Victoria. The South Australian commission received a total of $28.8 million from the Whitlam Government and $4 million from the Dunstan State Government and acquired 1920 ha of urban land, 1094 ha of rural land and 654 ha of non-urban land between 1973 and 1976. By 1977 it was providing 70% of new residential allotments. According to Whitlam this kept land prices down and guaranteed better land development and planning._{#fnEgw14" id="txtEgw14">14}

The situation in Victoria was much different. The Urban Land Council there only marginally affected land prices, according to Whitlam. He also writes that the Council only purchased land when demand was low, which helped out developers who could not otherwise have capitalised on this land and therefore maintained high land prices. Furthermore, the Land Council resold the land to builders at close to market prices. (We need to remember that in the Australian system developers and builders are usually separate concerns, with the former generally much better financed than builders and the latter working on very small profit margins, due to the initial cost of land bought from developers.) Whitlam's observation is that the Victorian Liberal Goverment (and the New South Wales and Western Australian governments) acted in accordance with the private land market and against the public interest. He provides evidence that, using public money, the Victorian Housing Commission purchased land at well above market price in 1973 under the Minister for Housing in Victoria, Vince Dickie._{#fnEgw15" id="txtEgw15">15}

The Hamer Government in Victoria achieved another remarkable feat, which has not received any critical comment, to my knowledge, although it has been recently documented in Australian immigration literature. This was the successful passing of an amendment to the Local Government Act whereby non-citizens became eligible to vote on council elections and to run for local government election._{#fnEgw16" id="txtEgw16">16}

Leonie Sandercock was moved to write a book about the corrupt Victorian Housing Commission, which engaged in land speculation under the Hamer Government in Victoria :

"... the VHC [Victorian Housing Commission], as much as any private speculator, assisted in the maintenance of the land boom in Victoria by paying to other speculators urban prices for land which was at the time of purchase zoned as farming land, thereby contributing to land price inflation and making it more and more difficult for low income workers to enter the land market, and thereby adding clients to its own waiting list. And this amazingly counter-productive policy was pursued because the State Government, at a Cabinet meeting on 16 July 1973 (after six months' concern at the likely consequences of the establishment of a land commission on the Victorian land market), decided to try to pre-empt this Federal program by allotting to the VHC the role of land banking and development."_{#fnEgw17" id="txtEgw17">17}

These and other speculatory activities under the Victorian government resulted in an Inquiry and criminal proceedings, and such was the extent of this land speculation that it impacted on the Federal Liberal government that followed on from Whitlam's and resulted in the removal of Treasurer Lynch in December 1977._{#fnEgw18" id="txtEgw18">18} This is ironic because it was Lynch, whilst in opposition, who had instigated the events that led to Whitlam's fall from government. One cannot help but wonder if this was pure coincidence or if Whitlam's strategies to frustrate land speculation, combined with his policies reducing migration, had not significantly added to the number and dedication of his enemies in the Victorian Liberal Party. This would be a very interesting and difficult object of future study but is not within the purview of this thesis.

If Whitlam's land development and housing reform strategies had succeeded, in combination with much reduced net immigration and, arguably, policies for lower energy use, it seems likely the housing industry in Australia might have adapted to a much lower rate of population growth and household formation. However these measures were doomed, along with the Whitlam government.

Leonie Sandercock, in her close analysis of the subject in the Transaction edition of Property, Politics and Urban Planning_{#fnEgw19" id="txtEgw19">19} with hindsight almost concludes that the Australian State based political system may make it impossible to reform land speculation traditions. She nevertheless concedes that Whitlam did succeed in influencing State Labor governments, although he failed with State Liberal governments. She also allows the possibility that Whitlam might have succeeded in establishing greater long term changes if the economic problems of rising unemployment and inflation had not undermined the government's ability to finance these changes and if the government had not been brought down. Her introduction to the Transaction edition is of documentary interest in its own right, if you depart from the premise that the she is revising a book that was written on the cusp of an era of great social and environmental optimism and confidence, just as the global effects of the oil shock related world recession had taken hold of Australia._{#fnEgw20" id="txtEgw20">20} Her concluding paragraph is poignant:

"If the left is to put its energy behind practical reforms of this kind, it will need to redirect its thinking away from grand schemes based on the premise that capitalism is about to collapse ... Now that the prospect of a continued, unlimited increase in material wealth has faded, we need more than ever a worked out conception of the good society - that is, an ideological stand - if we are to discuss policies intelligently._{#fnEgw21" id="txtEgw21">21} [My emphasis.]

In this section we saw how Labor, under Whitlam, attempted to curb land and housing speculation. The success of these innovations was limited by external events, the short life of the government, and institutional resistance by those with focused benefits in speculation. If Whitlam's innovations had succeeded, along with the maintenance of low net overseas immigration, according to my argument, then we might have seen a similar picture in Australia to the one in France in Figure 7.3. That is, there might have been a similar huge drop in the number of property development and building companies, to the extent that their ultimate regrouping would have been as a much smaller and more efficient sector, with substantially modified technologies, modes of production and organisational forms. According to this argument, the industry would thereby have lost its dependence on high immigration and a major immigrationist force in Australia would thus have become spent. Without the traditional recourse to population pressure and population competition to drive up land and house prices, property inflation and prices would have become substantially lower. Money might have been invested in new industries. The long-term demographic outlook of Australia might have been stabilisation at a smaller population.

In fact, the property development and building industries did go through a doldrums between 1974 and 1986_{#fnEgw22" id="txtEgw22">22} and these doldrums did coincide with a net fall in overseas immigration between 1972 and 1979.

In the end, however, Fraser reversed Whitlam's innovations and there was ultimately a return to high immigration. This, plus progressively more liberal access to foreign capital, progressively more banking deregulation, and progressively more globalisation of the property market, under successive governments, seem to have restored the old speculative system in good health. I will introduce these changes in the next section and then go into more detail about their nature and impacts in Chapter Eight.

NOTES

Audience with open microphone, commenting and asking questions of Kelvin Thomson and Mayor Doyle at the "Big Population Debate" on 13 October 2014 at Deakin Edge, Federation Square, which attracted well over 200 people from peak ratepayers, planning and environmental groups. It culminated in a call by Mary Drost, of Planning Backlash, for a referendum on Australia's population growth. Both Kelvin Thomson and Lord Mayor Doyle agreed that this was a good idea.

Video inside: The Big Population Debate at the Deakin Edge in Federation Square, Melbourne, on October 13, 2014, between Kelvin Thomson and Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, was a fantastic success in terms of numbers and outcome. Given the utter inertia of political process in responding to this democratic emergency, Mary Drost's call for a Referendum on Australia's Population Growth was a great idea to go forward. With both Kelvin Thomson and Mayor Doyle agreeing that a referendum on population is a good idea, Victorians and other Australians have something concrete to go forward with. The film here is of the debate. The referendum is on the open mike section, which is the next film that will be published. The debate embedded here showed that Mayor Doyle really doesn't have a handle on the issue at all, except as a loyal servant to the business end of growth. Kelvin Thomson's ability to debate the subject would make him a world leader in this area. This is a very important and historic record. Congratulations to Mary Drost of Planning Backlash for making it happen. Sheila Newman produced the video.

Consider the simple example of a "good" man who has worked hard to provide for his family. He finds out his wife has had an affair and decides to murder her. His only defence in court is temporary insanity. The judge doesn't accept it and he is found guilty of premeditated murder.

This is analogous to the way the ABC has provided a quality public broadcasting service while plotting to misrepresent one of the most important public policy issues.

It seems that behind closed doors a bunch of ideologically driven nutters have hatched an elaborate, premeditated plot to suppress open public policy debate of extreme population growth, and instead focus on their pet carbon tax fetish. Their only excuse appears to be that the Government told them to do this, which is analogous to the temporary insanity defence; or perhaps the "I was only obeying orders" defence used at Nuremburg.

Walking a tightrope of feigned impartiality in a deliberate strategy to betray the people of Australia is a crime. There is no other way to define this. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Politicians are not bound by a Statutory Duty of impartiality and editorial integrity. The ABC is.

The plot has been unravelled by the ABC's track record and also by the exposure of the ABC's deconstruction of the carbon tax debate. That debate has omitted the fact that extreme growth in Australian emissions is directly correlated with extreme growth in Australian population.

What is even more embarrassing for the ABC is the bizarre way that the entire Carbon Tax strategy seemed like nothing more than redistribution of wealth via the tax system, assisted by Climate Change Minister Greg Combet. The absurdity of this would be comical if it was not so tragic.

I would welcome anyone who can provide a greater example of political farce in the history of Australia; and a more culpable example of ABC complicity in un-Australian denial of a "fair go" for all Australians who want to see open public policy debate as a first step towards development of a rational population growth management policy. That policy should be supported by a majority of Australians in the name of both global humanity and global sustainability.

The world has very dark days ahead of it. Denying that a root cause of this is overpopulation, as if it must be accepted without question, is absurd. You cannot address a problem by denying that it exists or by pretending it will go away. That is fatalistic contempt for the truth.

Is Australia governed by morons? Australia preaches about the Asian Century but behaves like the 18th Century British colonists who originally invaded Terra Australis. If Australia understood what it means to be Asian it would realize that most Asian countries have predominantly indigenous populations. For example, Indonesia, China, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines to name but a few.

None of these countries run mass migration programs like Australia’s. Australia leads the world in this category. Asian countries are not selling off their assets and housing to foreigners like Australia does; while crying crocodile tears about carbon emissions as they rapidly expand their fossil fuel exports to pay for population growth that the country cannot afford. With one of the highest costs of living of any country the annual growth of the Federal Budget combined with growing Government debt far exceeds the capacity of the growing economy to finance.

Asian populations grow at varying rates, depending on the level of development and the rates of natural births and deaths. None of these countries subject their people to mass migration as a tool to drive GDP growth in irrational contempt for the social, environmental and economic consequences.

If China used mass migration at the same rate as Australia's, it would be flooding the country with over 16 million migrants per year. China's reported population growth rate is 0.6% per annum. Australia's deliberately engineered population growth rate is 1.8% per annum.

Australia is a dishonest, hypocritical country built on a lie that government media fully supports while it preaches about humanity and the environment.

The death cult of Migration Assured Destruction is alive and well in Australia. Even the US example of how to screw up a country is not enough to educate Australia’s ruling class. This is a unique recipe for a cock up.

The argument that population growth is inevitable is as defeatist as the argument that the human race must destroy itself together with the environment that supports it.

The 20th century saw the developed world set the example of fossil fuel consumption for the developing world to follow. Now, in the 21st century, Australia insists on continuing to set the example of ridiculous and unsustainable, migration-based population growth as an example of how underdeveloped countries should behave once they have developed?

The premise of most demographic gurus is that population growth will slow as developing countries become wealthy. If that is true, then why does Australia deliberately drive population growth rates as high as those of some of the most underdeveloped areas of Africa and roughly 4 times the OECD country average? It certainly isn't about prioritising refugee intake.

Australia is an insult to the intelligence of most Australians. The primary responsibility for this reckless stupidity lies with both Government and its tool the ABC; both of whom are beyond the control of the Australian people.

There is no democracy in Australia when it comes to open public policy debate of population growth management and maximising Australia's potential to act humanely and sustainably both at home and abroad. It's just not up for discussion; and that is the essence of what Australia's autocratic "death cult" is all about. Cut philanthropic aid at home and abroad and destroy the environment; all in the name of profit - otherwise misdescribed as "economic growth".

The latest propaganda inundation to force people to accept overpopulation as a fait accompli is coming from the so-called "Bradfield Oration",₁ which is to be inaugurated by that mass-media propaganda horn, Australia's Prime Minister, Tony Abbott. The University of Sydney and Lend Lease have been described as 'key partners' in this 'initiative'₂ which will steer university students their way by awarding an associated prize. So much for independence in academia, eh?

The current publicity machine anoints some architect from New York to tell Australians how to suck eggs for their greedy masters.₂ Vishann Chakrabarti is being used to frighten the people of Sydney with a "build up or else" and to market the idea of selling air-space to developers so that they can build the residential towers residents have been fighting for generations. This concept of selling airspace is obscene in the context of human rights as well as Australian values of freedom and nature accessible to all. Australia's self-appointed leaders are in the business of making everything for sale by privatising all natural rights and resources. They should be put on trial for this as a criminal conspiracy to advantage a few at the expense of the many citizens whose taxes they abuse for their own ends. Unfortunately they also make the laws.

“If you don’t plan, those folks in Western Sydney will have their worst nightmares come true,’’ Chakrabarti told The Daily Telegraph, threatening that Sydney "would also struggle to create good jobs and fall behind East Asian cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai".

That is the awful benchmark our enemies who call themselves our leaders seek to impose on the rest. It is indeed our worst nightmare, to compete with Hong Kong and Shanghai. Only psychopaths like warlords and corporate landlords would wish such a nightmare on Australians. Good leaders would lead us against it.

Bad leaders stand on a rubbish heap of trashed human rights

How could any self-respecting media dignify such authoritarian drivel as the basis of planning policy? Is this what inevitably happens in a capitalist system that privileges bullies and psychopaths by making them rich enough to dominate the public messaging system? If it cannot be made democratic then we can only hope the system will be brought down. The sole reason most of those talking up development and population growth are even heard is that they stand astride a skyscraping rubbish-heap of trashed human rights which they have helped to bury through land-speculation on an industrial scale.

The mass media that purveys this propaganda and invests in real-estate, keeps any dissenting views to a whisper. The ABC follows suit in a conspiracy to protect the beneficiaries of propaganda. Australians hate what is happening, but because so many still rely on the mainstream media to understand what is happening and to represent their views, they fail to connect on the ground and therefore fail to organise. Most people reading these transparent propaganda tracts marketing population growth and infrastructure explosion as inevitable must feel alone in their horror.

I believe that I have shown in Demography, Territory, Law: the Rules of Animal and Human Populations, that growth is not inevitable and that about half of the first world nations are planning to adapt positively to smaller populations by the 2050s.

Chakrabati is also reported to have said that the selling of airspace to highrise developers is, “a very viable model as areas around train stations are very, very valuable.’’ Fighting highrise development above a local station was where Marvellous Melbourne came into being, with the help of Planning Backlash. Marvellous Melbourne sought to publicise what the speculators who have taken over our government had planned for Camberwell Station, in Melbourne, Victoria. As well as the imposed massive changes to the local visual and experienced environment, there was the abrogation of democracy of local residents. The situation has since greatly deteriorated with VCAT, the Victorian Court system, now imposing impossible costs on citizens to prevent them from exercising self-government.

Coming up from the wings in the two party fixed horse race _{#fnAirSpace3" id="txtAirSpace3">3} towards impossible living conditions is the growing unaffordability of land-rates. As well as driving up rental costs, elderly residents innocently living in homes they bought and paid for decades ago, find that rates based on speculative land-values are pulling them into debt at a time of life when wages and pensions do not keep up with the related inflation. And it is not just the elderly, young renters and young home-owners face lifetimes of enslavement to debt with little prospect of retaining equity in purchased property as these costs rise.

Of course, this suits the predators who pass for parliamentarians and their friends, because it means that a proportion of those people will be forced to sell-up and move out, creating a dynamic that will favour subdivisions, making housing even less affordable.

"Policies which promise to build low cost modest housing, or any policy which increases density will only drive prices higher and worsen the situation. By reducing dwelling size, the premium paid for land increases and land price increases." (Dennis K in "The Housing market and the death of Australia.")

Whilst building high-rent slums, the person or corporation that buys the 'air-rights' around the stations servicing increasingly congested suburbs will make billions of dollars, far more than is needed to buy parliamentarians and political parties.

We are told that the Planning Department estimates Sydney’s population will increase by 1.6 million over the next 20 years, requiring 664,300 new homes. Chris Johnson, of Urban Taskforce, an organisation that represents the interests of property developers, is quoted predictably as saying that 'Sydney will need to build 100 new high-rise apartment towers a year for the next 50 years to accommodate a third of the increased population.' Only if Mr Johnson and his allies get away with their political push to bulldoze Australians' rights.

Australia's population is increasing at an unsustainable rate, impacting on democracy, the environment, and civil rights, only due to immigration policy at both Federal and State levels. All the states have websites inviting people to come and live in them and all the states pretend they have no control over the situation. The Australian government is trying to induce young people to move to the north of Australia in the context of high unemployment. The aim is to give young people no choice but to work for the predators who are moving in on the north to cover it in mines, roads, dams and suburbs. There will be no natural environment left at this rate. The high immigration that permits all these abuses is not Australia's friend. But it's not terrorism from overseas we should fear most; it is the terrorism of the developers inside and outside parliament who are removing our rights in order to promote growth for their selfish profits.

Probably the only way to change this kind of situation is through a revolution that redistributes land and decommodifies it. With the mass media working so successfully to keep Australians ignorant and isolated from each other, this would be almost inconceivable, except that there is also a good possibility that petroleum depletion and the inadequacy of alternative sources of power and of nuclear will undermine the awful profit system we are groaning under. The result will be a decline in the ability to travel long distances and a return to the family and clan unit, interacting locally. The family and clan unit has an organic power structure, rooted geopolitically in its local environment. _{#fnAirSpace4" id="txtAirSpace4">4}

Did Vishann Chakrabarti, touted as a 'leading New York architect' willingly lend his name to this subversion of democracy by the new Australian squattocracy? Such a man could use his position to denounce the hidious transformation of the world into New York-style ghettos divided by desert, or he can use it to help Australian Prime Minister Abbott to further privilege corporate power and wealth, in an entropic race to the bottom.

Footnotes

#fnAirSpace1" id="fnAirSpace1">1. #txtAirSpace1">↑ Bradfield was a founding member of the Australian Engineers Institute and famous for being the engineer in charge of the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He was also famous for pushing schemes to turn Australian rivers inland to animate the desert. Someone decided to attach his name to give some ersatz gravitas to this grande bouffe for greedy developers. However, I note that his great great granddaughter, Holly Parker, won a young scientist prize for a kind of packaging that can be replanted after use, which sounds like a generational turn for the better.

#fnAirSpace2" id="fnAirSpace2">2. #txtAirSpace2">↑ See, for instance, article in the Sydney Daily Telegraph: Sydney Harbour Bridge engineer John Bradfield: A great legacy to live up to in our city.

#fnAirSpace3" id="fnAirSpace3">3. #txtAirSpace3">↑ The ALP saw that Bill Shorten, rather than the membership favoured Anthony Albanese, was pushed to the top of the heap after the last election. Shorten, like Abbott, will push population growth on behalf of the ruling and wealthy classes, whereas Albanese actually said he preferred for Australians to democratically decide on immigration numbers. See "Numbers man” Shorten apparently open- ended on Australia’s population numbers."

#fnAirSpace4" id="fnAirSpace4">4. #txtAirSpace4">↑ Demography, Territory, Law: the Rules of Animal and Human Populations

"This issue is not the cost of building nor dwelling sizes, but the economic and political conditions which are fuelling the bubble. Policies which promise to build low cost modest housing, or any policy which increases density will only drive prices higher and worsen the situation. By reducing dwelling size, the premium paid for land increases and land price increases. After all, the bulk of the cost is the land, as houses can still be built for under $200,000. The high land price due to flooding the market with credit and speculation, not the size of the houses built. So reject any policy about increasing density or providing smaller "more affordable homes". [...] In the current climate the only result of making dwellings smaller, is to make people take $600,000 loans for 2 bedroom units instead of three bedroom houses. The market will simply price the smaller properties at the same price as the larger ones they replaced."

The housing bubble is one of the the biggest financial threats to Australia, and is still inflating [1]1. Our banksters still refuse to admit that there is a bubble, preferring to state that there is just a bit of "froth" on the market.

"I don't think we have a housing bubble overall, but there's some froth in the Sydney market and some of the potential house purchasers need to be wary,"

says HSBC bank's chief economist for Australia and New Zealand Paul Bloxham.[2]
When you hear language like this, where euphemisms replace straight talk, you can be sure that you're being served buffet proportions of horse manure. Mr Bloxham is either lying or ignorant, and therefore either no longer feels it necessary to make an attempt to give legitimacy to the lie, or is so out of touch with our economy one has to wonder how he could have even have an entry level job at HSBC let alone be chief economist. It is not just mere coincidence that the West is struggling financially and in economic decline and that neo-liberal economists like Mr Bloxham are relied upon for advice and commentary.

Australia is now a one or two trick pony, relying on increasing private debt to keep our economy afloat (in this respect, we are not unique) and mining. With our banks greatly exposed to the real estate market, we cannot supposedly afford a popping of the bubble. So it is expected they will deny a bubble exists, no matter how ridiculous and laughable such a statement may be. The banks simply cannot admit there is a bubble, that would be suicide for them.

The Australian "property" market (these are our homes) has been in a bubble for years now and has defied, so far, predictions of a crash or severe correction. The fundamentals behind these dire predictions were sound, but didn't take into account Australia's specific peculiarities, or that the government would take further measures to prevent a correction. If this was any other country, the market would have corrected by now, but it hasn't, and this is due to the following factors.

• High immigration rates which push demand. There are many reasons for high immigration, but finding new debt fodder is undoubtedly one of them.

• Cultural obsession with property. Property has an image of being a guaranteed wealth generator and property investment is almost part of the culture. Criticising property as some kind of miraculous credit machine is tantamount to criticising the very core of Australias success and pride. Another aspect is that the industry conditions people to accept property and features which would be considered ordinary and banal overseas, as exceptional here, thereby giving the impression that a premium should be paid. Backyards, once typical are now attracting premiums and pushed as exceptional features than a basic fixture.

• Negative Gearing. Negative Gearing allows investors to bid up house prices, knowing that the tax payer will cover the shortfall. A property purchased for rental returns would have its value weighed up against its earning ability. With negative gearing, the property can be overvalued and the tax payer subsidises the overpayment.

• Lack of information and transparency. Banks, the media, the Real Estate Industry and the government itself have obfuscated the market, spreading misinformation thereby giving buyers misplaced confidence that prices are based on "fundamentals", and not based on debt and cheap credit. The media push articles to 'spruik' the market, using nonsensical phrases such as "sideways growth", "softening" as well as fear and speculation to push people into the market. The threatened removal of the First Home Buyers grant causes people to purchase before the grant ends to take advantage of it. The FHB grant has ended how many times now?

• Low interest rates. There are other reasons for this, but the necessity to keep rates low to allow people to afford a bigger debt cannot be overlooked. Rates cannot return to their historical mean without upsetting the market. Add to this, Australia's willingness to take on high levels of private debt and an odd lack of fear of doing so. We have among the highest level of private debt in the world.[3]

• Poor urban planning. This includes limited land release, poor planning of infrastructure and likely cronyism and corruption between government and developers.

• Escaping the GFC, which has enabled further cheap credit to flood the market and therefore allowed Australians to ignore the risks of taking on crushing debt.

Where to from here

So where will this lead? What will burst the bubble?

The most important factor here is the obsession with property, and the 'mania' that Australia, and its establishment have with it. It is from this, that the baffling continuation of Negative Gearing, sky high immigration rates and poor planning stems from. Any other market would have corrected itself by now, leading to a deflation of prices, but the irrational mania surrounding our market has prevented this, aborting sound analysis and realisation of the problem. The market is irrational, and its participants are determined to remain irrational.

Being blinded to the major financial risk and refusing to acknowledge the irrationality, we've chosen to march ahead. As Australians are unlikely to push for a political solution for various reasons, including apathy, acceptance of the Real Estate spin and fear, the situation will continue.

This leaves two possibilities from here on in.

The staggering propaganda effort regarding property will continue, as the Australian market is small and easily coerced in such matters. Concentration of media power, and lack of media diversity inhibits the flow of information, and complicity in most levels of power and influence keeps the message uniform and monolithic. Therefore a correction is unlikely to result from investors realising the risk and bailing out. The correction will be forced, that is, we will hit a brick will with regards to one of the fundamental drivers fuelling this bubble.

These drivers are new entrants into the market who can go further into debt to pay higher prices. Subdivision has done much to push this further along. Dividing traditional 1/4 acre blocks into units, each of which is priced carefully to be just within the level of affordability can keep prices at the "sweet spot", which is just within the level of affordability, just low enough to be affordable, with free standing houses priced high enough to be only within reach of investors. It is for this reason that the market is now largely investors, many of whom are subdividing. Free standing properties are largely unaffordable, and those who afford them subdivide them for profit, further raising prices. This could potentially go on as long until the last free standing property is remaining, but quite likely to hit a limit sooner.

It is important to note here, that subdivision is a self defeating investment activity. A property which is worth money to an investor (due to the ability to subdivide) is turned into a property in which investors are less likely to purchase, due to the fact they can't be subdivided further. Investors are relying on owner occupiers and new home buyers in the current market to purchase the produce of their investments, but the market is only worthwhile for investors to enter and not first home buyers (who may be better of financially renting). A ponzi scheme needs new entrants, and this market is shutting them out.

But prices can't go up too fast, not faster than the ability for people to service debts. That "sweet spot", which investors in a tight market can price their poorly built hovels at, has to go up fast enough to bring enough money into the market, but not too fast as to leave out home buyers. With stagnating wages, this leaves few other options for people. These are, assistance from parents and pooling with siblings and friend, both of which have increased in the last few years, a sure sign of an overpriced market. Also, foreign investment has kept the bubble afloat. Without foreign investment and the corruption and flouting of FIRB guidelines, the market may have corrected some time ago. Foreign investment makes up for a potential shortage of people able to go into debt Australia, be essentially off-shoring the debt creation. Foreign residents are doing the job Australians won't or can't do, that is go into ridiculous levels of debt for basic homes. This is also reliant on interest rates remaining low (they can't go up at all now), or lowering, which puts the RBA in a problem. They need to use the lever of interest rates to control the economy, but now can only go one way. Do not expect to see any significant interest rate rises. Interest rates will remain low until the next financial disruption.

Essentially, the bubble will continue until it hits a brick wall, when the rise in price finally pushes out enough home buyers. The crash will therefore be forced due to the inescapable financial reality, rather than a correction due to changing market conditions. It is not clear when this will happen, but there may be a few years left. The end result will be a disaster for Australia. Our banking sector will have lost much credibility and Australia has little going for it other than mining and the FIRE industries. Without prior economic reforms or economic restructuring, this burst has the potential to push Australia into very hard economic times. Also possible, is an external factor, such as a worldwide GFC, or economic trouble in China.

The second option is that the bubble will not burst, and that Australia will continue to subdivide, use mass immigration, and that social and cultural changes will occur. These are, smaller and smaller dwelling sizes, reduced quality of life, more and more house sharing, where multiple couples live under the one roof and a general decline towards third world conditions. Foreign investment, and a reluctance to enforce regulations with regards to this matter, could increase, resulting in us put into a situation where we are paying foreigners and foreign banks rent to live in our country (this is already happening now). Do not underestimate the level of treachery our officials will go to. In this scenario, rather than wear the cost of the housing bubble financially in terms of economic costs, the cost is worn through loss of quality of life and loss of sovereignty. After all, the massive prices and 'profits' is merely the selling of our future quality of life, with the proceeds of the sale being brought forward and pocketed by a few. All Australians are essentially giving up quality of life, having it liquidated and sold, and turned to cash profits for the investor/parasite class. This alternative scenario allows the bubble to remain, with the price paid for maintaining the bubble being the conversion of quality of life and of social cohesion back to money. Whereas previously we have spent money to improve the quality of life, we are now doing the reverse, converting that hard earned quality of life back into cash payments. It's easier to concentrate this wealth into a few pockets when it is in the form of transferable funds. We can sell social stability, community continuity, space, health, mental well-being, social mobility, pride, culture and freedom to prop up the bubble, which will transform Australia from an egalitarian society to one resembling the landlord/serf arrangement of feudal Europe, but with modern trappings and far better propaganda engineering consent from people. Lets hope this doesn't happen, but an indefinite continuation of escalating property prices will have far reaching, negative social consequences. While European countries can make landlord/tenant arrangements work (due to the ability to sign very long term leases and protections for tenants and a view of housing as a right), Australia doesn't have the culture to make such an arrangement successful here.

These two scenarios seem extreme, but the housing situation as it is today, is extreme, and extreme problems force extreme solutions, however they may end up being solved. If only Australia had the foresight or sense to keep the market in check. Either way, our economy cannot survive if the market is continually geared towards serving the parasitic class (specuvestors) over the productive class (workers trying to house themselves).

Possible Solutions

So how do we solve this problem?

I think that lobbying government by now is a useless endeavour. There is simply no way that politicians, who are personally profiting from property investment will take a personal loss, let along go against their backers and mates. It is indeed cute to see Australians who think that politicians may still act in their interests in this day and age, but there is too much at stake for any political solution to be considered feasible.

These are recommended courses of action.

Firstly, vote for parties which offer to resolve this issue by means other than providing cheaper built housing. This issue is not the cost of building nor dwelling sizes, but the economic and political conditions which are fuelling the bubble. Policies which promise to build low cost modest housing, or any policy which increases density will only drive prices higher and worsen the situation. By reducing dwelling size, the premium paid for land increases and land price increases. After all, the bulk of the cost is the land, as houses can still be built for under $200,000. The high land price due to flooding the market with credit and speculation, not the size of the houses built. So reject any policy about increasing density or providing smaller "more affordable homes" or any policy indicating the necessity of doing this to improve affordibility. Policies which consider increased density and smaller homes as a means of increasing affordability, only continue the problem, as it proposes an ameliorating measure as a solution. Look for parties which address the factors driving up house prices as listed earlier in the articles. Parties which address our globally high growth rates, tax concessions for investment (Negative Gearing, CGT Concession), debt based banking system and foreign investment. It is critical that the party recognises that it is land price, not house price which must come down to improve affordability.
In the current climate the only result of making dwellings smaller, is to make people take $600,000 loans for 2 bedroom units instead of three bedroom houses. The market will simply price the smaller properties at the same price as the larger ones they replaced.

The failure of providing smaller homes to ease affordability is clearly evident. Despite the proliferation of subdivided units and apartment towers, prices are still going up, and housing affordability is still degrading. Clearly, as evidenced by what is happening around us, making smaller, "cheaper" units to help people isn't working at all. Worse still, property spruikers convince investors who buy up decent family homes and bulldoze them to make units, that they are doing the market a favour by providing a 'cheaper' home.

This rules out Palmer United, the Greens[4], One Nation[5], and the Labor party[6] , and obviously, the Liberal party. The Greens do have a policy of partially implementing the Henry Tax review, but likely not to go far enough. The Sustainable Population Party have a reasonable policy and Family First do well highlighting the cause of the issue and provide good discussion and analysis, but with a simplistic solution. [7], [8], [9]
Secondly, the property mania should be undermined. Undermining the mania doesn't mean spreading lies, but exposing the problems within and giving buyers and investors a clearer image of the problems. This can involve attending open for inspections and auctions, and passing out flyer's highlighting the social issues, or highlighting the bubble nature. Information should be disseminated regarding the true extent of foreign investment, and the complicity of the Real Estate industry in turning a blind eye to possible flouting of our Financial Investment Review Board (FIRB) regulations.

Also as part of this, is reinforcing and publicising the fact that the current panacea to the affordability crisis, having investors bulldoze large homes to build multiple small ones, is not working at all and that subdivided homes cost more per square meter of space than the original free standing dwelling cost. Further to this, the subdivided property is not likely to be sold to an investor, who is the one most likely to be able to pay a decent price. The propaganda that is spread to people, that this activity helps people must be countered, and the argument put forward that activities to 'help' people into homes (such as buying investment properties to rent out, subdividing) have no evidence of them working and are doing quite the opposite. Many investors are suckered into believing that they are doing the nation a favour with this activity. This lie should be busted.

This will attract a lot of negative attention and accusations of people being 'bitter renters', or 'losers who are upset they can't afford a home', and suggestions that people simply move further out. There is enough information to demonstrate that the property market is in a precarious bubble, and people should stay on message and continue to disseminate this message, than get sidetracked answering spurious accusations. It may seem mendacious to engage in such acts, but the earlier the correction, the less the impact. That is to say, the sooner people come to their senses, the better for all of us.
Thirdly, the plight of young Australians should be brought to the fore. Most people my age and younger, are deeply concerned about house prices, yet despite this being one of the biggest issues we face, the media are conspicuously silent. At best, they put a tepid "we feel your pain" article every year which proposes no solution, nor even suggests that a solution should be sought or demanded. This silence has to be broken, and it will only be broken by forcing the media to address the issue, and this can be forced by creating media worthy events (such as activism at open for inspections, etc), or social media chatter too big to ignore. Unfortunately, prominent mass activist groups don't seem to care, as housing affordibility doesn't come under the typical repertoire of concerns that activists have.

Australia is in a reasonable financial position currently, as we should use this opportunity to bring a controlled correction rather than wait for an uncontrolled, chaotic and unpredictable correction. It would be far better for the government to use policy to deflate the bubble, as it would then be able to have some control over the process to minimise the disruption to people and the shock to the economy. Deliberately done, by phasing out Negative Gearing, various concessions, reducing immigration according to a timetable which is rigidly stuck to, those invested in the market would have time to adjust and plan from the transition from an economy based on speculation on property to some other, hopefully more productive model which will have other ancillary benefits. Investors could divest their portfolio on their own terms and those who have property as a nest egg would have time to consider alternative options. Banks could plan for the reduced prices. Without this controlled correction, we are essentially at the mercy of circumstance, with unpredictable results, and the chaos that would result from this.

Footnotes:

[1] http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/breaking-news/house-prices-strongest-winter-in-7-years/story-fni0xqe4-1227043581623
[2] http://www.theage.com.au/business/spring-in-the-property-market-may-be-a-leap-too-far-20140829-109vrm.html
[3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-07/household-debt-the-big-threat-to-australian-economy/5435844
[4] http://greens.org.au/housing
[5] http://www.onenation.com.au/policies/policies_housing.html
[6] http://www.alp.org.au/cm4_210813
[7] http://www.familyfirst.org.au/files/Housing-Policy.pdf
[8] http://www.vic-familyfirst.org.au/housing/
[9] http://www.familyfirst.org.au/files/Home-Truths-Revisited-May-2013.pdf

On the 13th of May Environment Minister Greg Hunt purportedly answered a simple question about Australia's dangerous and undemocratic population growth put to him by Kelvin Thomson. Minister Hunt's response should be a source of great concern for all Australians. It shows no respect for the very serious consequence to democracy or the environment of continuous population growth. The response is cavalier and disrespectful to Australians who have major and justifiable concerns on this matter. Below we quote the short dialogue in Hansard, and then we publish two observant comments about the Minister's failure to take the question seriously.

House of Representatives Question No.0101

"Mr Thomson asked the Minister for the Environment, in writing on 13 May 2014:

Is he aware that past and current open ended population growth policy creates the inevitable prospect of imposing continual infrastructure projects on the public, each one more invasive and destructive of the social and natural environments?"

Mr Hunt's reply was a monument to obfuscation and unreality, surpassing anything you have seen on Yes Minister:

"Mr Hunt: The answer to the Honourable Member's question is as follows:

Setting a fixed population target can mask the complexities of the issue. For example, there are many aspects of population change in Australia, such as changes in fertility rates that cannot be accurately predicted or directly controlled.

The Australian Government has in place a range of commitments to infrastructure, services, jobs and the environment which will provide for Australia's currently growing population including a commitment to better plan for and sequence infrastructure development across Australia, and to develop a White Paper on the development of Northern Australia. These policies will support environmentally, socially and economically responsible growth and cultivate resilient, productive and fair communities."

Quark: "Not an environment minister's bootlace"

Candobetter's Quark's analysis of the logic involved was breathtaking:

Quark wrote: "Mr Hunt is making something sound more complex than it is.

It's as though Kelvin Thomson had asked if Mr Hunt was aware that if you add 5 to 6 you get 11 and Mr Hunt had answered that it is more complex than that because 2 and 3 make 5 and 2 multiplied by 3 makes 6 and 11 can be reached by adding 1 to 10, 2 to 9, 3 to 8 etc.

It also sounds as though endless infrastructure for Mr Hunt is a good thing

Mr. Hunt is not an environment minister’s bootlace.

I wonder what would emerge if Kelvin asked the same question over and over in different ways to try to corner the little ponce.

Jack Roach: "We should be very worried"

Jack Roach of Boroondara Residents Action Group (BRAG) wrote, in response:

"It is no wonder that Australia is headed for a massive jump in the rate of our population growth with woolly thinking like the Minister for the Environment’s attached reply to a question on our population growth. Our population is set to double within the next 30 to 35 years because we have no clear immigration policies. There is no set annual immigration intake and visas are issued with no limit as to numbers. (And most are issued by licensed agents not by the immigration department – where is the control?)

When a senior Minister says that “setting a fixed population growth target can mask the complexities of the issue” (refer attached reply to a question asked in Parliament on May 13) we should be very worried. He is falling back on the politician’s ploy of trying to confuse the issue by talking about “fertility changes that cannot be predicted”. That is not the concern, it is the number of new migrants that is the issue. The numbers just keep on increasing very year. In the late nineties and early 2000’s our immigration numbers were around to 70,000 to 80,000 but these have steadily but surely increased to 250,000 now and there is no indication that there will be any curbs in this increasing trend. In addition we also have in our country over a million long stay visa holders who put further pressure on our infrastructure. By a well understood visa swapping process they extend their stay and many eventually gain permanent residency.

And who pays for all this new infrastructure required to cope with this growth? Certainly not the new arrivals to this country, it is you the taxpayer that foots the bill. Who benefits from this massive population growth. The productivity Commission has issued a statement that it is not the existing general population, the main beneficiaries are the new arrivals themselves and, of course, the development industry.

Kevin Rudd’s BIG AUSTRALIA was a con but it is still being pushed by many of today’s politicians and the growthists. The time has come for an Australia- wide debate on our lack of any real immigration policy and the increasing rate of our population growth. What we need from now on is a properly planned rational and sustainable migration policy.

Send a copy of this [...] to your local state and federal politicians and demand a debate on this issue before it is too late."

The Sustainable Population Party invites members and supporters to meet in Hawthorn for an informal meeting to discuss a number of key issues. 12pm for 12:15pm (lunch at 1:30pm); Glenferrie Hotel, 324 Burwood Road, Hawthorn (Glenferrie Room at rear).Please RSVP: CLICK HERE

The issues include:

- Party update from national President

- Distribution of new SPP flyers for letterboxing, etc

- Proposed formation of Victorian committee/branch

When: 12pm for 12:15pm (lunch at 1:30pm)

Where: Glenferrie Hotel, 324 Burwood Road, Hawthorn (Glenferrie Room at rear).

We look forward to seeing you.

Please RSVP: CLICK HERE

Michael S brings to a persuasive conclusion his argument that Your ABC has been complicit in a brainwashing exercise that will damage the survival chances of its loyal listeners. As one who comes from a family of Friends of the ABC, with seniors who simply love the ABC for its programs and the window it provides on the world, I know how difficult it is for such people to bring themselves to believe that the ABC would mislead them. For them it is like a fundamental betrayal from an old friend. Nevertheless I think that Michael S is right: ABC policy is run by people whom the lay-person would judge to be outlaws. Yet they are not disciplined or taken to court. What does that say about our legal system? - Candobetter editorial.

A layman’s view of the legal landscape

If we accept that breach of the ABC’s Statutory Duty to avoid bias (Ref: ABC Code of Practice) has occurred, then we must also accept that the ABC is a law breaker.

One premise for accusing the ABC of law breaking is the following 5 minute video, which is the “tip of the iceberg” of ABC pro-Carbon Tax and pro-Population Growth bias:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97cmFCkb1KE

Here is a proof of party political advertising in the ABC Vote Compass, which is also unlawful according to the ABC Editorial Policy document:
http://candobetter.net/?q=node/3844

Pro-population growth and pro-Carbon Tax bias underlie each example. There are many more examples that can be exposed by scrutiny of ABC conduct between 2008 and the present.

It’s a bit like parking in a No Standing Zone. If you didn’t see the No Standing sign you still broke the law.

So I think we can comfortably move on knowing that the ABC has been, and remains, a law breaker in its coverage of these issues.

Both the ACMA and the Commonwealth Ombudsman have refused to acknowledge this bias, despite the facts presented. So they have denied the ABC even parked in the wrong place, let alone did it with intent.

This interesting excerpt provides a description of Accessory after the fact:

CRIMES ACT 1914 - SECT 6
Accessory after the fact

"Any person who receives or assists another person, who is, to his or her knowledge, guilty of any offence against a law of the Commonwealth, in order to enable him or her to escape punishment or to dispose of the proceeds of the offence shall be guilty of an offence.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 2 years."

So if the bias is proven, and the ACMA and the Commonwealth Ombudsman argued that it did not exist, are they Accessories after the fact or are they incompetent and therefore innocent?

So is it possible for the ABC to be incompetent and guilty while the ACMA and Ombudsman are incompetent and innocent?

Hence nobody is accountable for a major betrayal of the Australian people? And because nobody is accountable, the betrayal can continue indefinitely?

Let’s move on to some incriminating facts that challenge the incompetence defence:

• I first raised the direct relationship between emissions growth and population growth in written communication with the ABC on 23 November 2009 and continued to do so many times before passing of the Carbon Tax legislation in November 2011
• Statistics quantifying the direct relationship between emissions growth and population growth, and relatively constant emissions per capita, had been recorded in National Inventory Reports by Government on an annual basis since 1990. They show emissions growth correlated with population growth far exceeding the Australian-based Carbon Tax reduction targets. The ABC has always had full access to this information.

Here’s something interesting about what a reasonable person should be able to do:

Ref: http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=law_pubs
Ordinary and reasonable people: The design of objective tests of criminal responsibility

“This paper reviews the design of objective tests of criminal responsibility for serious offences. It will be argued that their design needs to be rationalised in light of two fundamental principles. First, there is ‘the fault principle’, that is, the principle that there should be no penal liability without fault. It follows from this principle that, whatever the seriousness of an offence, we should reject liability for failure to attain a standard that was beyond the capacities of the accused. Secondly, there is ‘the proportionality principle’, that is, the principle of proportionality between culpability and punishment or penal liability. Proportionality is both a sentencing principle and a principle of responsibility. As a principle of responsibility, it demands that the degree of culpability required for an offence should be commensurate with the level of penal liability. The more severe the sanctions that a person will face upon conviction, the worse should be the culpability required for conviction.”

Since we are not seeking to imprison anybody (but maybe we should?) the persons facing the severe sanctions are the people of Australia whose democratic rights are being abused due to:

• Misrepresentation of the Carbon Tax issue
• Omission of the Population Growth Management issue from public policy debate

Any reasonable person can see this truth, including all the ABC Operatives who perpetrated the bias. So why is it an unreasonably harsh penalty to expect them to apologise and correct all their misrepresentations. Or was it outright fraud?

What's different about this petition to tackle overpopulation in Australia? It is published on the Australian Wildlife Protection Council (AWPC) site. AWPC, it seems, is the only wildlife group that remains real and courageous when it comes to protecting our fauna. AWPC is entirely staffed by volunteers, is Australia-wide, and hasn't just become some kind of professional fund-raising organisation. This one comes from Matt Moran of Brisbane, Australia and is posted on the Australian Wildlife Protection Council site here.

Environment

This morning the Herald Sun reported that Melbourne has experienced its fastest property boom since the turn of the century. The median house price rose by over $100,000 in the past nine months, jumping over six percent each quarter from June last year to the end of March this year. These figures came from the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, which is happy about them. But elsewhere in the Herald Sun, Tom Elliott, who has a radio program on 3AW, has a less rosy assessment of the situation. In an article titled "Home horror is a people problem" he pointed out that first home buyers face a housing market that is one of the most expensive on earth. According to the International Monetary Fund, Australian residential real estate prices as a multiple of average incomes are exceeding only those of Canada and Belgium.

And not only was Tom Elliott on to the fact that rising house prices is not a good thing for the young people who get locked out of the chance to have their own home, he was also on to the reason why. "What is the real reason houses are now so expensive?" he asked, and gave the following answer "Look around – its people. More specifically the huge increase in population that Australia, and particularly Melbourne, has experienced over the past twenty years". His conclusion was that until we work out a way to conjure up more land close to the city, reducing population growth is the only sure fire method of denting property prices".

He's absolutely right. And he's certainly right about the huge recent increase in Melbourne's population.

In recent years Melbourne's population has taken off. We have been growing at an unprecedented rate – 200 a day, 1500 a week, 75,000 a year, more or less, year in, year out. Each new population projection for Melbourne is bigger and more outrageous than the one before it. The latest says we'll get to 7.7 million by 2051!

The question we don't spend near enough time thinking about is, is this growth giving us a better city? Now I am not a zealot or an ideologue. I am fundamentally a very middle of the road, practical sort of person. So when I try to work out whether something is a good idea, I look around for examples to compare it with real-­life examples. If I can't see how something works in practice, I don't set too much store by it.

Now in the case of thinking about an issue like the size of Melbourne, there seem to me two relevant kinds of example, two kinds of comparisons we can make. One is with other cities, both bigger ones and smaller ones. And one of the advantages of my life is that I've got to see a lot of other cities, both bigger and smaller. And I am absolutely convinced that in terms of living standards and quality of life that the smaller cities have it all over the bigger ones. We do not want to become Manilla or Mumbai, or London or New York.

Let me return to Tom Elliott's last line this morning "Until we work out a way to conjure up more land close to the city...." Of course some planners and policy makers, to say nothing of property developers, think they have achieved just that with their dual occupancies and multi-unit developments and in particular with their high rise. Let's build upwards, they say. The City of Melbourne reported breathlessly that in 2013 it had welcomed 11,000 new residents, making Melbourne City Council the fastest growing municipality in Australia. John Masanauskas wrote in the Herald Sun in May that over the past few years, in the CBD, 90 high-rise towers have been approved.

The advocates for high rise and multi-unit developments say they are necessary to maintain housing affordability. But if this is their purpose, then they are failing miserably. Housing has never been less affordable, as I pointed out earlier. Another thing they say about high rise is that we shouldn't stress so much about quantity – it's quality that matters. Reducing our environmental footprint and living sustainably is all about good design, and efficiency and so on.

To respond to that, let me turn from this morning's Herald Sun to this morning's Saturday Age. Aisha Dow reports that windowless bedrooms exist in almost a quarter of new residential developments in the CBD. A Melbourne City Council study estimates that more than half of the city's tallest apartment buildings over 15 storeys are of poor quality, with common design flaws and lack of natural light. All of the high rise apartment designs were considered either poor or average quality. Common failings include kitchens in hallways, poor storage, lack of ventilation and excessive energy use. The latter point is very significant, because there is a myth around that high rise is environmentally superior.

The Age says some Melbourne architects are so unhappy with the result of buildings they have designed that they have refused to have their name associated with them. The article quotes the Melbourne architect Jon Clements, representing the Australian Institute of Architects, saying "The general feeling among architects is that it's ridiculous to be forcing architects to produce buildings that don't appropriate quality and amenity standards". He is calling for minimum apartment design standards to be legislated. Some people would call minimum quality standards red tape. But I say the absence of them is a recipe for 21st century slums.

I lived in New York as an Australian Parliamentary representative to the United Nations for three months a couple of years ago. Fascinating, certainly, but not as good a city to live in as Melbourne, not even close. Even the relentlessly pro-growth, pro-business, The Economist ranked Melbourne at the time as the most liveable city in the world. New York was 56th. No doubt this has much to do with New York's well documented problems with crime, drugs, unemployment, beggars in the streets, and unaffordable housing. And all this is on a good day. It's intricately designed public and private transport networks have no margin for error and are incredibly vulnerable to adverse events like car accidents, train derailments, or storms. When these happen the whole system seizes up and hundreds of thousands of commuters are left stranded, seething with impotent rage.

Manhattan's intersections carry a myriad of signs warning of $350 fines for motorists who honk their horns. But they honk anyway. They honk constantly. They honk because they are angry, sitting there in gridlock in traffic. Is this really what we want for our city? Is it seriously worth sacrificing the vision of Melbourne's founding fathers of a city of parks, or the former Victorian Liberal Premier Dick Hamer of a city of green wedges, for this?

It is an urban myth that people living in high rise buildings use less energy and have a lower environmental footprint than people in detached houses. In Manhattan people run their air conditioners all day and all night to keep their airless apartments cool. There are no rainwater tanks, no solar PV panels, no people growing their own vegetables. Manhattan is not the self-sufficient, sustainable world of the future. It is a product of a time when we thought the sky was the limit. But the planet does have limits — food, water, energy, carbon.

The second kind of comparison I make is with the past. I remember what Melbourne was like when I was young. I remember what it was like 10 years ago. It is not getting any better. I've already talked about declining housing affordability. It is way harder for my children and their generation to afford a house than it was for my generation or that of my parents. And there's traffic congestion. We had a great deal of discussion about that at the February Victoria First Meeting with Dr Ernest Healy.

And then there is planning. We talked about that in Ringwood in April with Professor Michael Buxon. Developers use doublespeak terms like "housing choice", "sustainable", "exemplary design", and "efficient planning". But these are all code for removing residents rights to meaningfully object to developments in their neighbourhoods. I stand for the right of residents to have a say in the character of the street, the neighbourhood, the community in which they live.

You know they say that Melbourne and Australia used to be greyer and duller before we went all out on population growth. I grew up in the sixties and seventies. Jim Keays has just passed away. We had the Masters Apprentices, Daddy Cool, Skyhooks, Sherbert, Zoot, Chain! Seriously life was not duller or less interesting back then! We had more freedom more choices.

Is life better now for students? With youth unemployment at much higher levels than when I was young, and students being fitted with deregulated course fees and a student debt that goes up at the long term bond rate and gets bigger rather than smaller over time? I don't think so.

Is life better now for older people? With electricity, gas, water and council rates increasing above the rate of CPI, with increasing costs to visit the doctor, with cuts foreshadowed to the rate of pension indexation? I don't think so.

And is the environment in better shape than it used to be? We all know the answer to that one. Our list of endangered species grows ever longer, and climate change threatens more droughts, bushfires, and extreme weather events.

In recent decades Melbourne has grown both upwards and outwards. What have been the consequences? I have given a window into the consequences of growing upwards in talking about Manhattan, including beggars in the streets. And indeed the Lord Mayor of Melbourne Robert Doyle talks at some length about the problem of begging in the city in his Mayor's Message in their latest publication. Not something a Lord Mayor of the 60s or 70s would have needed to talk about.

But there are plenty of consequences from growing outwards too. We've expanded over fertile soils very suitable for vegetable growing. We've expanded into bushfire prone areas. And when fires come, and they always do, everyone wants someone else to pay for the damage — homeowners, insurance companies, councils, taxpayers. No-one thinks they should have to wear the loss. And just last Sunday the Sunday Age reported that thousands of homes in new estates from Grovedale on the outskirts of Geelong to Doreen in Melbourne's north, and including homes in the municipalities of Hume, Melton and Wyndham, have been built on highly reactive volcanic clay soils on "waffle slab" foundations. Soil movements under a home's foundations are causing walls to crack, doors and windows to jam, and floors to tilt. Homeowners now facing ruinous home renovation and legal bills will not think that housing has become more affordable for them as a result of greedy and short-­sighted behaviour by property developers and planning authorities.

This is also an issue about quality of life and mental health of communities. Health experts have pointed out clear health benefits from exposure to nature. Children build up their immune system by playing with soil and being in the real world rather than indoors. What do you call a kid in a backyard? A free range kid. Joggers and walkers and cyclists have been found to derive mental health benefits from being doing their exercise outdoors rather than in a gym. Patients in a hospital recover more quickly if they have a view out their window of nature, rather than a wall, to look at as they convalesce. And retaining green spaces and trees and vegetation helps keep our city cool, and reduce the urban heat island effect. Most of you will notice on the weather report at night how Melbourne is warmer than surrounding areas. This is because of the extent of heat absorbing concrete, brick and bitumen we have in the city. This might feel like a good thing in June, but it isn't when we have the heatwaves in January, February or March. They kill people. We should be doing what we can to stop Melbourne from overheating.

We spend endless amounts of time on our grey infrastructure — the freeways, bridges, drainage and so on. We need to put more effort into protecting and advancing our GREEN infrastructure of parks and trees and vegetation, and our BLUE infrastructure of creeks and beaches and lakes and waterways. We shouldn't see this as an environmental issue, as if it's some optional extra that we can afford to care about some years but not others. It is a health issue. And our health is a core issue by any yardstick. The OECD says that health is, globally, the highest ranked issue of public concern.

The things that we used to be able to afford — free education, free health care, a home of your own, a say in what happens in our street — now we are told we can't afford them anymore. Well if we can't, we're not better off, we're worse off.

We need to show the same foresight the founders of this city showed when it was initially designed. They left us with a city with open space, extensive tram and train networks, and liveable suburbs supported by extensive local infrastructure in the form of schools, hospitals and social services. We should leave a legacy for future generations that we, and they, can be proud of.

Kelvin Thomson MP

I don’t have kids but I am disturbed about the Heart Foundation’s Active Healthy Kids very poor report card for Australian children last week. It said that Australian children are largely unfit because of a lack of exercise and that this deterioration has happened in the last couple of decades. Natasha Schranz author of the Foundation's inaugural report has graded Australian children at a disgraceful D minus. Contributing to this terrble score was a D for "active transport", meaning not nearly enough walking or bicycle riding to and from school.

Prisoners of chair and screen

81 % of Australian children do not get the required 60 minutes of physical exercise per day. 26% are not involved in organised sport, 71% are too sedentary, Discussion in the media focused on the seduction of screens such as tablets, computers television and phones. As an adult , I know how screen activities can sap the time in which one could be outside in the sunshine exercising, however there is more to this than the wonders and availability of very attractive technology.

Deprived of open space and adventure

A generation ago and before that, there was a lot more open space which enticed children outdoors when they were not in school. Incidental activity, exploring interesting places in nature or in the local neighbourhood is not just beneficial but essential to children in developing their imaginations, experiencing and dealing with unpredictable situations without rules and the directions and supervision of an adult. This used to be easy to access in the street, in vacant land, parks and the private backyard and friends backyards. There was plenty of space to explore in the suburbs.

There is a huge difference between sitting on the couch in front of a screen from 4- 6.30pm and actively playing in the local environment. It is not necessary to have a strenuous game of basketball for the body and mind to register a level of exercise and a 3 dimensional experience . Furthermore sitting is supposed be the most unhealthy thing to do for hours on end and it makes you fat! For that reason I will not make this a very long article.

Victims of blinkered planners and growth lobby

The push to make our cities more crowded by increasing the population very fast, densifying suburbs and removing private space including backyards is not going to help this terrible situation with the health of Australia’s children. It has to make it worse. Our politicians show no care at all for the welfare of Australia’s citizens. I understand that many of Melbourne’s’ private schools have built all over their playing fields and now have to bus their students to public areas to play sport. I suppose the children just sit during lunch hour because with no sports areas they could not spontaneously start a ball game.

Unnatural

It’s unnatural, anyway for children to sit all day at desks listening to teachers and severing all their avenues of expressing themselves physically adds insult to injury.

A child living in an apartment, will naturally turn to his/her tablet or phone for entertainment if the only outside alternative is a concrete balcony. A trompe l'eouil on the back wall of the 2x3 metre couryard, however far it backons cannot acccommodate the need of a child to run. We have not made Australia better over the past 50 years. The "age of entitlement is over" and for what? What really have we gained as a society?

Massive decline in children's fitness

Two generations ago, we had a nation very well represented in international sport partly because, I believe most children had a chance at participating even if it was just making a “100 in the backyard at Mum’s” or hitting a tennis ball on a broken -down asphalt court, but now it seems we have a generation of unfit young people unlikely to live as long as their parents. The social engineers and economists are always complaining about the aging population but if people start dying younger, the achievement of longer life expectancy will be just a nostalgic memory.